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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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