During the eighties and nineties it was rare to visit a client where there weren’t Dilbert cartoons all over the walls. The joke was funny then. Today I see less of them on the walls. I don’t know whether that’s because management have banned them, or because Baby-Boomer and Generation X workers don’t like being reminded that they’re still living in the same Kafka-esque nightmare today that they were thirty years ago. Either way, you sometimes still have to love a Dilbert cartoon.

This one is a particular favourite. I’m in the contradiction business, so I guess I have to love it. Even better, this strip describes a great trilemma. A lot like the ‘cost, quality, schedule’ problem and the ‘which two would you like?’ question, Alice’s response to the Communication, Integrity and Teamwork triad defined by management is a classic ‘two out of three’ solution.

If Alice had used TRIZ, she might have re-framed the problem to look something like this:

The Contradiction ‘Bubble Map’ is in effect a way of drawing trilemmas. The physical contradiction – ‘I should be honest and I should not be honest’ – being the part of the trilemma Alice was unable to solve.

If we map the problem onto the Contradiction Matrix we ought to be able to tap into the solutions used by others to solve the whole problem. When we do this, the ‘three-out-of-three’ solution to the Communication, Integrity and Teamwork trilemma is likely to make use of these Inventive Principles:

   7 – Nested Doll

 13 – The Other Way Around

   2 – Taking Out

 17 – Another Dimension

All of which, suggests that Dilbert and Wally in this case – rarely – are the ones that hold the key to the ultimate solution. Damn, Scott Adams is good.