Problem Solving

Should you learn TRIZ? – Yes. ….and No.

Published date: February 1, 2024 в 2:37 pm

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Category: Innovation,Methodology,Problem Solving

Are you in the world of problem solving?  Is problem solving a skillset you have to own and master?

If so, you are like many of us, who are working in jobs required us to methodologically solve problems and are tasked with finding solutions to problems on daily basis. Despite the fact that we are expected to deliver good, and sometimes innovative, solutions, some of us are still working without clear, well-established, effective methods. Our success, reputation and KPI’s depend on this ability.

I am fascinated by the way people attempt to solve problems!

As humans, we developed philosophies and models, as well as myths and misconceptions towards handling problems. When you take a closer look at the ways we deal with problems, one of the first things you notice is the fact that most people never learn solving-problem tools… Can you imagine an architect or engineer finding their own way to calculate the circumference of a circle, instead of using the formula? Surely you would offer them the formula (C=2πr) designed specifically for that purpose. There are many tools and methods that help us solve complex problems, yet most of us still choose to rely on experience, intuition, and common sense; all of which are excellent in keeping us away from creative or innovative solutions.

So today I want to share with you some knowledge and thoughts about one of the most robust problem-solving techniques. We are going to discuss TRIZ.

TRIZ (Theory of Inventive Problem Solving) takes a scientific approach to problem solving. TRIZ is designed to understand what kind of contradictions were resolved or dissolved by an invention, and how this had been achieved. Experts analyzed tens of thousands of creative solutions to technical and engineering problems. By characterizing common principles and manipulations, they created a database of 40 principles likely to lead to good solutions.

A systematic approach like TRIZ will shorten the process. It also creates strong alignment and ensures exploring all possible solutions, without cognitive fixedness or other biases.

In order to explain what TRIZ is and when (and by who) it can be applied, I will discuss its main characteristics by comparison: I am assuming that you already know the SIT method or know about it, So I will use SIT as a point of reference when considering the following factors:

  • Learning time for efficient use: SIT can be learned in 3-10 days, while TRIZ takes about 1 year to learn.
  • Applications: SIT can be used in a variety of applications, while TRIZ is used for problem solving.
  • Applicable domains: SIT can be used in all domains, while TRIZ is most commonly used in engineering, technology, and manufacturing.
  • Utilizing existing knowledge versus Creating new ways of thinking: SIT utilizes ~20% existing knowledge and ~80% new ways of thinking, while TRIZ utilizes ~80% existing knowledge and ~20% new ways of thinking.
  • Application protocols: SIT has two application protocols: one for solving problems and one for inventing and improving. TRIZ does not have any specific application protocols.
  • Resource utilization: SIT only utilizes existing resources, while TRIZ can utilize any resources.
  • Run by / led by: SIT is usually run by a facilitator or coach, and is organic to the company, while with TRIZ you often bring in an external TRIZ expert.
  • Uniqueness: SIT is designed to break cognitive biases, and therefore is more likely to arrive to unique and differentiated type of solutions, while TRIZ benefits from robust data sets of pre-existing innovative solutions.
  • Target audiences: SIT is suitable for everyone who is willing to engage in result-driven innovation, while TRIZ is suitable for experts who need a very specific set of problem-solving tools.

Overall, SIT is a less complex and less time-consuming approach to creative problem solving than TRIZ. However, TRIZ is a more comprehensive and systematic in its approach and in finding innovative solutions to technical and engineering problems.

Which method is right for you will depend on your specific needs and goals. If you want a quick, easy, and disciplined way to effectively solve problems, SIT may be the best choice. If you are looking for a more comprehensive and systematic approach to technical and engineering problem solving, then TRIZ may be a better choice.

The best way to decide which method is right for you is to try both and see which one you prefer.

The T-Puzzle

Published date: April 27, 2022 в 4:51 pm

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Category: Innovation Facilitation,Problem Solving

This is a puzzle that occurred to me about 30 years ago, inspired by reading Douglas Hofstadter’s collection of essays “Metamagical Themas” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metamagical_Themas.

My colleagues and I have used it sporadically but extensively in innovation workshops throughout the years. We call it The T-Puzzle. I believe that it raises some interesting questions and thoughts, some more philosophical, others directly related to problem solving and innovation.

But, before discussing meanings and interpretations, would you first take a stab at solving the puzzle?

Have you tried? This is what happens:

Once you realize that the number is 21, you write “twenty one”, but, as you are instructed to count the t’s in the word you fill in as well, the number of t’s now grows to 23. OK, you say to yourself, and write “twenty three”, BUT this brings the count to 24 t’s. Annoying, but still manageable, you think, as you fill in what is now the correct reply “twenty four”. But here it starts getting weird, because NOW the right answer goes back to 23, and you know where writing THAT answer will lead you. So, basically, there is no way (that I’m aware of) to break this wicked loop and write down the correct answer.

UNLESS, that is, you start breaking some IMPLICIT assumptions about the requirements from the solution, while strictly complying with the EXPLICIT instructions themselves. Here are some possible solutions suggested by the public, on LinkedIn and in our workshops:

  1. Seven plus seven plus seven
  2. wenny-one or _wen_y one
  3. fifteen-plus-seven, or other arithmetical combinations
  4. “several”/”many” or “more than twenty-one”
  5. “Blackjack winning number”
  6. Einundzwanzig, עשרים ואחד and the like

Some practical learnings about innovative problem solving:

  1. Useful problem solving is usually not about breaking rules, but about finding novel solutions WITHIN the constraints, INSIDE THE BOX.
  2. Once you break the FIXEDNESS, or the mental model of how the solution should supposedly look, a floodgate opens for alternative possibilities.
  3. Solutions tend to come in “families” that share common PATTERNS. Once you recognize these patterns, you can follow each one to create variations (arithmetic, languages, slang, estimates, metaphors, etc.)
  4. One can be SYSTEMATIC about solution-searching. For “arithmetic” solutions, say, there aren’t many t-less numbers in the English language: one, four, five, six, seven, nine, zero are the only ones in the first 100 natural numbers (!), still enough to create quite a few combinations equaling 21, and combining them with t-including numbers you can reach other sums without falling into the wicked t-loop.
  5. Easy to CREATE ALGORITHMS churning out solutions for some patterns (arithmetic, languages), less easy for others (metaphors and slang) but probably not impossible.

Additional, more philosophical musings will be supplied on demand. Meanwhile, happy to hear your thoughts.

Why Impact Investment is Useless but Why Not All is Lost

Published date: March 9, 2022 в 8:40 pm

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Category: Problem Solving,Sustainable Innovation

In August 2021, a 3-part longish article was published by Tariq Fancy, Ex-CIO for Sustainable Investing at BlackRock, considered to be the world’s largest asset management firm, with who’s-counting-many trillions of dollars under management. In the article, Fancy describes in detail why he decided to leave his well-remunerated and perkly-speaking-attractive job and denounce the practices which he was promoting during his 1 year and 9 months in the firm. It is a fascinating read which I strongly recommend:

https://medium.com/@sosofancy/the-secret-diary-of-a-sustainable-investor-part-1-70b6987fa139

The article develops an argument, which I will briefly expound here because of its importance, and will follow with a set of questions that I think are crucial to our thinking about solving the world’s most pressing crises. Some of the questions challenge Fancy’s argumentations, others aim to direct readers’ attention and thinking to its consequences.

The article is obviously way more detailed and nuanced than my brief exposition, providing the added pleasure of the author’s sardonically realistic descriptions of the financial milieu, from (literally) high-flying arrogant executives to well-intentioned svelte Swedes. So, make sure not to miss the original. The argument goes something like this:

1)     The climate crisis is probably the number one threat that humanity is facing, and it is inextricably linked to several other crises, including extreme and growing inequality.

2)     There is currently a strong effort to promote the idea that the business and financial sectors, through “sustainable investing… impact investing, ethical investing and environmental, social, and governance (“ESG”) investing”, are the ones who will extricate us from these crises.

3)     This is part of a wider concept that is being touted, which is that the business sector can and is mending its ways by adopting the principle of doing well by doing good. Or, as Fancy says, “a new worldview that purpose and profits are not in conflict and that companies need to serve society rather than just their shareholders in order to prosper.”

4)     Much of the article is dedicated to prove and demonstrate that this claim is utterly false, since the business sector is neither capable nor motivated to be guided by anything other than the quest for profit, which is in most cases strongly at odds with purpose. Fancy excels at enumerating some of the specific mechanisms of the hugely profitable (since it provides higher fees) but totally illusory business of “impact investing”, convincingly describing the lack of any known causal chain translating this kind of investment into even the slightest discernible change in environmental parameters.

5)     “Impact”, “Green”, “Responsible”, “ESG” investments, promoted as a solution, are, therefore, utterly useless. Worse, they only serve to exacerbate the situation (even in the rare cases in which they are practiced with sincere intentions), by greenwashing the true picture while distracting the public into believing that the crisis is being resolved, and thus delaying and defanging any serious attempts at applying the only viable remedy, which is a complete overhaul of the rules of the game.

6)     It should not come as a surprise that these “green” practices are useless: the business sector has no motivation whatsoever to solve the problem since the rules of the game are designed exclusively to incentivize financial gain at the expense of any other consideration. In fact, the game is set up to incentivize anti-ESG behavior. In addition – even if businesses were willing to solve humanity’s problems, why should we entrust them with our future? Their leaders have neither been elected to represent us nor naturally selected for their benign attitudes towards their fellow humans.

7)     There is therefore, only one player who can, should and must shoulder the responsibility: government. For this to happen governments must take the initiative, change the rules for all players, and strictly enforce the new rules, forgetting about voluntary compliance.

8)     In summary: it is unfair to the public, undemocratic, illogical and impractical to expect the leaders of the business community to extract us from the crisis they have led us into. Governments need to take the responsibility now!, change the rules and ruthlessly enforce the new ones.

