What is it about the public sector? Specifically their propensity to try and influence human behaviour using public service announcements. Which almost by definition end up doing the opposite of what they were set up to do. Social distancing campaigns that make people less likely to social distance. Litter reduction campaigns that increase the amount of rubbish on our streets. ‘Just Say No’ type anti-drug campaigns that attract more people to drugs.

The common feature of all these kinds of initiative is their failure to understand the workings of the human mind. People do not change they’ve been told to by a well-intentioned authority figure. Rather, many people – especially youngsters – will stubbornly do the opposite.

So, what to do if we want to reduce drink-driving? Well, rule one, based on past experience, would be to not try and do it using a public service announcement.

Enter Jay Winsten of the Harvard Alcohol Project, a person that recognises people do things for two reasons, a good one and a real one. Traditional public service announcements give people good reasons not to do something, but nothing at all to influence their real-reason thinking. Real-reason thinking is all about appealing to our ABC-M-driven core. In terms of changing a person’s behaviour, this means understanding change happens when a desired new behaviour is perceived by people as ‘normal’. All of us instinctively want to belong to the tribe. And the easiest way to do that is to fit in with what we perceive the tribe already does.

Here’s the basic contradiction: we want to improve drink-driving safety, but traditional campaigns ignore all of the intangible, emotional aspects of a situation and hence end up tapping into the negative rather than positive ones. When we map that pair onto the Contradiction Matrix, it looks something like this:

Back to Jay Winsten. Instead of presenting his designated driver programme as a government social marketing campaign, Winsten persuaded several major  Hollywood studios and TV companies to embed casual references to the ‘designated driver’ in their scripts. One of the first shows to take up the challenge was the (set in a bar!) sitcom, Cheers. When the scriptwriters began building designated drivers into the show, they were able to present it to viewers as already ‘normal’ behaviour. If Norm does it, so can we.

Thanks to Carla and Norm, the concept quickly spread from fiction to real life. It was an enormous success, one that has significantly reduced the loss of young life in car accidents.

The principles of Winsten’s solution seem eminently transferable. And consistent with TRIZ:

Principle 28, Emotional Fields – tap into human emotions

Principle 2, Take Out – remove the public service announcement

Principle 13, The Other Way Around – do the opposite of a public service announcement.

Principle 7, Nested Doll – insert the desired concept into an established set of popular fictional characters

Principle 10, Plant the idea in people’s heads as already established normal

My good friend, Professor Toru Nakagawa asked to make a Japanese translation of the virtual presentation I prepared for this year’s US TRIZCON. I happily agreed. Then we found out that my colloquially-dominated English commentary was a major hindrance to effective translation. Partly, I suspect, because there was never a script, and that I merely recorded my commentary on the sequence of slides. Worse still, I did it in one take.

So, anyway, if you want the Japanese translation, you’ll still have to wait a while. In the meantime, having now made a transcription of the commentary, I thought I’d publish it here. The slides, in the meantime, can be downloaded from the link found in the News section on the SI home page. The full paper, if you’re feeling particularly masochistic, is the lead article in the October issue of the SI ezine.

The transcription:

Slide 1

Hello, TRIZCON. Long time no speak. Great to be a part of this years conference and to share with you some of the things we’ve been doing with our clients this year. Helping them to make sense of the world we now all live in, and to see what’s likely to happen in the coming years.

Slide 2

I’ve got four parts to the presentation. First of all, I thought I’d look at society as a whole, and where we think society might be heading in the next ten years. We’ll then zoom-in to focus on the world of business and how it may be changing. Then zoom-in one step further and look at the world of innovation, and what’s likely to happen there. And then, finally, use those three levels to try and understand a little bit better how the TRIZ-world might change in the coming years.

Slide 3

As soon as we say we’re going to try and predict the future, then we’re in fundamentally complex territory. Which means that there are an awful lot of things that we can’t know about what’s going to happen. But at the same time as that, we know that’s not the same as saying there is nothing we can know about the future. And, particularly if we look at things from a bottom-up perspective, if we look at things from a first principles perspective, we can do a pretty good job, I think, of seeing how the world emerges from where it is to where it is going to end up in the next ten years.

Slide 4

A big part of the problem of predicting the future is the ‘Black Swan’ side of the story. This relates to the Nassim Taleb concept of the highly unpredictable, high consequence event in life. What we know to help us on such a journey is that even though events happen at random, society’s reaction to those events is conditioned by fundamentals associated with the behaviour of human beings. And so, if we can build that stuff into our prediction models and our evaluation of what’s happening then we stand a pretty good chance of identifying some of the key things that are likely to be ahead of us. Ironically, perhaps with the Covid world that we now live in, Covid was not a Black Swan, but rather a highly predictable event. And really the only surprising part of the story, perhaps, is the fact that so few Governments decided to prepare for the pandemic. And then, because of that lack of preparation, as soon as you see that has happened, it sets in place a sequence of events that are now unfolding.

Slide 5

Let’s start with the Societal level perspective. I’m using Nikola Tesla here as a marker to distinguish between the different sections of the presentation.

Slide 6

At the Societal level, what’s happening at the moment is completely consistent with some of the things we talk about in the TrenDNA book, and in turn, where we got that from was the work of Strauss & Howe looking at generation cycles. I think they’re a little bit mis-understood in that they’re perceived as being top-down analysts of the world, whereas in actual fact, the premise of their work was very much a first-principles idea. One which says the way you were raised by your parents will impact the way you raise your own children should you choose to have them. This model tells us that the years 2000-2025 is a Crisis period if the previous pattern is allowed to repeat. And, so far it has done. We’ll dig a little bit deeper into that in a second. I’m conscious with this presentation that I’ve got a lot of material to try and cover and so the way I’m trying to handle that is by providing, as you’ll see on the bottom of a lot of the slides, a reference for further reading. We’ve published a lot of material this year, and if anyone’s interested in any particular part they can go and look at whichever bits they feel they’d like more information on.

Slide 7

We also know that there are an awful lot of things we can’t predict as described earlier. We do know that in the Crisis period there are lots of wobbling dominoes. And while it’s difficult to predict which domino will fall over first, once one domino falls over it gives us a good indication of what the next domino and the domino after that will be to fall over.

Slide 8

So, whether it’s trade, employment, politics, we’re now in a situation where the pandemic has already severely impacted other dominoes and we’re starting to see some of those also falling over.

Slide 9/10

Right at this moment we’re coming to the climax of the Strauss & Howe predicted Crisis period, and, if the pattern plays out, it tells us the next four-to-five years, things will get worse than where they are today. And then hopefully, somewhere around 2024/2025, things will settle down into a ‘New World’. In effect what the model says is that the world is currently in transition from one s-curve to the next.

