Media commentator, James O’Brien, is becoming my go-to guy when it comes to hitting the nail on the head, problem-finding-wise. Here’s how a recent New Statesman article of his begins:

“I’m joined now by Galileo Galilei, a follower of Copernicus who has used modern telescope technology to make astronomical observations that he believes prove heliocentrism beyond any reasonable doubt. “Also joining us is Nigello Lawsini, who has no scientific training whatsoever but has written a short book insisting furiously that the sun does in fact revolve around the Earth. Because he says so. “As the presenter of this programme, I shall now offer exactly equal amounts of time to each guest and treat their conflicting positions as if they are of equal intellectual and epistemological value.” 

As I’m reading the article, I’m reminded of the quote attributed to journalism professor Jonathan Foster: “If someone says it’s raining and another person says it’s dry, it’s not your job to quote them both. Your job is to look out the f**king window and find out which is true.”

Part of the problem here is that the cost of writing and publishing a book, especially an ebook, is rapidly tending towards zero. Therefore, anyone can create a book. About anything. Viva freedom of speech. The ‘thud of credibility’. The media, unfortunately, still thinks that an author with peculiar views and a book describing them makes for a ‘balanced’ argument against someone who actually understands their subject, has rigorously studied it and subjected themselves to years of peer review.

The situation is not helped by the shear amount of media that’s out there. The cost of assembling a podcast, ezine, blogsite, etc, etc also tends to zero. What counts in this kind of environment, therefore, is Share Of Mind. Facebook and Twitter are the masters of capturing it. They know – or rather their algorithms have worked out – that people love arguments, they love (self-)righteous anger and they love whoever tells the best story. The media knows, too, that to fight the dominance of Twit-Face, they also need to play the game.

The big problem though is that 99 times out of a hundred, the person that tells the stickiest story is the cretinous charlatan. It works something like this: If truth is on your side, you fool yourself into thinking that will be enough to win the day, so you devote the bulk of your time to finding more truths. Conversely, if the truth is not on your side, your only way to win an argument is to find better ways to tell your story. Which means you learn how to focus on cunning aphorisms, wild examples and, best of all, incredible stories that make listeners wish they were true. Stories that listeners want to then share with other listeners. All the while leaving the person that’s gone to the trouble of finding the truth sat alone at the end of the bar. Billy-No-Mates. Introvert book-worm versus ribbons-and-bows, loud-mouthed raconteur.

And thus the media unwittingly – or is it? – causes the spiral of lies and dysfunction to spin out of control. The best story wins the most likes.

In theory, the answer to this vicious cycle is for Billy-No-Mates go on a few intensive story-telling workshops. But then you end up with Brian Cox. Which definitely doesn’t help either.

The problem is deeper than that. It’s the one first described by Edward De Bono in his critiquing of what he labelled ‘The Gang Of Three’, and in particular, the Gang’s leader, Socrates. Socratic thinking is the world’s dominant thinking method. It’s what still gets taught at Journalism School. Get two opposing views together and have them slug it out until logic wins the day. It’s better than nothing. But it’s no longer good enough for the complex world we now all inhabit. Socratic thinking is either/or thinking. This was sort of okay when the world was simpler and didn’t change very fast. But now everything is connected to everything else, either/or thinking just means we all end up going around in circles, passing the trade-offs from one person to the next, with – as we now know – the person with the least interesting story ending up with the resulting shit on their lap.

The Jonathan Foster solution to this excess-Socrates problem is that the journalist is the one tasked with helping everyman to determine the truth. If their thinking is also Socratic in nature, though, the best they can hope for is to act as some kind of a referee. A referee that gets to look at the either/or spectrum and decide which is the best compromise point between the two extreme views. Except the ‘right’ answer – if there is such a thing – is never on that spectrum. It lies in a third dimension. The one introduced by Hegel. Thesis-antithesis-synthesis. The Third Way. A third person in the discussion. Fourth if the journalist doesn’t have the skills to look out the window and see ways forward that resolve the conflict between Bill-No-Mates and the loud-mouthed raconteur and generates a higher level solution. A solution that might reveal one or both of the thesis-antithesis opponents are talking bollocks. And a preceding discussion that, by putting conflict at its heart, could also help satisfy the media urge for share-of-mind generating thrills and spills.

Or maybe. There’s still the problem of people not liking smart-arses. And it would be very easy for the synthesis-focused Third Way spokesperson to find themselves trapped in that smart-arse position. Who made them the decider?