To drive home his key message, Fancy utilizes an effective analogy: basketball players who are being paid for scoring more points than their rivals will use any means to do so if they can get away with it, even if this goes in the face of the generally accepted maxim that one should attempt to “play fair”. Acting otherwise would be irrational within the system in which they are embedded, and this holds for their coaches, managers and all other members of the “basketball ecosystem”. Back to the financial analogue, Fancy grimly states: “Unfortunately, many things that are lucrative are also bad for the world.”, which is, one supposes, why they are still happening despite humanity’s absolute necessity that they stop.

Why there may still be hope

1)     One of the strongest critiques of the reigning economic model is its reliance on the Homo Ecomonicus model, the perception of humans as rational agents motivated solely by self-interest. This vision is so obviously skewed, that one can only wonder how it has managed to hold so many economics experts and “experts” in its thrall for so long. Surprisingly, Fancy’s powerful criticism of the system makes the same erroneous assumption (or maybe not surprising, given that he is – professionally speaking – a fruit of this very system). His main argument as to why businesses will never be able to extract us from our crises, is that the actors in the business-game, by its very design and rules, will never be incentivized to do so, because they are financially incentivized against it. But what if they will be motivated to fundamentally change in spite of it being against their self-interest, in the narrow sense of providing them financial gain?

2)     To continue the previous point, why assume that human beings – even finance-sector-human-beings – will always seek only direct financial gain, while the (undoubtedly persistent) tendency to do so may be simply the result of a culture that could, in principle, be shifted through a combination of education, leadership, persistence, necessity and maybe some luck?

3)     In 2007, I was facilitating a conference for a division of a large corporation providing harmful and profitable products to the market. The division’s president surprised his managers by agreeing to my suggestion that we close the yearly management conference with a video of Severn Cullis-Suzuki, who in 1992, at the age of 13, spoke to the assembly of the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro (as a “proto-Greta Thunberg”) against the preposterous state in which this generation was planning to leave the earth to hers. There was some discomfort in our corporate conference hall, but also a surprising amount of support and even empathy with the young speaker, and when I inquired about this surprising reaction, I was told that some of the managers were feeling uneasy lately because their high-school aged children were complaining that they were ashamed of sharing with classmates the information on where their parents worked. That’s one type of powerful, non-financial incentive, isn’t it?

4)     Recruitment – another incentive. This is a complaint we were hearing in various industries, even before the so called “Big Resignation”. It is becoming more difficult to recruit and retain talent, especially in categories that are considered harmful or unethical. Hopefully, with the right education, it can become harder still.

5)     The “Sting” argument, from the cold war, could be repurposed and (para)phrased as “I hope the CEOs love their children too”. One supposes they do, and that they also love their grandchildren. True, that if grandfather CEO amasses wealth today, future grandCEOchildren can be guaranteed a much safer existence than that of the regular grandchild-Joe, still the prospects for even a billionaire in 2060 seem quite grim, unless some profound change occurs.

6)     Assuming you agree with the entire argument presented by Fancy about the impossibility of trusting the business community to be our savior, how much can you trust governments? The record of governments to date in taking full control of national economies is dismal. Not to say, as capitalists are wont to do, that the economic failure of socialist economies is a proof that any government-controlled economy must fail. Still, the onus is on governments to prove that they are able to steer an economy, especially in times of crisis.

7)     Bernie Sanders’ analogy to WW2 comes to mind, re the ability of a country’s government and citizenry to unite in a no-holds-barred common effort to overcome a threat to its existence. Is it the lack of a “climate-Hitler”, someone to direct your anger onto and to focus your defensive aggression on, that is missing in today’s crisis, versus that of the Second World War?

8)     Back to the role of businesses. What if, discarding the misguided interpretation by which business leaders are motivated exclusively by financial consideration, we conceived of a global all-encompassing cultural and mindset shift? What if the same kind of childish egotistical impulse that drives the Bezo’s, Musks and Bransons of the world to spend their billions just to be the first, the biggest, the most famous, could be transformed into a genuine competition for who is more… good?

9)     The former point relates to the concept of “positive tipping points” i.e. the idea, as described for example by Timothy Lenton et. al., that “small interventions can trigger self-reinforcing feedbacks that accelerate systemic change” (Operationalising positive tipping points towards global sustainability). This challenges the maxim that only large-scale steps can tip the scales quickly enough to avert disaster and resonates with the intuition that complex systems can often be swayed by slight shifts to initial conditions.

10)  What happens to all the thousands of businesses toiling away in an effort to do good within the current system? Those that are sincerely trying to connect profit with purpose, some even successfully, others ceding chunks of profits to gain bits of purpose? Are we to discourage them from sustaining these efforts, since we believe, as Fancy appears to claim, that their efforts are useless or worse? Doesn’t it feel that our world is better off when companies place themselves on a trajectory of giving up toxic practices and adopting better ones, albeit too slowly?

Considering both the limitations of relying on the business community for solving humanity’s crises, and the huge potential that lies with these powerful players, one suspects that a comprehensive solution may therefore be a combination of much stronger government-led regulation, tightly enforced, with strong public support, accompanied by massive work on a cultural and mindset shift in which individuals, organizations and businesses will be driven through a wide range of incentives to replace current harmful practices with activities that contribute to the well-being of the planet and the species that inhabit it.

Inventive Solutions: Problem Solving Techniques in the Healthcare Industry

Published date: November 3, 2021 в 5:50 pm

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Category: Innovation,Problem Solving,Strategy

In the years leading up to 2001, the statistics showed a consistent annual increase in both the prescription and use of antibiotics among children. Today, it is common knowledge that overuse of antibiotics is one of healthcare’s biggest concerns. Back then, only healthcare professionals were aware of the danger of the evolution of “supergerms” with resistance to antibiotics. This, together with the financial impact that heavy antibiotic consumption had on the insurers (i.e. HMO’s) who subsidize the drug’s purchase, incentivized the HMO to find a solution.

Prescribing for the wrong reasons

Funnily enough, the biggest contributors to the problem were the HMO’s own General Practitioners, who obviously knew better. It was found that they were over-prescribing antibiotics to their patients not because they felt that it was the correct treatment, but because the HMO was – in part – evaluating them according to customer (i.e., patient, or in this case, patient’s parents) satisfaction. Not surprisingly, parents with children who did not feel well had their own motivations to get an antibiotics prescription. Parents wanted to give their children some type of medication to feel they were contributing to end their child’s suffering and… they needed to get back to work ASAP.

No silver-bullet solution

SIT was invited by the HMO to help generate solutions to this problem. After applying the Systematic Inventive Thinking method during multiple sessions over several days, it became apparent that there wouldn’t be a silver-bullet solution, but a collection of inventive solutions addressing different aspects of the problem. However, at the forefront remained the paradox of the doctors’ dilemma: wanting to satisfy their patients while giving the most appropriate clinical solution. In other words, the HMO was looking to remove the connection between the patient’s request for antibiotics and the doctor’s decision regarding the right treatment.

One of the most inventive solutions generated was a result of SIT’s Multiplication tool: Add to the problem world something that is similar to what already exists there.

 

 

Two for one – Inventive Solutions!

The idea was that the doctor would give the parent two prescriptions. One was effective immediately, prescribing medications that reduce the severity of the symptoms – nose drops, lozenges, etc. The second, effective 48 hours later, was the prescription for antibiotics. It was anticipated that if the symptoms would be gone by then (as is the case with most viruses), the parent would simply not fill this second prescription. [Note that in 2001, the OTC market in Israel was close to non-existent. Therefore, even symptomatic medicines were dispensed only by a pharmacist, even though no prescription was needed.]

This solution, together with an ad campaign against antibiotic overuse, and other solutions involving education for parents and doctors, generated an impressive decrease of 33% in antibiotic consumption over the following two years!

A very healthy, virus-free and bacteria-free autumn and winter season to you all!

An Effective Tool for Problem Solving – Part 2

Published date: October 10, 2021 в 12:37 pm

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Category: Innovation,Methodology,Problem Solving

In Part 1 we described a method for laying out a chain of events that describes a problematic state of affairs, starting out from a problem statement. We call the resulting diagram a UDP chain, where UDP stands for Undesired Phenomena. I used an example from 6sigma.org to create the following map. If you are one of the few people on the globe who have not read Part 1 (you and the LinkedIn algorithm(:, I strongly recommend that you click here to do so, and 7 minutes later return to continue reading here. In this Part, I will continue with the same example to demonstrate a principle and a tool that can be used to “break the chain” and find solutions to the problem. The following was the UDP Chain based on the Root Cause analysis in the 6sig.org example:

Creating the UDP chain usually results in a first wave of ideas or at least directions for solutions. Simply laying out the problem in this way is conducive to fresh thinking, and to the discovery that some of your colleagues may even understand the problem totally differently from you. But this is only the first part of the exercise.

To test a UDP Chain, we recommend that you read it aloud, from bottom to top, as if you were telling a story. Any defects in the causal logic will immediately emerge as you listen to yourself. In this case the story could sound like this: I have a hole in my pocket, so I lost my wallet, so I was left without cash, so I didn’t buy gas, so my gas tank was left empty, so I couldn’t start my car, so I couldn’t drive to work, so I got to the office late, so I got in late (again) to a meeting with my boss, so it added to my boss’s list of complaints, so I needed to prove myself even more, so I needed to stay late in the office. Every instance of the word “so” represents one of the small causal arrows in the diagram, and if I say, for instance, that there was a hole in my pocket and therefore my wallet got lost, I am accepting the causality of: hole in pocket -> wallet lost. Or: I will get into the office late -> I will arrive late at the meeting. The general structure of the UDP chain is therefore this:

Link N exists and therefore Link N+1 will also come to be (and therefore Link N+2, N+3 and so on). In our approach to problem solving, we aim to break this seemingly necessary sequence of events, by first asking a challenging question:

A)   What if, DESPITE N, NOT N+1?, which we can phrase also as:

A*) Let’s accept that N will happen, and then see how we can make sure that in spite of this fact, still N+1 will not happen.

