As the post-match analysis of the Scottish Referendum gets into gear, many commentators have already made mention of the likely significance of the barnstorming speech of Gordon Brown given on the day before the voting took place. By any account it was a beautifully constructed and passionately delivered call to arms for the Better Together and ‘undecided’ voters.

From my perspective, it struck exactly the right chords in terms of the heart of the No campaign argument. Our analysis (see previous blog post) to try and establish the core virtuous loops of the argument for ‘Better Together’ suggested there were two things that the No side of the debate would do well to focus on: first, the 3+1>4 synergy effect of being part of the Union, and second, playing on the economic doubts associated with Scottish debt.

Read the speech (http://www.buzzfeed.com/jimwaterson/gordon-brown-delivered-a-passionate-speech-against-independe#zzcu49) and you can quickly see Mr Brown hit the nail squarely on the head on both counts.

Here’s what he had to say on the synergy part of the story:

“So let us tell people of what we have done together.

Tell them that we fought and won a war against fascism together.

Tell them there is no war cemetery in Europe where Scots, English, Welsh and Northern Irish troops do not lie side-by-side. We fought together, suffered together, sacrificed together, mourned together and then celebrated together.

 And tell them that we not only won a war together – we built a peace together, we created the NHS together, we built a welfare state together.
We did all this without sacrificing within the union our identity, our culture, our tradition as Scots. Our Scottishness is not weaker, but stronger as a result.”

Not only that, when we analyse the entire speech with our PanSensic tools, especially when we compare what Mr Brown said relative to what Alex Salmond was saying in his run up to the start of the vote, we see that the ‘yes, and..’ tone indicative of the synergistic builder was the dominant one across the whole speech:

Notice too how, beyond the expected emphasis on the ‘uniter’ tone, Mr Salmond was far less focused overall in his output.

We can see a similar focus characteristic when we look at the Brown and Salmond words through another PanSensic lens, this time looking at emotional archetypes. As we might expect, both featured the ‘warrior/lover’ archetype strongly. But while Brown’s speech was almost exclusively speaking from this archetype, Salmond may well have blurred his position by also speaking from a ‘Monarch’ stance:

High ‘Warrior’ archetype scores are closely connected to authority figures that are positioning themselves as the ‘right’ person to tackle issues of fear. Playing on the fear card can always be a tricky one if you don’t get the message exactly in tune with the intended audience. Again, I think Mr Brown got it just right, both from the overall tone perspective, but also through his ‘economic trapdoor’ metaphor and the sentence, ‘ seven deadly risks pushing us through an economic trapdoor from which there is no escape’.

Here was what I think will come to serve as a classic ‘word that speaks a thousand pictures’ situation. Not only was it massively subtle in its construction, but it was also evocative enough that all the media picked up on it, and, as a result of that, it planted an unforgettably potent mental image in the mind of anyone that heard it.

And that’s perhaps the ultimate brilliance of the speech. It’s also very likely the lesson we might all take away from this story: understand what the key issues are and then connect them to a powerful visual image that supports your argument. Over the course of what will very likely go down in history as the most striking 13 minutes of his political life, Gordon Brown did exactly that for both of the core issues. Consciously or otherwise, we all went to bed on Wednesday night thinking of trapdoors and British soldiers in war cemeteries.

The smartest move any English person can make this week would most likely involve staying as far away from discussing or expressing opinions about the Scotland independence referendum as possible. On the other hand, the ongoing debate represents a somewhat unique opportunity to examine and analyse two opposing sets of perspectives to see what they might reveal.

Why, for example, is such a large percentage of the voters still apparently undecided three days before the referendum?

Is there a way to get beneath the noise of the ‘yes’ and ‘no’ campaigns to see what the core issues are?

And, if there are ‘core issues’, what might the politicians best say during these last days of electioneering to get the undecided to land their vote on their side of the debate? Or rather, what should the impartial onlooker be listening out for in the next three days?

In any kind of complex situation like the one in Scotland right now, we tend to use our Perception Mapping process to try and make sense of the things that a group of people are saying about a situation.  This time around, however, we can draw up a pair of Maps – one attempting to make sense of the Yes campaign and one making sense of the No.

