Purpose: As a Liberating Structures (LS) practitioner I want to debug TRIZ so that the structure is super clear for those that have never used it before.
In this post I’m going to explain how to go from a meh-triz to full-caps-TRIZ! To do that we’ll explore what goes wrong and how to correct course.
Background
TRIZ is a structure that acts as a “pre-mortem” in order to find what we must stop doing in order to make progress on our deepest purpose. The structure has 3 steps:
- 1. “Make a list of all you can do to make sure that you achieve the worst result imaginable with respect to your top strategy or objective.”
- 2. “Go down this list item by item and ask yourselves, ‘Is there anything that we are currently doing that in any way, shape, or form resembles this item?’ Be brutally honest to make a second list of all your counterproductive activities/programs/procedures.”
- 3. “Go through the items on your second list and decide what first steps will help you stop what you know creates undesirable results?”
Setup
Despite how simple this sounds we’ve all been there, you try to run a session of TRIZ that just doesn’t… work. Try as you might to explain the invitation of the first step, that we actually WANT to create a bad outcome, nobody gets it. Instead of getting a list of actions, people make a list of things that could go wrong. Not the worst thing in the world. As my dude Christiaan Verwijs puts it “even a failed Liberating Structure(LS) is better than an unstructured group discussion.” However it misses the magic you’ve experienced before with this structure
Conflict
What went wrong?!
Maybe it was the people and their attitude, they just didn’t get it.
NOPE, this answer makes us powerless to change things, try again!
Maybe it’s just the structure that is challenging and you’re just not a good enough host.