Slide 11

Another model that’s useful in these kinds of situation is the Hero’s Journey. Here, as soon as we understand there is an s-curve shift taking place, the work of Joseph Campbell tells us that there are some clear milestones that occur during those transitions. One of the key ones being that, once we’ve jumped off an s-curve, there will be an ‘Ordeal’, or, from a TRIZ perspective, a contradiction that needs to be solved. Trying to look at previous cycles of the pattern and where we are right now, the analogy I would draw is that the pandemic is the equivalent, in the US at least, of Pearl Harbour in the last cycle. Pearl Harbour was a clear signal to the United States that their current way of living wasn’t going to prevail any longer, and triggered the start of a transition to a New World. So, right now with Covid, if the pattern repeats, then we have four or five years to unravel the Ordeal, make sense of it, solve the problem and – hopefully – solve it well.

Slide 12

We also know that we’re in a situation here of ‘punctuated equilibrium’. So, for large periods in history, things are relatively calm. Then one domino will fall over, and it will trigger the fall of a number of other dominoes and we’ll see lots of change, and then things will settle down again. So, again, right now we’re in one of those punctuated equilibrium situations. And one of the things we know from previous cycles is that these periods of instability are really important from an innovation perspective.

Slide 13/14

Here’s another model of the world offering a classic case of someone, somewhere having done some hard work for us. This is the Disaster Cycle. A piece of knowledge concerning the occurrence of bad events, that what follows from them forms a very consistent pattern. So, we have the impact of the event, there’s a subsequent ‘honeymoon’ period when everyone pulls together to try and fix things, followed by disillusionment, where we realise that the temporary fixes that have got us out of the initial emergency aren’t innovation at all, but rather merely expedient, and that the real innovation job starts during the Disillusionment phase. We’re heading in to that phase right now and a lot of the expedient solutions are becoming innovation opportunities.

Slide 15

This is another piece of research looking at the world from a societal perspective, and again, looking at disaster and situations where society jumps off its s-curve. This is the work of Dmitry Orlov. His scenarios for the world where it is now are all quite bleak to be honest. The best of which is that we do what Iceland did at the end of the GFC and thus allow ourselves to stay, or return to where we are. He didn’t have one of the good scenarios that we think is a possibility. We just published the ‘Everythink’ book, and that talks about a breakthrough situation where we jump to a ‘higher’ level s-curve than the one we’re on right now. We think it’s a fairly low probability, but its not possible to say at this point in time which of those scenarios, whether it’s the optimistic one that we’ve got, or the five pessimistic ones that Orlov has got, is the one that will happen. I think what we do have though is the opportunity to identify some of the signals that will tell us which of those scenarios is the most likely to play out.

Slide 16

In order to make any kind of meaningful prediction about the future, we need to take all the uncertainties and try and bracket them. So, what we’ve done with several clients this year is build a number of scenarios which together cover the range of possible changes in the world. In this picture here we’re essentially looking at four scenarios along two different axes. One looks at society – which either stays in the doldrums that its in right now or it undergoes a significant step-change. And on the other axis we look at the world of business and again have one scenario that says the current systems remain locked-in where they are right now, or, at the other end of that spectrum, there’s some kind of a major breakthrough. That could either be a technological breakthrough (for example the energy sector, probably the most likely), or its some kind of legislative breakthrough and shift. The most likely scenario there, I think, is the power of the Big Data companies and the likelihood that Governments will try and break them up. So, we look at those four scenarios and then, if we identify something that occurs in all four scenarios, then we can say with a degree of confidence that its likely to happen whatever the reality turns out to be. We’ve done that analysis. I don’t have time to go through it here, but…

Slide 17

Pointing out what we have seen from those scenarios is that in Crisis periods, whatever the scenario turns out to be, looking at those four extremes, there are always winners, winners that are consistently winners, and then there are winners that are likely to be winners in this particular cycle. The headlines on the slide are essentially the findings that we’ve published, and we think are going to inform the innovation side of our story.

Slide 18

It’s sometimes nice to look also at some of the losers. Without wanting to get too depressing about things, there’s a few references I think give us some signals. One of the most likely ones is, looking at the book, ‘Bullshit Jobs’ by David Graeber, who sadly passed away recently. During Crisis periods a lot of those meaningless jobs that currently exist in the world will disappear. That could mean 30% of the jobs in the world according to Graeber’s research. I think also highly likely is the fact that when we’re in a period of chaos and high instability, optimisation is not the right strategy anymore, and so things like Lean, SixSigma will fade into the background. Providers of those kind of services are going to have a tough time.

Slide 19

Let’s now zoom in and look at the world of business…

Slide 20

…and introduce this model. Again, it’s all written up elsewhere so I’m not going to spend too much time describing it here. One of the things that we’ve been saying quite strongly to our clients is that you need to understand the capability of your organisation in terms of complexity, and you need to set that in the context of the surrounding environment that you’ve got. So, you’ve basically got four scenarios you need to be thinking about. One is that the world you’re operating in is ‘simple’. Another is that it is ‘complicated’. Then it’s complex. Then it’s chaotic. If you don’t know which of those scenarios you’re in then it’s highly likely you will find yourself doing the wrong things at the wrong time. So, know where you are, know where the context is…

Slide 21

…One thing we know from before the pandemic hit is that the prevailing business model for most organisations was efficiency-driven. And so what that meant was a desire to simplify things inside organisations…

Slide 22

…ever since Taylor came along and studied work, ‘standardisation’ has been the dominant model. The converse of that is Nassim Taleb again, and his 2012 book, looking at AntiFragile. Which is kind of the opposite view that says you should be aiming for a situation in which the more your organisation is stressed, the stronger you become…

Slide 23

…that’s the line at the top of the 4-by-4 picture. The natural world tries to take us away from this line. So standardisation and Taylor’s work tries to simplify everything; the 2^nd Law of Thermodynamics and the reality of life push us towards the boundary with chaos. Boththese forces combine to make it difficult for organisations to get to where they’d like to be… which is where they are ‘efficient’…

Slide 24

…there are certainly things we can do in order to achieve that. Some of them quite drastic – for example, if we look back at the beginning of the automotive industry and Henry Ford, ‘any colour you like as long as it is black’ was a great way of simplifying their market. If you wanted to buy a Ford, it was going to be one that had a black paint-job.

Slide 25

Where you’d like to be, where Taleb encourages us to be is up in the ‘Golden Triangle’ at the top of the picture. That’s the place that says we acknowledge the world is complex, and we have processes in place inside our organisation which are consistent with that complexity. Above the diagonal line – the Ashby Line – says that the capability of our system is greater than the level of complexity of the world around us. Hence it makes a great target for organisations to be. The distance between the previous green triangle, the Efficiency Zone and the Golden Triangle, unfortunately, makes life quite difficult for most organisations. It’s a big shift that needs to take place…

Slide 26

…the book we published at the beginning of lockdown is all about start-up companies, but it’s also about the journey of getting out of the ‘ordinary’, efficiency-dominated world and into a complex environment. Almost fundamentally that means going through a period of chaos. I think many people will recognise that the world only really changes when we are in such a situation of chaos. Because, if nothing else, chaos teaches us that the existing rules don’t apply any more.

