Innovation

Six Thinking Hats
Goldratt's Current Reality Tree
A five-step implementation process
TRIZ

Six Thinking Hats [1]

Early in the 1980s, Dr. de Bono invented the sophisticated brainstorming tool, the Six Thinking Hats method. The method is a framework for thinking and can incorporate lateral thinking.

Companies such as Prudential Insurance, IBM, Federal Express, British Airways, Polaroid, Pepsico, DuPont, and Nippon Telephone and Telegraph, possibly the world's largest company, use Six Thinking Hats.

There are six metaphorical hats and the thinker can put on or take off one of these hats to indicate the type of thinking being used. This putting on and taking off is essential. The six hats represent six modes of thinking and are directions to think rather than labels for thinking. The hats must never be used to categorize individuals, even if their behavior may seem to invite this. Judgmental thinking has its place in the system but is not allowed to dominate as in normal thinking. The hats are used proactively rather than reactively. When done in a group, everybody wears the same hat at the same time.

White Hat thinking – facts and figures This covers facts, figures, information needs and gaps. "I think we need some white hat thinking at this point", means "Let's drop the arguments and proposals, and look at the data base."

Red Hat thinking – intuition and feelings This covers intuition, feelings and emotions. The red hat allows the thinker to put forward an intuition without any need to justify it. "Putting on my red hat, I feel this is a terrible proposal. It makes me upset that...". Usually feelings and intuition can only be introduced into a discussion if they are supported by impersonal logic. Usually the feeling is genuine but the logic is spurious. The red hat gives full permission to a thinker to put forward his or her feelings on the subject.

Black Hat thinking – logical negative and caution This is the hat of judgment and caution. It is a very valuable hat. It is not in any sense an inferior or negative hat. The black hat is used to point out why a suggestion does not fit the facts, the available experience, the system in use, or the policy that is being followed, or is not practical. The black hat must always be logical.

Yellow Hat thinking – suggestions This is the logical positive. Why something will work and why it will offer benefits. It can be used in looking forward to the results of some proposed action; or it can also be used to find something of value in what has already happened.

Green Hat thinking – creativity This is the hat of creativity, alternatives, options, proposals; what is interesting, provocations and challenges.

Blue Hat thinking – organizing the thinking process This is the overview or process control hat. It looks not at the subject itself but at the way you are `thinking' about the subject. "Process check! Putting on my blue hat, I feel we should do some more green hat thinking at this point." In technical terms, the blue hat is concerned with meta-cognition.

The method promotes fuller input from more people. In de Bono's words it "separates ego from performance". Everyone is able to contribute to the exploration without denting egos as they are just using the yellow hat or whatever hat. The six hats system encourages performance rather than ego defense. People can contribute under any hat even if they initially support the opposite view.

The essential point is that a hat is a direction to think rather than a label for thinking. The main theoretical reasons to use the Six Thinking Hats are to:

encourage Parallel Thinking
encourage full-spectrum thinking
separate ego from performance

Goldratt's Current Reality Tree [2]

Goldratt claims that problems are not independent of each other – there are usually strong links of cause and effect between them. Until the cause and effect is established, you do not have a clear enough picture to know which problem to solve. It is very likely that all the seemingly unrelated problems come from one or two core problems – the one or two core problems that are the cause of all the others. If you can identify the core problems, it gives you real direction for action and stops you wasting your time on what are annoying but irrelevant symptoms. You can direct your efforts at the core problems not the symptoms. [Note: The rigorous process described here is significantly different from Root Cause Analysis working off Fishbone or Ishikawa diagrams.]

Follow the recipe set out below to get a clear identification of the core problem.

The symptoms are called Undesirable Effects (UDEs) – unavoidable derivatives of the core problems. Begin with a list of five to ten UDEs – these may be common excuses. [Suggested questions to use to generate UDEs: What is preventing you from getting what you want; what are the major complaints of your customers; what demands do your customers make; what do they demand in order to place an order with you; what are the major problems in your market or industry?]

The next step is to build a Current Reality Tree – a diagram of the cause and effect relationships that connect all the problems prevailing in a situation. You need intuition and the will power to do the meticulous work needed. It takes about five hours. A small investment for a serious problem.

