Duc Pham, chance professor of engineering, University of Birmingham
Readers of this column might remember an article I wrote a couple of years ago about a systematic creative problem-solving technique invented by the Soviet mechanical engineer Genrich Altshuller (see How to have our cake and eat it, CMM 7.7, December 2014). While working in the Inventions Inspection department of the Caspian Sea flotilla of the Soviet Navy in the 1940s, Altshuller studied thousands of patents to try to discover the inventive principles underlying them.
Altshuller found that only about twenty percent of the patents reviewed were truly clever, offering solutions to ‘contradictions’ by resolving conflicting situations (improving one characteristic such as the strength of a mechanical component that causes another, such as its weight, to deteriorate) or satisfying incompatible requirements (for example, to be at the same time light and heavy). He also observed that those clever patents embodied some common ‘principles’ and involved the application of a few simple systematic techniques.
Altshuller subsequently assembled the discovered principles and techniques into his Theory of Inventive Problem Solving or TRIZ, which comprises tools such as:
- the 40 inventive principles and four separation heuristics for handling conflicts and incompatible requirements;
- eight trends of evolution for predicting technical developments in any field;
- 76 techniques (‘standard solutions’) for improving a system; and
- some 2,500 scientific and engineering effects for achieving certain desired functions.
These tools enable access to all the conceptual solutions ever produced in the world.
Although Altshuller developed TRIZ to solve complex technical problems, some people have also tried to apply it to non-technical issues. I must admit to being rather sceptical about the validity of such unintended uses of TRIZ. However, tempted by its ability to yield truly original solutions, I have decided to examine some of the techniques to see if they might offer creative answers to the Brexit problem.
In its simplest and most naïve form, the problem can be formulated as a TRIZ contradiction. The latter has arisen because the country has two diametrically opposite camps: those that voted to remain in the EU and those that wished to leave. Any solution aimed at satisfying one camp (i.e. improving one characteristic) will make the other deeply unhappy (i.e. causing the other characteristic to deteriorate).
The ideal solution is perhaps to leave the EU while not leaving it. How might this be realised? Here, the TRIZ separation heuristics of ‘separation in time’, ‘separation in space’, ‘separation in scale’ and ‘separation upon condition’ may prove useful as they could help resolve this contradiction with little or even no trade-off. As their names imply, they do that by separating the conflicting requirements in time, space and scale or according to some given condition.
Take the separation in scale heuristic, for instance. This separation strategy is applied to differentiate the system from its components, with the system having one property and the component, the opposite property. An example is a chain, which is flexible as a system but rigid at the component link level. This perhaps suggests that the UK as a whole could leave the EU but individual parts of the UK could remain in some form of union with the other twenty-seven states.
I admit this sounds a crazy idea—one that I cannot recommend in its raw form as it is constitutionally unacceptable. However, truly creative solutions can sometimes stem from what first appeared impossible, like having our cake at the same time as eating it.
Duc Pham
Department of Mechanical Engineering, The University of Birmingham
www.birmingham.ac.uk/schools/mechanical-engineering/index.aspx
Biography
Duc Pham holds the chance chair of engineering, introduced in 1900 at the University of Birmingham. His research and teaching are in the areas of manufacturing, remanufacturing and intelligent systems. He is a fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, the Learned Society of Wales (LSW), the Society of Manufacturing Engineers (SME), the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) and the Institution of Mechanical Engineers (IMechE).