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Why using TRIZ on management


History can be divided into four epochs. First, the Age of Agriculture,
which is largely behind us. Then The Industrial age, fast fading. Next,
the age of Information Intensification, where most of us would say we
are today. But that's not the end of it. We're moving into the age of
Creation Intensification. And that is a whole new ball game. Providing and
helpfully packaging information is one thing. Getting a handle on that is
tough enough (most of us haven't). Ripping out layers is also one good
thing. Re-engineering is an other good thing. But this is different. This is
Creation Intensification. Creation of the curious corporation. Label it
anyway you want but it will seperate tomorrows winners from losers.

We have long been fascinated by businessleaders who are able to detect
strategic opportunities for their organizations that other leaders simply never
see. It is what we might call creative insight or the more popular term Vision.
Bill Gates of Microsoft, Steven Jobs of Apple Computer, Percy Barnevik of
ABB and Leif Lundberg of Inter Innovation all come to mind as examples of
such visionary leaders. All of these leaders possessed a seemingly uncanny
ability to foresee future market and social trends in their various worlds. Just as
important, they were able to capitalize on them by devising revolutionary new
products, services or organizations. In this sense they are extremely creative
individuals. Their creativity comes from a unique ability to see opportunities
before they are apparent to anyone else and then to devise a vision that
promotes their realization.

Organizations regularly devote creativity to trying to solve unsolvable problems.
Because societies promote inconsistent values, corporations try to pursue
inconsistent goals. Organizational properties that support some goals conflict
with the properties that support others, so organizations must take conflicting
actions, and every solution creates a new problem... or?

Profit maximization is one good example. Firms try simultaneously to bring
in as much revenue as possible and to keep costs as low as possible. To
maximize revenues, the marketing personnel ask firms to produce
customized products that are just what the customer want and to make
these products available just when the customer wants them. To minimize
costs, the production personnel seek to minimize inventories and machine
down-time, so they would like to deliver the same product to every customer
or at least produce different products in optimal quantities on efficient
schedules. Thus, marketing and production personnel conflict about what to
do and when to do it. Seeing unpleasant conflicts, managers try to "resolve"
them. These efforts can only ease short-run symptoms, however, because
the conflicts are intrisic to the goal maximizing profit.

Such unsolvable problems evoke frustration of course, but they also
present opportunities for genuine creativity. For one thing, inconsistent goals
reflect the fact that people create organizations to carry out complicated,
difficult, but important tasks. These tasks justify creative effort. For one
thing, it occasionally happens that someone finds a way to solve an
unsolvable problem - as when Leif Lundblad brought out the bank to
the street and made it work 24-hours a day seven days a week. These
surprising solutions are a major reason creativity fascinates and reward us.

Creativity in leadership and in management demands a unique ability to see
what others don't see. Whether it is the need for low-cost, user-friendly
computing power or automatic banking machines, opportunities are always
presenting themselves. The issue is whether our immersion in the status quo
and in our worldview will preclude the îeyesî we need to detect these chances
and remarkably important opportunities. Visionary creativity can only come
about when we realize that we must encourage managers to be greater
information-seekers, to seek out broad marketplace experiences, to
experiment with innovation, to get closer to constituents, and then for
organizations to seek out difficult changes and taking risks.

The tool to use is TIPS.

Invention Machine Authorized Reseller