Example: How to Increase Sales

Step 1: Write the UDEs

Competition is fiercer than ever
There is increasing pressure to reduce prices
In more and more cases the price the market is willing to pay doesn't leave enough margin
More than ever the market punishes suppliers who don't perform according to expectation
Managers are trying to run their companies by striving to achieve local optima (ie lack of overall vision – as a result this gives ad hoc solutions, fire fighting, but no sound overall strategy backed up by a reasonable detailed, tactical plan)
Various functions inside the company blame each other for lack of performance
There is unprecedented pressure to take actions that will increase sales
There is the need to launch new products at an unprecedented rate
The constant introduction of new products confuses and spoils the market
Most new outlets and most new/improved products eat into the sales of existing outlets/products
A large percent of the existing sales force lacks sufficient sales skills
Sales people are overloaded
Production and distribution do not improve fast/ significantly enough
Engineering is unable to deliver new products fast or reliably enough
Companies don't come up with sufficient innovative ideas in marketing

Step 2: Find a cause and effect (an IF ... THEN relationship) between at least two of the UDEs listed

Write each UDE on a Post-it note.
Prioritizing the UDEs is not part of the process.

Step 3: If necessary, add clarity by inserting intermediate steps

Step 4: If something is missing, an insufficiency, write an IF ... AND ... THEN ... set

Read it from the bottom as "IF 1 AND 2 THEN 3"

Step 5: If the bottom of the tree is general and the top of the tree is specific, add an entry at the bottom that accounts for the specific

Step 6: Correct any necessary, clarifying wording as you go

Step 7: Using the solid nucleus so established, add UDEs one by one.

It is not difficult it just requires meticulous work. Usually there is a long period of floundering.
Initially, many connections pop into your mind, but when you try to put them on paper, none is substantiated. If this happens, use Goldratt's categories of legitimate reservations, ie converting an intuitive connection into something so solid that everyone will refer to it as common sense.
Go slowly. The process cannot be rushed.
Expect to find at least one loop (where a UDE feeds itself) when the effects are getting worse (unprecedented, bigger and bigger, increasing)
Don't brush aside nagging `trivialities'
- They often let you connect more UDEs and often lead to breakthrough solutions.
- However, tracking down all the trivialities can lead to paralysis. Don't forget, you are looking for a solution that will make a difference
Logic by itself is not enough. You must have intuition as well. The logical diagrams force you to verbalize your gut feel and so enable true unleashing of your intuition, and the ability to check it. Intuition is a necessary condition for finding solutions, but is far from sufficient. The diagrams give you a method to unleash, focus and study your intuition so you can arrive at practical, simple solutions.

Step 8: Work down the arrows to the root cause issue – the core problem.
It will be towards the base of your tree.

How to cause the change

Goldratt approaches this issue in a very different way from Carlopio. In doing so, he fills in some important gaps.

In Its Not Luck and The Goal, Goldratt suggests that these questions are the critical and fundamental for leaders of companies:

What to change
What to change to
How to cause the change

Many people in almost every company have many innovative, bright ideas. Which ideas are the `right' ones — the ones that will solve the current and future problems? Most innovative solutions address only symptoms and fail to address the causes - the underlying problems. As Goldratt says, how do you know what you need to change? Then, when you have found the underlying problem, how do know what you need to change to? And when you know that, how do you go about causing the change to happen?

We believe that the process of innovation can learn a lot from the tools Goldratt presents to address these three core issues. The process is extremely rigorous and significantly helps the innovation process. Its main draw back is the rigor– which is off-putting to many. However, if you are serious about innovation you will need to be rigorous, otherwise you are probably wasting your time and money on half baked ideas or solutions to the wrong problems. If the idea is worthwhile, its is worth your while to treat it seriously and analyze it properly. The details of the techniques are well beyond the scope of this book. We refer you to Goldratt's work and the book by Lisa Scheinkopf.