Slide 27/28

I think, just looking at business, and how it’s changed by this s-curve shift that society is taking, there’s another book that has come out recently, which we think is relevant. That is Gary Hamel’s latest book, ‘Humanocracy’. It talk about a shift in paradigm that’s taking place in the workplace. He’s another person who understands ‘first principles’. Humanocracy in effect talks about the shift that is taking place away from the efficiency-dominated world in which people employed by organisations are effectively given tiny, segmented, easily-trainable jobs… into one in which efficiency shifts to effectiveness, and where we need people to bring their brain to work and to think creatively. Now, whether that creates any innovation opportunities remains to be seen, but that paradigm shift is certainly something we can see on the horizon…

Slide 29

…I’m not sure every organisation is going to be able to make it. I’m not sure many actually want to make it. If we look at what’s happening in the media at the moment, there’s lot’s of talk about a K-shaped economy. All of our scenarios predict the same thing. Which basically means that we’ve got three types of organisation: Type 1 is the organisations that are currently part the way up their s-curve and get to keep going; Type 2 is the type of organisation that, unfortunately, doesn’t make it through the societal shift; and Type 3 is the organisation that makes a shift to the new paradigm described in Gary Hamel’s book: the ‘effectiveness’ world rather than the efficiency world.

Slide 30

I think there are clear signals, and certainly looking at Hamel’s book we can see examples of these ‘new world’ organisations – where they’ve engineered completely different organisation structures: structures that are consistent with empowering people, eliminating the ‘bad’ jobs, creating ‘self-organisation’. In many ways, very consistent with TRIZ. Haier, WL Gore are the two prime examples of what the new world could look like. The ‘command and control’, Type 1. Organisations, those are the Facebooks, the Amazons of the world, the ones that have become highly dominant in the past decade or so because they’ve tapped into the virtuous cycle that comes from owning peoples’ data and using that data to better understand what it is that customers will want in the future. And then, the Type 2 downside sees the ‘command and control’ dinosaurs, the top-down driven organisations… I think automotive is going to be one of the biggest sufferers in this domain. Aerospace not far behind it. Unless these companies are able to make a marked transition to a new way of doing things then they’re going to be in serious trouble.

Slide 31

From an innovation perspective then, what have we heard so far? From a societal perspective we have difficult times, but good times for innovation. Business on the other hand, has got to undergo a significant shift away from an efficiency model towards an innovation model. And one of the challenges of that is, do the skills exist inside organisations…

Slide 32

…to enable it? Certainly if we look at the Big Five consulting companies there’s a strong case to be made to say that they’re the cause of the problem that the world’s in right now, because what they’ve been doing is teaching client companies about operational efficiency for the last 40 years, and have taken companies too far down that efficiency road. To the point where many of them are unable to come back and rethink how they do things. We think they’re in trouble. We think there are signs, if you look at the companies the Big Five consulting companies are buying at the moment – eg buying ‘Design Thinking’ boutiques and innovation boutiques – its clear they fundamentally don’t understand what innovation is about yet. They could be a solution in the future, but in the short term are very definitely not going to be…

Slide 33

…part of the reason for that is there is still an awful lot of confusion about what we mean when we use the word ‘innovation’. We published this article a couple of months ago looking at the different definitions that are out there. The one that we use is the one that defines innovation as ‘successfully implemented ideas’. In other words, it is making money for the organisation. But it turns out that our view represents a minority perspective on what innovation means. The majority of innovation authors think it’s about an ‘implemented idea’, irrespective of whether it has been successful or not, and about a third of authors still think that ‘innovation’ means ‘generating ideas’. It’s only the green definition on this slide that actually makes any kind of sense in terms of the TRIZ story, and the future for the innovation world – that you’ve got to deliver success to your clients, otherwise you’re basically not innovating, but rather merely preserving the status quo.

Slide 34

Something we’ve known for a long time is that TRIZ over-shoots the market to a high degree. It was 2012 when we published the Innovation Capability Maturity Model, where we’d identified five different Levels of Capability to innovate inside organisations. TRIZ really becomes a valuable tool for Level 4 and Level 5 organisations, but, as shown in this picture here, there aren’t many of those organisations. The majority of organisations have never really had to think about innovation, and so have really been thrown in at the deep end when the Covid domino fell over. This is a problem for the TRIZ World… a lot of the tools are useful, but actually quite dangerous if the Capability to innovate inside the organisation is low.

Slide 35

What do we also know? We know that other methods struggle similarly to deliver success inside organisations. So, 98% of all innovation attempts fail. And if we look at innovation attempts that purportedly use Design Thinking, Or QFD, or Open Innovation, they really do nothing to impact the overall success or failure rate. The problem is something deeper than methodology. We could easily add TRIZ into that story too. It’s a necessary part of the innovation story, but it’s not a sufficient part when we’re dealing with complexity.

Slide 36

So, what we’ve tried to do over the years, we did it with the Capability Maturity Model back at the beginning of the last decade, is try to look at the 2% of organisations that were successful, and reverse engineer what they did. This year’s book, the Hero’s (Start-Up) Journey is really been about the start-up organisations and the 2% of those that are successful, and reverse engineering what is it about their capabilities that allow them to succeed where their competitors did not.

Slide 37

So that takes us to TRIZ. And how TRIZ becomes a big part of that success story…

Slide 38

…’necessary but not sufficient’ is the way we’ve been describing it for a number of years. Some of you may be familiar with the ‘Hype Cycle’ from Gartner. We’ve been tracking TRIZ’s along this Cycle for a number of years. It makes for a great case study. One we’ve written up a couple of times now, looking at some of the key events that took place in the 1990s – the arrival of the first consulting companies, the software, and the deployment inside companies like Samsung. The pinnacle of TRIZ so far was probably the Samsung medal awarded to the TRIZ team. Everything after that has seen TRIZ on a downward trajectory, completely consistent with what the Hype Cycle tells us. I’d have to say, where we are right now is right at the bottom of the ‘Trough of Disillusionment’… which is a dangerous place to be. Ideally, we get through it, and up the ‘Slope of Enlightenment’ – so people begin to understand what TRIZ actually does, But, when you’re in the steep downward trajectory, sometimes it’s the case that we can’t climb out of the descent fast enough and we end up crashing everything completely.

