# TRIZ on the Blackboard Let me start with a claim: As far as it is about problem solving, TRIZ is a blackboard technology - all six field in that picture are about models. There is nothing strange about that since Shchedrovitsky emphasises: Thinking only happens on the blackboard, and with the help of the blackboard. When we have a board, then we have thinking. Without it there is no thinking. In this sense TRIZ is not about actual management, but about these diagrams – models of organisation, management and leadership in companies or elsewhere. And by doing this we are doing something that is crucial for human thought: we are imposing our mental schemes of ideal objects onto reality. We have one layer, that of pure thought (schemes on the blackboard), and another layer, that of practical activity. And the transition from the world of practical activity to the world of thinking is very complex and confused, as is the transition from the world of thinking to the world of practical activity. ---------------- # TRIZ and Real-World Systems Here is a diagram which adds also the "living real world part. Most applications of Business TRIZ also focus on this work on the blackboard. For example, Darrell Mann with the four phases Define, Select, Generate, Evaluate in his textbook "Hands on Systematic Innovation in Business and Management". The process ends with the solution plan, the implementation is not considered. This is quite justified, insofar as this and parts of the analysis phase are strongly domain-specific. But Howard Smith emphasies: Dreaming up a process on a whiteboard is one thing, making it happen quite another. ---------------- # Organisations This applies in particular to organisations. %%extra: An organisation is an entity — such as a company, an institution, or an association — comprising one or more people and having a particular purpose. (English Wikipedia) %%extra: Represents a collection of people organized together into a community or other social, commercial or political structure. The group has some common purpose or reason for existence which goes beyond the set of people belonging to it and can act as an Agent. Organizations are often decomposable into hierarchical structures. (org:Organization) %%extra: subclass of foaf:Agent - things that do stuff. Shchedrovitsky distinguishes between the phases of creating an organisation and a "living organisation". He distinguishes three dimensions of that notion * Organisational work as practical activity. * Organisation as the result and means of organisational work. * Organisation as a form of life of the collective. ---------------- # Development of Organisations Organisational work is thus directed towards the _development_ of the real-world organisational system. However, such a real-world system is a "living system" that has a _structural_ as well as an _operational_ dimension. A system can be structurally disassembled, but can only be operated in assembled state. This is a fundamental contradiction of any systemic view - the contradiction between the necessity of decomposing a system for its analysis and its basic indecomposability in operation. This principal indecomposability does not end at the system's boundary, because the system needs a throughput of material, energy and information in order to maintain or further develop its own internal structure. ---------------- # Long-term and Short-term Goals This real-world development can itself be represented in a blackboard form through comprehensive planning. Such planning supports control of the real-world processes. But this itself involves greater effort and thus is in conflict with the goals of efficiency and profitability. Organisational systemic development is determined by long-term goals of developing _product portfolios_ and developing the company's short-term _capabilities to produce_ products and services from this portfolio. This interplay of organisational development on different time scales is also expressed in the distinction between strategic and operational management and is a source of contradictions between long-term and short-term goals. This is a kind of a contradiction that is difficult to handle with TRIZ tools. ----------------------------------------------- # Project-like Business Today short-term _operational_ activities have greater variability and are often planned and implemented as _projects_. Additional to the representation of _planning_ of projects at the strategic level blackboard, the representation of the _implementation_ of these projects on that blackboard also plays a role. To do this, however, it must be understood how project plans, initially a "dead body" as noted by Shchedrovitsky, are integrated into the "living system" of organisational work. ----------------------------------------------- The whole thing becomes further complicated when cross-company cooperations play a role in such projects, in which the partners each contribute specific competences and possibly pursue their own goals in addition to the common project goal. This means that the strategic plans of different partners overlap in such projects. This type of business activity is on the increase, not only in the IT sector or in manufacturing of special machines, but also in many other areas where specific customer-adapted solutions, service-orientation and prosumer approaches play a role. The transition to such customised products is a general trend with the increasing possibilities of digitalisation of planning and manufacturing processes. ----------------------------------------------- # A Use Case Let me explain the topic on a project that we are pursuing at the moment in Leipzig with two business partners. We successfully applied for funding to develop an App for Indoor Navigation for Visually Impaired People. Product idea: The app is a kind of digital assistant of the user that not only supports navigation in buildings but also organises the direct connection to different kinds of structured information in the web. The app must "understand" what the user wants and react accordingly. In our requirements analysis, we found that there are three modes to distinguish: preparation mode, orientation mode and movement mode. Preparation and orientation modes access prepared digital information exclusively and directly. In these modes which primarily remain in the digital universe the app is the _only_ tool that the user utilises. In the movement mode, the user directly interacts with the real world, using other senses and tools as well. This is even more noticeable with visually impaired, as they use other tools or common tools (including the app) in a special way. The product can be modelled as a bi-system: app, user and their interactions. Thus we have to distinguish three systemic contexts - a system with two components, where the component "app" has to be developed driven by the requirements of the component "user". A big problem is the massive access of the app to external services (weather, timetables, opening hours, city map, speech technologies, localisation services ...) as resources with very special access conditions. We are faced with three technical challenges: 1. Organisation of bidirectional interaction for a specific target group. 2. Expanding applications for location-based services. 3. GPS is available as outdoor localisation service, but there is currently no comparable indoor equivalent. Three partners joined forces in the project: Partner 1 - consortium leader - with experience in app technologies, in particular also already with initial experience in speech technology and the implementation of location-based services; is interested in expanding this experience. Partner 2 - leader in BIM technologies (BIM = Building Information Management), a new technology for complex building description standards over their full life cycle that has clearly shaped in the last 10 years and is therefore also interesting for indoor location and thus for partner 2. Partner 3 - we, the university working group mainly with methodological experience (requirements engineering, mixed social methods, systematic innovation) as "scientific junior partner". Challenge 1 is interesting beyond this use case, since speech technologies are very popular these days and generally interesting for different sorts of digital assistants and human-machine interaction applications. Challenge 2 is interesting beyond this use case, since location-based services is a large market at least for B2B. But no-one knows how to earn money with such services in the B2C market even though there are strong political regulatory efforts to enforce the availability of this technology in the course of inclusion. Challenge 3 is interesting beyond this use case, since it is an fast emerging new technology standard. ----------------------------------------------- This results in contradictions between short-term and long-term interests of the project partners, as technical experience gained during product development also heavily plays a role, at least for internal motivation. The project context is embedded in 4 supersystems - that of the funding agency and each of the three project partners - and is essentially determined by the approved project application. We are faced with the fact that long-term and short-term business goals are in contradiction: The goals formulated in the project application (which must be compatible with the funding conditions) and the strategic goals of focussing on technological progress. Such contradictions are not necessarily already visible during the project planning, but may arise only in the practical implementation of the project. These contradictions must be resolved in the course of project implementation. This means that the organisation of the "living" project undergoes clear modifications and clarifications during the project implementation, which at the same time must (essentially) move within the defined project working programme. This is the form of the movement of the mentioned contradictions. The conflicting long-term goals of the partners met in a _rough consensus_ of the project proposal, which was approved by the funding agency. The project is based on such a rough consensus of the four parties on a practical working programme, with the biggest contradiction between the funding agency and the three project partners. On the other hand, the financial support of the funding agency allows the project partners to move forward in further technology development. The orientation towards a concrete technical application, as demanded by the funding agency, is definitely helpful, but the question of practical business fields to be occupied on the basis of the project results is open. ---------------------------- The project realisation thus follows the old IETF slogan Rough consensus and running code. The project is set up as a "living part" of organisational work and in the end delivers "running code" as well as diverse technological experiences of the partners. Such an interplay of small consensual steps with different and also changing partners on a longer strategic path and the adjustment of directions on the basis of experienced results is a proven way to solve the conflicts between long-term blackboard goals and short-term goals. Solution: Develop practical short-term advances towards a long-term goal identified at the blackboard. Permanently modify the long-term goal based on the experienced results of the short term projects thus processing the contradiction. Long-term goals on the blackboard are unfinished thoughts that could be broken down into a rough consensus of short-term goals. This rough consensus makes cooperative action possible and thus practical experience, which in the best case manifests itself in "running code" as proven institutionalisation. This in turn has an effect on the long term goals on the blackboard. Let me coin that into a new Principle, the "Principle of Unfinished Thought": Thoughts can be thought on when the time comes. Most of them disappear by themselves anyway.