I know it’s difficult, but the TRIZ community really needs to stop indulging in fatuous either/or arguments. Admittedly, sometimes its not always clear that’s what we’re doing. But if attendees at the 10th International Conference on Systematic Innovation last week spent half the conference falling in to the either/or trap, what chance do we have of making progress with the wider innovation community?

One paper at the conference was a call for accuracy in the various definitions of the TRIZ Ideality equation. Of which there are quite a lot. Here are a few of them:

1. Ideality = Sum Useful Effect / Sum Harmful Effects
2. Ideality = Sum(Useful Functions)/ Sum(Harmful Functions)
3. Ideality = Sum (Benefits)/ (Sum(Expenses)+ Sum (Harms))
4. Ideality = (Perceived){Benefits/(Cost+Harm)}
5. Ideality = Performance – (Harm + Interface + Cost)

If nothing else, there’s certainly plenty of scope for arguing which might be better or worse than another. The last one, for example, taken from patentinspiration.com, is particularly annoying because it fails to acknowledge the importance of measuring ratios when comparing good and bad things. My personal annoyance at this definition, however, is no reason at all to enter into an argument about it. Because it, like any other argument about the other definition differences would be value-less.

Here’s why. We know that ‘increasing ideality’ is one of the TRIZ pillars. That ideality moves in a clear direction tells us it is a vector. A direction of success.

If one person talks about benefits and another mixes benefits up with functions, provided they’re both consistent with the increasing ideality vector, it makes no difference at all that one might be a ‘better’ definition. You say tomayto, I say tomahto.

So when one TRIZ educator describes to their students that what they want to see (referring to a drone case study) is this:

Benefits (Functions) – lift, control, pilot feedback, payload capacity, flight duration, ground speed, acceleration
Cost – purchase, maintenance cost, electricity used, delivery time
Harm – weight, noise, battery disposal, collisions

(incidentally, several of which are neither functions nor benefits) When the student comes back with this –

Benefits (functions) – low weight, low noise, better manoeuvrability, faster delivery
Cost – lower cost than competitors
Harm – reduction in accidents

…that doesn’t make the student wrong. Or it shouldn’t. Everything the student has written down here is completely in line with the important part of the story. And that is that each answer is consistent with the increasing ideality vector. If our solution is lower cost than competitors, are we ‘more ideal’? Yes. If our solution is low weight, is that ‘more ideal’? Yes.

By forcing an unnecessary precision on students, all we end up doing as a community is perpetuating the ridiculousness of yet another either/or argument, and as a result getting further away from what’s important. Our job is to spot the either/or nonsense before we expose it to newcomers. And once we have spotted it, we need to realise our next job is to solve the contradiction and get to a higher level consensus. Arguing about whether ‘low weight’ is a function, a benefit, an outcome or an attribute is utterly futile, and, worse, confuses people about an important issue they very likely already instinctively understood. That ideality increases.