In the Yes campaign, a scrape of the various media commenting on the debate revealed 19 main reasons why Scots should vote ‘Yes’ to independence. Having compiled this list we conducted our usual ‘leads to’ analysis to try and make sense of the relationships between each of the reasons in order to establish what the main issues were. Here’s what the resulting Perception Map looked like:

 If anyone is interested in looking at the full analysis, we’ll be featuring it in the September issue of the Systematic Innovation ezine to be published after the dust has settled on the Referendum. For now, fosucing on the key points of the Map, the Yes campaign pretty much distills down to two core issues:

1. A hope that independence will create a virtuous cycle of fairer society, better wage equality and increased importance of the family.
2. A hope that independence will create a virtuous cycle of job creation, leading to greater individual benefits, fresh ideas and hence even more job creation‘Yes’ advocates would do well to talk convince voters about the validity of these two assumptions. Conversely, ‘No’ advocates would do well to try and show that they are not valid assumptions. Impartial outsiders, might like to watch for evidence of either thing happening in the coming days. If the race is as close as current polls are suggesting, the right words in either of these two directions might just be sufficient to sway the result.

So, what about the No campaign? An equivalent search for reasons to say No was performed across the media, this time revealing a slightly shorter list of perceptions. Here’s what the final Perception Map looks like when we map the relationship between them:

Again we end up with two core independent issues:

1. A downward spiral concerning doubts about the future being expressed both individually and collectively, and driven by the fact that Scotland is currently financially dependent on the UK
2. A hope that by being part of the Union Scotland opens up the opportunity for greater cross-border unity and synergies coming from the Government in Westminster and their ability to look at the UK from a big picture ‘whole’ perspective.

‘No’ advocates would thus do well to play up the negative uncertainty issue and the positive synergy opportunity. And, conversely again, the ‘Yes’ campaign should be looking to allay the doubt concern and offer up arguments against the synergy opportunity. Impartial outsiders might like to keep a look-out for signs of either set of arguments to again see how the ‘undecided’ might be influenced.

So much for analyzing what people are saying. Perhaps the bigger issue at this point is whether there really are over half a million Scots that haven’t made their minds up yet. This is obviously a much more difficult question to answer, but as such makes it a perfect challenge for our PanSensic toolkit to try and sort out. Here’s another topic requiring a more detailed discussion than is appropriate here. That said, we’ve done a lot of scrapes of what Scots are saying about the Referendum in the past couple of weeks to get a flavor of what’s going on ‘between the lines’. Here are the results of a pair of the PanSensic tools that we’ve used to analyse what’s being said on the ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ sides of the debate:

We’ll leave those familiar with PanSensics to try and summarise what this picture is trying to tell us. From my perspective, I think the story they’re trying to tell us is that the polls are likely to be quite significantly in error. And that the ‘No’s will have it by a big enough margin for the pollsters to be concerned about the validity of their techniques. Whether that will result in a surge in interest in PanSensics is rather more difficult to predict <grin>.

Anyone that’s spent any time at all with anyone from the SI team will have fairly rapidly grown sick of hearing us use the J.P.Morgan aphorism, ‘a man makes a decision for two reasons, the good reason and the real reason’. The idea is that it acts as a reminder to always be thinking about both the tangible and intangible factors that lay behind a decision. Or a piece of communication.

A couple of weeks ago we had a timely reminder that there is often a third reason why people say the things they do. The furore in the UK when Government Minister, Mark Simmonds announced that he was resigning because, to para-phrase, he wasn’t able to live on the salary the government role attracted. When the public learned that this income, including housing allowance, amounted to £120,000 a year, to say there was a lack of sympathy would be one of the understatements of the year.

Now, working on the assumption the Right Honourable Mr Simmonds is a smart guy, one is still left wondering what his real reasons behind his resignation might have been. Some internal politicking with the rest of the Conswervative Party, for example, or a desire to protest at an issue he felt strongly about. Something with a ‘pay peanuts, get monkeys’ theme perhaps? He might have a point. But, regarding his ‘good’ reason, using poor salary wasn’t perhaps the best choice in the world.

Given the public outcry that followed his announcement, it feels to me like there was a clear third reason why Mr Simmonds explained the resignation in the way that he did. Maybe people say things for three reasons. The good one, the real one, and the half-baked, ‘didin’t think this one through properly’ reason.