Every problem is solvable, of course, and, if we believe our own methods, someone, somewhere will already have found the solution for us. Or at least the basic foundations of a solution.

Which is what I think we can see in, of all places, the Welsh Government. An organisation that has in effect created a Third Way oriented person in the form of a Future Generations Commissioner. A person tasked – per the Well-being Of Future Generations Act of 2015 – with representing future generations during the usual Socratic either-or policy debates.

The fact that the role has existed since 2015 and is still there is probably some kind of testament that the idea works (especially when pitched in terms of a Commissioner that is in effect tasked with representing the future of our children). The fact that most people haven’t heard about it, or sought to replicate it elsewhere is that, when I read the Act, it doesn’t have enough teeth, and – more importantly – they haven’t done a good job of telling their story. And especially the idea of seeking to switch nugatory either/or choices into both/and breakthroughs. Which is a pity since, I think, the story is an almost unbeatable Hero’s Journey tale if it can be told right. Which is where things come full circle back to the media again. A shiny new Third-Way Media.

Moaning. The rule inside Systematic Innovation HQ is this. Anyone is allowed to take a minute to moan about any topic they like. Beyond that minute, unless you’re doing something to fix the source of the moan, your job is to shut-up. Often, the moaning focuses around the difficulties of getting books shipped to the EU. Or ‘who stole the damn parcel tape?’ Or ‘why does the volume always go up when there’s a Swans CD in the player?’ Brexit-related problems aside, these sorts of moan usually get fixed. We’ve also had quite a long phase of moaning about the depressing state of British politics. That’s probably where the one-minute rule came from. Short of a Cromwell-like insurrection, there’s not an awful lot we can do to get our global-laughing-stock, uber-liar Prime Minister out of office. Unless you count collective willpower. Which is probably going to require a few million wills as opposed to the SI collective.

Some encouragement on this front, however, appeared in the news today, when we saw a few thousand of what ought to have been Clown—Boy’s biggest (Royalist) fans roundly booing him as he walked into Day Two of the Jubilee celebrations. All power to them.

Meanwhile, I haven’t been able to get the self-appointed King Of The World’s car-crash interview with Mumsnet out of my mind since it came to light on Tuesday. I imagine he agree to the interview because, unlike most other pockets of the British media, on the face of it, talking to Mumsnet probably sounded like an easy gig. The first you-are-a-proven-habitual-liar question swiftly let him know that this wasn’t going to be the case. That he chose to try and answer it by justifying his crass PartyGate behaviour was probably telling in its own right. As was the moment, later in the interview when he was asked about what books he liked reading to his latest offspring at night, where he swiftly dug himself into another hole that not only re-confirmed he was a liar, but also showed that he was a shit dad too.

Here’s what he said about why it was okay for him to be holding parties in Downing Street when the rest of the country was under lockdown and people couldn’t visit dying relatives in hospital: “We had to keep morale high. Everybody was working blindingly hard… what I thought I was doing was simply doing what is right for a leader in any circumstances and that’s to thank people for their service. If you don’t do that people feel under-appreciated.”

Putting aside the fact that the majority of the parties seemed to start around mid-afternoon and therefore didn’t seem to suggest the kind of ‘blindingly hard’ work that I’ve ever had the privilege to experience, the response seemed to me to reveal not just some rather half-baked thinking, but also, like the Mumsnet reading-to-the-kid gaff, that if that’s what he really thinks being a good leader is about, he’s also a shit boss.

Here’s my logic. Which, these days, typically begins with some kind of 2×2 matrix. This one is based on what I think are the two main dimensions that will determine staff morale:

The first dimension relates to the level of meaning contained in the work that people are tasked with doing. The latest Gartner survey on staff engagement, published earlier this year, reveals an all time low 13% of the global workforce are engaged in their work. The other 87% (87%!) being either passively or actively dis-engaged. My suspicion is that the reducing engagement trend is causally linked to the reduction in meaningful work being given to employees. Now, in theory, out of all the jobs in the world, the one that at the top of the meaningful work league table, ought to belong to a civil servant working in Downing Street. If that were the case, I think it would be safe to say that the morale of those people would almost inherently be as high as it could possibly be. Everyone wants to make a positive difference in the world, and how could you not make a difference working at the literal epicentre of national government? The implication of Clown-Boy’s morale-building parties was that people in Downing Street are not doing meaningful work.

