Very occasionally, somewhere on the planet, a rare individual with a unique way of looking at thinks reveals an insight that develops into a big new idea. Edward de Bono’s conception of how the human brain works and ‘lateral thinking’ for example. Or Taiichi Ohno with the Toyota Production System and ‘Lean’. Taguchi method. W. Edwards Deming’s System of Profound Knowledge. Or Genrich Altshuller and TRIZ.

Sometimes these ideas seem to take off very quickly, while others, important though they may be, end up discarded in a locked cupboard. Why should this be so? If something is inherently a good idea – like TRIZ – why doesn’t it get adopted by everyone?

We thought we’d explore the reasons.

What we found was, to say the least, a tad depressing.

The good news, though, as with so many things in life, is that there is a very repeatable pattern of evolution.

One of the inevitable ‘next stages’ of the evolution of a Big Idea is that it needs some kind of a ‘real-world’ proof point. DeBono’s work with Shell, for example. Or the rise of Toyota. Or Samsung saving $91M on their first TRIZ project.

This ‘proof-point’ results in a wider awareness of the Big Idea. Success acts like a magnet. Managers in other enterprises look at the success and say (or are told), ‘we want some of that’. And so a Hype Cycle kicks in. The Big Idea gets oversold and quickly starts to create a backlash and assorted cries of ‘foul’. At least that’s what we can visibly see happening. Perhaps the bigger unanswered question is why does it happen? If the world knows about the Hype Cycle, why doesn’t it do something about the Hype Cycle?

Here’s why. An unholy Trinity of Dysfunction. First up a growing cohort of anxious and uncertain managers who know where they want to get to but don’t know how to get there. This knowledge vacuum leads to the second part of the vicious cycle, hungry, bandwagon-jumping consultants. Which then, thanks to the way publishing and copyright law works, results in a myriad variations on the initial Big Idea.

Think, for example, about how DeBono’s insights about lateral thinking and ‘parallel thinking’ have been turned into a thousand shade of ‘Design Thinking’. Almost invariably, these variations involve simplification of the Big Idea. So TRIZ gets devolved into a dozen versions of SIT. 15 Wastes get trimmed to 7. 14 Points gets stripped out to 4. And so on.

Looking at the vicious cycle that results, these ‘simplifications’ can perhaps be seen in a new light: Managers don’t understand (and probably don’t have time to understand) the full intended implications of the Big Idea, they just want something that’s easy to grasp. At the same time the cconsulting community has its own learning problem: how to teach large numbers of consultants to sell and assist their clients to adopt the Big Idea? They have profit margins to think about too. So they have every imperative to strip out the inconvenient ‘difficult bits’ of the Big Idea – they have less to learn, and it’s easier to sell the simplified idea to their gullible, give-me-anything-that-sounds-vaguely-like-what-I’ve-been-told-to-go-do clients.

And so we end up with this horrible self-fulfilling cycle of doom:

Which in turn leads to the next ‘inevitable’ evolution stage of the Big Idea: Corrupting Simplification. Classic example: one of the key tenets (we now know) of the Toyota Production System is the elimination of waste. One of those wastes is ‘the waste of a lost customer’. That’s a difficult one for many companies because the ‘customer’ is to all intents and purposes outside their control. Especially so if you’re the manager in charge of a production line. Far easier to strip out waste from the production line than some ethereal, invisible, and fickle customer. And so ‘Lean’ gets corrupted to mean ‘stripping out waste from the factory’. Which, as most companies get to experience, works fine for a while, but then quickly devolves into elimination of ‘waste’ that later transpires to have not been waste at all. Leaving the factory looking like an embarrassed Dodo: too late to re-evolve wings.

Many Big Ideas fail to make it through this Trinity-of-Dysfunction-driven ‘Trough of Disillusionment’ part of the Hype Cycle. TRIZ is on the cusp right now. It could make it through or it could find itself in the cupboard of lost ideas.

The Big Ideas that do make it through the downward spiral do so because, out of all the failures that the spiral produces, what we might think of as the ‘true DNA’ of the Big Idea emerges. In many cases, ironically, what emerges doesn’t look too far different to the initial rare individual’s initial conception of the Big Idea. But, importantly, what the world now gets to see is precisely why the Big Idea was expressed in the way that it was. Deming ended up with ’14 Points’ in his Profound Knowledge System because that’s how many turn out to be necessary. Companies (and consultants) get to see evidence that stripping out the rather inconvenient, say, Point 1 (constancy of purpose) was very demonstrably a dumb thing to do. We can all intellectualise these things, but, weird, contrary creatures that we are, it’s only when we live through the actual consequences that we finally accept a truth.

More importantly still, by understanding the ‘why’ the Big Idea is the way it is makes it much easier to engage people – managers and consultants – in the process of learning it. Which in turn means that it’s easier all around to learn it.

Hype Cycle-wise, the Big Idea’s ‘True DNA’ triggers the final climb up the ‘Slope Of Enlightenment’. Slowly but surely the Big Idea finds its way into the collective unconscious. Eventually to the point where it reaches what we might think of its final evolutionary state of ‘MetaStability’.

And so, finally, here’s what we think the overall Big Idea evolution pattern looks like:

Given the rather unfortunate ‘Trinity of Dysfunction’-driven ‘Corrupting Simplification’ stage of the trend it is perhaps tempting to now ask the same question we might ask of the Hype Cycle: if we know the problem is there, why don’t we just solve the problem.

To answer that question it is perhaps helpful to bring in to the story another Big Idea. J.P. Morgan’s ‘people do things for two reasons, a good reason and a real reason’. The good reason for adopting a Big Idea is that it derives a tangible benefit. The real reason why Big Idea’s tend not to get adopted is that humans have evolved, let’s not beat around the bush, to be lazy. We like staying inside our lovely, warm comfort zone cocoons. Whenever someone brings us a new problem to work on, the very first thing we do is ask ourselves, ‘have I seen this problem before?’ We ask that question in the hope that we have already seen the problem, such that we can then save ourselves a lot of time, effort and emotional discomfort in having to think up a new answers. We’re evolutionary ‘satisficers’. If the answer is ‘good enough’ to get the boss off our backs for a while, it’s the answer we’re programmed to go with.

Taguchi’s Design Of Experiments is mathematically provable to be massively more effective than traditional ways of doing things. And yet it’s viewed as cult’ish voodoo by most people. Why? Because it hasn’t been sufficiently ‘proved’ to those people (or their bosses) that Design Of Experiments is the ‘right’ thing to do. That plus the fact it’s got matrix algebra in it.

The point being that Taguchi Methods, like TRIZ, like every other Big Idea, needs the Trinity of Dysfunction to do its work before the ‘TrueDNA’ becomes emotionally visible. And the problem for both right now is that they’re both so difficult the community of hungry consultants is able to find much easier pickings elsewhere. Which is why the only way to sell Taguchi is to hide it in a piece of software that does other – easier to grasp – things. And why in many countries right now the only way to sell TRIZ is to call it a Design Thinking tool.

Cream always rises. Someone will unlock the lost Big Ideas from their cupboard when the time is right. And sometimes the trick is to hide Big Ideas in a Trojan Cupboard.