Crossing Signals Weblog

We came to the realization recently that the essence of what we are trying to do can be called creative conflict. Our approach to teambuilding is looking for the differences and potential conflicts in the worldviews and value-systems of the team members. We make these differences explicit with our Collaboration Scorecard, this instrument enables us to compose teams that contain the kind of differences and contrast that are helpful within the context in which they operate. The method we use to do problem solving with client teams is a ‘soft system’ application of classical TRIZ. For those readers who are unfamiliar with TRIZ: TRIZ is a theory that describes a systematic way in which to do problem solving (TRIZ is a Russian acronym meaning “theory of inventive problem solving”). Innovation is all about problem solving, which makes TRIZ a very powerful way to do innovation. More on TRIZ, examples and applications can be found at www.xtriz.com.

Recently I had a chance to learn more about this method at a special workshop where we discussed an extension of classical TRIZ called OTSM-TRIZ, which has been used to teach pre-schoolers and elementary school students this method of thinking by developing and playing games. OTSM-TRIZ is another Russian acronym that basically translates into “theory of powerful thinking”. Powerful thinking… it felt like I was doing philosophy again (I was educated as a philosopher, more here. More on this particular workshop here.

This morning we taught another class at the Johan Cruyff University, which is a special program within the Hogeschool van Amsterdam which offers a masters degree in international sports management. We decided to teach the students something about creative conflict, emphasizing the idea that differences are useful provided you have an approach to complex issues and problems. Since the students of the Johan Cruyff University receive the most benefits from ideas and skills that they can apply in concrete ways, we tried to limit the conceptual stuff and spend half the time on practicing the method together with the students.

We first spend some time understanding that different individuals bring different perspectives to a situation, and integrating these perspectives helps you gain a better understanding of where you are and what you want. Then I presented the group with a short overview of the history of dialectics, from Socrates, through Hegel and Marx to Genrich Altshuller (who I consider to be a philosopher). The point was to show them how opposites (contradictions) can help you find breakthrough solutions. In the technological realm the new Samsung Upstage is a good example. The phone has twice the surface of similar models, without an increase in size. The contradiction between wanting a phone with more surface area (for a large screen and enough room for buttons) that is still small enough to function as a cellphone. In other words the phone needed to be big (in terms of surface) and small (in terms of size and weight). The TRIZ trained Samsung engineers created a solution that is both effective and elegant because of its sheer simplicity, and it looks like this.
We spent the last half of the class on working with a specific case, and this was the challenging part. I presented the group with Ajax as the case. Ajax is Amsterdam’s famous Soccer club, and it is facing a number of problems, not in the least with their performance in the competition (Ajax is supposed to be national champion, and it’s not). Some of the basic steps in problem solving using OTSM-TRIZ are identifying the relevant or most interesting parameters, the ‘properties’ of your system, and then proceeding to look for contradictions within this parameters. Conceptually this is rather abstract stuff, and the challenge was to make these concepts meaningful in a practical application. To my surprise, despite the short introduction and the abstract level of the ideas, we were pretty effective at applying the ideas to Ajax. We took some time to identify some relevant parameters, and the students came up with a couple of good ones: the organizational structure, the european context where Ajax is competing against clubs with a lot more resources, the technical level of soccer that is being taught and trained and a few more. We took the first aspect (the organization) and tried to look for the contradiction within that aspect of the whole complex entity that is Ajax. It didn’t take too long to open up some new doors. One of the students mentioned the fact that the professional management of the organization has little affinity with soccer, while the rest of the organization is passionate about soccer. That is somewhat of a contradiction. Just phrasing it in this way led to someone else mentioning that it may still be a good idea to have a professional management, with the rise of professional soccer the (financial) risks have increased, so it is a good idea to have competent decision makers on your staff. Formulating it in this way suggests a solution to the situation that integrates the different aspects, rather than forces one to choose. A simple compromise would be to just fire the management and replace them with former soccer players, and such a compromise may carry a whole new set of problems with it. The real win-win may be in looking at it as a communication problem between the management professionals and the soccer professionals. What is the added value of a professional management? What legitimizes the way the organization is currently run? How can the management professionals show their contribution and value to the rest of the organization and the stakeholders?

In this way we produced some interesting strategic questionsby just applying a limited set of OTSM-TRIZ principles to a complex case, and taking a good 20 minutes investigating the problems with a group of fresh students on an average monday morning. It was an example of really leveraging the different perspectives each of the students brought to the situation, and getting some rapid results using a systematic way to think about your problem.