Editor | On 24, Apr 2007

Katie Barry

There are five different tracks going today (TRIZCON and GOAL/QPC sessions are open to all attendees.) so I’ll only be highlighting a small portion of today’s learnings.

Pat Carlisle, president of The de Bono Group, is leading us through a discussion of the tools of TRIZ (contradiction matrix, separation principles, etc.) and de Bono (parallel thinking, lateral thinking, perception management tools, simplicity tools).

** “This is a way of doing ’what’?” This is a key question/sentence in lateral thinking – it helps take you from ideas to concept to alternative ideas.

An example concept extraction (lateral thinking tool) - say your focus is how to improve staff morale. The idea “increase pay” can lead to “incentives” and then to “time and a half overtime” and “bonuses for reaching goals.”

Now look at random word (another lateral thinking tool) – say your focus is how to increase revenue on public phones. Pick a random word – pipe. What comes to mind? Lead, smoke, tobacco, dream. Those go back to the focus – generate new ideas based on the words/thoughts that came from the minds from the random word. Lead – put lead in the handset of the phone. Smoke – sell products in the booth. Dream – reward program. Tobacco – self-help smoking line. Illogical, but when you get used to it, it lends far more flexibility to your work.

Time for practice work – play at home with us. Use concept extraction to generate four ideas from the focus of “how to use TRIZ and de Bono tools together.” Each idea should then lead to at least three concepts, which then lead to any number of alternative ideas. We only have a minute and a half to generate ideas, so be sure to time yourselves and not overthink. Now take a minute to generate concepts. Now select one of those concepts and generate your alternative ideas – a minute and a half again! You should have a slew of ideas now from which to use TRIZ and de Bono together.