TRIZ for Dummies by Lilly Haines-Gadd

Author:Lilly Haines-Gadd
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781119107484
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2016-03-03T00:00:00+00:00

Defining the Ideal Outcome

Your Ideal Outcome is an essential first step in understanding what you want to achieve, defining not only your requirements but also the direction and scope of your problem solving.

Locating your North Star: Setting your problem-solving direction

The Ideal Outcome is how you define your needs and capture all requirements with TRIZ. Your Ideal Outcome is a wish list – everything you’d have in an ideal world without specifying (yet) how you’d achieve the outcomes. This ideal thinking has a practical purpose: while you never expect to achieve everything on your wish list, identifying all the things you want ensures that you work towards the things that, like a Spice Girl, you really, really want, rather than just the things that you think are possible. The Ideal Outcome is independent of any system – and many ways of delivering it will exist.

Too often when people are asked what they want, they offer you a solution – one way that they can imagine of getting the thing that they really want. Very often in practical problem solving, you uncover the real problem when you start defining the Ideal Outcome; you discover that the problems you need to solve are actually problems with someone’s imperfect solution that was put into place to solve the fundamental, underlying problems.

Defining what’s ‘Ideal’ frees your thinking from practicality and sets the direction of your problem solving: by allowing yourself to think of where you really want to go, you break out of thinking in constraints and within the systems you’re currently working with, and allow yourself to lift your head and see the big picture. So in a way, defining your Ideal Outcome is like the ‘North Star’ for your problem-solving journey. You’ll never actually get there – just as you won’t actually arrive at the North Star – but it tells you the direction you ought to be going in.

An Ideal Outcome has no solutions – it’s a list of benefits. A benefit is an outcome: it doesn’t tell you how – it just tells you what you want. There’ll be many, many ways of achieving any benefit.

For example, if I were to say I wanted pockets on every item of clothing I own, that’s a premature solution. The benefit behind having ‘pockets’ is fast and easy access to belongings such as keys, wallet and glasses. Other ways of getting those benefits exist – I could carry a bag. Or put my things in someone else’s pockets. Or not need to carry any stuff. Focus on benefits, not solutions!

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