This question leads to a second wave of ideas (the first came through the creation of the UDP chain itself), each created through posing the question on a specific pair of links.

  • What if despite the fact that my car won’t start, I can drive to work? (take a cab, get a ride, rent a car, call an Uber etc.)
  • What if despite the fact that I can’t drive to work, I will get to the meeting on time? (Zoom?)
  • What if despite the fact the I lose my wallet, I will have cash (next time)? (payment app?)

As you may note, each of these questions brings up thoughts, some more mundane others more exciting, but what they all have in common, and this is the power of what we call the first Qualitative Change Question, is that you eschew the tyranny of the causal necessity. Think how often we automatically assume that one bad thing leads to another. The Qualitative Change question challenges this mindset. It is also wise in the way that the famous AA Serenity Prayer (which, I just learned through WP, was written by Reinhold Niebuhr) teaches us:

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,

courage to change the things I can,

and wisdom to know the difference.

With God’s role played in our case by the Spirit of Innovation, we can aim to replace the misguided search for the miraculous Root Cause which when extinguished will solve our problem, with an acceptance that some things we cannot change, don’t need to change, and, as we will see later, may even not wish to.

As I demonstrate in my article about the COVID World (click here to read) both individuals and corporations tend to make the automatic leap from, say, “there is strict social distancing” to “my restaurant/theater business is ruined” while others, who resist the urge, demonstrate that the option to break the chain exists. I am not espousing the New Age concept that just by dint of willing something you can achieve it, only pointing to a possibility to challenge the assumption that you necessarily won’t.

Asking this question provides you with two benefits:

1)    You can select a variety of entry points to tackle your problem;

2)    You gain flexibility of thought by reconsidering the causal relationship between links in the chain.

You are now ready to ask the Second Qualitative Question, which will challenge your thinking even further than the first:

Qualitative Change Question 2: Given a link N, what if not only will N+1 not come to pass, but

The more N increases, the less N+1 will obtain.

This question not only breaks the causal chain, but turns it on its head.

  • The more I lose my wallet the more cash I will have (maybe losing my wallet repeatedly will convince me finally to keep my cash elsewhere?)
  • The less cash I have the more I will be able to buy gas (I will finally download the payment app to my phone?)
  • The longer my boss’s list of complaints the less I will need to prove myself to her (I finally realize that I don’t want to work for a boss who constantly complains about me, and I finally make the move and leave the job?)

This is the classic “Qualitative Change” in SIT terminology: you train yourself to focus less on the phenomena that are bothering you and more on the relationships between them, and then to challenge the necessity of these relationships. This is pretty powerful when you manage to internalize the habit, and not only in work-related contexts:

  • We took the family to the beach and the more it rained the more fun we all had.
  • The more time I had to spend driving the girls to their activities around today, the more I advanced with the article I was supposed to write.

Note that if in the first example one could claim that it was just a matter of defining what I considered as “having fun”, in the second example there is an objective measure – the article’s deadline, and the task was indeed objectively achieved by running the article’s outline in my mind as I was driving or sitting around and waiting, or maybe even by discussing some of my premature ideas with the girls while in the car (a conversation such as the one that gave birth to one of my recent posts). Back to a business context and some real-life examples from the past year:

  • The less our customers can come to our bank branch, the stronger our relationship becomes (launch an initiative for calling our clients at home and offering support)
  • The lower the demand for our flagship product, the more profitable we will be (use the opportunity to focus on launching our higher-margin next generation for which we never managed to get proper management attention before).

You may have noticed that this flipped approach to assessing causal relations, although not identical, is a more generalized form of the well-known tactic of turning a problem into a solution. The UDP approach is wider, and it very rarely fails to deliver solutions, but even when it doesn’t, it invariably leads to fresh perspectives about your predicament.

In future installments we will analyze specific case studies to demonstrate in further detail how these tools can be used and converted into daily habits. Meanwhile, please try this at home!

[The tools described in this post have several progenitors. They are mainly based on the PhD work of Roni Horowitz, who in turn was strongly influenced by the work of both Genrich Altshuler and Karl Duncker, with contributions from Jacob Goldenberg and the SIT team as it used and refined the tools in 25 years of work. No one but me is to blame for the philosophical comments; they are my fault only.]

An Effective Tool for Problem Solving – Part 1

Published date: October 3, 2021 в 12:26 pm

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Category: Innovation,Methodology,Problem Solving

If you come to a problem-solver and say: “I have problem X”, most chances are that they will tell you to search for the Root Cause (RC) – a basic rule of Problem Solving (PS). I want to propose that in most cases looking for the RC is not an effective nor an efficient way of going about PS. I will then present the basic principles of an alternative approach, which I believe can very often be more useful.

Here is a definition of RC from Wikipedia:

A root cause is an initiating cause of either a condition or a causal chain that leads to an outcome or effect of interest. The term denotes the earliest, most basic, ‘deepest’, cause for a given behavior; most often a fault.

And this one, from ASQ.org, refers specifically to the common usage of the term in the context of Quality:

A root cause is defined as a factor that caused a nonconformance and should be permanently eliminated through process improvement. The root cause is the core issue—the highest-level cause—that sets in motion the entire cause-and-effect reaction that ultimately leads to the problem(s).

All this speaks to a widespread intuition: that in order to solve a problem one must look beyond the symptoms, and dig deeper “to its roots”. In fact, since the term seems to have been in circulation at least since the late 19th century or beginning of the 20th, its existence may even have contributed to the strength of this common intuition. So, what’s not to like?

To demonstrate the limitations of searching for a RC, and to demonstrate an alternative, let us use an example that appears in 6Sigma.us, as an example of using a common tool for RC analysis, named “The 5 Why’s” and attributed to Sakichi Toyoda, the founder of Toyota.

The problem statement does not appear explicitly but presumably it is: “My car won’t start”.

  1. Q – Why won’t your car start? A – There’s no gas.
  2. Q – Why is there no gas? A – You didn’t buy any.
  3. Q – Why didn’t you buy any? A – You didn’t have any cash at the time.
  4. Q – Why didn’t you have the cash to buy gas? A – You lost your wallet.
  5. Q – Why did you lose your wallet? A – There’s a hole in your coat pocket.

The RC here is, obviously, the hole in the Problem Owner’s (PO) coat pocket, and obviously, it makes a lot of sense to fix this hole, if PO doesn’t want to be in the same predicament again or suffer even worse consequences. But let us look at a different approach, that starts out very similarly but then diverges dramatically from RC analysis.

We write the initial problem statement in the middle of the page, and, before we ask the Why questions, we ask, five times: “So what?”. Then, we add the 5 Why questions and their answers below, as in a RC analysis. The resulting chain could look like this:

 

This series of causes and effects, which we call a UDP Chain, where UDP stands for Undesired Phenomena, seems like just a longer version of the same list produced by the 5 Why’s, but conceptually, it is a total rebuttal of some crucial aspects in the RC approach, resulting in an approach that addresses the crucial faults of RC analysis:

1)   The Problem Statement is not “the problem”. It is the intuitive manifestation of the pain felt by the PO (problem owner) at a given moment. More often than not, we will discover, through building the UDP Chain, that what needs to be fixed is elsewhere, or in several “elsewheres”.

2)   The reason we start building upwards, rather than starting with the Why’s going downwards is twofold:

a.    It gives a measure of the importance or urgency of the problem, thus providing an evaluation of the prices one is willing to pay for a solution.

b.    You may discover that what you perceived as a problem isn’t in fact something you need to change. I personally find this the most useful part of the exercise, when I use it on my personal problems (my 2nd grader refuses to study math, so what?, so her teacher will be angry, so what? so she will fail her this year? so what? So she will have to work much harder next year, great – let that be a lesson for her, excellent, I don’t need to do anything about it now).

3)   The UDP chain opens up an entire range of entry points to solve the problem. In the Part 2 of this article, we will introduce an important tool for finding solutions based on the UDP chain analysis, but independently of which specific tools you will use, the UDP parses the problem situation in such a way that you have now at least 12 entry points or angles of attack to try to solve it. The worst you can do at this stage is to narrow the search to one specific link, whether root or other – there is absolutely no reason to deal with the hole in the pocket first!

4)   Even if you do want to focus your efforts on a single link, there may be very good reasons to focus on others, rather than the “root” link, depending on various factors, for instance:

a.    If you are there, with the car, at the side of the road, the state of your coat pocket is undoubtedly very low on your priorities. You may, instead, wish to get hold of some money, or some gasoline, or find someone to replace you at the meeting.

b.    The coat might have been lent to you by someone and you don’t intend to ever see it again, so why bother about the hole?

c.    Your problem is that you tend to lose your wallet constantly. Today it was through the hole, but other times because you just forgot it, or left it in the office or whatever. Fixing the whole wouldn’t really be very helpful then.

d.    In the same vein, you can easily imagine how to continue this series of scenarios in which the RC is low on the PO’s priorities. Why direct their thinking to it then?