What’s for sure is he certainly didn’t try and see the way his words might be interpreted by his constituency members or the public at large. Or, if he did, there was a striking flaw in his logic somewhere.

To most people in the UK, £120,000 a year represents an awful lot of money. If Mr Simmonds had had them in mind, and had spent no more than another couple of minutes thinking about things, he might well have chosen to give a different ‘good’ reason for his resignation. Had he said, for example, that he was resigning from the Government because his role was forcing him to spend too much time at work and not enough time with his family, he might well have garnered a whole lot more sympathy. Well done, a lot of parents might well have said, someone who’s prepared to give up his career for the sake of his work/life balance and to spend more quality time with his family.

But no, Mr Simmonds succumbed to third-reason logic. Perhaps he was trying to remind us all that foot-in-mouth disease is an ever-present danger. That there is always the possibility that after we’ve thought through our good and real reasons, there’s still one more reason to go.

About a year ago we conducted a study to investigate the impact TRIZ had made inside organisations. To say the results were disappointing was something of an understatement. Even within ‘famous’ TRIZ users like LG and Samsung evidence that TRIZ was genuinely contributing to the success of either organisation was sparse to say the least. The problem we uncovered bears a lot of similarities to the GE Six Sigma story from a the last twenty years: first-up, no back-to-back experiments were ever conducted to demonstrate that the benefits being purportedly delivered by SixSigma wouldn’t have been matched or exceeded by any other toolset or method. Second, and probably more importantly, once CEO Jack Welch had stood up and said that the company had saved $9B through Six Sigma, whether it carried any truth or not, the method began carrying a ‘good for your career’ aura that quickly turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy: now anyone anywhere inside the organisation had a vested interest to attribute any money they saved on any kind of project to their use of the method, ensuring the real truth would never be known.

It has become a very similar thing at Samsung. Except. Despite the ever-growing number of employees who have attended workshops, the self-declared statements from the TRIZ team regarding the number of patents they’ve filed suggest TRIZ has contributed very little to the wave of success being experienced by the organisation. We only have to compare the number of patents being attributed to TRIZ to to the per-capita patents filed by the company as a whole to see that something doesn’t add up somewhere. According to this kind of comparison, the use of TRIZ would appear to impede the invention process by a factor of around three. Again, it is almost impossible to get to an objective truth, but the view from outside, it has to be said, doesn’t look great.

Anyway, following this disappointing result, we shifted our attention to individual TRIZ practitioners. If there was no evidence that TRIZ was good for organisations, we speculated, was there any to demonstrate that TRIZ proved to be good to a person’s career. We immediately, of course, fall into the same problems as occur at the organisational level since there have been no – nor could there be any – back to back trials comparing a ‘with-TRIZ’ person to an individual who knew no TRIZ or who maybe used another method. We can’t even realistically go and ask individuals what they thought TRIZ might have or have not done for their career since we felt it was a topic area that was very difficult to obtain objective truth about.

What we did instead is conducted an outsiders look at people we knew of in and around the TRIZ world – conference attendees, TRIZ Journal authors, etc – and looked for evidence of the likely impact of TRIZ on their careers. The big hope was that we would find compelling evidence to indicate that TRIZ was good for an individual. What we found was overwhelmingly the opposite. Here’s how the overall analysis stacked up:

In less than 10% of cases could we find evidence that TRIZ had been good for a person’s career. Evidence that TRIZ had had a negative effect was present in well over half of the cases we looked at. Her are a few examples of the sorts of problem we observed:

Exhibit A: mechanical engineer that has consistently generated a significant number of granted patents for his employer, and yet somehow finds himself frequently having to justify his continued employment at the company. While he has never been made redundant, he has been re-deployed several times over the course of the last decade, each time to a job that is increasingly peripheral to the company’s core business. There is no evidence that any of his patents have been commercialised.

Exhibit B: lead a management supported initiative to bring TRIZ into the organisation, organised the training of several dozen engineers, circulated regular TRIZ bulletins and ‘case studies’ across the organisation. Is currently perceived, following a leadership change, as the main instigator behind an ‘obscure cult’ and, despite delivering several successes to the organisation, is perceived as a person who ‘does not deliver’.

