TRIZ for Engineers: Enabling Inventive Problem Solving by Karen Gadd

Author:Karen Gadd
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Published: 2011-01-17T16:00:00+00:00

Identifying Real Goals – Owning a Submarine Fleet

Defining both the Ultimate Goal and Primary Benefit helps us understand why we have a system.

This is helpful in most situations, for example:

What is our Ideal Outcome delivered by owning a submarine fleet? (Safety?)

What is the Ultimate Goal delivered by owning a submarine fleet? (No one attacks us?)

What is the Primary Benefit of a submarine? (Deterrent?)

These may not be the first questions we think about if involved in submarine design. When solving submarine problems we may be concerned with space, safety, footprint, capability etc. However understanding the high-level distinction between the ultimate goal of why a nation has a submarine fleet, and the primary benefit of a submarine may influence its design choices. When defining the Ideal Outcome for a submarine we would ask, ‘Why have we got this system? What are all the benefits it gives us?’ One general answer would be safety. This answer contains the ultimate goal, although in the UK it may be defined by different people in different ways, but one consensus answer for our Ultimate Goal has been to ensure that no-one attacks us. The way this is delivered, preventing attack is to deliver a deterrent, the prime benefit of the system – for a submarine. For some systems the Ultimate Goal feels too obvious to state, and for others it can be elusive but it is the highest purpose of our endeavours and should not be omitted when defining a problem.

The Primary Benefit of a submarine therefore may be to provide a deterrent and offers only one way/one solution of achieving its ultimate goal that ‘no-one attacks us’ – but Ultimate Goals can be delivered in many ways, including opposite solutions. Opposite ways of ensuring that no one attacks you could be making yourself too poor or unimportant or completely inoffensive to ensure that no one wants to attack you. This was the savage solution used in England in 1069 by William the Conqueror to crush rebellion and to stop the Scots invading the north of England. He laid waste the north east of England, burning all villages, destroying all flocks and crops and killing 150,000 people so that no one wanted to invade or attack that area as there was nothing left. Other solutions could have been to defend the north, attack the Scots, or create a terrifying deterrent to dissuade them from attacking; the 1069 solution to ‘no one attacks’ was leaving nothing to attack or invade was just one of the brutal, available solutions. For today’s world our ideal outcome, safety, and our ultimate goal, ‘no one attacks us’, also have many worryingly brutal solutions. At the highest level we are concentrating on understanding what we want, to check that our chosen solution of submarine delivers this. Once we have chosen and commited to one solution to ensure ‘no one attacks us’ then we have limited our options and created constraints, and have to find ways of delivering the best system for the solution.

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