5) What determines the level in which the problem should be tackled are two parameters:

a.    Define which is the lowest link that you are not willing to accept and make sure you break the chain somewhere below that point. Example: if the only thing I care about is not having to stay at the office late to impress my boss, then I can break the chain at any link below #12 – that means I can tackle any of the 12 links below! Even link 11, meaning that in principle I could still be stuck with the car, be late for the meeting, incur the boss’s rage, and just find a way to show that I am trying harder without having to stay late. But obviously, if I am not ready to live with the fact that his boss will be dissatisfied with him (#10), then the chain should be broken below that link. Hailing a cab there and then is a solution that comes to mind (lock the car well before you do that). But note that we are still very far from the RC, and it may very well be the case that we don’t have any reason to go that deep because we can find a better, faster solution, much easier to achieve and much closer to our pain point. If, for instance, you are hurrying to a wedding after work, you may decide that #5 is your lowest acceptable link – “no gas in the car’s tank” in which case, forget your meeting or boss, and make sure you somehow get gas into the tank and then get moving.

b.    Define what is the lowest link that is still within reasonable scope for intervention by the PO. You should break the chain anywhere from the link and upward. Are you a psychologist? Do you have the authority – ethically or organizationally speaking – of dealing with a certain phenomenon? Do you have the expertise? Make sure you work on a link or links that are within your scope in all these senses.

c.    The combination of this ceiling and floor give you the Solution Domain – this is the scope within which you are searching for solutions by breaking the chain.

6)   Chains of cause and effect tend very often to be cyclical rather than linear. Imagine that you ask another Why? (link #0) and come up with “He doesn’t have time to fix his coat”. In this case the top SoWhat (#11), which states that he needs to stay later in the office every day, is obviously the cause for #0, thus closing the loop and creating a (somewhat vicious) cycle.

 

 

In sum, although searching for a Root Cause can be useful at times, we recommend a method that both opens more possibilities and enables you to select the most effective and efficient course of action rather than necessarily tackling “the root”. In 25 years of experience using this approach we have found that very often just mapping the UDP Chain will usually either:

1)   Liberate you from the need of taking action (so what? Nothing);

2)   Emphasize the variety of ways that your team understands the problem state;

3)   Point to the real versus perceived pain points;

4)   Mark the scope of the problem and its potential solutions;

5)   Open a variety of angles of attack.

And – TEASER AHEAD – a UDP Chain sets the stage for finding a variety of solutions using Qualitative Change tools, to be described in Part 2.

Houston we have an Opportunity! Qualitative Change and the Inventive Solution

Published date: September 1, 2021 в 4:25 pm

Written by:

Category: Innovation,Problem Solving

In a famous Seinfeld episode, Kramer sues a coffee chain after scalding himself with boiling coffee. This fictional lawsuit is based on a true story in which a jury awarded close to three million dollars in damages to a woman who burned herself on boiling coffee at McDonald’s. As a result, McDonald’s took two actions: it chose the knee-jerk, trivial response, and reduced the temperature of the coffee from 90° to 60°C (194°-140°F), thereby eliminating the harmful effect, i.e. the boiling coffee. They also added a warning on the lids of the coffee cups, indicating that the hot liquid could cause burns. Both solutions do protect McDonald’s from future lawsuits. However, they are deficient in two aspects: the first solution spoils our coffee-drinking experience, as the coffee is now not hot, but warm. The second solution is not effective as most consumers do not notice the warning on the lid.

Those of us who like our coffee hot, but prefer drinking it without suffering burns, might search for more inventive solutions.

The SIT – Systematic Inventive Thinking® method contends that there are two sufficient conditions for a solution or idea to be inventive: the Closed World condition, and the Qualitative Change condition. The Closed World condition stipulates that when developing a new product or addressing a problem, one must utilize only elements that already exist in the product/problem or their immediate environment. In this article, however, we will focus our attention on the second condition—Qualitative Change—which stipulates that when trying to solve a problem, we must search for solutions in which a harmful element (one that either creates or aggravates the problem) becomes either neutral or instrumental in the problem’s solution.

This begs the question: is there a way we can transform the harmful phenomenon, i.e. the coffee’s high temperature, into an instrumental factor in reducing the risk of scalding? Smart-Lid Systems have developed such a solution—a lid that changes color according to the temperature of the liquid in the cup. The idea is so simple that one glance at a picture of the product reveals its brilliance. When the liquid is too hot for consumption, the color of the lid changes from black to red, giving a clear indication of the risk.

There are two ways in which the Qualitative Change condition can be satisfied: Reversal—as the intensity of the harmful element increases, that of the undesired phenomenon decreases; and Elimination – the intensity of the undesired phenomenon is not dependent on the [no longer] harmful element. Smart-Lid’s solution uses Reversal. Under normal circumstances, the hotter the coffee is, the greater the chances are of getting burned. Using the innovative lid reverses this correlation—the higher the temperature, the more conspicuous the indication is, which in turn reduces the risk of a burn.

The qualitative change condition is considered, for a good reason, the surprising and elegant element in the inventive solution. When properly implemented, it no longer matters if the previously harmful factor continues to exist. Either we become indifferent to it, or it becomes a corroborating element in limiting or eliminating the problem.

The scorching coffee case exemplifies how the Qualitative Change condition can help in problem solving; but it can also be easily implemented in developing new products and services. Most successful products solve a problem, even if the problem only becomes evident after the solution has been found. All-you-can-eat restaurants, for instance, use the Elimination strategy in Qualitative Change. Post factum, we can report a problem that has been solved: usually, the more food and drink a customer orders, the more expensive and complicated the dining experience becomes (both for the customer and for the proprietor). The Qualitative Change is manifested in the billing process, which is no longer dependent on the number or type of dishes ordered. For many consumers, this solution simplifies the experience and allows them to limit and control their expenses in advance.

Those who are well trained in SIT – Systematic Inventive Thinking®, focus on exploring the space of the problem instead of the solutions’ space (simply because the latter is virtually unlimited). Rather than look for ways to minimize the damage caused by the source of the problem, they concentrate their efforts on examining the relationships between the various harmful elements and other factors in the system. Searching for a solution that will enable us to alter the correlation between the harmful element and the undesired phenomenon, leads us away from the trivial solution strategy, where we simply rid ourselves of the harmful factor, and promotes surprising and inventive yet simple solutions.

How Innovation Varies Across Countries & Cultures

Published date: May 5, 2021 в 10:21 am

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Category: Innovation,Innovation Facilitation,Organizational Innovation,Problem Solving,Strategy

Tags: ,,,,,

Have you ever wondered how different cultures view innovation? Why are some countries more willing to adopt new advances while others fight to keep old systems in place? In today’s article, we’ll be taking a look at two innovative research studies that reveal the impact of culture on people’s ability to innovate.  We’ll also show you how to use this information to create a work environment conducive to innovation. To begin, let’s jump right in to discuss how a country’s culture affects the early stages of innovation.

What Affects the Early Stages of Innovation?

In a study on innovation in European countries, innovation researchers wanted to see if understanding different national cultures could help them predict certain behavioral patterns when it came to initiating innovation. To do this, they categorized cultures using four dimensions –– power distance, uncertainty avoidance, individualism-collectivism, and masculinity-femininity — and then tested the relationship between each dimension and innovation. Today, we’ll concentrate on the first two dimensions: power distance and uncertainty avoidance.

 

Power Distance Measures: Just How Much Power Lies in the Hierarchical Structure

 Cultures with large power-distance measures are those with formal rules and a centralized decision-making system. These societies keep information-sharing to a select few — only those in power, know the master plan and everyone else remains in the dark. On the other hand, small power-distance cultures don’t rely so heavily on a rigid chain of command. There’s free-flowing communication between hierarchical levels. Both of these traits help foster an environment where creative thoughts and ideas can flourish, which may ultimately lead to breakthroughs. So, which culture do you think does better in the initiation phase of innovation…the one with small or large power distance? If you guessed small power distance cultures… you are correct! Countries in this category include the UK, USA, Germany, the Netherlands, and Nordic countries.

This innovative research shows that high power distance cultures, such as Belgium, France, Poland, and Portugal, may be unknowingly inhibiting their innovation efforts due to this trait. If people are more likely to feel confined and afraid to come up with new ideas for fear of disapproval, they won’t even try. This strategy will severely limit innovation initiation, according to the study. The next dimension may also greatly impact the early stages of innovation.

 

Uncertainty Avoidance: Whether Tense Situations are Avoided or Tolerated

You may not think there’s a connection between uncertainty avoidance and innovation, but there is according to the research. See, cultures with high uncertainty avoidance adopt an attitude of “What’s different is dangerous.” People are encouraged to follow the rules to a T — without ever stepping out of line. When this type of environment is created, you’ll often see a workforce that’s unmotivated to think creatively. As a result, they may struggle to come up with new ideas and innovative solutions to existing problems.  Not only that, your team may be much more resistant to change. And as you can imagine, this way of thinking can negatively impact your innovation efforts. On the other hand, a low uncertainty avoidance culture constantly revises rules and makes allowances to bend existing ones, given the right circumstances. Cultures that rank low on this dimension also expect conflict and see it as just another part of life. Ambiguous situations are viewed the same way — since they’re inevitable, you must always be ready to adjust your plan and adapt accordingly, two things that work well when it comes to innovation. Now before we dive into the specific traits shown by innovative cultures, it’s important to understand a few fundamental findings first:

“Existing cultural conditions determine whether, when, how and in what form new innovation will be adopted,” as our next study shows.

 

Cultural Impacts on Innovation

Which characteristics do cultures with high innovation rank well on?

Researchers discovered that there’s a greater acceptance of innovation when the foundation is already ingrained in the culture.  For cultures built on long-standing traditions, innovation may seem as if it’s going against the societal norms that have been passed down for generations. Therefore, it may not be as well-received or encouraged. Yet, researchers discovered, and research revealed, that when societies are willing to take traditions and adjust them to fit modern times, innovation is much more likely to happen. To that end, there’s one more factor that may contribute to fostering an innovative culture: whether people believe they can make an impact.

Cultural or organizational “class systems” can become like shackles — with people unable to move and think freely.

When applied to the work environment, it’s virtually impossible to motivate your team or community to work at their potential (or, as often is required to innovate, to exceed their potential) when they don’t see their hard work paying off for them in some regard. “Most people work in the hope of reward,” and if they don’t see any, they’ll be less inclined to work hard. People need to feel like they can make a difference and that their ideas are not only heard but also used whenever possible. And they need to do this in an environment that fosters community and relationships.