Exhibit C: a career academic that made the brave move of bringing TRIZ into their engineering department curricula, in the process alienating several domain experts who apparently felt the ability of TRIZ to transpose solutions from one domain into another was somehow threatening to their expertise. While there is no evidence of a personal vendetta, the tangible evidence is that the academic in question has still not secured tenure after over a decade, and finds themselves isolated within the department.

Exhibit D: chemist, one of a cluster of people trained in TRIZ by an outside consultant. Subsequently gained a reputation within his team of hampering progress on projects by ‘asking awkward questions’. When the business was forced to reduce head-count, he was one of the first people to be made redundant. At his exit interview, he was informed that his prospects of employment elsewhere would be greatly improved if he ‘became a better team player’.

All in all, the picture looked somewhat bleak. Digging a layer deeper into the minority of people for whom TRIZ appeared to have benefited their career, however, and something significant emerged:

Nearly 90% of the individuals in this category had learned to keep their TRIZ skills hidden from the view of others. They used TRIZ in their work (and planning their career as far as we can establish anecdotally), but they had quickly learned that ‘using the T-word’ was career-poison and so best not to mention it or any of the surrounding jargon at all.

Again, it is very difficult to gauge whether even this group would have done even better had they devoted the time they spent learning TRIZ to something else. Maybe it was merely their inquisitive nature that has stood them in good stead over the years? But I’m not sure. From where I sit, it feels like TRIZ did play a role in helping them to create a clear compass heading for everything they did, and a confidence to know that whenever bumps in the road appeared, they had a great set of tools to overcome them. All they needed beyond that was a dogged persistence that meant they didn’t just dream up some cool solutions to the right problems, but they executed too. They put in the ‘99% perspiration’ hard-yards, in other words. We probably shouldn’t be too surprised. Maybe the real message here is a story analogous to Fight Club: the first rule of TRIZ Club is don’t talk about TRIZ Club.

One of the reasons I left the academic world was that I got sick of having what I thought were really insightful papers rejected because they didn’t contain enough rigour. Now because I look after a team of 20 much-smarter-than-me full-time researchers, this sort of comment used to catch in my craw a little bit. They’d done rigour until they bled; my job was to try and turn their hard work into something interesting. Which in my mind meant getting through to the other side of the complexity, to something that was both simple and meaningful. So, whenever I questioned what sort of rigour referees were looking for what it seemed to always come down to was mathematical formulae. The basic correlating relationship is this: the higher the number of convoluted mathematical derivations per page, the higher the likelihood of acceptance, and the smaller the likely readership.

I used to be a mathematician, and I can still get excited by a good piece of mathematical genius, but when I saw this equation for the first time, I knew I had to begin weaning myself off the algebra and back into the real world.

This is a formulae that delivered a Nobel prize in Economics to the pair that came up with it a couple of decades ago.

Today we know that it is meaningless crap. Nay, it’s worse than that, it’s dangerous meaningless crap. But because it came with a  ‘Nobel’ pedigree, and it made for some really great computer models, it in effect generated its own little industry. It’s the very definition of crackpot rigour. i.e., the unquestioning acceptance that sophisticated mathematical models must automatically be correct.

The clue to the problem here is in the word ‘economics’. Increasingly a terrific warning sign that what you’re about to hear next is also meaningless crap. Economists serve as the veritable archetypes of crackpot rigour. I blame the numbers. Economists live numbers and love numbers. Their problem is that the large vast majority of the important numbers in life are, to quote W Edwards Deming one more time, ‘unknown and unknowable’.

Any idiot, for example, can look at the patent databases of the world and count the number of times that a patent was cited by other patents. But the crackpot-rigour idiot (CRI) wants to turn it into this:

A really beautiful picture, that – best of all for the CRI – clients appear willing to spend lots of money for. After all, it looks really scientific. Really plausible. Just think of all the data and all the intricate mathematical analysis that went into its creation.

Because these days my aforementioned researchers spend a lot of their time analysiing patents, this is the sort of picture guaranteed to make my blood boil. I know, I know, I should jump on the bandwagon and make some pretty pictures of my own, but sadly for me, I have the naïve desire to sleep at night without the feeling that I’ve been wasting people’s time and money.