Before I get too depressed about that thought, I need to look at the second dimension on the matrix. This one talks about the effect of leadership on morale. My thinking in this situation starts with one of the most frequently used aphorisms I hear when I get to talk to people that have moved or are thinking about moving to a new employer: ‘people don’t leave jobs, they leave arseholes.’ A boss with poor (EQ) leadership skills, in other words, could be another reason why morale among staff might be low. We’ll try and forget for a second that a majority of the lockdown parties Johnson threw were leaving parties.

The question is which quadrant of the Meaning/Leadership matrix the Downing Street civil servants and their tousle-haired narcissist leader sit? My answer to that question stems from experiences working with myriad different leaders over the course of the last 25 years. This experience firmly indicates that any leader that believes getting a suitcase of Prosecco in to the office to improve morale is the sort of leader that is a) someone who wouldn’t know meaningful work if it hit him over the head with a baseball bat, and b) was an archetypal snake-in-suit sociopath. Britain’s current Prime Minister – a man that, lest we forget, has spent the last two years saving his job and the Conservative Party while letting the rest of the country descends into chaos – thus sits in the bottom-left corner of the matrix. Which, by my reckoning, puts him in the same category as the Emperor Nero. Or David Brent. Or, if you’re a little older, Major Frank Burns from M*A*S*H. Either way, I find myself thinking about collective willpower again. And what I’m going to do now my minute is up.

Money is the fuel that keeps organisations going. I used to say that Red World was the one that knew how to make money. That’s true, but it forgets that getting money from customers in return for providing them with useful products and services isn’t the only source of money. Red World exists to generate repeatable and reliable sources of revenue that allow the organisation to keep going. Part of this ‘keep going’ revenue involves an amount of money to support the work of Green World to create the new products and services that will eventually have to replace the current ones. Green World in this context is typically seen as a ‘drain’ on resources. Particularly by all those people in Red World tasked with generating the cash that allows Green World to exist.

What often gets missed in this Red-today/Green-tomorrow dynamic though is that many members of Green World have also learned to become good at finding their own sources of fuel. Usually in the form of either government-supported grant schemes or, more commonly, investors. Attracting money from these Green ‘customers’ is a very different job to attracting money from Red World’s already-made customer base.

One of the biggest differences is between tangible and intangible. Red World selling, while it will inevitably involve intangible elements (‘when all else is equal, we buy from our friends; when all else is unequal, we still buy from our friends’), is able to focus on the highly measurable, eminently quantifiable and very tangible attributes of an already established product or service.

Green World selling, on the other hand, is almost exclusively about selling the intangibles. Simply because little to none of the tangible stuff exists yet. Green selling is about selling customers dreams of the future. Which, as you might expect, is about being creative and, more specifically, about being able to tell compelling stories.

Red-selling is built around data and facts, supply and demand, helping customers to get their pre-existing jobs done and demonstrating that the benefits and attributes of our solution are better than those of our competitors. The Who, What, When, Where, How and Why’s have all been worked out, and it is about using the same ‘script’ over and over again, with periodic carrot-or-stick variations depending on whether it looks like we’re going to hit our sales targets this quarter or not.

Green-selling starts from a point where that script doesn’t exist yet. None of the 5Ws or the H have been worked out. It is therefore about conducting as many experiments as we can, saying things in different and hopefully eventually better ways to as many prospective future customers as we can muster. All the time walking a cruel tightrope walk that reminds us that every time we fail to convince one of those prospective customers, we are eating away at what may already be a pretty small pool of brave, early-adopting dreamers. In so many words, every new product or service offering that an organisation is hoping to take to market needs to be accompanied by a corresponding amount of Green Sales ‘business innovation’ to accompany the Green Engineering technical innovation work that went into creating the new thing.

I’m mentioning this now because one of the things we’ve been noticing in this strange between-s-curves time in society – a time when most industries should be realising this is also the perfect time for them to be innovating – is that the most important attribute of just about any innovation attempt right now is to be quick. Which means that the business innovation task of working out the stories that will sell the future dreams to prospective customers are largely going to have to happen in parallel with the product/service development activities. In a normal market (if such a thing exists) the smart innovator ought not to contemplate selling new products that are still only halfway along the Technology Readiness Level scale. In today’s turbulence, it is highly likely that the braves souls that work out how to sell R&D outputs at TRL3 or 4 or 5, in parallel with the ongoing technical development work that will be the winners.