For an innovative culture to flourish and thrive, the scientists learned, this form of social capital is needed.

 

The No-Forecast-Kit for Dealing with the COVID World

Published date: May 20, 2020 в 2:00 pm

Written by:

Category: Innovation,Methodology,Problem Solving,Strategy

A Short Article, a Toolset and a Loooong List of Vectors

The purpose of this post-COVID Kit is to help guide your thinking and discussion about a crucial issue: how should one prepare for and live with the changes brought about by the global pandemic. In the first two pages, I describe a certain approach to the issue, of which the gist is: do not attempt to forecast what is going to happen, but pay close attention to certain forces, vectors or trends, and figure out how they can influence you and your organization, and then try to proactively engage with these developments. The second part is a set of questions, based on SIT’s methodology for innovation, that allow you to convert the list into a practical exercise in thinking about the future. The third, and last part is a list of 23 topics, each followed by 5-10 bullet points, each of them pointing to at least two directions, often contrary, in which some force or vector can play out in the coming months or years.

Contents

Article

Toolset

A. Exploring the list

B. Breaking Mental Fixedness*

1. Task Unification*
2. Subtraction*
3. Qualitative Change*

List

A. Individuals, Families

1. Mindset and Attitudes
2. Mental Health
3. The Family

B. The Collective

1. Society
2. Education
3. Communications
4. Government
5. Religion/Spirituality
6. The Arts
7. Travel and Tourism

C. Health, Science, Technology

1. Public Health
2. Science
3. Technology
4. Data

D. The Globe, the Planet

1. Sustainability
2. Global Politics
3. Global Economy

E. Work, Business

1. Work, employment
2. Business: General
3. Retail
4. Supply chains
5. Transportation
6. Manufacturing

Article

I am not a futurist, nor are my colleagues at SIT – Systematic Inventive Thinking. As famously remarked by Niels Bohr, “Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future”. And much more so, when a cataclysmic event of global magnitude is unfolding as we write. What we specialize in, and what this document is about, rather than exploring predictions about the future, is attempting to shape this future, even if on a modest scale.

There are two confounding aspects of the attempt to forecast even the near future in 2020. The first is the well-known butterfly effect, but with billions of butterflies fluttering their wings simultaneously in an unprecedent manner. Thus, the Mozart of 2040 may have found her vocation when her mother, after 30 days of quarantine, out of desperation, downloaded a piano-teaching app to calm the noisy 3-year-old. The second is the appearance of strong and often opposing vectors that seem to cancel each other out, but, in fact, do not. So if a million couples who otherwise would have stayed together are driven to divorce, while another million couples about to divorce rediscover the bonds that held them together and don’t, in term of global statistics nothing has changed, but for two million families life’s course has swerved dramatically.

But, even though the ability to forecast with a high probability of success is very limited, it is still extremely useful, even necessary to pay close attention to some strong vectors or forces that are emerging as a result of the virus and, even more so, the various manners in which the world has chosen to deal with its effects. There are two prevailing views as to the changes: they, too, are contradictory, and yet both can prevail at one and the same time. One view holds that in the end, most people, and definitely businesses, are looking more than anything to resume life as it was pre-COVID. Expect, therefore, relatively small changes, mainly temporary adjustments. The other party claims the opposite: the pandemic, with its imposed restrictions and behaviors, has triggered changes so fundamental, that humanity cannot but evolve into a state of “new normal”. I use the expression “party” advisedly because I believe that both views have an element of “wishful forecasting”; those who wish to maintain the status quo are attempting to will reality to do so, and those who see an opportunity for – finally – a major upheaval, are loath to give it up. In this document, true to the spirit of our approach, we claim that both can, in a sense, be right at the same time. Each view represents a strong and potent force pushing in a contrary direction, and as reality will be shaped by the interplay between both, it would be wise for any individual, group or organization to consider the potency of both without trying to conjecture which will prevail.

Below, you will find a non-exhaustive list of 23 areas in which one can expect the world to change following the COVID crisis. There is no attempt here to predict what will eventually happen in any area, only to map some relevant vectors of potential change in each of them. In many cases, the vectors are contrary in their directions, which raises two questions: what is the value, or is it not tautological to claim that, for instance, people will either strongly yearn and search for the contact of other humans or will develop a defensive stance of distancing themselves from their fellow inhabitants of the globe. Our claims are that both vectors are very likely to be felt post-COVID, and that they will not necessarily cancel each other out. The way this will unfold is difficult to predict, but if your business or organization depends on prospects’ relation to other humans, for example, you would be wise to consider that many of them will probably be living with the conflict of both feeling strongly the need for human contact, and fearing its risks and consequences.

Another example: Say that you need to make decisions that depend on the future of shared rides globally. Do we predict an increase post-COVID, with a strengthening of the Ubers of the world, or rather a decrease, as new models emerge, or passengers return to pre-rideshare habits? The most useful answer may be a combination, or at least an invitation to consider at least two tendencies. The first is an aversion of potential riders to spending time in a confined space with people of whose health they have no information or guarantee, touching surfaces that have probably been in contact with other strangers not so long ago. The second is a set of economic pressures that may push both users and drivers to depend even more on shared rides, the former due to difficulties in owning a car and the latter as their only alternative for employment. In addition, the evolution of shared rides may be affected also by other tendencies, with their own combination of (sometimes conflicting) vectors: will the post-COVID world be (even) more unequal, or will this crisis be an inflection point, by exposing the perils of inequality and the interdependence of rich and poor, thus pushing towards creating a more level playing field?

Thinking about the food and beverage industries, to look at yet another case, can we expect a strong consumer tendency to seek healthy food, finally acknowledging that rather than trusting their fate to vaccines and antivirals one’s first duty towards oneself is to keep healthy, by, among other means, eating fresh and natural food? Or, alternatively, will we see a surge in consumption of fast (and junky) food, due to fatalism (“Why should I give up the food I like, if a random virus can kill me anyway?”) or to a habit created or strengthened by weeks upon weeks of ordering pizzas and hamburgers in quarantine? Our prediction: both. Recognizing these two highly probable and opposing vectors, a corporate player in this space could reach one or several practical conclusions, all logically, if not always ethically, valid. For instance:

a)      Gamble on the healthy option, using the opportunity to dare not only to supply the partly-met need of health seekers but also to lead the laggards into healthy consciousness.

b)     Play the fast food card, not necessarily cynically, but catering to the “new lazy” who absolutely refuse to cook, by competing with take-aways and expanding the variety of easy food for the home.

c)      Recognizing both tendencies, find ways to provide offerings that answer both the desire to be healthy and the tendency to outsource household tasks.

d)     Lead a revolution in the role of food manufacturers in society and the economy, by recognizing their critical share of the responsibility for public health.

e)     Disregard the health issue, and focus, instead, on convenience and/or safety as the greatest consumer concerns.

We see, therefore, that even lacking a crystal-ball-clear view of the future, one can engage actively in creating it. Disregarding COVID- related developments comes at a risk, since what can be expected with high probability is that COVID will cause a ripple effect of strong forces or vectors for change. But, contrary forces at play again, when imagining the unfolding of exciting and/or frightening (depending on one’s imagination and inclination) futures, one should never underestimate the strength of individuals’ and societies’ tendency towards homeostasis, a tremendous pull to what feels like the safe equilibrium of old and comfortable habits.

To summarize: trying to forecast – futile; but watching trends, interpreting them, figuring out possible effects and proactively attempting to adapt and influence the future – a must.

 

Toolset

There are multiple ways to use the list below, some of them are presented here, divided in two modules:

A)      A set of questions that help in exploring the list systematically;

B)     Several tools for challenging your assumptions and opening your minds to come up with inventive ideas to deal with the phenomena described in the list.

A. Exploring the list

  1. Read though the topics, enjoy entertaining your own thoughts, guesses and predictions about each area;
  2. Identify those areas that are relevant to you, your organization, your business, and ask yourself what the probabilities for certain futures are, and what would their emergence mean for you;
  3. Select one or two areas that don’t feel directly relevant to your organization, activity or business. Challenge yourselves to figure out whether and how these seemingly unrelated forces will in fact influence you;
  4. Most challenging, but potentially most rewarding: which futures do you feel strongly about, and what can you do to increase the probability that they, rather than their alternative, comes to pass.
  5. Focus on an area/topic and add vectors and forces to the list. Discuss them as well.
  6. Review the “positive” vectors: how can you strengthen them?
  7. Review the “negative” list: how can you overcome these?

B. Breaking Mental Fixedness*

In this section, a set of mental tools is presented, that allows, in addition to stretching one’s mind as recommended above, to tackle head on one’s “mental fixednesses”, the patterns that restrict a thinker to old and well-trodden paths. There are additional tools in the SIT method that can be applied as well, but these are some of the most obvious candidates.

      1. Task Unification*

a) Select a certain force or vector, which intuitively seems to be working in your favor in some way;

b) Ask yourself: can I see this vector as a resource? Meaning, can I make it work for me?

i) By acting to promote one of my objectives?

ii) By acting to promote something positive that I had not been aware of?

c) Now select a vector or force that intuitively feels as if it can affect you negatively.

d) Repeat the resource exercise (1b) with the “negative” vector, but this time you will need to overcome your intuitive negative sense of this vector, since you will be searching for ways to employ it in your benefit. Ask yourself:

i) Can this, supposedly negative vector, actually work in my favor?

ii) What would I need to do to make this happen?

       2. Subtraction*

a. Some of the vectors, trends or forces will cause certain elements which seem crucial to you, your activity or your business to simply disappear, or be radically reduced temporarily (e.g. tourists for an airline, during quarantine). By browsing the list, take note of these cases as they apply to you. This disappearance we call a Subtraction.

b. For each of these cases, ask yourself the counter-intuitive question: what can you gain, how can you benefit, and which opportunities will open up thanks to this subtraction? Can it be that, even when the temporary subtraction ends (say, tourists return), you can continue doing some or all that you put in place when they were gone?

c. Ask yourself the following counter-intuitive question: COVID is forcing you to do without element X (say, face-to-face meetings), and you are learning how to manage with this subtraction, and even find benefits in it. What if COVID would have forced you to do without element Y (say, without meetings at all, or without internet connections)? Can you think of benefits for that as well? Is it worth experimenting with this option?