Slide 39

So, what do we conclude from our analysis? The answer takes us back to  our Complexity Landscape again. One of the reasons why TRIZ has struggled s because if we look at original, Classical TRIZ…

Slide 40

…it really sits in the ‘Complicated’ domain. It’s not designed for complex problems, but rather, complicated technical problem where the system is in control. The clue is in the name – ‘theory of inventive problem solving – it tells us something about the problem, but the crux of the method really resides with the problem solving part of the story…

Slide 41

…it’s only later on when we have what might be called, TRIZ 2.0, where we start to bring in some of the Western influences. So, Function Analysis gets added to the story, for example, and it’s then that we can look at complicated problems where the definition is very unclear. What we’ve been trying to do is, because of the work we do with marketing functions and looking at ‘business’ is create a TRIZ 3.0, or, more appropriately, ‘Systematic Innovation’ these days, is to get into that complex world such that we can deal with complex situations. And where we’re trying to get to at the moment, the upcoming TRIZ 4.0, or ‘Systematic Innovation 4.0’ more properly, is enabling organisations to work no matter where we are on the Landscape. So, if the environment is in Chaos, for example, we know there are things that can and should be done in order to get the organisation out of that chaos. The idea here is, again, diagnosing where an organisation is and then bringing along the appropriate sets of tools and methods for that particular situation. So, if it’s a complicated situation then Classical TRIZ is a perfectly adequate, and a perfectly sensible thing to bring to the story. If you’re in a complex environment then, unfortunately, Classical TRIZ is really not going to help you. It will point people in fundamentally wrong directions. What’s required is to acknowledge and embrace the complexity that’s there. When we’re dealing with chaos, what that essentially means is that we have to be able to do things an awful lot faster…

Slide 42

…and so when we start attaching methodologies to these different scenarios then, in the Chaos world, we’re looking at the work of John Boyd and his OODA model – the idea of rapid learning cycles, which may well have a TRIZ element to them, but it is the cycling and the rapid learning that is the key to survival and thriving in those environments. The model basically gives us an indication that, once we’ve understood where an organisation is and where their market is, we get a much better chance of bringing along the right combination of tools and methods to deal with the situation.

Slide 43

As far as TRIZ itself is concerned, then, I’ve used this slide way too many times in recent years. The UK has some of the worst politicians on the planet at the moment. Historically, we’ve had some of the best, and I think, the best was probably Winston Churchill, who, famously talked about democracy as being the worst form of government… apart from all the others. I think TRIZ finds itself in a similar situation, in that it is the worst innovation method… apart from all the other ones. This is a problem. It’s certainly a problem for the TRIZ community. But it’s a problem for organisations that are trying to innovate also, because there’s a lot of stuff out there – with 1500 books a year published on innovation – and none of it really seems to help…

Slide 44

…so, the prognosis for TRIZ… what are the ‘yes, buts’ first of all? A constant frustration, certainly inside our organisation, is the bickering and argument that still takes place in the TRIZ world. Fighting over crumbs instead of growing the pie. I look at some of the Big Five consulting companies that have got zero innovation capability, and the TRIZ world really should be destroying those organisations. And yet, here we are, literally scraping a living, especially those that are trying to do it with purely TRIZ. There are too many TRIZ providers… many of whom are not users of TRIZ. Again, it’s an enormous frustration of mine that TRIZ tells us the customer wants the function, and still we hear TRIZ consultants saying you have to use TRIZ. It’s completely inconsistent with the reality of the world and, because a lot of the TRIZ providers aren’t innovators – they’ve never innovated, they’ve never seen a project all the way through to its end, its really difficult for them to understand the complexity of the world, especially the 99% perspiration that follows the 1% inspiration at the beginning. We’ve talked a little bit already about complexity and using compatible strategies for a complex world, but Classical TRIZ is still stuck in the ‘complicated’ world. That’s clearly a problem. Where we do try and take TRIZ out of the technical world and into the business world, we immediately fall into the trap of, looking at the history of TRIZ and its Soviet origins, raising eyebrows with organisations who cannot connect the idea of ‘business’ and the Soviet Union at all. That is a really enormous problem. Both for the organisations that are trying to innovate and don’t know where to go to look to find solutions, but also for the TRIZ community, because, its very clear that the people with all the money inside organisations are the people that sit in the boardroom. If we take all of that stuff and think about how we solve all these contradictions, what do we get left with?

Slide 45

Fundamentally, I think we can say very safely that, when we take things down to a first principle level, innovation is largely about contradiction solving. The vast majority of all innovations – in other words the 2% that have been successful – they’ve identified and they’ve solved a contradiction. TRIZ is the absolute home of contradiction-solving. Theory of Constraints is perhaps the only other methodology that gets anywhere close to it. Recognising the importance of contradictions, philosophically speaking we’re looking at Hegel and his insights about the importance of contradiction solving. So, the good news as far as the TRIZ community is concerned, is that, whatever happens, when the world understands that innovation is contradiction solving, TRIZ has an enormous advantage over just about everything else. I think, unfortunately, the down side, and I guess the bad news, which isn’t going to make me popular with a lot of people is, whichever way we look at it, the TRIZ name makes no sense in the world we’re heading into. You’ve got to deal with complex problems, you’ve got to deal with business situations, and its just not possible to overcome the stigma that comes with the Soviet roots of the methodology. So, I can’t see that, by 2030 the TRIZ name will be anything other than a footnote in history. I think a lot of Altshuller’s research, on the other hand, and the contradiction-solving part of the story in particular will be right there in the centre of whatever the innovation world ends up being. I think, if we come back to the societal level part of this presentation’s story for a second, we’ve got four or five year’s worth of Crisis and Chaos ahead of us. I don’t think that’s a great time to be launching on to the world a new TRIZ or whatever the successor to the TRIZ name ends up being. It’s a time to stay underground. People want to innovate, they don’t want to learn innovation methods. They need the output, they need the success stories, and so, certainly we’re not going to put any effort at all into promoting new methodologies in the next four/five years. What we are going to be doing is getting ourselves ready for the period when things settle down, when society has found it’s new s-curve and is stabilised in that New World, because that’s the end of the punctuated equilibrium and we’re back to equilibrium, and it becomes a much more sensible time to start thinking about creating innovation capability in a wider number of organisations and a wider range of the population inside those organisations. If we look at the Haier business model, however, its difficult to see them outsourcing a lot of innovation activity, simply because, when you have a self-organising system, and you’ve got lots and lots of tiny organisations within the overall organisation, all of them empowered to do whatever they need to do in order to innovate, its difficult to see them going out to innovate with large consulting companies. And so the TRIZ opportunity there is going to be a highly segmented one, and one that is still largely unclear. It’s a case of being underground at the moment to get some success stories, getting ready for whatever the New World turns into. In my most optimistic days, I have the probably naïve expectation and hope that the TRIZ community will get together in this four/five year period such that we can make a positive difference to the rest of the planet. On my more realistic days, I think what’s going to happen is that an outsider – again applying TRIZ to itself – is going to come along and cherry-pick the important parts of TRIZ, combine them with other things, and they’ll be the ones that end up being the big success and will reap the rewards of surviving the chaos period and prevailing then in the New World.