The problem is this. When you really get down to it, and try and work out what’s meaningful and what’s relevant, if we want to really study what’s happening in the world’s store of intellectual property, the number of citations a patent receives has practically nothing of value to tell us. All it means is this is how many other inventors referred to this one. It doesn’t matter whether they might have referred to it as an example of a really bad invention that their’s is an improvement on, or whether they referred to it because it was one of their own earlier inventions that they’ve subsequently improved upon, the key thing is that the cited patent has now been improved upon, thus making the earlier patent somewhat redundant.

Add to that rather inconvenient reality the fact that citations can only ever happen after the earlier patent has been made public, and you’ve now just made a beautiful picture that’s also about two years out of date.

And if that’s not bad enough, some ornery new inventor might just come along tomorrow morning with a new invention (uncited by anyone, anywhere) that just made your invention completely irrelevant.

There’s the only meaningful stuff: how much is my patent worth? (easy one: probably zero) How likely is it that someone will come along tomorrow and design around it? Who could I license it to? How could I use it to block my competitors. All the stuff, in other words, that has nothing to do with mathematics at all. Much as the economists might deny it, there is no mathematical model that will ever be able to take due account of the testosterone-driven foibles of the business strategist. Well, unless it’s our PanSensics tools, of course, but that’s another story. Albeit one that also doesn’t produce pictures that are nearly as pretty as the crackpot rigour ones.

Big Data Analytics apologists will argue that meaning comes from the meta-data. i.e. we need to step far enough above the mathematical detail to see the bigger picture. The meta-data doesn’t lie they will argue. Well, there certainly no rule that says it will, but it probably does. If your starting assumptions were garbage (i.e. numerical), when you integrate it all together into your pretty picture, all you’ve really done is created meta-garbage.

“It was vertigo. A heady, insuperable longing to fall. We might also call vertigo the intoxication of the weak. Aware of his weakness, a man decides to give in rather than stand up to it. He is drunk with weakness, wishes to grow even weaker, wishes to fall down in the middle of the main square in front of everybody, wishes to be down, lower than down.”

Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

One of my longstanding theories, no doubt borne of the last twenty-some years of working with TRIZ, is that there aren’t that many problems in the world. In my mind I’ve imagined the total number is somewhere in the vicinity of a hundred. The more I think about it, the lower the number gets.

We’ve been doing lots of projects in the healthcare sector in recent months, trying to understand how to solve the crippling rock-and-a-hard-place contradictions in a system that everyone seems unable to change. We’ve also been doing some work with employment agencies, trying to get long-term unemployed people back into work. And then with transport sector bodies trying to reduce the number of complaints they receive from an ever growing, ever more demanding population of commuters.

Each of them thinks their problem is unique, but each time, when we’ve constructed a map to show how all the different opinions, policies and vested interests interact, we keep coming up with the same basic finding: as individuals we – all of us – increasingly find ourselves sliding down a slippery slope towards helplessness, and reliance on others – usually expensive officialdom – to sort out our problems for us.

How could that be? How can we find ourselves in a society in which literally millions of people find themselves on this slope. Do none of us have the gumption to say, ‘enough already’, or, per the words of pub landlord philosopher and comedian, Al Murray, ‘snap out of it’?

It felt like time to draw another map.

As usual, the start point was to define a question. In this case it was: ‘a culture of learned helplessness has arisen because…’

Then we set about scouring all the reasons we could find, across all the different sectors of society where we could see evidence of the slippery slope. We ended up with a list of just over twenty different answers:

Then we looked at the interactions between these answers by asking the ‘leads to’ question, ‘which of the other ones does this one lead to first?’

Here’s the map we ended up with:

It clearly showed a single vicious circle. If there’s a slippery slope at play in the learned helplessness problem, chances are this is where it is. Which turns out to provide something of a shock. At least to my way of thinking. Here’s what the vicious circle looks like close up:

What it basically says is that the principle driving force behind learned helplessness is… the helpers.

W Edwards Deming famously said that nearly all (he eventually ended up at 95%) problems come from the system rather than the individuals within it. No-one comes to work to do a bad job. It’s just that somehow, all that positive intent sometimes finds itself combining in ways that create unfortunate outcomes no-one could have expected. In other words, while the vicious cycle tells me that the helpers are the problem, the real problem is the emergent complexity of their combined actions.