        3. Qualitative Change*

a. Each force, trend or vector you review immediately conjures in your mind a certain chain: if A will indeed happen, so will B. Sometimes B will be negative, which means that you will automatically view A as negative as well (since it seems to inexorably lead to B). Identify an A that seems to lead to a negative B.

b. Create two sentences to use as triggers for invention:

i.           Given A, how can you prevent B from happening?

ii.           Can you imagine a context or situation in which: the more A the less B? Meaning, even though as A grows there normally is more of (negative) B, can you imagine a situation in which the relationship is flipped so that the more A the less B?

c. Repeat (3b) with other forces or vectors.

*These tools and principles are part of the SIT – Systematic Inventive Thinking methodology. Read more about them, and their use, in www.sitsite.com

List

This list of forces, trends and vectors covers 23 areas, that are divided into 5 general groups (A-E). It is obviously not exhaustive, nor is it meant to be, but rather covers a wide range of points of view that can serve as triggers for a productive discussion of the Post-COVID world, with or without the recommended Toolset. The list is long. Browse it at leisure, perhaps turning both to some areas that are directly relevant to what you care about, and some that initially feel further away. You will probably be surprised to find that contemplating some of the latter can turn out to be just as productive.

A. Individuals, Families

       1. Mindset and Attitudes

a. Work-life balance. Millions desperately returning to work after being kept away for months versus millions discovering the joys of spending time at home rather than at work.

b. Approach to nutrition: realization that the best way to protect oneself is by maintaining good health, and this is possible through nutrition, versus, health can always be maintained through medication, versus, live as you please and trust the system to treat you when you fall ill.

c. The natural quest for convenience maximized in certain societies where all basic needs are delivered immediately with a digital click, versus the need to factor in safety as the overriding consideration in consuming, and balancing these requirements with cost.

d. Invitation to humility – human beings cannot control everything, versus a deep-seated human hubris – the belief that in the end our science and technology prevail.

e. Belief in science: in times of crisis we can only trust our scientists, versus “science failed us when most needed, and scientists can’t even agree among themselves about the basics of the pandemic”.

f. Individuals feel debilitating uncertainty, living a situation akin to cultural shock, as regular assumptions cease to apply to reality: a strong urge to surrender your decision making to authorities, to those “who know”, versus an impulse to seal out disturbing information and trust one’s intuitions.

g. Impressively, extremely complex and multi-faceted problems can be broken down into sub-tasks and solved by a distributed multi-team effort, versus, even the combined efforts of global talent and technology could not overcome a simple virus.

h. Feeling of dependence on humans, versus dependence on technologies. When push comes to shove only our fellow humans can give us the strength and energy to survive, versus: distanced and split from our fellow humans, our reliance on technology is near total.

i. Apart from phenomena that defy the laws of physics, will we ever be able to say again, of anything, even the wildest scenario, that it is improbable, much less “impossible”?

j. Has this crisis completed the rewiring of our brains, creating humans who can capture and digest only the briefest and simplest twitterized communications, or have we benefitted from this time of relative tranquility and immobility to read, think and discuss profoundly about important issues?

       2. Mental Health

a. Immediate results of the crisis: depressions, anxiety, solitude, or recognizing one’s internal strength and abilities to adapt and overcome adversity.

b. Usage of psychiatric drugs: increased dependency, versus forced cold-turkey and freedom.

c. Addictions: increase due to stress and depression, discontinued rehab programs, solitude, versus forced rehab through scarcity induced withdrawal.

d. Stress levels at record high due to frightening messages and general feeling of impotence, uncertainty and lack of safety nets, versus finding calm in the tranquility of one’s home and proximity of family.

e. Solitude: for the world’s growing number of single-person households, for those whose families do not provide comfort or company, for those who find themselves far from their homes, others?

       3. The Family

a. Rethinking, re-feeling the importance of one’s nuclear family, if there is one, or of having one if you don’t, versus the oppressive feeling of being unable to physically break away from it.

b. Need for keeping close to other humans, versus benefits of social distance, overdose of proximity.

c. Baby boom with welcome/unwanted newborns, versus huge wave of abortions with related political/social conflict.

d. The elderly – their important role in one’s life, their importance and contribution versus the price one pays for their well-being, alternative modes of communication.

e. Violence within the family – rapid escalation following weeks of lockdown, versus exposure of the problem and large-scale treatment by society.

f. Children-parents’ relationship: parents discover their kids who discover their parents and love it, versus same and can’t stand it.

g. What have children learned from the crisis? About their parents’ ability to control their reality, about their family, about the importance of schools, friends, hobbies, or lack thereof.

h. Opportunity for adopting and accepting alternative family models (non-traditional, non-nuclear) by understanding the huge importance of belonging to a community, versus hunkering back to the traditional model of the nuclear family?

B. The Collective

       1. Society

a. The huge inequality challenge: the virus as universal equalizer (“does not discriminate by race or social status”), versus dramatic disparity in rates of illness and mortality along social and economic lines.

b. Realization that the well being of any member of society can strongly affect that of others, that social phenomena can become literally viral, can lead either to a strengthened sense of mutual responsibility towards all parts of society, or to even stronger separation and walling-in of the well off, as they separate and protect themselves from the masses.

c. Coming together or breaking further apart? Expressions and acts of solidarity with those regions or segments of society most affected by the illness, versus isolationist tendencies and blaming of the “other”.

d. Gender: reversal to traditional women’s role in the home accompanied by widespread violence in the family, versus full-time male presence and egalitarian sharing of all family tasks.

e. Gender: Men as weak sex, higher probability of infection, more liable to die, gap in average longevity grows in favor of women.

f. Gender: #MeToo post-CV: losing steam as humanity deals with a host of survival issues, versus returns with vigor, fueled by pressure cooker of quarantines and crisis.

g. Societies with high Gini Coefficients find that a crisis strains the fault lines, bringing to the fore suggestions like universal basic incomes on one hand, versus a reflex of the rich to prepare and protect themselves for future adversity.

       2. Education

a. The role of the kindergarten. Massive realization of the crucial importance of this less prestigious and less budgeted step in the educational ladder, versus experiencing the huge advantage of young children’s spending many hours with their parents and siblings.

b. Homeschooling: the new wave or backlash. Waiting anxiously to re-deposit the kids into educational institutions, versus realizing that having them at home and spending time with them can be an enriching and feasible model for many.

c. Higher education: years of slow ascendance of MOOCs and other online courses accelerated to near-universal adoption of remote learning models vs. finer identification of those aspects that do require person-to-person interactions.

d. General reconsideration of the principal roles of education: transference of knowledge that is deemed important, creating good citizens or enabling individual development (as per Zvi Lam) – when education is decentralized to families.

e. Accelerating (finally) remote digital learning: leveling the playing field through more egalitarian digital education, versus a widening gap driven by high-cost superior digital content and platforms.

f. Opportunity to (finally) adapt pedagogy to technology. When teachers have no choice but to teach remotely, they are forced to adapt their pedagogy rather than falling back on traditional methods and skills, versus total collapse in pedagogy as traditional teachers give up and leave education totally to kids and their families.

g. Will disparity rise when/if a bigger part of education happens at home? Difference in parents’ ability to support home education can lead to focus on parent education, or extra support to counterbalance this effect, or it can lead to widening of the gap.

h. Widespread adoption of the flipped classroom model? Alternative model vying for widespread adoption for the past ~15 years, requires strong abilities of learning at home utilizing digital resources.

i. Education will be perceived by governments as a tool for creating obedient citizens for the next crisis, and therefore will receive extra budget and (at times repressive) attention, versus governments will prefer less educated populations, easier to control in times of crisis.

       3. Communications

a. Role of social media explodes as the only option for maintaining social proximity while socially distancing, increasing the number of people for whom a “friend” is someone you exchange written messages with, and a “meeting” is virtual. Or, social media is mentally associated with lockdown and crisis, driving traumatized users to search for real-life contact.

b. Fake news vs. facts: establishing standards. It is no longer a game; fake news can kill you. Therefore, standards must be established. Versus, no one believes in anyone any longer – there can be no standards since there are no agreed upon experts.

c. Solitude. With technology, even when alone, we are not alone if we can communicate at a distance. Communication has always been crucial, but this has never been so evident. But for some, long stretches of lonely existence revealed how over-saturated they usually are, and how stress decreases when they are less communicated.

d. Decline of face to face interactions versus rebound and consciousness of how much we all need them

e. Growth and importance of independent (from government and business) media. Strong incentive to create and sustain independent outlets but, in parallel, stronger intervention of governments in setting media agenda and controlling media.

f. Digital media thrives as bored viewers are glued to the various screens, increasing exposure to advertising of all kinds, printed media on one hand has increased attention and demand, and on the other hand starved of advertising (plus dealing with logistics and distribution challenges) turns to digital or closes. Will a new model emerge, that can save print?