Slide 46

So, a mix of good and bad news. Thanks again for the opportunity to let me speak. I’m conscious that I’ve thrown lots of information at people. If anyone wants to know more information, I’m always happy to start a conversation. Either through email or, these days, through Twitter. Enjoy the rest of the conference, and thanks very much.

One of the more fatuous exhortations I hear being used, usually by weary academics talking to incalcitrant students (or weary bosses to incalcitrant employees) is, ‘don’t give up’. I’m sure in the majority of situations the advice was well-intentioned. But it was also lazy. And, if we’re working on a wicked problem, potentially quite dangerous. And not just for the incalcitrant student or employee.

There are definitely times, wicked-problem-wise, when giving up is precisely the right thing to do. “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. Then quit. No use being a damn fool about it.” So said one of my all-time favourite comedians, W.C. Fields. I think what he was getting at was the sort of situation where we find ourselves beating our heads against brick walls. Which, when we find ourselves blinded by the metaphorical blood dripping off our metaphorical forehead, is probably as good a time as any to give up. Except things are never quite that simple. And not just because W.C. Fields never actually said those words.

Here’s a hopefully better version of a give-up/don’t-give-up decision process:

You’re welcome.

Very British Problems #2384. Drivers hogging the middle lane on the motorway. Why do they do it?

I read a theory this morning that it was all about the British class system. The inside-lane is for lorries, and inferior vehicles that can’t travel very fast, otherwise known (according to the espoused theory) as the Working Class. Then by extension, the middle-lane is for Middle Class people, and the fast-lane is for the Upper Class, In that they have better, faster cars.

The theory seemed a little odd. The question, though, was quite intriguing (and, frankly, way more interesting than the student essays I’m supposed to be marking today). Intriguing enough to go on a short, ‘someone, somewhere already solved your problem’ exercise. On which, sure enough, there have been a number of surveys of lane-hoggers.  Perhaps not surprisingly the ‘middle-lane-equals-middle-class’ argument was not one of the cited reasons. It wouldn’t be, would it. Because no-one is going to give such an answer to a person with a clipboard and tape-recorder. A classic case of people doing things for good reasons and real reasons. Surveys capture the good reasons, but we have to do something different in order to capture the real reasons. Like understanding human bevahiour at a first-principle level. Using something like our Autonomy-Belonging-Competence-Meaning (ABC-M) model, maybe.

Then there’s another piece of the jigsaw missing: it’s not just the good and real reasons that govern behaviours, but the relationship between all those reasons. If we don’t understand the ‘betweens’ there’s no chance of understanding – actually – why drivers persistently hog the middle lane of the UK’s motorways. It was time for a Perception Map…

First up, then, I needed to formulate a question. I decided on, ‘Ideally, drivers don’t hog the middle lane of the motorway, but…’

And then I trawled through the literature to make a list of all the good ‘buts’. There were quite a few. Then I spent a few minutes thinking about and speculating on the (ABC-M) real ones. Here’s the overall list I ended up with:

A Inside-lane is for ‘Working Class’/grubby/slow/inferior people

B Middle-lane is for Middle Class people

C Driving in the middle-lane is a sign of control

D Drivers don’t understand why lane hogging is bad

E There’s a perception of increased safety margin when driving in the middle-lane

F Reduced effort staying in lane (laziness)

G Rules are not enforced (or enforceable)

H Being in the middle-lane saves having to think ahead for lane-changing to overtake

I ‘Better visibility in the middle-lane’

J ‘I drive at the speed limit so no-one should be overtaking me’

K ‘More options if there’s a problem on hard-shoulder or central reservation’

L ‘Everyone else does it’ (surveys show ~23% of drivers follow Code instruction)

M ‘Not aware of Highway Code requirement’

N ‘It’s faster in the middle-lane’

O ‘It doesn’t harm anyone else, people should mind their own business’

P ‘More likely there will be oil/debris on inside lane’

Q ‘It’s called the ‘cruising lane’’

And here’s what happens after using the ‘leads to’ question responses to map the betweens:

The upshot of which is a big vicious cycle preventing the problem from being solved. None of which has to do with Middle Class, Working Class or any other kind of Class. The only intangible ‘real reason’ element in the vicious cycle is the perception that driving in the middle-lane is a sign of control. Something along the lines that we enjoy breaking rules that we perceive as trivial… especially if, looking at the rest of the vicious cycle, we know were likely to get away with it.

Breaking the vicious cycle still looks like a tough one. But that’s what solving complex problems is inevitably about. An absence of silver-bullet solutions on the one hand, and the need for multiple partial yet complementary strategies on the other. Like using smart motorway cameras to spot and fine drivers, making those fines visible to all (overhead signs saying things like ’25 drivers fined for lane-hogging this week’), and public education programmes that show how lane-hogging has a real and tangible adverse effect on other road users.

Or, if I revert to mapping the overall contradiction on the Contradiction Matrix and see that Principle 13, The Other Way Around, is the most frequently used solution, I might suggest solving the problem by doing what other more enlightened nations do, and switch to a traffic system that allows drivers to go (and stay) in whatever lane they want. Self-organisation beats command-and-control. But then again, as we’ve been amply demonstrating to the rest of the world for the last four years, the reality of ‘taking back control’ seems to mean sticking with petty top-down, command-and-control rules. And then moaning about it.

Picture the scene.

You’ve just purchased your cinema ticket and you’re on your way into the theatre. You remember to check your seat coordinates before entering the already darkened auditorium. The moment you find yourself in the dark though, the information leaves your head. Worse, you’ve turned your phone off so the flashlight check option is gone. You have no idea where you’re supposed to sit.

What to do?

Answer: you visit the cinema with these tickets…

…a simple but, I think, elegant example of contradiction solving in action: I want to be able to read my ticket, but there’s not enough light. A problem that maps onto the Contradiction Matrix something like this:

Use a field, use an intermediary, turn something around the other way, remove something – all sound like pretty good clues. Use the light from whatever’s on the screen and remove something from the ticket.

Admittedly, I think I’d ideally like to have seen Principle 31, Porous Materials (or, more colloquially, ‘Holes’), which would have given a pretty direct jump to the holey-numbers solution. But that’s one for Matrix 2022 I think… the place where we finally – fingers-crossed – solve the contradiction that will allow us to provide readers with not just the most frequently used Principles to solve a particular conflict pair, but also the ones that give the biggest, most wow-like resolution clues.

