TRIZ - The Ideal Final Result

Introduction

In the previous Module on the Unreasonable Effectiveness of Available Resources we understood how to identify resources in everyday situations and to come to terms with our assumptions and functional fixedness. This is the first and most important step in the TRIZ Problem Solving Method.

Another important idea in TRIZ is that of the Ideal Final Result(IFR).

Here is what TRIZ pioneer Ellen Domb says:

The IFR is an implementation-free description of the situation after the problem has been solved. It focuses on customer needs or functions needed, not the current process or equipment. The goal of formulating the IFR is to eliminate rework (solve the right problem the first time!) by addressing the root cause of the problem or customer need. The IFR helps you reach breakthrough solutions by thinking about the solution, not the intervening problems.

In this way, TRIZ is itself an implementation of TRIZ: we are working backwards to the present from the solution, “the other way around” !! (We will see this Principle later)

The Intellectual Position in stating the IFR

Here are two quotes:

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” — George Bernard Shaw

And from Alice in Wonderland:

“How old are you?” said the queen.
“I’m seven and a half exactly.”
“You needn’t say “exactly” the queen remarked : “I can believe it without that. Now I’ll give you something to believe. I am just one hundred and one, five months and a day”
“I can’t believe that!” said Alice.
“Can’t you?” the Queen said in a pitying tone. “Try again: draw a long breath, and shut your eyes.”
Alice laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said: “one can’t believe impossible things.”
“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

So, how “unreasonable” and “impossible” can we become? Alice could not, but the Queen said she could contemplate, and believe, 6 impossible things before breakfast!

Can we try? How about this?

The IFR: Apollo-13 once again

The IFR: We Invented the Post-It

Here is a first-person story from Art Fry and Spencer Silver, the inventors of the Post-It. Let us quickly read it to find evidence of “IFR Thinking!

Ideal Final Result: Believing the Impossible

( Written after a project discussion with Aarushi Kakkar, student @ SMI, on 5th August 2024 ).

Consider the following statements:

1. I believe I can be in office without travelling.
   
2. I believe that milk can boil itself and wait for me while I check my Insta.
   
3. I believe a ball can spin in the same direction regardless of the torque applied.
4. I believe elephants and monkeys who come into my orchard to raid it can decide by themselves to leave it alone.
5. I believe I can remove seeds from a capsicum/bell-pepper without cutting it open.
6. I believe I wear baggy, ill-fitting clothes and still look good.
7. I believe my bike/car exhaust filter clean itself, without me scrubbing it with soap and water.
8. I believe that in a class/course all students taking the course must:
   • have their own textbook and write it too;
   • have 150% attendance;
   • be able mess with time, i.e. be able slow down or speed things up on their own (like a podcast at 1.5x/0.5x) without having to leave the class. (Would you call that a “podclass”?)
9. I believe it should be possible for any patient anywhere to be operated upon by a surgeon anywhere in the world.
10. I believe that in a football/soccer game, each player in a team should be able to play multiple roles simultaneously.
11. I believe my shirt must make itself clean after being worn for a while.

What is our immediate reaction? “It is impossible”. ¹

Why do we think so? Most likely because we “know”, or rather assume that we know, how things work and these statements may make no sense at all. However, do we actually admit to those ASSUMPTIONs? How do we utter and list them? And then, how if we momentarily pretend they were impossibly not true?

Suspending the Tyranny of the Assumption, however momentarily allows us to contemplate, safely within our heads, the possibility of a Design Space that is not available…yet. It may show up things that we have been “living with” all along, without questioning why that is so. And therein, we may find an IFR.

So, with Objects and Situations, we can now do one more thing to unearth hidden problems that lie within them: look at the Assumptions that make them work. Let us list the Assumptions for some of the above statements, asserting why the statement cannot be true, but what would happen it it were! And of course, you will find yourself repeatedly asking, “What does that even mean??!!??”

Discussion

• Like the Queen in Alice in Wonderland, it is important to conceptualize the Ideal Final Result as one of the six impossible things before breakfast..

• One of the ways in which this can be done is to check the implicit Assumptions that we make within a Situation, or with regard to an Object.

• Making an Assumption momentarily disappear may lead us to what Jack Hipple says in his book The Ideal Result(Reference 3)², it’s when something performs its function, and does not exist.

• In this sense, TRIZ is a foretaste of what was said much later after TRIZ was invented, that the best Technologies are those that disappear.

References

1. Titanic Game (PDF)

2. Stan Kaplan, An Introduction to TRIZ (PDF) This is a simple and short introduction to all aspects of Classical TRIZ.

3. Jack Hipple, “The Ideal Result: What it is and how to achieve it”, Springer, 2012.

4. Mark Weiser. The Computer for the 21st Century

5. Humpty Dumpty’s Recitation.
   “The little fishes’ answer was
   ’We cannot do it, Sir, because – ‘”.
   https://www2.open.ac.uk/openlearn/poetryprescription/humpty-dumptys-recitation.html