       4. Government

a. Failure of democracies and advantages of authoritarian regimes in managing crisis situations and enforcing compliance versus failures of totalitarian systems due to lack of transparency, lack of initiative. Jury still out.

b. Local versus national. Only strong central government can deal with magnitude of crisis, versus local leaders and communities taking independent steps as required by their specific conditions.

c. Leadership and lack thereof: rise of the need for strong leaders vs. obvious weakness of relying on the wrong “pseudo strong” ones.

d. Alternative leadership roles: leadership vacuum creates need and opportunity for non-official or non-elected-officials to become the leading voices, or military figures to impose restrictions justified by “emergency measures”.

e. Balance between technocrats and politicians: strong need for politicians to closely consult with professionals on topics in which they have no idea, versus inaction due to endless discussions between experts and lack of authoritative professional answers.

f. Elections by digital platforms become necessary to avoid congregation, but fear of vulnerability and possible interference increases

g. Opportunity for autocrats to dismantle democratic norms and institutions vs. democratic popular backlash through digital platforms and “socially-spaced demonstrations”.

h. Governments’ responsibility to create safety nets for their citizens and population in general becomes obvious (even to “small government faithful”), versus individuals understanding that they can trust only themselves to prepare for next crisis.

i. Who do taxes belong to? Huge unprecedented spend of public money by governments with no clear source of funding, versus fear that this centrally directed spend will allocate resources unjustly and inefficiently

j. Governments must assume responsibility for well-being of immigrants, refugees and itinerant populations out of self-defense, versus migrant populations bearing the price of being away from home and family, and lacking support fro their host governments.

k. Smart cities – huge opportunity to build on existing infrastructures and accelerate development because of need for surveillance and tracking compliance, versus strong backlash due to privacy concerns.

l. Lockdown enforcement creates precedents of mass control over public behavior, especially in cities, versus shift of population back to villages and the country where isolation is easier and more convenient.

       5. Religion/Spirituality

a. Role of faith for people dealing with crisis: huge win of science over religion for many, versus many others who find fortitude precisely in their faith and religious leaders.

b. Decision makers interact with scientists and rely only on data and hard facts, or realize the comprehensive nature of a crisis and carve a space for spiritual and religious leaders.

c. Role of moral leadership in determining strategy: place around the decision making table, versus support for their followers in reality that is a given.

d. Widespread belief in religious or spiritual interpretations of the pandemic (“God’s punishment for our sins” etc.), versus a division of labor between science as explanation and religion/spirituality as guides to behavior.

e. Moral reckoning driving people to organized religion, versus disappointment with minor role of religious establishment in preventing current sorry global state of affairs (pre-COVID).

       6. The Arts

a. Halls and museums will fill up with thirsty art lovers kept away for a long time, versus persistent fear of agglomerations.

b. Public discovers that art can also be consumed from afar, leading to increased appreciation and interest in visiting museums and concert halls, versus leading to lazier habits of art-couch-potatoes.

c. Artists, musicians, dancers have all performed for us at home, many for free, and whetted our appetite to see them live once we can, expanded our horizons and made us better audiences, versus, we are spoiled now and want it for free and on the couch.

d. Variety of models for monetizing art emerge, as desperate artists find way to live from their art in the absence of live events, versus artists give up and find employment in other professions.

e. Collaborative art, facilitated by digital sharing, emerges as the new 21st century medium, or disappears as a fad post-CV.

f. Cross cultural art, free of geographic constraints, grows in importance as part of globalization, versus art follows xenophobic and nationalistic tendencies.

g. Free time at home serves as major opportunity for exposure to art, thus expanding the “base” of art-lovers, versus masses opt for low brow and less demanding activities in their CV-home-hours.

h. Future of museums and concert halls: adapting their physical spaces and installations to pandemic and post-pandemic requirements, versus expanding their strategies to reaching out and distance engagement with their publics.

i. Artists retreat into survival mode, versus celebrity artists follow Cardi B’s (and others’) example to take a strong stance in front of their followers.

       7. Travel and Tourism

a. Visiting other countries will have lost part of its charm for some, but perhaps become a lifeline for the more claustrophobically-inclined.

b. Return in droves to beloved patterns of travel after lifting of bans, versus appearance of new models of tourism (socially-distanced? More local? Remote and isolated? Ecological?)

c. Technological solutions as enablers of travel: screening travelers for fever, filtering and protection in flights and other confined spaces, navigation and translation to minimize contact with strangers, etc. versus technology as a replacement for physical travel, as in VR and AR tours.

d. Post Corona border control using a variety of technologies to enable or restrict travel, by scanning, comparing data to data bases, identifying travelers’ conditions and more.

e. The future of Airbnb – crash as travel contracts, as does trust in the cleanliness and safety of private homes, versus rebound as the company adapts to new realities with novel measures.

f. Tourists prefer sea and sun tourism, away from the masses, versus tourists flock back to cities, thirsty for human contact.

g. Airplanes taking off dangerously after being grounded for weeks or months, versus fleets in best shape ever due to planes finally resting and receiving plenty of maintenance and attention.

h. Importance of hygiene on planes, passengers avoid confined cabins, preference for private flights.

C. Health, Science, Technology

       1. Public Health

a. Discovery of fault lines: weakness emerges in supposedly robust health systems. Low correlation between national health expenditure and readiness of countries to confront the pandemic

b. Strong drive for change of a health system that is perceived as having failed in its main role, versus glorification of the health system that saved us all.

c. Gearing up for new strains and mutations: focus on solving the immediate legacy of CV-19 and its aftermath, versus searching for a universal solution to all future types of virus.

d. Change of priorities: investing heavily in hitherto impoverished national health systems, versus changing the paradigm and rethinking the entire model.

e. Recovering from damage wrought by distancing strategy: keeping the social-distance mentality with a stepwise approach to relaxing constraints, versus identifying the perils of distancing and finding ways to be safely together.

f. Immunization and vaccines: huge emphasis on search for an ever-expanding arsenal of vaccines, versus opting for alternative strategies to combat illness, given the obvious limitations of the vaccine strategy for influenzas.

g. Resource allocation: dramatic increase in budgets for public health, versus widening the gap between poor public services with a parallel system for the wealthy.

h. Scenario planning: strengthening and reopening of forecasting and preparedness units vs. perception that it is impossible to predict so better focus on generic preparations.

i. COVID-19 as “dry run”” for catastrophic scenarios: pandemics of a global scale and grave risks have occurred on average every 300-400 years, so the probability of another one soon is low, versus this was just a mild version of what we can soon expect to be hit by.

j. The ascendance of telemedicine. Necessity has proven that telemedicine is far more effective and accessible than anyone predicted, leading to rapid acceleration of the genre, versus CV exposing the dire need of personal and close primary care to maintain health and thus protect the population from future pandemics.

k. Importance of digital health: the huge importance of data, its analysis, translation into insights and rapid deployment of conclusions, versus the limitations of too much data leading to inconclusive or multiple recommendations and therefore paralysis.

       2. Science

a. In the COVID global theater, science plays lead role of savior, only carrier of hope to billions, and is vindicated as the exclusive approach to dealing with any important challenge, versus powerful pull of religion and spiritual beliefs as only answer in a world devoid of certainties of any kind.

b. The sight of scores of highly esteemed scientists viciously disagreeing on what feels like hard facts erodes the credibility of science as arbiter of truth.

c. Science is fully harnessed to practical purposes, further strengthening the tendency to prefer applied science over theory, versus deep understanding that underlying basic science and theory are the basis of all the anti-COVID wizardry.

d. Countries find that organizing their efforts to confront the crisis requires a cross-disciplinary approach, as do scientists in search of cure or vaccine. Silos, once broken, will remain porous, versus a tendency, as problems become more complex and the need to solve them more acute, to specialize in ever narrower mini-fields enabling an even deeper understanding of limited phenomena.

e. Role of data as a leading tool in the process of science, often replacing the need for “wet” science, serving both as creator of hypotheses and their confirmation or refutation, versus anecdotal evidence that the clinician or experimenter in the field is privy to certain types of insight that the “cold numbers” will never reveal.

f. Even as huge collaborative data-driven science is being performed, a rise in the importance of good old observation, with scientific insights stemming from anecdotal clinical evidence accumulating in real time.

g. Enthusiastic embrace of cross and multi-country collaboration with science as the universal language of truth, versus enhanced competition between countries and realization that only few countries have the budgets and resources to conduct state-of-the-art research.

h. Cuts in funding for science and research as part of general tightening of budgets, versus increase in scientific spending as only defense against future pandemics and catastrophes.

       3. Technology

a. Accelerated pace of technological development was already a cliché pre-COVID, but the dramatic need for immediate solutions, expressed in the towering price, both human and financial, of every day of delay, have pushed technology to hyper-agile tactics, even in traditionally cautious fields such as medical devices and pharma.

b. In parallel to the hubris brought on by a truly overwhelming display of technological prowess, humanity discovers the limits of its power in confronting nature. Specifically, Silicon Valley, the standard bearer of technologic dominance, disappoints in its inability to contribute much to crucial issues.

c. New synergies discovered and collaborations forged between experts in medical devices, various branches of drug development, public health specialists, physicists, computer scientists, mathematicians and others will evolve and expand, accelerating the trend for creating multi-disciplinary labs, projects and companies.

d. Regulation rises to the occasion, relaxes constraints and enables accelerated development, learning that it is possible and opening doors that will be hard to close in the future, versus regulation learns its lesson the hard way after irresponsibly relaxing in its role as gatekeeper resulting in faulty equipment, errors in tests and raising of unrealistic expectations for cures.

e. Technologies at the service of human and social control proliferate, for detecting, monitoring, controlling, nudging, tracking and analyzing behaviors, are accelerating ever more, while raising and confirming concerns over privacy and disregard for human rights.

f. A host of technological enablers of digital transformation, seen pre-COVID as promising but still out of reach, thrusted into public consciousness as they are harnessed for anti-COVID purposes.

