Nothing new under the sun
Nothing new under the sun
Nothing new under the sun
TRIZ, Systematic Innovation and the three phases of Lean
Innovation is becoming quite a buzz word. A pity then that no one seems to be able to agree what it means. The innovation story presented here starts, like most major discoveries, with an accident of history. An accident that in this case began in 1946 when a young engineer, Genrich Altshuller, was sent by the Soviet Navy to go and study patents from around the world. Now that instruction could have happened anywhere and for a variety of reasons, but we're now left with the fact that this engineer was the first to discover the underlying DNA of technical innovation. The basic idea behind the research was go and work out what innovation success looks like'. A million data-points later and the answer seemed clear. But there was a problem. A big problem. Most innovation attempts fail irrespective of how good the technical solution might be (currently the number sits at around 95%). The reason they fail, we now know thanks to the additional two million data-points added to the story in the last decade, is because innovation isn't just about a new technical solution. Most great technical ideas end with companies losing their money because of bad business decisions.
With this in mind, our team of researchers, starting in 1996, set about studying innovation in a more general sense. First off, we started with a very simple definition of what we meant by the word:
Innovation = successful step change
Successful in our context meant that the new thing whether it was a new product, process, advertising campaign or way of doing business made a net positive impact on the balance sheet. Step-change meant that there was a distinct, discontinuous shift from one way of doing something to another. We looked for these successful step-changes' on five basic levels Figure 1.
Next up, as we were looking at how organisations undertook their innovation activities, we examined like Altshuller lots of data to try and uncover the differences between successful and failed innovation attempts. Part of this (still ongoing) search required us to go and look at what we now call the death by a million tools' suite of tools, methods and philosophies from around the world that purported to help organisations to innovate.
Included in this array of good, bad and sometimes downright ugly options is Lean. In theory, whenever an organisation successfully strips a category of waste from a part of their business, they have satisfied our definition of a step-change'. Given the popularity of Lean (what organisation can afford not to be seen to be doing it these days?), we found many examples of Lean-originated step-change whether successful or otherwise amongst our two million data-points. What that data revealed was what seemed to be three distinct phases of Lean activities. Those three phases correspond closely to one of the main DNA strands of the Altshuller findings the evolutionary S-Curve.
S-Curves are a universal phenomenon, and as such any Lean deployment initiative is bound to the rules imposed by the dynamics of the S-Curve as illustrated in (Figure 2.)
The first phase of the S-curve occurs when an organisation first decides that they need to do' Lean. Almost
inevitably once this decision has been made, those tasked with hunting for waste find plenty of low-hanging fruit. Waste reduction is easy at this stage, and the Lean team is likely to be handed lots of pats on the back for doing such a good job. And quite likely there is no need for any kind of formal methodology or toolkit other than a checklist of types of waste to go looking for.
The second phase of Lean is what we think of as the whack-a-mole' stage Figure 3.
If this picture looks familiar, chances are your Lean initiative has reached this stage. It is characterised by the finding that any attempt to strip a piece of waste' from the system now has consequences. The rules of whack-a-mole tell us that every time we try and improve one thing reduce waste in this case something else in the system bites back. Often tragically, there is usually a distinct lag between action and consequence. So that, for example, we strip out a piece of waste only to find six months or a year later that we've now adversely affected the reliability of the system, or made it more difficult to update the design.
The third phase of Lean is the dodo' stage. Now we find ourselves right at the top of the S-curve. At this point we've stripped out all' of the waste from the system and the Lean team find themselves wondering what on earth can they do next. Alas, what they will usually find themselves doing next at this stage is going to look for another job. Usually because, like the beautifully optimised Dodo, as soon as the environment changes - because we've stripped out all the waste - we've eliminated the ability to adapt to suddenly changed surroundings. Wings were waste' to a bird chasing prey around the jungle floor so birds that eliminated this waste' found themselves at an evolutionary advantage. Unfortunately, when hungry, shotgun-bearing sailors arrived, wings would have been mighty useful again.
Both the second and third phase of the Lean S-curve shown in Figure 2 are phases where Altshuller and his innovation DNA findings come into play. The second phase is what Altshuller and his TRIZ (Theory Of Inventive Problem Solving') method would have recognised as a conflict. The third phase is what he would have called a contradiction.
In many ways, spend a decade or two rummaging around the death by a million tools' collection and you begin to realise that a lot of the world's finest minds have recognised the importance of conflict and contradiction to the innovation story. In simple terms, using our successful step-change' definition of innovation, successful step changes occur whenever we stop making trade-offs between the things that fight each other (we tend to call making trade-offs' optimisation' to make it sound more like it is a good thing to do) and set out instead to do something different.
Another, even simpler, definition of innovation inferable from this finding is that innovation is the successful challenge of trade-offs. Any engineer or designer worth his or her salt can make a process run faster by optimising' all of the different variables in the process.Hey, that'swhat we've all been taught to do throughout our education and career. Some have even learned how to use Taguchi methods to bring some real science to the story. Fantastic.
Except and it is a pretty darn big except' innovation has nothing to do with optimisation. It is the opposite. Optimisation is about following rules. Innovation is about breaking them. Cutting speed goes up; but so does tool wear. A just-in-time pull system gives zero inventory, but the organisation goes out of business when the factory burns down. This is optimisation'. Innovation is about increasing, cutting speed AND reducing tool wear, having zero inventory AND fall-back in emergency situations. The person who achieved these feats did not follow the rules. They went out and discovered better rules. They challenged' the trade-offs and compromises.
In TRIZ, Altshuller built a tool called a Contradiction Matrix' (Figure 4). It was basically a compilation of all the people who had successfully made such challenges. Today we have built new versions of these tools one for technical trade-offs, one for business trade-offs and one for IT trade-offs that contain the three million data-points. They represent again a compilation of all those people who, consciously or otherwise, found themselves in the whack-a-mole' or dodo' situation and found their way out of it. What Altshuller uncovered, is what we continue to see: someone, somewhere already solved a problem like yours. Most likely someone who had to deal with a more extreme version of your problem you're struggling to squeeze a few thousand components out of your production line, so go and look at the people who've already managed to achieve a few million.
What TRIZ and, now, its Systematic Innovation successor, tell us is that, although we all like to think our problems are unique, in actual fact they're not. Whatever our trade-off, conflict or contradiction is, someone out there probably several thousand others have already found a successful step change solution.
You might not believe it. You might not even want to believe it. But it's true either way. There really is nothing new under the sun. So far. There are only a certain number of ways we can change something. Chances are you know them already. The only major thing TRIZ/Systematic Innovation has done for you is put all those ways together in one place. And perhaps most important of all given you permission, whenever you find yourself in either the whack-a-mole or Dodo position, to contemplate the possibility that there is a better way.
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