| Next Step Associates |
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| Facilitation, consultancy & training ... in innovation | |
| for organisations of all sizes around the world (clients past & present) |
 | Contact Graham Rawlinson, Principal Consultant | | Find out the latest news from Next Step .. and perhaps take a look at our TRIZ resources |
Other web sites you may like to visit, people we know and trust, not people who have paid us any money, include: |
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| Organisational Leadership
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| Creativity, Inspiration and some great books
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| Partnershipswork
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The Secret TRIZ page So, you have been intrigued and found the secret TRIZ page. Well done. The idea of having this dark mirror was inspired by reading the book, The Globe, The Science of Discworld II, by Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen. They used the Discworld as a mirror to what the Roundworld is like, and have some intriguing ideas about how stories are the key to our intelligence and extelligence. This fits TRIZ very well, as TRIZ is a set of stories about Invention, Innovation, Creativity, and the evolution of design. To match the idea of a Mirror, but a mirror for which you had to do some work to find, also fits the TRIZ Principles, Reverse it and Prior Action. Instead of the normal one colour against a contrasting colour, TRIZ suggests using Prior action to make the contrast happen, thus reversing what you normally do. The idea of a secret page also creates a Contradiction, another TRIZ concept. I wanted the front page to show a simple introduction, so you can choose to enter just a few select areas, but I also wanted search engines to find this site if people are searching for TRIZ, and that means a lot of TRIZ words, and maybe sex a few times too! In the book, The Globe, they suggest that science is not simply a collection of facts but a 'Narrativium' a set of stories which we learn, and TRIZ is a set of stories too. They suggest that when we teach children, and adults too, we are telling lies, but they are helpful lies because they provide one step at a time a way of looking and reflecting on the world, and then slowly we build our picture together with our experiences so that our storytelling gets more and more complex as it needs to do to handle the real complexity of the world. The advantage of TRIZ stories is that, in many senses, they take you back to this child vision of the world so that you can reflect more carefully about what you have buried in assumptions about how things work, how they behave. Have you come to believe that your story is the real world? So we reflect using TRIZ on the generic behaviour of all things, moving away from the language of complexity and bringing in the language of simplicity, from which we can invent alternative approaches and concepts for design. So with TRIZ we do not say "temperature increase assists chemical interaction" or even worse "heat encourages chemical action" but "shaking molecules increases attachment/detachment to other molecules". And then we can tell some TRIZ stories about how we might shake molecules. Storytelling is a fashionable thing for companies to get into, and I guess Pratchett and his friends would be pleased, but it seems a good idea to have some good storytelling techniques, and TRIZ offers these. TRIZ has stories about using resources, life's contradictions, how things evolve and why, and why not, stories about Ideal design criteria and stories about simple functions like measure, move, attach, and detach. In fact in the simplest of senses, these are all one can do to things. You may say, well we spin things, but this is just a feature of moving. You may say we store things, but this is a feature of moving and attaching. Having simple stories with TRIZ allows you to do some creative connection making between different devices and systems. It allows the use of metaphor in a structured way. Other processes like 6 sigma or QFD or FMEA are also storytelling techniques, but they are nothing like as imaginative as the stories of Pratchett and they give the impression that by gathering facts you get the complete picture. With TRIZ you have stories which get beneath the appearance and into the author's mind, the author of course being nature itself, or whoever or whatever designed this amazing world full of mysteries! From time to time this secret page will be edited and more stories added, so do look in again, but don't tell your friends you have found this page! If you want to suggest some secret stories then just Email me and maybe your secret story can be added. Finally, my website of the month is www.deepfun.com Do have a look, and if you go and have some fun there do let me know how it went! Graham |