       4. Data

a. Dramatically ubiquitous, from popular media to sophisticated algorithms, nobody will ever doubt its importance, versus backlash that human phenomena, feelings, well being are irreducible to numbers and therefore data-based decisions should be limited in certain crucial domains

b. Data is a resource that grows in value when shared, and therefore huge push to share one’s data, versus data as scarce and most valuable of resources, and therefore tendency to greedily hoard it.

c. Citizens have become aware of the amount of data that governments possess relating to them. The good news: they are being listened to, their needs can be analyzed and treated, solutions can be customized. The frightening news: all the above can be converted to control and suppress.

d. New models emerge for sharing and ownership of data to allow both sharing and monetizing.

e. Crucial role of data in decision making: leaders realize that they need a dashboard of data to reach rational decisions, but the predominance of certain types of data (number of ill, number of dead) in public discourse also skews decisions towards simplistic approaches (e.g. decrease number of COVID casualties at the price of disregarding all other casualties and costs).

f. As the world’s reliance increases, so does the importance of mechanisms to validate their source, integrity and precision, but as the barriers to publish data diminish so does its fidelity.

D. The Globe, the Planet

       1. Sustainability

a. COVID provided a demo of the planet resting, air quality, animals resurging – maybe this experience will make it harder to fall back to our old polluting ways?

b. An opportunity for global collaboration to save ourselves by slowing down the pace, versus each country frantically throwing itself back into the race to make up for lost time compared to others.

c. Can the world agree on Global Sabbaths? We saw that we can withstand weeks of time-out and even enjoy some of the consequences, so can we decide on a day per week? A week per year?

d. Heightened consciousness of the situation given the dramatic impact of the global pause, and therefore: Opportunity for a Global Green New Deal? Or backlash to put aside sustainability in favor of “more pressing” issues?

e. Remember that while we humans put ourselves on pause for the CV, global warming and related negative phenomena have (mostly) continued. Will this serve as an argument for or against human made global warming?

       2. Global Politics

a. Humanity has finally united against a common, non-human enemy, and, realizing the huge potential of this unity, organizes itself to deal with the major global issues?

b. Nationalism and racism are further stoked by autocrats and shamed governments in search of scapegoats, while opportunities for “catastrophe diplomacy” abound, as traditional enemies express their solidarity sending materials and volunteers or sharing crucial information.

c. Xenophobia arises from fear of the other, the foreigner: “the virus” will always arrive from the outside, confirming deep seated fears of those who “don’t really belong here”, or “eat weird stuff”, etc.

d. New global organizations will be founded and existing ones strengthened as countries understand their crucial importance in defeating enemies that transcend borders, versus fatal weakening of global organizations as a chain effect of the US pulling out, cancelling its contribution to the WHO, blaming these organizations for the initial failure of global response to COVID.

e. As the role of data both increases and becomes more evident, and in parallel the most important challenges are recognized to be global, the need for a data sharing on a global scale is inescapable. The world creates the United Nations for Data.

f. Tectonic shifts among world’s superpowers: the US continues its decline, or proves its strength in rebounding and supplying the (bio?)technological solutions to the pandemic; Russia hit hard by plummeting petrol prices combined with what seems like inadequate and totally opaque treatment of the crisis; other BRICS in general in bad shape; EU while dealing with Brexit exposed as the elderly inefficient continent (in the south) or a model safety network for post-capitalism (in the north).

g. As traditional wars are put on pause, the rise of soft power in international relationship, expressed not in tanks and warships but through scientific, industrial and social strengths vs. rapid re-flame of numerous local and regional wars and fighting.

h. Increase in power of China and Asia, the “winners” of the crisis, vs. shrinking export from China and Asia due to CV trauma in rest of world

       3. Global Economy

a. As countries and peoples realize that GDP does not ensure real prosperity, an opportunity arises to break away from GDP as the god of indicators, replacing it with more subtle and complex measures that capture well-being and are therefore better guides for national strategies.

b. What will happen with the huge and growing debts of governments, businesses and individuals?

c. Widening of the inequality gap between countries (those who won from the crisis vs. those who lost), or the crisis as equalizer, where giants fall to their knees and smaller, poorer countries forge ahead with minor injuries?

d. Trigger to scale down globalization, the great pandemic accelerator, versus opportunity to create a more fair, transparent, equitable model of globalization, increasing collaboration and interdependence.

e. Will international alliances and organizations impose criteria about readiness for crisis on their members?

f. Huge government bailouts: exacerbating inequality (taxpayers funding corporates), versus fairer models in which taxpayers share rewards of the bailouts as well as their risks.

g. Unprecedented stock and commodity market volatility leading to strong disillusionment with current investment mechanisms and corresponding losses as the public’s money flees to safer options, versus opportunity for even bigger gain for a connected minuscule minority.

E. Work, Business

       1. Work, employment

a. Working from home, now proven to be effective, becomes widespread, versus emphasis on all we couldn’t achieve without physical presence will strengthen demand to be present. Will hybrid models proliferate?

b. Influence on home/office design and therefore on real estate?. Will offices become smaller and homes larger? Will this affect prices? Locations? Architecture?

c. Workplaces hygiene will become a dominant concern, versus the apparition of a “magic chemical” that will make efforts to maintain hygiene appear quaint in retrospect.

d. IT becomes even more important than it is today. It converts into your partner, holding your hand for all your remote activities. Dependence on IT grows – the worst thing that can happen to an employee is to be left without a connection.

e. The gig economy – exponential growth of the perfect format for digital experts, deliveries, nomads, minimizing proximity to co-workers, services for lockdown, outsourcing for cash deprived businesses, only solution for many employed and more.

f. The gig economy – dramatic weakening: fear of proximity to variety of strangers (Uber, AirBnB), workers yearning for the safety of a salary, pensions, safety net.

g. A great gap between how “essential” a worker is considered and how much they are being paid. Will essential workers be able to leverage the crisis to improve their lot, or will society search for and find ways to continue their exploitation?

       2. Business: General

a. Values: a tremendous opportunity for businesses to live up to and showcase their values, accumulating loyalty points in the eyes of customers and prospects, versus moment of truth when values are shelved in favor of cost cutting and survival mode.

b. Recovery from the crisis. Most businesses will bounce back rapidly thanks to: pent up consumer demand, loans and grants injected by governments, benefits of low oil prices, accelerated COVID and health related activity, large government projects and contracts, or: Catastrophic slow recovery due to: huge debt, businesses who failed to survive the lockdown, furloughs converted into unemployed, unemployed failing to rejoin workforce, chain effect of businesses hit by low oil, inconsistent and insufficient governmental recovery plans, deflationary effects of uncertainty and fear.

c. Emerging and declining businesses (winners and losers from the crisis). Obvious winners and losers from lockdown: hand sanitizers, Zooms, take-aways, Netflixes, healthcare, analytics for the former; airlines, tourism, car makers, art industry in the latter. But, also, suppliers of the abovementioned and others influenced indirectly. In some of these “losing” categories, survivors may surprisingly end up way ahead of their pre-pandemic position thanks to the disappearance of competitors who did not survive COVID-death valley.

d. New and old competitors: united against the common enemy, companies frantically and generously opened their knowledge and markets to newcomers in order to jointly supply, say, masks or respirators, which may lead to a beautiful future of collaboration, or, to a fight to the death with newcomer competitors.

       3. Retail

a. Buyers’ behavior post weeks/months of remote buying and limited budgets (for the majority): trend towards buying less, sticking to the necessary, versus hoarding mentality to prepare for any eventuality.

b. Limited movement drives shoppers back to small shops close to home, or strengthens large retail outlets that can offer and deliver bulk discounts.

c. Barriers broken for the pre-CV non-digital-savvy, leading to dramatically increased share of online shopping, or nostalgic impulse to return to the “good old shops” pre-CV.

d. Shopping centers, malls – will they survive the need for social distancing even months after the first wave abates? Will they evolve, in terms of interior design? Opening hours? Activities for shoppers (to keep them from running back home quickly)? Hybrid models of collaboration with digital channels?

e. Shops and independent retailers animated by close to home shopping, versus massive closures due to cash flow, loans, competition from large players?

f. New models of retail will sprout and grow, such as smart subscription retail (for those who can afford it), while the trend for locally sourced produce increases because of distrust of the far and foreign.

       4. Supply chains

a. Push for cost saving and efficiency leads to leaner distribution structures, while worries about maintaining supplies in times of crisis drive preference for distributed supply chains, with hubs nearer to end users.

b. Strong push for 3D printing and on-site manufacturing or last mile assembly to skip steps in distribution, versus recognition of the limitations of these technologies.

c. Manufacturers will put a premium on old and trusted relationship with suppliers, who can be trusted to deliver under any conditions, or widespread search for alternative suppliers, and the safer redundancy of multiple suppliers.

d. Companies opting for large inventories vs. just-in-time with close-by reliable suppliers.

e. As commercial flights and other means of transportation are prohibited, their providers close and/or their prices rise, alternative options for delivery will appear: drones, finally?

f. The benefits of globalized supply chains have been emphasized by their absence, but so have the dangers of relying on them. As local governments invoke various versions of the “Defense Production Act”, will globalization continue or will there be increased focus on localization and supply chain continuity?

       5. Transportation

a. Public transportation in pandemic times: increase in usage with alternative models, hygiene and spacing of passengers, versus decrease in usage per limited movement in public.

b. Rebound for autonomous shared vehicles, as users prefer to avoid proximity to drivers, vs. preference for own cars, with full control of access to strangers.

c. Uber and shared rides: surge as people avoid mass transport, versus crash as gig drivers without safety nets go bust vs. shift to drivers as employees

d. Strong adoption of alternative non-polluting fuels following rising consciousness of the damaging effects of oil-based, vs. return to oil guzzling habits due to record low prices.

       6. Manufacturing

a. Increased automation to minimize dependence on virus-sensitive humans vs. increased use of humans for remote operation of manufacturing equipment.

b. Versatility – proven ability to switch to manufacturing totally different products in crisis mode may lead to adoption of this flexibility in commercial contexts.

c. On-shoring backlash to off-shoring trend driven by: governments’ efforts to “bring back jobs”, fear of geographically long supply chains and increased automation.

d. Focus on redesign of plants for distancing and hygiene? And/or emphasis on workers’ well-being and health? Voluntary or driven by legislation?

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