If the exact same stairs, however, made fun sounds when climbing them, would that make a difference?

You will find the answer to this question in the following clip which demonstrates that assigning stairs a new task of “convincing” people to climb them can result in a fun, innovative and perhaps unexpected situation.

The SIT pattern, by the way, that we see in this inventive idea is called “Task Unification”.  When using this pattern, we assign a new task to an existing component – in this case, we assigned the (existing) stairs with the task of convincing people to climb them (a task they didn’t fill before).

What other task could we assign the stairs? Any ideas?

The following story shows how Inventive Thinking can help us to negotiate and get out of tricky situations.

A few years ago I took a ride to an SIT workshop with one of my colleagues (he was driving). On the way, we stopped to drop off his computer that needed fixing. We parked near the entrance of the shop and started marching towards the entrance.

“I wouldn’t park there if I were you,” said the doorman, “you’re likely to get parked in”. We were in a hurry, so we answered, ‘It’ll be OK,’ even though we had a nagging suspicion that it wouldn’t be. Anyway, when we came out of the building, our suspicions were confirmed - a truck had parked us in, and the driver was very busy unloading.

“Would you please move your truck forward a bit so that we can get out,” asked my friend politely.

Without looking up, the driver replied, “There’s plenty of space for you to get out”.

“Well, yes,” I thought, “we could get out if we had a motorcycle…” but I kept my thoughts to myself.

My friend and the truck driver then started arguing back and forth about whether it was possible to get out or not. I wasn’t in the mood for a heated debate, so I moved to the side and started thinking SIT.

I was having a hard time thinking, because at this stage my friend and the driver were yelling at each other… Basically, the truck driver wasn’t willing to move because he was in the middle of unloading, and as far as he was concerned, we could wait.

So I thought about it and realized that this was the situation: the busier the driver is, the less likely he’ll be willing to move the truck.

Therefore we need to find a solution that will change the situation to this: the busier the driver is, the MORE likely he’ll be willing to move the truck. This is what is called Qualitative Change in SIT.

Do you want to think about it before I tell you what I did? I’ll give you a few minutes…

One,

Two,

Three… Did you come up with something?

OK, so here’s the rest of the story:

After I set myself the goal of finding a solution where, contrary to what one would think, the busier the driver would be the MORE likely he’d move the truck, I came up with the idea very quickly.

I interrupted the heated argument and said to my friend, “You know, I think he’s right. There IS enough space for us to get out”.

My friend glared at me, and all I can say is, if looks could kill…!

I then went up to the driver and said very politely, ‘Would you please guide us out - we don’t want to bump your new truck’.

‘OK, OK, I’ll move the truck,’ was his reaction.

Although he may not have spotted the “Qualitative Change” inherent to the situation, the driver twigged that guiding us out would take a lot more of his time!

So, next time you’re in a squeeze, think how to make a Q.C…

See you all in my next post,

Roni

Visit Roni at the start2think website

Because of this problem, the law enforcement authorities have devised an excellent way to force us to pay our dues immediately - they simply tow the car away. However, towing is a clumsy and expensive process.

I once heard a novel solution to this problem from the city of Kiev, in the Ukraine.  It appears to have been taken right out of the school of Systematic Inventive Thinking.

What do the authorities there do when they come across an illegally parked car? They simply remove the license plates from the offending vehicle and take them to the depot.

The owner of the car has no choice other than to go down to the depot and pay the fine so that he can get his license plates back and continue driving his vehicle.

What SIT tools have been used here?

I’m sure you recognized the Division technique: the license plate is a part that is separated from the rest of the vehicle.
But the Task Unification technique is also involved here. The license plate is the agent of the action that forces the owner of the vehicle to pay the fine.

I invite readers to suggest inventive ways of avoiding getting a fine in the first place.

I do enjoy spending time with my nephew, but the little fella sure knows how to keep me, and mostly his parents, on our toes.

I want to share with you an incident that I am sure all of you who have kids, are related to kids or watched over kids, are familiar with. Bear with me through the description of the incident because, at the end, I would love to hear about your experiences as well.