Here we perhaps find ourselves contemplating the double-edged sword that is the Minimum Viable Product. Another of those business buzzword ideas that is likely to go out of fashion before anyone works out what it was supposed to mean. My theory is that the business world finds itself talking about MVPs because it sounds like something that Red World might find acceptable. i.e. it is a Green World conception that has rapidly found itself corrupted in order to pander to business leaders that usually have no conception that a Green World even exists. Consequently, as with most important ideas, it rapidly descends into lowest common denominator territory. So the Red World focused version of a MVP focuses on the main elements of functionality. As opposed to the original intent of having MVPs that also helped designers to gain the earliest possible opportunity to explore usability and desirability parameters. And, now that it has become important to think about having a Green Sales capability as a business imperative, to also be able to explore the higher level story-related characteristics of a new product or service. Something like this:

Thinking through this kind of Green-MVP strategy is something that I believe the best Green World inhabitants have always been able to do. I’m thinking specifically about those people that are able to simultaneously pitch their dreams to investors and sponsors and demonstrate that they know how to safely and reliably transition from the dream to money-making (Red World) reality.

…Clay Christensen followed up the big question posed in 1997s Innovator’s Dilemma with the Innovator’s Solution book. The answer took six years and a co-author. And 292 pages. The only problem was that the Solution wasn’t really any kind of solution at all. Which, I guess, is a pity. Except for the fact it probably sold more copies than the question book, so Christensen and Raynor probably didn’t mind too much.

The irony in this story is that if either of them had bothered to check out TRIZ they could’ve answered the Dilemma question and saved themselves 100,000 words worth of going around in circles. Albeit the circles were both entertaining and eminently readable.

If you don’t know where the future disruptors are going to come from or what their solution is going to look like, 292 pages of not very meaningful text is probably about par for the course. But the TRIZ Trends give us some very clear descriptions of what the future solutions will look like. If you’re making, say, band-aids, the Dynamisation Trend alone will tell you that the future is liquids, gases and fields:

Very likely in that order. The existence of these kinds of roadmap offer the plastic-strip-based incumbents all the useful future-proofing directions for their business:

1. if they’re lazy and in possession of below-average morality and ethics, they could simply patent the liquid, gas and field-based solutions. The only downside of this (aside from perhaps not being able to sleep at night at the thought they were using the patent system to do the precise opposite of what it was intended to do) is they may have to conduct some insurance-policy type research in order to be able to demonstrate to the Patent Examiner that their novel solutions are ‘manufacturable by one skilled in the art’. Beyond that, the patents would then ensure ~20 years of protection against any meaningful disruption. By which time it would in any event be likely that there would be a new set of leaders in place, hopefully one or two of which would have raised their moral standards a tad.
2. if they’re lazy and in possession of already higher than average moral standards, they could patent the same TRIZ-derived solutions and then, rather than sitting on them for 20 years, they could look to license them to a friendly new-entrant. They would then let this new entrant play the Innovator’s Dilemma game up until the point where the new solution is starting to take away valuable customers, and then allow the incumbent to buy them. Ideally using a pre-determined arrangement agreed upon at the time of the initial license contract.
3. If they’re not lazy, possess good moral standards and a decent level of Innovation Capability Maturity (Level 3 or above), they could develop the disruptive ‘inferior’ new solution themselves. Most likely using a separate-from-the-main-business SkunkWorks type development arrangement and then launching under a different brand name, gradually then managing the retirement of the old technology and fully transitioning to the new.

Seems fairly straightforward. The (TRIZ) Innovator’s Solution in 500 words or less. The only problem now is that the knowledge won’t earn me nearly as much in royalty payments or client engagements as the none-TRIZ version did for the esteemed Professor Christensen. Which, now I think about it, sounds like a really important contradiction to go work on…

The paradox explored in my book ‘The Innovator’s Dilemma’

is that successful companies can fail by making the ‘right’ decisions

in the wrong situations.

Clayton M. Christensen

This year marks the silver anniversary of Clay Christensen’s classic text, The Innovator’s Dilemma, a book that, unlike the vast majority of business titles, is still being referenced twenty-five years after publication.

There was a time during the mid-noughties when I spent a lot of time working with the senior leadership team of an American-headquartered MNC. It felt like they were alternating between me and Professor Christensen: I would be in there one month telling them one thing, and he’d then be in the next month telling them something different. Well, hopefully different. Although, hopefully also, not too different.