Blame is not the point. The point – for all of us helpless ones – is that when we’re trying to change our behviours and finding it really difficult, the very people we go to for help, aren’t helping. In the words of Nicholas Taleb, society has inadvertently made us all much more fragile. We live increasingly on a fragile knife edge, and the only way to turn things around, to make ourselves ‘antifragile’ is to realise who the enemy is. The enemy is us. Us plural.

It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for subtlety.

Isaac Asimov

And vice versa.

 
‘Someone, somewhere already solved your problem’ is one of the main tenets of TRIZ. There are some in and around the TRIZ community that appear to operate under the misapprehension that it is an expression that will encourage everyone to want to use TRIZ. ‘Who wouldn’t want their problems solving?’ they will very rationally argue. And they might have a point, if it weren’t for the fact that it’s rarely the rational argument that carries the day in any walk of life. The glaring absence of TRIZ use around the world is probably as good a piece of evidence to illustrate precisely how rare.

Tell some people that someone, somewhere already solved their problem and they’re not going to look at you with a smile on their face. You’ve just created an unhappy person. Someone who’s not going to be giving you a call wanting to know more any time soon. In extreme cases, you might just have created a person who has every incentive to make sure no-one else in the building hears what you’ve been saying either. Especially their management, who, the unhappy person probably quite rightly surmises, would very much like to know who this other ‘someone, somewhere’ might be.

And, hey presto, we just found ourselves another thorny contradiction: ‘someone, somewhere already solved your problem’ is both a good thing to say and a bad thing to say:

Which side of the good/bad divide you find yourself depends on who you’re talking to, and when the words leave your mouth.

In terms of the ‘who’, you can make a fairly safe bet that the person tasked with solving a problem won’t want to hear what you have to say. The person who does want to hear is the person who merely wants the answer. Why would the problem solver not want to save themselves some hard work? Answer: because the work your ‘someone, somewhere’ statement has just questioned is the best part of their job. People love solving problems.

That’s why the newspapers of the world all have a crossword and puzzle section in them. They give us all the opportunity to solve a problem every day. We are Homo Sudoku.

When we use the ‘someone, somewhere…’ expression with a person in problem solving mode, what we’ve just done is pretty much the same as the annoying know-it-all dick looking over your shoulder shouting out the answer to 7 Across.

It’s not what you want to hear right now, thank you very much.

The only time you want to hear what 7 Across is, is just before tomorrow’s paper arrives. Only then can you admit defeat, because only then do you see you’ve also just been given a whole new problem to work on.

Actually, that’s not quite true. If you look at what a lot of crossword puzzle solvers do (I’ve visited Gemba!) when the tension of not-knowing 7 Across has reached a threshold level of agony is they’ve gone and had a sneaky peek in their dictionary. Or on Google. And rest assured, it will be a sneaky, highly covert operation. Having to admit you needed help to solve a puzzle rarely feels good to most people. And if you do find yourself in the position of needing some help, far easier to admit that need to a computer than to another person.

Which might just be another clue to the problem of knowing if or when to come out with your smart-aleck ‘someone, somewhere already solved your problem’ introduction to TRIZ. You can use it when:

1. You’re talking to the person who wants the answer but won’t be doing any of the solving
2. You’re talking to the stuck crossword solver, waiting for today’s newspaper to arrive (with a new problem to work on!)
3. You want to wind somebody up or shock them out of some kind of paradigm paralysis (provided you can give them a sneaky, covert get-out-of-jail-free card).

If the situation is not one of those three, you probably shouldn’t let the ‘someone, somewhere’ words leave your lips. And in reality there’s a fair amount of doubt with Option 1 too if you’re the outsider, because the person is in all likelihood going to go ask the person they thought was working on the problem what they think. Option 1), in other words, is really nothing more than an indirect version of options 2) or 3).

Aagh, damnit, probably easiest to just not use it at all unless you’re absolutely sure what you’re doing. Careful with that axe, Eugene.

“anyone can do any amount of work, provided it isn’t the work he is supposed to be doing at that moment.”