In overview:

Create the Current Reality Tree to identify the core problem. The Current Reality Tree answers the question "What to Change?" by listing the Undesirable Effects (UDEs), and describing the causalities that exist between them and identifying a core problem that is keeping the Undesirable Effects in existence. This was shown in detail above as a tool for `Idea Generation'.
Create an evaporating cloud to identify a systemic conflict in your assumptions that is perpetuating the core problem. Brainstorm solutions to the core problem and select the initial elements of a solution. This was discussed in Principle 5 (`Improved Decisions') where we established the every problem is a conflict between assumptions. We should be able to articulate every core problem as a conflict – the core conflict. The `evaporating cloud' technique will help verbalize the assumptions that are maintaining the conflict.
To answer the question "What to change to", create a `Future Reality Tree' to develop a robust solution to the core problem. Use the starting point found in the `Evaporating Cloud' – the initial solution – as your `injection'. The process calls for you to list the positives and all negatives of the injection. Eliminate all the Undesirable Effects and block all undesirable side-effects that you can think of. The process also calls for you to do a Negative Branch Reservation Analysis whereby you look for and find solutions to everything you and your team can think of that can go wrong. You should test the Negative Branches to destruction. It is far better to find solutions to problems during this stage than when you are in production. When you begin this analysis, your initial solution may seem as impossible as getting pigs to fly. The beauty is that this process provides a way to get them to fly.
Create a Prerequisite Tree to determine the necessary conditions (immediate objectives) for implementing the injections (objectives) and the sequence in which they should be accomplished to overcome all the obstacles you can think of. This is the first step in answering the question "How to cause the change". Obstacles can include all the enemies shown below as well as `hiring freeze, no staff, no money, no advertising'.
Create Transition Trees to define the detailed specific action plans to accomplish the intermediate objectives and injections of the Prerequisite Tree.

Now, that sounds complicated and long. It does not have to be. If you know the answer, don't follow all the steps. But the full process is there, when you need it, for an important innovation. It is rigorous and it certainly gives focus on real problems, real solutions and problems that you need to overcome along the way.

The rigor involved – that few companies or bosses have the patience to follow – is another clear indication of the work needed to have innovations implemented successfully.

A five-step implementation process

Carlopio gives a five-step process and extensive checklist for implementing anything.

Knowledge and awareness – creating awareness, R & D, information gathering, identification of needs, initial planning.
Matching and selection – solutions/ innovations are matched to problems, initial sorting.
Decision – innovation(s) is/are chosen to implement.
Implementation – rollout: putting the innovation or new technology to use.
Confirmation – modification, testing, evaluation, the `innovation' becomes normal.

The fourth step – implementation – is not a simple "just do it" step. The implementation step, itself, consists of five parts, all of which must be done – though not necessarily in a linear order. However, you will not be successful with the last two until the first three have been fulfilled.

We give detail of the implementation steps below. Notice that the implementation steps mirror the generalized five-step process above.

Do not rush through them. Each one is important.

This is a very useful checklist. It shows that there is a fair amount of work needed to implement a good idea. Regardless of how good it is, it will not work unless this work is done.

Knowledge and awareness.

People have to be comfortable about the new thing
You have to fill the rumor gap – that gap in information in which rumor thrives
You must deal with emotions and the ghosts of the past (This is very important. You must counter the "here comes another one" syndrome. You must acknowledge past failures and say how this implementation will be different. If jobs are at stake because of the innovation – acknowledge it. You cannot expect people to be enthusiastic about losing their jobs or being lied to about it. You are attempting to deal with "It wasn't what was done, it was how it was done".)
You must answer the fundamental question "What's in it for me?" WIIFM.
People want to know the 5-Ws ("what, when, why, how, who")
You must provide education and training about the innovation (what it means, where it fits in, how it will work, how people will use it) so you need: course content, types of training and education, sources of training

Facilitating structures

You must have in place (or modify) all those systems that will allow the implementation to work. Because the implementation of the innovation is, by definition, new, it will run up against all the previously installed systems. You will need to modify these where necessary so the innovation can coexist (and does not run counter to) existing systems. You may even need very new systems. Depend on it, if there is nothing to support the new wonderful idea, or if people get punished for using it, or if your company is set up to keep looking after the old ways, the new way will fail.
Facilitating structures that you must consider include: reward and recognition systems; performance management system; technology; standard operating procedures; standards systems; communications systems; company structure; performance indicators; resources; job descriptions; performance agreements; peer pressure; company values; personal values; audit systems.
You will also need these facilitating structures: detailed implementation plan; cultural analysis; innovation analysis; innovator analysis; union agreement; change agreement; working groups; discussion groups; committees.
You are working to counter the fallacy of supporting (or rewarding) the old way while hoping for the new way.