During a game at a play date last week, Rani banged his head against a window and started crying. You know, that type of crying that makes even the iciest of hearts melt. I ran to him, breaking the 2.5-meter world record, took him in my arms, and rocked him against me while murmuring the most ridiculously ineffective things such as “shush now, don’t cry, the pain will go away soon” or futilely getting him to look at the new crayons on the table. While his sobbing continued as strongly, I was thinking to myself that I have to do better – and different – if I want this to work - which led me to the SIT inventive problem solving approach.

I reminded myself that one of the characteristics of inventive problem solving is that the problem is the solution. This led me to the realization that my salvation will not come from bizarre traditional sentences such as “the pain will go away by your wedding day” or external resources like the crayons on the table. Rather, I need to focus my attention on my crying nephew in order to come up with an inventive solution.

I, therefore, looked closer at my crying nephew taking inventory of my available resources such as Rani’s tears, Rani’s clothes etc.

Then, I noticed Rani do the tiniest thing which made me go “Eureka! Got it!”
All he did was blow air heavily on my neck. I instantly had an idea of how to use this fact to solve my problem. The next time he blew air on my neck, I made a big theatrical scene, saying:” Who did that?! Where did it come from?! Someone is blowing air on my neck!”
I then held my breath and waited….and there it was – the tinniest pause in his sobs followed by another, intentional blow of air. I then exaggerated my reaction even more making a whole fuss about it and this time, I got the most wonderful sound - a giggle!
From that moment on, it turned into a game and within a matter of seconds, my nephew was back to his cheerful self, running around the backyard acting as if nothing ever happened.
In case you were wondering about his aunt, well, the fact that I am writing about it in the blog a week later should tell you how far behind me this incident really is…

The whole event got me thinking that if there ever was a place where being innovative is a must, it has to be parenting or in my case, aunt-ing.

Routine, daily activities such as getting my nephew to eat, take a bath, brush his teeth, go to bed while avoiding confrontation and permanent damage to his tender soul (or mine), are definitely areas where one could think and act differently in a useful and
effective way (the SIT working definition of innovation).

Here is an example of parental innovative thinking in a situation with which I am sure you are familiar.

Innovation should be applied to any area where what you do today does not work well enough. No matter how big or small, work or non-work related.

From personal experience I can tell you that it is not easy, BUT the beauty of it is that if one applies Systematic Inventive Thinking regularly and for an extended period of time; innovating becomes one’s second nature.

The example I mentioned above is just a first sign that this is starting to happen to me….

What about you? Has innovation “invaded” your home?

I would love it if you shared examples of how you use innovation (SIT methodology or others) in your parenting, babysitting or aunt-ing.

I, too, have been faced with this situation. I’ve often felt frustrated that I don’t share a big enough part of my son’s experiences throughout his day. One day, while we were eating a meal at Macdonald’s and my son was trying to put the toy together that he got from the kids meal, I decided to try my luck again and ask how his day at school had been. As predicted, I got the usual, ‘It was OK’ answer.

But this time I was determined not to give up. I’m often asked if SIT can be used to solve day-to-day problems or family issues, and my reply is always a confident yes. Here was an opportunity for me to put my money where my mouth is!

By the way, it is important for me to point out that in order to activate SIT, there has to be a ‘conscious’ decision to use it. In fact, the decision to use SIT is perhaps the most important stage in the method. After the decision has been made, the thought process almost always changes.

(This is somewhat similar to something that I once read: the most important stage in psychological treatment is the decision to get treatment. Apparently the decision itself reduces considerably the symptoms that cause the need for treatment).

Let’s return to our story.

After I decided to activate SIT, I made a mental list of all the objects: my son, his events of the day, the story of his events of the day, Macdonalds, myself.

I had a feeling that the solution may come about by using the Multiplication technique, and so I decided to duplicate the story. According to the Multiplication technique, adding to the problem world a new story that is different in some way from the original can solve the problem. ‘Aha,’ I thought, ‘I’ve got it!’