Robert Benchley

Eagle-eyed readers of my ramblings may have noticed an increasingly apparent contradiction. The contradiction exists between two pieces of consistent advice to innovators. One side of the contradiction says, ‘run towards the barriers’, or, put another way, ‘there’s little point working on all the easy problems if you never get past the difficult ones’. This is a piece of advice borne of watching organisations waste literally millions of dollars having project teams skirting around the potential project killers, only to then fail miserably when they can no longer put off the inevitable tackling of the real problem any longer.

The other side of the contradiction is the piece of advice discussing the critical importance of achieving a ‘sense of progress’ within innovation teams. People will keep going on a project when they feel like they’re moving in the right direction. No matter how slowly. The best way to create this sense of progress is to work on problems that are easy to solve, and allow everything to cross something off their job’s list at the end of the day.

So which is right? Quick wins or big wins?

Trick question, right?

No-one wants the either/or answer. Innovation is about solving contradictions, and achieving the both/and solutions. And the reason we spend time drawing pictures like this…

…is it allows us to tap in to the breakthrough solutions that have already been derived by others that have travelled the same road before us.

The generic solutions we can observe from others then need translating into something that works for us as individuals. From a personal perspective, I’ve spent a lot of time in the last couple of years working on my own walking-on-the-shoulders-of-giants solutions to the quick-win/big win conflict.

A lot of it starts from the state of mind I find myself in. Some mornings I wake up thinking I can change the world. Others I have a strong suspicion I’ll be lucky if I manage to get the breakfast cereal from the packet into my bowl. Some days will end up being big win days, and some won’t. The critical thing in the ‘won’t’ days is that you can still nod your head at the end of the day and say to yourself that some kind of progress on something has occurred. Even if it was just a tick in the box marked ‘cereal in bowl’.

One way to tackle the conflict, in other words, is to tailor what you work on during a given day to your prevailing mood. I’ve taken to keeping a pair of jobs lists in recent times, one for all the important, run-towards-the-difficult, ‘big win’ stuff I want to do, and the other for all of the handle-turning grunt work I don’t manage to foist on other people, but that I know needs to be done. The second list is the one designed to allow me a few easy ‘sense of progress’ wins during the day.

It’s a start, but then there’s the procrastination problem. We all have a tendency to procrastinate I think. The trick with procrastination is to allow yourself to procrastinate over some big task without feeling guilty because it meant you didn’t procrastinate over a cluster of lesser tasks. It’s amazing just how much you can get done this way. It all boils down to making the thing you allow yourself to procrastinate over bigger than anything you actually want to get done.

The other reason I allow procrastination is that I’ve learned to stop thinking of it as a bad habit, and started to reframe it as ‘situations where we don’t have enough information to meaningfully solve yet’.

One of the things that working with TRIZ for the last twenty-some years has taught me is that there is no such thing as a problem that can’t be solved. It has given me an absolute – really, absolute – confidence that anything is possible.

In parallel with that, one of the things that working through all of Edward Matchett’s ‘5M’ equation discoveries has taught me is the amazing power of the human brain to make sense of seemingly random clues and ideas. To the extent that, once you’ve piled in the requisite number and quality of inputs, you won’t be able to stop meaningful answers from popping out.

Taken together, I’ve grown in to the habit of piling as much information about a problem I’m working on into my head just before I go to bed or before I head out on a run, knowing that there’s a fairly good chance that, when I wake up in the morning, or get into my running stride, the answer or some important new question will appear. Sometimes it won’t, but mostly it will. Those times it doesn’t, I interpret the lack of progress as a sign that I just haven’t included sufficient clues yet. ‘Creating a ‘sense of progress’ in this situation becomes quite easy: ‘find something new to add to the mix today’.

Rethink your perspective on ‘procrastination’ and pile enough information on enough problems into your head, and I’d be willing to make a fairly safe bet that you’ll have found yourself a highly effective way of ensuring you get a regular supply of big wins, and a daily sense of progress.

One of the main reasons the divergence-convergence job doesn’t get done well in the majority of organisations is that the divergent part often feels very inefficient and a round-a-bout way to get to an answer that will – if its any good at least – will look completely obvious in retrospect. Edward De Bono talked a lot about this irreversibility in his early work. But, it appears, not too many people took too much notice.