I was kind of hoping people would’ve cottoned onto this monetised anger game by now, but seemingly not. Yesterday I noticed Fairytale of New York trending on Twitter. The BBC in their wisdom had apparently banned it because it contains a couple of no longer acceptable words. Then it turned out they hadn’t. Or not quite. Only an edited version could be played on some stations. But, alas, by the time this clarification arrived, it was too late. Every nut job in the UK was on the case. About half defending the song, about half saying it was about time. The latter group were mostly glad because, quote, the lyrics might offend someone. Not them personally, obviously, but, you know, someone.

Spool forward a couple more hours and the offended-third-party warrior anger levels had reached a solid nine on the Laurence Fox Uber-Twat Psychosis Scale and #defundtheBBC was trending. These are the moments my faith in humanity’s ability to dig itself out of the myriad global problems hit tailspin levels.

Will we never learn?

Banning or editing controversial stuff always ends up having the precise opposite effect to the one intended. Just ask Tipper Gore. Founder of the PMRC movement in the 1980s. Prototype Stepford-wife soccer-mom, Tipper, found herself shocked after hearing some of the lyrics her kids were listening to. Something has to be done about this, she said, and so, being, ahem, politically well connected, to cut a long story short, she managed to force record companies to put stickers on records with potentially offensive content. Genius. What better way to make kids want to listen to something than stopping them. Banned stuff is cool when you’re fourteen. Stuff labelled ‘explicit content’ was like nectar to innocent youth. Artists that would never thought of swearing on record realised that having a PMRC sticker on their album was a great way to increase sales. In more ways than one, you could argue that Tipper Gore’s noble but ill-conceived intentions were the making of artists like Madonna, Prince and way too many way too crappy hair-metal bands. Talk about Law of Unintended Consequences.

And so here we are again. The more the PC brigade seeks to ban potentially offensive material, the more they try and re-write history, the more they force it underground, the more they make it irresistibly cool.  

Hmm. Wait a minute. Maybe that was the plan? The actual BBC plan. Now the GenXer’s are in charge of the Beeb, what better way to get back at the Establishment than to overturn one of the biggest crimes in pop-chart history? Let’s make the monetised hate work the other way around for a change. Let’s get the best and only Christmas song worth a damn to the Number One position it cruelly never achieved.

Yes. Ha. I get it now. Hash tag. I have ten copies on order.

Pithy as it might be, I’ve never been a massive fan of Peter Drucker’s famous aphorism, ‘culture eats strategy for breakfast’. The intended meaning – that corporate culture outweighs strategy – sounds about right. But then, when I hear people using it, it usually gets stretched to encapsulate the rather faulty meaning that changing the strategy of an organisation is easy, whereas changing culture is almost impossible. Faulty because I’ve been witness to several situations where company cultures have quite literally been flipped overnight. All that was required was to fire the senior leadership team. Boom. Goodbye dysfunctional culture, Hello sparkly, fresh-start, new one.

The other way to instantly change culture is to give people a cause. As in, cause eats culture for breakfast. I’ve seen groups of people who really don’t get on with each well at a personal level, and I’ve seen some fairly alien and unproductive cultural traits that all became utterly irrelevant the moment everyone was aligned around a bigger issue. Like Covid-19. Or putting a man on the moon. Or shutting down a manufacture facility with dignity. Or ‘Beat Sony’, Samsung’s de facto mission statement through the years it took to achieve. The subsequent shift to ‘Beat GE’ didn’t quite work out so well, but that’s another story for another day. The point is that there’s not much to beat a meaningful cause. Simon Sinek might claim that it also needs to be an infinite cause, but, as the success of ‘Beat Sony’ suggests, it just needs to give employees the clear sense of a common enemy. Actually, thinking about it, ‘Beat Sony’ was really a proxy for ‘Beat Japan’, a rather bigger cause. Finite or infinite, though, the point is, successful organisations identify a high enough level, yet still tangible ‘enemy’-based cause to unite a critical mass of their people. I’m not sure whether that counts as a ‘first principle’, but if it’s not, it’s somewhere close.

One of the most successful and meaningful metaphors I’ve found when working on innovation projects in ICMM Level 1 or Level 2 organisations recasts the innovator as pirate. Pirates rebelled against authority; innovators need to rebel against the authority of Operational Excellence. Pirates hide away in Pirate’s Cove; innovators need their own equivalent. Pirates talk funny, have a wooden leg and a parrot sitting on their shoulder. Etc.

Pirate clichés aside, what’s less well known about the seafaring pirates of the 18^th Century is  the extraordinary level of trust and teamwork they engendered amongst their ranks. In no small part this came about because many pirates arrived at their career after being illegally dragged into the Royal Navy and then thrown out again without any support after the wars they were expected to fight had ended. In other words, they had something to rebel against, and that something was The Establishment. I guess this is stretching the metaphor a little bit since very few employees recruited onto Operational Excellence were literally press-ganged, but the point ends in pretty much the same place: Operational Excellence is all about efficiency, which in turn means that employees are often seen as resources to be exploited. Anyway, let’s not go too far down that rabbit-hole, the main point is to understand how 18^th Century piracy achieved and maintained the levels of trust and teamwork required to defeat much more plentifully resourced opponents. The answer was the Pirate Code. Effectively a set of heuristics that every pirate was expected to sign up to. Like any good manifesto, the Pirate Code evolved over the years, with successive pirate Captains building on the principles of their predecessors. The Code probably reached something like its pinnacle in the Bartholomew Roberts version. If there is a competition between all pirates in plundering ships, Bartholomew Roberts, or ‘Black Bart’ as he is more popularly remembered, would win it by far. Perhaps he was the most successful pirate that the world ever knew. Rumour has it that he successfully plundered close to 400 ships.

In addition to his Code, the other big reason for the success of the Black Bart crew was his boldness. This fearless leader terrorised every ship he encountered throughout the Caribbean Sea. Including many superior warships, ones that most pirates would avoid at any cost. The conventional pirate logic was very much consistent with the strategy that later came to make Napoleon such a successful General: Critical mass at the critical point. Or, only fight battles you know you can win. Black Bart knew that there was a chutzpah-related multiplication factor that could be applied to the equation: Critical mass of highly integrated, self-organising, fully-focused pirates at the critical point. That’s probably another story for another day. The main point of this story is to look at Black Bart’s Pirate Code and make a first attempt at re-framing it into the context of the 21^st Century innovation pirate inside a larger organisation that likely as not sees them as a virus, cockroach or efficiency-sapping parasite. Other derogatory labels are available.

Here it is, with my first hack at making a 300-year upgrade:

I. Every man has a vote in affairs of moment; has equal title to the fresh provisions, or strong liquors, at any time seized, and may use them at pleasure, unless a scarcity makes necessary, for the good of all, to vote a retrenchment. (Every innovator gets a fair say in what happens; every innovator shares equally in the spoils; every innovator has equal skin and equal soul in the game – ‘no prey no pay’.)