So I said to my son, ‘Instead of you telling me what happened to you today, I’ll tell you a story about your day,’ and I started telling the story (as if it were coming from him). The story I told him began like this: ‘As I got off the school bus today, this kid came up to me and started asking me questions…’ This, of course, was a wild guess based on a few details that I had already picked up about his life at school (he once told me about a kid that annoyed him when he got off the bus).

‘No, no, it wasn’t like that’ he interrupted. ‘It was like this: I got off the school bus and then…’ And so he went on to tell me what really happened to him at school. I continued the story and he continued excitedly to correct me as we got into more and more detail. It proved to be successful beyond all expectation! (I could have written a diary, stating minute by minute what happened to him at school)

This is an example of using SIT’s Multiplication technique. The problem was about the story that my son didn’t agree to tell me. It was solved by a story that I invented about his day.

See you all in my next post,

Roni

Visit Roni at the start2think website

Our lives are full of cases of cognitive fixedness that prevent us from making changes, including changes to our careers. Some rules of creative thinking can help us see beyond the well-known and the familiar.

I have been working at SIT for 13 years, facilitating thought processes for new products and services for companies and organizations around the world. The invention of new products is a fascinating process, but just between us – how many of us get to dabble in it? How relevant is it to our everyday lives? On the other hand, perhaps we could use inventive thinking not merely for the development of new products, services and strategies, but also to reinvent ourselves?

After all, one of the major challenges of creative thinking is in the ability to overcome cognitive fixedness – the tendency to perceive things in a particular way, and the inability to notice their other facets. And we all have fixedness. We attribute certain roles to given situations or to their components and tend to be blind to other possibilities. The more we get used to certain presumptions, the more they become axiomatic in our minds, and difficult for us to abandon.

But our instances of fixedness are not restricted to our view of our environment; they also exist in how we think of ourselves. For example, we don’t like ambiguous situations. We already know what our own role is. We know what is required of us; we are acquainted with our responsibilities and know how to address them. But facing a vague situation, one where we don’t know what to expect, is no easy thing, especially when our career is at stake. I am not saying this to dishearten you. On the contrary: if you cannot predict the future, invent it.

When thinking of products, we often encounter functional fixedness, which causes us to think of things or objects as having only one defined function. Naturally, it also applies to our thinking of ourselves. And in both cases, one of the ways to overcome it is to observe the parts, the components, rather than the whole. Doing this provides us with many degrees of freedom, enabling us to think and act differently.

Try, for example, if only as the thinking exercise, to “dismantle” yourself into components. Take a piece of paper and list your capabilities, and not merely those pertaining to your career, but the entirety of your abilities. Now, try to identify which of those, that are normally not utilized at work, might help you grow precisely there.

It is worthwhile to be aware of our fixedness, if only because sometimes knowing is in itself a step toward a solution. Indeed, even if we understand what change we can or want to make, there would still be a long road ahead of us. Implementing change is a complex process requiring determination, persistence and the ability to cope with challenges. But there are some general rules and principles to assist us in implementing our ideas:

• Limiting An Idea Is Better Than Diluting It – Sometimes we make a decision that requires a fundamental change to our lifestyle. Let’s assume, for example, that I was an attorney working for eight years in a law firm, and I have just decided to set up a business that would train lawyers for effective appearances in court. I intend to offer personal and group training for lawyers at every stage of their careers. But, possibly, for me the transition from being an employee to becoming an entrepreneur that establishes and leads an independent business might be too dramatic. If that is the case, I may do what many other people do: adopt a “diluted” version of my own idea, and rather than becoming independent, settle for giving a lecture in the litigation department of the firm. But if you want real change, try to preserve the essence of the idea, even if you implement in a more limited scope. For instance, do not establish an independent business yet, but rather convince the directors of the law firm to set up a department to perform this role and provide such services both within the company and externally. Do not give up your dream!  Make it happen, step by step.

• Define Your Closed World – A Closed World is a term used in inventive thinking to define the system of resources available in our environment. The reason we prefer to use our Closed World is that it is where resources are more readily available for us in order to advance our ideas. The question is what will we find in the Closed World? We tend to crudely separate between the worlds we live in, and therefore will are inclined to use work-related resources when we think about our careers, and resources relevant to our children for issues related to family and children. But that, precisely, is the fixedness. In fact, when our career is on the line, the resources of the Closed World are the entirety of resources surrounding us in our lives, and each of these has the potential to assist us in implementing our idea.