Maybe it wouldn’t be such a big issue if it weren’t for the fact that such a horrendously high proportion of complex problem solving exercises end in abject failure.

One of the things we always try and impress upon delegates working in the session we run is that there is a very strong causal link between how much time people spend in the divergent parts of the process and the likelihood of a positive outcome. Similarly, the extent to which a team allows themselves to diverge, is also very closely related to the likelihood of that same positive outcome.

F Scott Fitgerald once famously said, The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. In divergence-world, the idea is to turn two into ten or twenty. Or more. The more you can force yourself to keep on diverging, the more you start to feel sick with confusion, the higher the likelihood something good is going to come from the session. ‘Diverge until you can’t see straight any more’ is my usual instruction to the SI team when we get to work on our own complex problems. It’s not easy, because it’s not supposed to be easy.

I once ran a session for a client where there were a bunch of people I’d never met before. I figured because it was a big multi-national organisation and the team was quite senior, that I might be able to get them to diverge more than the average. By morning coffee break it was clear I’d got it wrong. ‘Why would we use a process that didn’t make life easy for us?’ one of the delegates asked me during the break, ‘if it’s not going to be easy, no-one will adopt it.’ Needless to say, I don’t do much work with that client any more. After a while, running sessions that deliver mediocre ‘easy’ results can get a little bit soul-destroying.

These days, rather than guess about the extent and duration of divergence that a team I’m about to work with is going to be up for, I try and assess where the team might be on another 2×2 matrix: 

Knowing that I have a room full of lions, cheetahs, vultures or wolves (or combinations thereof) before we get going means we can adapt how we do things.

Lions – like my ‘easy-life’desiring multi-national client – are not good at spending much time diverging or generating lots of divergent thoughts. This is a category with lots of multi-national organisations in it. Especially ones with lots of MBAs prowling around the building. Like lions, they’re already top of the food chain and, frankly, they don’t often have to try that hard to do anything. I try and avoid running sessions with lions, unless I’m allowed to bring a whip and a chair.

Next up, the cheetahs. These are the people – a lot like the ‘creativity consultants’ I ranted about in the previous diatribe – that love a Post-It party. Guaranteed they’ll fill any wall you might care to point at in under an hour. They’ve been there, done it, got the t-shirt as far as divergence sessions are concerned. In all likelihood they’ve become a little bit cynical about the process, due to the knowledge that they’ve done these kinds of things a million times before and nothing tangible ever came out of it, so why will this time be any different. I’ve even see one group sneak over to a cupboard and retrieve some of the Post-It posters they’d generated during a previous session. Cheetahs can put on a terrific busrst of speed when they have to, but don’t have a lot of staying power. Try to get a group of cheetah’s filling up Post-Its for more than an hour and you might have a mutiny on your hands.

The opposite end of the spectrum finds the vultures. These are the people that can circle around a divergence session until the sun goes down, probably thinking about stuff, but not actually getting that much done. They’re the ones looking for the already-dead prey. They’re definitely not going to bust a gut to fill you a wall of Post-It’s any time soon.

At least, though, the vultures have a solid understanding of the importance of biding your time. In complex problem solving world, ‘biding your time’ is better known as incubation. Incubation is really important in the complex problem solving world. Incubation is a skill that the final segment of the matrix, the wolves, have in abundance. Wolves represent the top of the evolutionary tree when it comes to stamina. They will chase prey for days if they have to. They’ll also work together. It shouldn’t be a great surprise to learn that it is the wolf groups – top-right hand corner of the matrix = best per convention – that are the ones generating the outcomes that are most likely to deliver meaning and success. They’re the dream groups to work with if you can find them. They’re the groups that will still be there at 6 o’clock in the evening, loading their brains up with stimulus so they can incubate it all over night, then come back at 8 the following morning all set to diverge some more.

In my experience, about 5% of groups have wolf-like characteristics. It’s a lucky day, in other words, if you find yourself working with one. Unfortunately, I haven’t reached a position in life when I can say no to 95% of my potential clients. Which means I find myself carrying around lots of wolf-suits for people to wear. For the duration of a session at least. Generally speaking, I find it’s easier to squeeze the cheetahs into them than the vultures or the lions. I’ve had some success taking a pair of clippers to lion manes, but am still at something of a loss with the vultures.