II. Every man to be called fairly in turn, by list, on board of prizes because, they were on these occasions allowed a shift of clothes: but if they defrauded the company to the value of a dollar in plate, jewels, or money, marooning was their punishment. If the robbery was only betwixt one another, they contented themselves with slitting the ears and nose of him that was guilty, and set him on shore, not in an uninhabited place, but somewhere, where he was sure to encounter hardships. (Any innovator  betraying the trust of other team members, irrespective of how trivial their betrayal, is out of the team.)

III. No person to game at cards or dice for money. (Innovators don’t gamble. Any and all experiments must be ‘safe-to-fail’.)

IV. The lights and candles to be put out at eight o’clock at night: if any of the crew, after that hour still remained inclined for drinking, they were to do it on the open deck. (Tempting as it might be to put in all-nighters, there needs to be clear end-point to the working day. The problem with all-nighters and working excessively long hours is that if an opportunity or threat arrives suddenly, every member of the team needs to be at their peak, and ready to deal with it. Outside the agreed working hours, it is definitely okay to re-charge the batteries on ‘open deck’ with other members of the team… the team that plays together, stays together.)

V. To keep their peace, pistols, and cutlass clean and fit for service. (Keep all your resources clean and fit for service at all times… you never know when things might kick off.)

VI. No boy or woman to be allowed amongst them. If any man were to be found seducing any of the latter sex, and carried her to sea, disguised, he was to suffer death. (No Operational Excellence thinking or thinkers allowed within the team.)

VII. To desert their ship or quarters in battle, was punished with death or marooning. (Innovators have the back of other innovators at all times; when the pressure is really on, innovators do whatever is required to support other members of the team.)

VIII. No striking one another on board, but every man’s quarrels to be ended on shore, at sword and pistol. (Shit happens. Innovators check their egos when they join the project, and sort out personal quarrels only after it ends.)

IX. No man to talk of breaking up their way of living, till each had shared £1,000. If in order to this, any man should lose a limb, or become a cripple in their service, he was to have 800 dollars, out of the public stock, and for lesser hurts, proportionately. (Innovating is hard and comes with a strong likelihood of harsh psychological penalties; innovators will be compensated for such harms… Bearing in mind that ‘what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’.)

X. The captain and quartermaster to receive two shares of prize: the master, boatswain, and gunner, one share and a half, and other officers one and a quarter. (The team decides how to divide up the rewards. There is no such thing as the ridiculous orders of magnitude difference in reward between the Captain and the crew as is usually found in hierarchical Operational Excellence management.)

XI. The musicians to have rest on the Sabbath Day, only by night, but the other six days and nights, not without special favour. (The innovator emotional support network needs, deserves and will have time off.)

XII (Add optional article(s) here) (e.g. Operational Excellence is not the enemy. What the innovation team does today benefits them tomorrow, and their tomorrow, in turn, pays for ours.)

That’s it. Pirate First Principles.

It’s almost like Black Bart understood complex systems.

One of the main TRIZ Trends of Evolution, ‘Mono-Bi-Poly’, describes the law of diminishing returns that kicks in when engineers turn off their creativity and instead look to make systems ‘better’ by adding more of what they’ve already done. Eventually, if the absence of creativity is allowed to continue for long enough, the world begins to bite back. It bites back by bringing in a bunch of negatives. These negatives progressively outweighing the benefits of adding more. To the point where a point of maximum viable (or sensible) complexity is reached. This is hopefully the time that the engineers wake up and realise that they now have a different job to do, that they need to increase the capabilities of the systems they’re tasked with creating and decrease the complexity.

With razors, sadly for customers, that point of maximum complexity occurred probably somewhere around the three-blade mark, and had entered the world of the surreal by the time 5-blade designs hit the market. The less said about the 7-blade versions probably the better. Imagine having to come in to work tomorrow morning to start a new razor project only to find that ‘the answer’ your boss has decided involves adding yet another superfluous and problem-creating blade.

Still, could be worse. You could’ve been working for the boss that thought adding a sixth mast to the Thomas W Lawson schooner was a good idea. Or the bosses at Caprioni that believed the new Ca.60 project would benefit from adding a ninth wing. Or the bosses at the Whitelock Tinker Toy bike company, who thought that what the world needed was a bike with a 48 cylinder engine. Make that 49, because it also turned out the bike needed a separate engine to start the main engine. I daredn’t ask what was used to start the starter engine.

Somehow, it feels like some of the pages have fallen out of the Book of Common Sense. The page with this picture in it especially:

Not quite the same as the Mono-Bi-Poly Trend, but very definitely a close relative is the boss-loved concept of ‘bigger’. This Trend is perhaps most visible in the world of architecture. Probably in no small part because architects tend to have much bigger egos than engineers. Seemingly every architect on the planet aspires to work on a ‘world’s tallest building’ project at some point in their career. Especially those living in countries where the amount of disposable money has exceeded brain power.

Intelligence aside for a moment, one of the great things about these ‘my building’s bigger than yours’ pissing contests is they allow the engineers to switch on their creativity. Literally anything is possible if you think about it hard enough. So, if the architect wants a 1300m high tower, and the client is dumb enough to stump up the cash, why not?

Never mind the fact that, physics being the awkward thing it can sometimes be, the end result looks utterly ridiculous, and the support structures take up the same amount of land as a dozen more sensibly proportioned buildings. These kinds of project require some fairly delusional economic thinking. Like kidding yourself the final building will be a tourist attraction, and that the revenue earned allowing tourists to travel to the top will somehow offset the price of a window-cleaner.

Architects are worst, but aerospace engineers have often showed themselves to be not so far behind. And again, what engineer wouldn’t want to work on a ‘world’s biggest’ plane project? Especially since they have quite literally no skin in the game. The boss wants a plane that can carry 850 passengers? No problem, we can do that.

The bosses also, it turns out, have no skin in this game. And so when the politicians come calling for a piece of ‘statement’ technology, they’re also happy to play the game. Far easier than turning around and telling the truth. Like, revealing that the economics of big-ness only make sense up to a certain point. Carrying 850 passengers at a time is good for lowering seat-mile price, but only if you ignore all the awkward peripheral parameters. Not least of which being, working out exactly how many routes can sustain that level of traffic.

It’s a fine line between ‘statement’ technology, half-science economics and stupidity. The case for the Airbus A380 was always a marginal one. But because there was literally no-one with any real skin in the game when it came to deciding whether to go ahead with the project, it went ahead anyway.