In one of those blinding flashes of the obvious that has somehow managed to take fifteen years to arrive, the other day I finally recognised a missing connection between Christensen’s Dilemma and TRIZ. One that, I believe, helps to eliminate some of the criticisms of Christensen’s work. Work that, according to my MNC leaders at least, started with a useful but incomplete theory and gradually, over the remaining course of his career, became increasingly convoluted in an ultimately vain attempt to try and make the theory complete.

For those that aren’t familiar with the Innovator’s Dilemma (full title: ‘When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail’), it works something like this:

1. Someone, often a new player, enters a market with a product or service that has ‘inferior’ performance (and usually lower price) to the existing and established offerings coming from the large incumbent players.
2. Because the new offering is ‘inferior’ it attracts the lower end of the incumbents’ customer base. Then, because the incumbent likes the idea of being able to focus on their more profitable higher-end customers, they are inclined to welcome the new player into the market and to take over the hassle and low margins associated with the low-end customers.
3. The entrant improves the likelihood and speed of their future success by identifying a new measure of performance that they can sell to customers alongside their inferior performance against the traditional measures of performance established and being monitored by the incumbent providers (e.g. when hydraulic earth-moving machines first appeared, their earth moving capacity was massively inferior to that of the incumbent cable-driven machines, but they were much more maneuverable; similarly – one of Christensen’s most widely cited case studies – new generation computer disc-drives had inferior memory but offered the benefit of being physically much smaller).
4. Engineers and designers, given half an opportunity, will work diligently to improve the performance and value of the products and services under their care. The rate at which they are able to make these improvements tends to be greater than the average rate of increase of customer need. Inside the large incumbent organisation, the engineers focus on meeting the future needs of their highest value customers. For the new entrant engineers, their improvement efforts increasingly attract not just the low-end incumbent customers but also progressively more of the middle and higher end customers. Hence the innovator’s dilemma: incumbents want entrants to take away their least valuable, ‘worst’, customers, but in so doing sow the seeds of the progressive loss of their more valuable customers as the entrant improves their offering. They invite an ‘inferior’ player into the market only for that player to then kill them.

The book was initially written for leaders working in the large incumbent companies. Perhaps ironically, today it more often gets used as a kind of playbook for the so-called ‘inferior’ entrants. And it is from their side that we see the vital missing connection to TRIZ: In the same way that the disrupting entrant makes their journey easier by finding a new performance measure to attract incumbent customers, they can also increase their likelihood and speed of success by following the TRIZ Trends of Evolution:

These trend patterns show engineers, designers and scientists of all industries a clear route-map to more ideal solutions. Prospective market entrants looking for their disruptive ‘inferior’ solutions could choose to find them by looking backwards along the Trends. This would definitely achieve the goal of delivering an ‘inferior’ solution, but it will almost certainly not allow them to win the Innovator’s Dilemma game. To do that they need to recognise that their ‘inferior’ solution needs to be based on forward jumps along at least one of the Trends.

The reason this works is that, because the Trends are built on patterns of successful s-curve jumps: whenever an industry makes a jump from one stage of a Trend to the next, they are effectively jumping from the top of the current curve to the bottom of the next. In such situations, the performance of the new solution will almost inevitably be inferior to the matured old solution. But – crucially – because the Trend pattern has provided us with a roadmap to future success, we can be certain that as the new solution makes its inexorable rise up the new s-curve, it will eventually reach a point where its performance will exceed the maximum capability of incumbent solutions still stuck at the top of the previous s-curve.

The TRIZ Trends in other words serve as the disruptive innovator’s near perfect play-book. Any prospective market entrant can find an ‘inferior’ solution to try and do the job with, but only those using the Trends will be able to identify the ‘inferior’ solutions that will inherently turn into the solution that will dominate the future market once the engineers work their improvement miracles. Good for the new entrants. Less good for incumbents… until we show them a better Innovator’s Solution…

Aah, Joseph Campbell. The Hero’s Journey. The DNA of successful literature. Literature that survives through the centuries. A DNA that has contradiction resolution – ‘The Ordeal’ – at its heart. Like the story concerning the fateful love of Orpheus for the beautiful Eurydice. A universal tragedy currently on show as a Broadway musical by one of my all-time favourite artists, Anaïs Mitchell (Reference 1). In Mitchell’s version of the story, one of the most vivid Ordeals comes to king of the underworld, Hades: Orpheus enters hell (‘Hadestown’) in order to rescue Eurydice, who has been seduced by Hades. Should Hades allow Orpheus to leave with Eurydice or not? Here’s how his dilemma is introduced in the musical:

Gotta think quick

Gotta save face

Caught ‘tween a rock and a hard place

What you gonna do?