• Intuition Apart – In one of the sketches on “Seinfeld”, George, Elaine and Jerry sit in the neighborhood diner discussing George’s life.  George claims that nothing in his life is working as it should. As a pretty women in the diner smiles at him, George ignores her, presuming that a bald, unemployed man living with his parents is not what that beautiful woman is looking for. But his friends challenge him and George reaches the conclusion that if every instinct in his life was wrong, then maybe it is so in this case too, and therefore he must approach the pretty woman and introduce himself. He goes up to her, introduces himself as an unemployed guy who lives with his parents, and the pretty woman only broadens her alluring smile and whispers: “I’m Victoria. Hi”.

I don’t know what the message of the screenwriters was, but mine is this: every now and then let’s try to do the opposite of what our intuition tells us to do. Not because it is better, but because it is different. Perhaps doing the opposite of what we’re used to doing will break our fixedness and lead us to things we had never thought of and to places we would not have reached otherwise.

Comment: This article was originally published in the Themarker magazine

While my wife and daughter (clearly post-modern women as made obvious by their choice of mobile phones) began pressuring me to get rid of the device and replace it with one of a more advanced generation, I kept considering what could possibly be done with a screen-less yet functional mobile phone. The idea that flashed through my mind, spiced with a bit of black humor, was “Why not sell it to a blind person?”

But now a little more seriously… Any SIT New Product Development (NPD) workshop addressing mobile phones would inevitably, in a structured and systematic manner (by applying the Subtraction tool), reach the potential product: a mobile telephone for the blind. The end product would have no display screen (the subtracted component), but would have supporting functions appropriate specifically for a blind user.

Due to the family pressure, I found myself with the screen-less device, seated in front of the cellular company’s sales rep, taking an interest in a new device which, of course, has a SIM card (absent from my old phone). “I’ll take the deal,” I told him, “but with the condition that you transfer all of my memories from the old phone to the new one”. The sales representative (who is supposed to be well-versed in the secrets of cellular devices) shook his head with some skepticism. “I’m not sure I can do it,” he said. “In order to transfer the information from the old device to the SIM card in the new device, we must connect the old phone to an appropriate contraption, and then perform a series of actions (pressing keys on the old device) according to instructions that appear on the screen… Since the screen is not intact, I’m not sure I will succeed in pressing the keys in the proper order.”

This is a classic problem, definitely worthy of a Problem Solving (PS) workshop in SIT methodology…. If only I had the time, I would map out the problematic situation, define undesired phenomena and possible routes to attack the problem, choose a route, formulate a specific problem, write down the components of the Closed World and systematically apply one tool after another on each of the components to examine whether the problem can be solved…. But I don’t have the time and I’m not in a workshop.

Intuitively and spontaneously I told the sales rep: take a working phone of the old model – you must have dozens of those in storage – hook it into an identical contraption, and apply whatever instructions are showing on its screen to my old device also “. Ten minutes later I left happy and content, with an advanced mobile phone, equipped with a SIM card containing all the memories I have accumulated in recent years.

In retrospect, it is clear that this case fits like a glove to the SIT Problem Solving methodology, and that the tool I used to solve the undesirable phenomenon “instructions to transfer memories that are not visible on the screen” is Multiplication. The components multiplied in this case were the phone and the transfer contraption. … But is that really what I did?

Every now and then, I get asked by different people interested in SIT whether I apply the methodology in my own work. My reply is neither yes nor no. Very honestly, I respond that often the process of solving a problem seems chaotic, lined with ups and downs, and includes intuitive and random parts. After the problem has been solved (and here I very conveniently mention that this happens in most cases), it is very easy to demonstrate that the process corresponds greatly with SIT methodology. So my conclusion, which is somewhat paradoxical (and possibly dangerous): once you already have an expertise in SIT methodology … you don’t really need it.