The desire of economies of scale naturally push all systems towards these kinds of giantism boundary. And, tragically, if there’s no-one willing to cry foul, it’s also highly likely that things will be allowed to sail blithely through the boundary and into the land of dinosaurs. Now that the industry has become ‘big business’, we can also see this boundary looming in the world of wind-turbines. Or rather, with the Sandia announcement of a 400m diameter, 50MW turbine, the industry has allowed itself to crash through the boundary with a flourish that is quite likely unprecedented. Unless, of course, we also include the Vestas project to ignore the rules of the Mono-Bi-Poly Trend and assemble multiple turbines on the same tower.

Here we see the precise same one-eye-closed economic logic at play. Bigger is more efficient, so bigger must be better. Well, it is until it isn’t. People – investors and politicians mainly – look at highly disguised data that shows all of the economy-of-scale upsides while conveniently not being shown (and, one suspects, they wouldn’t want to see it anyway since many of the inevitable downsides won’t become apparent until they’ve sold on their stake to an even more naïve downstream sucker) all the awkward and uncomfortable real world effects that also need to be taken into account. There are a thousand-and-one ‘yes, buts’ when it comes to proposing the world needs a 400m diameter off-shore wind-turbine – that the structural loads increase as the cube of the diameter, that the storm-forces on the structure increase with the square of the diameter, that the ‘out-of-sight-out-of-mind’ offshore location makes a terrific terrorist target that now necessitates constant surveillance – all of which ingenious engineers will be able to solve. But being able to, and deciding we should are two different things. Vastly different. Especially when there are so many other far more useful uses of that ingenuity. Which probably brings us back full circle to that Book of Common Sense again. And knowing when we’ve crossed the fine-lines between ego and truth, giant and giantism.

There’s a joke that goes something like… Ask me what the secret of comedy is.

‘What’s the secre…’

‘Timing’.

It’s hard to get the timing of many things right. At the more difficult end of the spectrum is innovation timing.

That said, one of the emerging phenomena arising from Covid-19 and the Disaster Cycle is that for a lot of work related innovation possibilities the timing question becomes, ‘now’. Especially for those that during the last seven months have had time to acclimatise to working from home.

Prior to the pandemic, most bosses were minded to ask their employees to work in the office. The rationale being that employees are being paid for their time, and its only when we can physically see people in the office that we can be sure they’re earning their salary. Never mind the fact that said employees might spend 4 hours of the day with their brain in neutral. Or worse. Then along comes lockdown and suddenly bosses have no choice but to trust that the people working for them will put in the hours. By all accounts, this trust seems to have been justified. Treat people like children and they will behave like children. Treat people like adults and they will behave like adults. Weird.

No innovation happening here so far though. And still a fairly strong likelihood that the four hours of brainless coasting a day is still happening. Only now its easier to hide the fact thanks to lack of camera resolution during Zoom meetings. Where a thousand yard stare and intense listening look indistinguishably alike.

Back in 2010, Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson published their book, ‘Why Work Sucks And How To Fix It: The Results-Only Revolution’. It offered up a revolutionary way of working based around the idea that if bosses gave workers control over how they achieved the outcomes  they were being paid for, the company would get significant cost savings and workers would get their lives back. Actually it was a bit more radical than that. As can perhaps be seen from the book’s 13 ‘guideposts’:

1) People at all levels stop doing any activity that is a waste of their time, the customer’s time, or the company’s money.
2) Employees have the freedom to work any way they want.
3) Every day feels like Saturday.
4) Work isn’t a place you go, it’s something you do.
5) People have an unlimited amount of paid time off as long as the work gets done.
6) Leaving the workplace at 2pm is not considered leaving early; arriving at the workplace at 2pm is not considered coming in late.
7) Nobody talks about how many hours they work.
8) Every meeting is optional.
9) It’s okay to catch a movie on a Tuesday afternoon; it’s okay to grocery shop on a Wednesday morning; it’s okay to take a nap on a Thursday afternoon.
10) There are no work schedules.
11) Nobody feels overworked, guilty, or stressed out.
12) There aren’t any last-minute fire drills.
13) There’s no judgment about how you spend your time.

The book was mainly built around an experiment conducted at US retailer Best Buy, to implement a Results Only Working Environment (ROWE) across nearly all of the staff at their HQ in Minneapolis.

The whole thing was built on trust, and treating workers like adults.

It lasted until 2013. When, it sounds like the CEO decided that people couldn’t be trusted after all, and that, human nature being what it is, we all of us have a tendency to try and goof off after a while. Treat people like adults for a couple of years, in other words, and they’ll behave like adults. Especially if they’ve just been let off the leash and given the reward of incredible time flexibility. But then, adults being what we are, what was once exciting becomes the everyday norm, which in turn becomes the new tedium.

What the Best Buy CEO apparently got caught up in was the old Theory X/Theory Y contradiction:

Which is to say that he saw adults naturally migrating from Y  to X just through the Second Law Of Thermodynamics. Entropy increases. Humans need extrinsic motivation because intrinsic motivation tends to zero over time.

In the TRIZ world, of course, we know that there’s no such thing as the right answer to any either/or question. It’s not ‘X or Y’, it should be X-and-Y. Or, better yet, Z. A solution that transcends the initial either/or question. Several esteemed work psychologists – including Abraham Maslow no less – posited possible ‘Z’ solutions fairly swiftly after Douglas McGregor first published his Theory X/Theory Y hypothesis in the 1950s. To be honest, though, neither Maslow nor any of the other Theory Z searchers seemed to understand the idea of contradiction solving.

But that can’t be allowed to be the case any more. Now we also understand that, complex as humans might appear, when distilled down to first principle level we’re all driven by just four things: Autonomy, Belonging, Competence and Meaning (ABC-M).

The beauty of the ROWE model was that it gave workers their Autonomy back. Emotional entropy, however, means that any feeling of autonomy we gain eventually fades. And when it does, we veer away from Theory Y and back towards needing the carrots and sticks of Theory X to keep us on the boss’s track.

The missing part of the ROWE story seems to us to be that it does little or nothing to tackle the Meaning part of the ABC-M story. We all of us want to spend our precious time doing things that are meaningful. The propensity to goof-off, in other words, only kicks in when we’re tasked with delivering boss-demanded outcomes that are essentially meaningless ‘busy-work’.

So where does this take us?

Well, first up, now that lots of people are forced to work from home, and bosses have realised that we can be trusted, it is perhaps the right time to re-introduce the ROWE concept again? It didn’t work in 2010 because the required foundation of adult-to-adult trust wasn’t there. Now it is.

Maybe, though, what we can now also see is that what’s needed is an evolved version of ROWE. One in which, rather than merely creating a results-only work environment, we design something that is a meaningful-results-only-work-environment. MROWE. The acronym’s not as good, but the idea is a step-change in the right direction.

Timing. The secre…