Persuasion, decision, commitment

Cost justification: economic evaluation; cost benefit analysis; evaluation of tangible and intangible benefits; determining costs.
Determining the costs of unintended side-effects.
Decision-making: rational and non-rational methods.
Obtaining commitment from senior managers – overcoming resistance. You need a senior person to sponsor the innovation, to demand compliance with the new way, to talk it up, to obtain resources, to coordinate and to not tolerate use of the old.

Roll-out

Training.
Conversion: slow migration from old to new, or run parallel systems, or quick switch from old to new.
Project termination – know when rollout of the new is finished and the maintenance phase commences.
Plan the evolution of the new – how to milk the most possible from the new way and modify and improve it.

Confirmation and routinization

Individual level measurements: What are people's attitudes to the new? Are people doing it or using it? Is everyone doing it or using it who should be?
Group level measurements: Is there conflict between the needs of different groups? Are there unintended side effects (good and bad)? Does the information-flow work? Do the supporting structures provide the necessary support? Are the process customers satisfied? Does it reduce (or increase) your customer's costs? Does it provide value to the employees?
Company level measurements: Is the innovation effective? Does it deliver the benefits promised? Does it provide value to the company, its customers and other stakeholders? Are the costs what were estimated? Is it always available when needed (up-time/down-time)?
Societal level measurements: How does this effect the community and society? Are there societal benefits? Are there any bad (or good) side effects?
Review: Is it still what you want to do? What have you learned during implementation? How can you use that knowledge?

Quite an extensive checklist. It is quite clear that all or most points on the list are essential. It is also clear that most companies do not bother with these points at all. This would explain why the vast majority of companies report that their innovations fail – even if they were good ideas that should have worked. Many bosses continue to think when they have a good idea (or approve one), it is instantly implemented everywhere.

If you want your innovation to be successful, you must work at it and do most of the points on James Carlopio's checklist.

TRIZ [3]

TRIZ is a set of problem solving tools developed in Russia. It is based on analysis of thousands of patents. It works by using previously identified solutions (or methods) to new problems (called contradictions).

The basic principles of TRIZ could be summed up as, "borrow ideas from others and reduce excess features".

TRIZ works! Large and small companies are using TRIZ on many levels to solve real, practical everyday problems and to develop strategies for the future of technology. TRIZ is in use at Ford, Motorola, Procter & Gamble, Eli Lilly, Jet Propulsion Laboratories, 3M, Siemens, Phillips, LG, and hundreds more.

TRIZ began with Genrikh Altshuller who was working as a Russian patent agent in the 1940s, and thought that he recognized a pattern of innovation in some of the patents being filed. Altshuller studied what he considered the best patents of the lot and read texts on the history of technology and the psychology of the thinking process. The result of his labor was a rigorous methodology of innovation, which he proudly described to Josef Stalin in 1946. Impressed by its radicalism, Stalin rewarded Altshuller by sending him to a gulag in Siberia.

Upon Stalin's death in 1953, Altshuller was released from prison and began teaching his methodology, which he dubbed TRIZ, a Russian acronym for "Theory of Inventive Problem Solving".

Altshuller recognized that ideas that improve technology are rarely original, but have recurring themes. In the 1980s, some of his disciples came to the United States to teach TRIZ and to apply the methodology for American companies.

TRIZ is a methodology for evolutionary and revolutionary innovation. (It can get you into the very top `Invention' level.) TRIZ takes the existing ideas that work and filters them into a smaller set of solutions based on the trends that Altshuller and his cohorts identified in engineering systems evolution over the years.

The first step of TRIZ

The first step of TRIZ is to determine your requirement and identify any likely problems (contradictions). In order to resolve contradictions, TRIZ looks for a solution from amongst previously tried themes.

