Forums Help   General Tools Principles Facilitation Project Management Method: Tools We used to have a short description of our tools here. Then we actually applied one of our tools, "Subtraction," to this section - and off came the description! (Please click here to see a detailed, non-subtracted, explanation of one of the SIT tools.) To help you get a better idea of what we really mean when we talk about the SIT "Thinking Tools," this section presents a more detailed description of one such tool, which we call Subtraction. Like all SIT tools, Subtraction is designed to help you move beyond the easiest - and thus most obvious - solution to a problem. The reason we need a tool to do this is that most of us, when asked to invent, innovate, or problem-solve, reach for the most intuitive and easiest ideas. Try this short exercise and you'll see what we mean: Ask a friend to give you 3 quick suggestions for an improved alarm clock. Your friend will probably come up with ideas like these: introduce color effects or glow in the dark, have the clock emit a pleasant scent when it rings, create a larger and easier-to-push off-button, add an additional screen with pastoral scenes or soothing music to help ease you into the morning. What do all of these ideas have in common? They all involve adding something to the original. Addition is the easiest way to modify a product - it's so intuitive, in fact, that we usually don't stop to consider the alternatives. But is more always better? Do added features always mean added value for customers? Consider how many functions your DVD player has. Approximately 578, right? But how many do you actually use? 1? 2? Most DVD manufacturers keep adding features because that's what we tend to think improvement and innovation are all about. But if instead of the obvious approach of addition, you were to use the SIT tool of Subtraction, you would come up with a truly innovative product - one your competitors, following the easy and obvious path of addition, would not even consider. (To see an example of a different approach to DVD design click here.) The definition of Subtraction is simple: Take away an essential component from the product, and find benefits for the subtracted version. When trying to find a suitable logo for the subtraction tool, our starting point was our company logo and when taking away an essential component - part of the orange background, we came up with this lovely lady: Here are some examples of products that follow the Subtraction pattern: Exercise bikes Soup mix The Dyson vacuum cleaner Baby chair And here is what you might come up with if you apply Subtraction to the alarm clock we were discussing earlier: The Now-or-Never Alarm Clock. This product would have no actual clock that you could see, and no snooze button. Regular alarm clocks tend to be great enablers for over-sleepers - with the Now or Never, users know they have only one chance to get up when the alarm rings. (This could also lead to another new product idea, or a new way of marketing an old product: a 24-hour kitchen timer can double as a Now-or-Never alarm clock.) But while the definition of subtraction may be simple, implementing can be tricky. Consider one of the examples above: An exercise bike doesn't sound like a particularly innovative product today. But imagine yourself in a workshop at a leading bicycle manufacturer in, say, 1950. And imagine someone coming up with this suggestion: "Maybe we should start selling bikes without wheels." There's a good chance that the would-be innovator would have ended his career right then and there, as his colleagues pointed out the central flaws in his "innovation": most customers buy their bicycles because they want to go somewhere; customers use their bicycles outdoors. The challenge, then, is to identify the potential in a Subtraction, even when it seems to fly in the face of everything you think you know about your product and your customers; the trick is to anticipate the potential of a subtracted product, rather than only recognizing its viability in hindsight. Of course, that's tough to do - so we help you through the process by using the relevant SIT Principles. Click here to read more about them. Bottom Line Simple to grasp, tricky to use, gets the job done. FAQ Are the SIT tools always the same, no matter what the application? Do you use the same techniques, say, for Problem Solving and for Marketing Communications?   All the elements of our method (tools, principles, techniques) are applicable to all SIT projects. We have also developed or adopted (and adapted) some additional tools for certain applications, especially MarCom. Although we adapt the use of our tools for each specific project, we've found that what's useful in terms of say, project management, is relevant whether you're inventing a new line of products for a hi-tech company in Sweden or helping an ad agency come up with an innovative campaign for a dairy product in Latin America. Does the systematic nature of SIT preclude the need for personal creativity? If the tools can lead me systematically to ideas, do they eliminate the need for a creative leap?   It doesn't and they don't. Let's take the somewhat schematic metaphor of a "creative gap" separating a thinker from the inventive solution: SIT does not claim to close this gap entirely. What we do is to bridge part of this gap, and then to provide the thinker with excellent equipment to leap the rest of the way. So a person's innate ability to leap is still relevant. And sure enough, when we tackle the same kinds of issues with different teams we see a lot of variation in the type and quality of the results. In every case, we're able to give users some equipment to take the leap - how much they can take, and how far they leap with it, depends on many variables, but everyone is in better shape than they'd be without it. Search: Home Contact Site Map SIT Ltd. © 2005 All Rights Reserved. Created by Puzzlehead