What you gonna do?

What you gonna do?

What you gonna do now?

If you tell ‘em no, oh, you’re a heartless man

And you’re gonna have a martyr on your hands

If you let ‘em go, oh, you’re a spineless king

And you’re never gonna get ‘em in line again

Damned if you don’t

Damned if you do

Whole damn nation’s watching you

What you gonna do?

What you gonna do?

What you gonna do?

What you gonna do now?

Here’s what Hades’ contradiction looks like in terms of our rather less poetic bubble-map:

By way of helping Hades to resolve his contradiction, the overseeing ‘Fates’ characters offer up a clue:

Here’s a little tip

Word to the wise

Here’s a little snippet of advice

Men are fools

Men are frail

Give them the rope and they’ll hang themselves

And here’s the equivalent set of clues offered by the again less poetic Contradiction Matrix:

We then hand over to narrator, Hermes, revealing to Orpheus, Eurydice and the surrounding ‘Workers’ how Hades decided to solve his contradiction:

Hermes: Well, the good news is, He said that you can go

Eurydice: He did?

Orpheus & Workers: He did?

Hermes: He did…, There’s bad news though

Eurydice: What is it?

Hermes: You can walk… But it won’t be like you planned

Orpheus: What do you mean?

Eurydice: Why not?

Hermes: Well, you won’t be hand in hand, You won’t be arm in arm, Side-by-side and all of that. (to Orpheus) he said you have to walk in front, And she has to walk in back

Orpheus: Why?

Hermes: And if you turn around, To make sure she’s coming too, Then she goes back to Hadestown, And ain’t nothing you can do

Eurydice: But why?

Hermes: Why build walls? Make folk walk single file? Divide and conquer’s what it’s called

Orpheus: It’s a trap?

Hermes: It’s a trial. Do you trust each other? Do you trust yourselves?

Orpheus & Eurydice: We do

Hermes: Well, listen, brother, If you wanna walk outta hell, You’re gonna have to prove it Before gods and men. Can you do that?

Orpheus & Eurydice: We can

Hermes: Alright… time to go

Orpheus: Mister Hermes!

Hermes: Yes?

Orpheus: It’s not a trick?

Hermes: No – It’s a test

Hades’ solution, his metaphorical (Principle 24, Intermediary) ‘rope’, was to force a (Principle 10, Preliminary Action) pre-condition on Orpheus: a trial.

One that, since the myth is a tragedy, Orpheus somehow manages to fail. But that’s another contradiction. Maybe for another day.

Reference

1. Mitchell, A., ‘Working On A Song: The Lyrics Of Hadestown’, Plume, 2020.

World War II. An important time for making sure your planes don’t get shot down by enemy fighters. Oftentimes, planes would return from battle covered with bullet holes. The damage wasn’t uniformly distributed across the aircraft. The data gave insight into where armour plating should be added. Adding armour, of course, comes with a significant trade-off: adding more armour made the planes less vulnerable to bullet damage, but it also makes the plane heavier, and heavier planes are less maneuverable and use more fuel. Armouring the planes too much is a problem; armouring the planes too little is a problem. So the traditional response was to find an optimum middle ground. And the bullet-holed aircraft data perhaps presented a way to manage the contradiction.

Enter mathematician, Abraham Wald. He was asked to look at the data. The Air Force was expecting to receive recommendations to strengthen the most commonly damaged parts of the planes to reduce the number that was shot down. Counter-intuitively, Wald had some rather different – contradiction-solving – advice: perhaps, he speculated, the reason certain areas of the planes weren’t covered in bullet holes was that planes that were shot in those areas did not return. This insight led to the armour being re-enforced on the parts of the plane where there were no bullet holes. A classic illustration of Inventive Principle 13, The Other Way Around.

Wald didn’t have access to the Contradiction Matrix back in 1943, when his insight came to light. If he had, it would have told him something like this:

At first sight, Principle 13 is definitely a strange looking answer to a Safety-versus-Weight problem. And making best use of the strategy indeed demands a high degree of lateral thinking. What are we supposed to do the opposite of? How can we sensibly do the opposite of what the data is apparently telling  us? Or, how might the missing pieces of data turn out to be more meaningful than the data we have?

