TRIZ vs Hard Data

[Bob Adsett <bob.adsett@blueyonder.co.uk>]

Denizens

For those of you who believe that collecting data is an important first step
in analysing any problem I was interested to see the following comments from
Roni Horowitz from his AIST posting this week.

ASIT is a problem solving technique based around the principles of TRIZ
(Genrikh Altshuller's systemic problem solving technique)
More details at:

http://www.trizgroup.com/page4.html

Is data such an unimportant factor in problem solving, or is it more
important for us to challenge the way we think?

Bob



------ Forwarded Message
> From: "Roni Horowitz" <Roni.Horowitz@start2think.com>
> Date: Thu, 26 Sep 2002 01:02:23 -0400
> To: "bob adsett" <bob.adsett@blueyonder.co.uk>
> Subject: ASIT technique for a week, Issue 89
> 
>

>"The only way to achieve any accuracy is to ignore most of
>the information available."

>- Preston C. Hammer.

>People love to immerse themselves in data.

> In many of my ASIT consulting sessions I have a very hard time trying to
> convince the participants to (temporarily...) forget about all the details and
> simply start the ideation process.
> 
> In one of my recent workshops one of the participants
> prepared a very nice presentation showing all the aspects of
> the problem we were facing. When I saw that he'd prepared a
> presentation of 20 slides, I was horrified. We had only a
> 4-hour session, and I was sure that this presentation
> (albeit beautiful) would use up at least an hour of our
> time.
> 
> Eventually I suggested that we watch the slide show during
> the last half hour of the session. We never did!
> 
> I'm not sure if this is what Preston C. Hammer meant, but my
> interpretation is that facts and information in many cases
> may disturb our thinking process more than they help. When
> facts are flying all around people tend to start arguing
> about them, something they enjoy so much that they forget
> the main purpose of the meeting - to come up with ideas.
> 
> The conclusion: instead of collecting facts and arguing
> about them, start looking for ideas.
> 
> Are facts and details (the nuts and bolts of the problem)
> unimportant when using ASIT?
> 
> On the contrary!
> 
> ASIT solutions always rely on the details, but we don't know
> which of the details will prove to be important.

------ End of Forwarded Message