In one of the lower level TRIZ tools, a matrix of `39 common contradictions' is combined with `Forty Innovative Principles'. You first identify what you want to do. For example, `make a lighter laptop'. Then find in the `contradictions' matrix the common things that prevent `lightness' (eg, these might be `strength', `manufacturability', `repairability'). In the contradiction matrix, the intersection of `weight' (the feature you want) with its undesired results (`strength', `manufacturability' and `repairability') gives 8 different suggestions from the `Forty Innovative Principles'. Two of these each occurs three times (ie, `replace expensive parts with inexpensive ones, forgoing properties such as longevity', and `replace a mechanical system with an optical or acoustical one'). The first of these is very often used (eg replacing metal with plastic). And we are seeing more connectivity using infra-red beams and radio. Another likely candidate is `segment the object into independent parts' (also used, eg separate disk drive or modem). The other suggestions do not appear useful. Nevertheless, this simple matrix tool gives useful obvious solutions within a few minutes – short-cutting hundreds of iterations.

As another example, consider the 30-year evolution of a pizza box. The purpose of a pizza box is to keep the pizza warm, and the obvious solution is to create a closed, insulated container. In a completely closed container, however, a hot pizza will get soggy. In order to keep the pizza dry, you could put holes in the top of the pizza box — but then the pizza will get cold. This is a contradiction. We want the pizza to be hot and dry. However, the ideal solution for a hot pizza will make the pizza wet. And the ideal solution for a dry pizza will make the pizza cold.

The tendency was to try to solve this problem by building a better box, perhaps to invent a new composite material that acted both as an insulator and as a water absorber. But the ultimate solution to the problem was incredibly simple. In a closed pizza box, the vapor condenses on the bottom of the box, which makes the pizza soggy. So to prevent the pizza from becoming soggy, one simply had to come up with a way to raise the pizza off the bottom of the box. The jagged piece of plastic below every delivered pizza does just that.

Existing solutions for solving various contradictions may not necessarily come from the same field. For example, Proctor and Gamble was trying to come up with a solution for drying paper. In other words, to `remove water from an object'. When the problem was worded as `remove water' rather than `drying', Proctor and Gamble found that two of their other divisions had already addressed this problem, such as the division that makes Pringles potato chips and the division that makes Pampers diapers.

The second step of TRIZ

The second step of TRIZ is "functional trimming". TRIZ defines value as

According to this equation, increasing the value of a product means either increasing its functionality or decreasing the costs and problems of the product. The difficulty is that increasing functionality often increases the number of problems as well. (A phenomenon very familiar to software developers whose software often accumulates bugs and higher maintenance costs faster than it acquires features.) TRIZ advocates reducing unnecessary functions, thus making the sum of the cost and problems go to zero. "The ideal machine is the one that performs the function but does not exist."

TRIZ summary

TRIZ tools work at a number of different levels. At the lower levels, the tools allow you to bypass thousands of iterations by passing you through previously identified types of solutions. At the upper levels, tools that are more complex give you the equivalent of millions of iterations.

TRIZ also requires:

rigorously specifying goals
focusing on important functions and trimming the rest away
borrowing good ideas from other places when appropriate

Can you use TRIZ outside of the technological field? Not yet. Application of TRIZ is restricted to the database developed from analysis of technical patents. Boris Yeltsin once asked Waldman and his colleagues if TRIZ could be applied to help Russia out of its economic woes. This could not be done because there is no existing database or rigorous study of evolutionary trends in economics to draw on – unlike the huge patents database available for technology. The TRIZ specialists could not apply a filtering process to derive a good solution because there was no existing set of ideas to be filtered.

The same restriction applies to social sciences and to company behavior.

Footnotes

^[1] Based on de Bono's book Six Thinking Hats (de Bono, 1985).

^[2] From Goldratt's book, Its Not Luck. (See our recommended reading list)

^[3] Based mainly on a paper TRIZ: The Theory of Inventive Problem Solving by Eugene Eric Kim on Dr Dobb's Journal web site . Which was in turn based on a talk entitled "The Exact Science of Innovation" Waldman presented at the Xerox PARC Forum in Palo Alto, California on April 15, 1999.