“I’ve got a brilliant new strategy which is to make so many gaffes, that nobody knows which one to concentrate on… they cease to be newsworthy… completely out-general the media in that way, and they despair. And so… they leave you alone. You shell them. You pepper the media… you pepper their positions with so many gaffes that they’re confused. It’s like chaff. It’s like a helicopter throwing out chaff. And then you steal on quietly and drop your depth charges wherever you want to drop them.”

So said truth-vacuum Boris Johnson in a 2006 interview. For the first time I found myself quite impressed by the Clown. Not that I believe the chaff/error analogy was his idea. But, from a contradiction-solving perspective, it makes for a rather elegant illustration of how the Business Matrix works. Here’s how we might best map Mr Pants-on-Fire’s contradiction:

Hey presto, out comes Inventive Principle 27, ‘Cheap Disposable’. Definitely the best match to the uber-liar’s still evident ‘gaffe-chaff’ strategy.

Meanwhile, just for interest, here’s the more usual use of chaff in its defensive context:

And here’s how we might best get to that solution. This time using the technical version of the Contradiction Matrix:

Not quite the same problem, but the fact that we end up with the same Principle 27 solution strategy is hopefully telling. All we need to do now is hope that Principle 2 – one of the other recommended solution strategies for the business version of the problem – will soon be on its way. Fingers crossed y’all.

‘Democracy is the worst form of government’, Winston Churchill famously said, ‘except for all the others that have been tried’. Which is to say that, despite the fact it is currently stuck at the limits of its current capabilities, it has done a pretty good job of increasing the quality of life for a large majority of citizens. The current swathe of wobbling institutions, though, perhaps indicates that we’re not too far away from some kind of a step-change. What such a discontinuity might look like is still massively uncertain. Much less uncertain is the fact that many of the underlying contradictions are very plainly visible. One of the biggest of them is the growing mismatch between the growing imperative to build long term sustainable solutions and short election cycles. The latter forcing political parties to promote short-term, expedient vote-winning measures to help improve their chances of being re-elected. How to solve this contradiction?

Here’s what the Business version of the Contradiction Matrix has to say about the problem:

Principle 9, Prior-Counteraction doesn’t appear very often in the Matrix, and appears as the most frequently used Principle in only a handful of places. So, to see it heading the list in the Design Risk versus Stability box means we have to have collected several thousand examples of it being used to tackle the conflict. Here’s one of them: the Welsh Government’s creation of the world’s first ‘Future Commissioner’:

With a remit set out in law to be “the guardian of the interests of future generations in Wales”, Sophie Howe’s role is to provide advice to the Government and other public bodies in Wales on delivering social, economic, environmental and cultural well-being for current and future generations and assessing and reporting on how they are delivering.

Sophie took up the post in 2016 and has led high profile interventions around transport planning, education reform and climate change challenging the Government and others to demonstrate how they are taking account of future generations. Described by the Big Issue Magazine as one of the UK’s leading Changemakers, her interventions have secured fundamental changes to land use planning policy, major transport schemes and Government policy on housing – ensuring that decisions taken today are fit for the future.

Fingers-crossed they’re using TrenDNA to help decode what the future might look like. Or at least remembering that there’s a difference between long term planning and long term responsibility. That the former is largely futile, but not using it as an excuse to give up on the latter.

The local bus drivers are threatening to go on strike again. In a rural community like ours, when the buses aren’t running, half of the population is literally cut off from many of the basics of life. I’m sure the drivers are very apologetic when they eventually decide to come back to work. In the same way, I’m pretty certain many of the commuters are sympathetic to the drivers’ plight. That’s the way strikes work in the UK. Workers protest, customers sympathise, customers suffer. Surely, there’s a better way? A way that recognises a contradiction – we want strikes and we don’t want strikes:

The problem can be mapped onto the Business Contradiction Matrix as a Supply Cost versus (in)Convenience conflict. Here’s what the Matrix has to say about how others have successful transcended such problems:

A lovely example of a joint Principle 2, Taking Out and Principle 13, The Other Way Around, solution to the problem can be found in Japan. Drivers continue to drive their usual routes but refuse to take payment from the commuters. Commuters get to work on time, and the bus company has a greater incentive to settle the dispute because as well as the lost revenue, they’re also having to pay for fuel. One suspects that both bus company and drivers continue to earn the respect and sympathy of the commuters.

Simple when you know how.