How to Solve Problems by Thinking Outside the Box

Have you ever come across a problem that seems impossible to solve? Problem solving starts with innovation. What may be considered impossible in one paradigm may be really easy to solve using another paradigm. This is just one of the ways to solve management problems.

So where do all the good ideas come from? Is it possible to solve problems by thinking outside the box? Yes, and it is more systematic than most people expect. Instead of waiting for a flash of insight, you can work through a repeatable method that tells you where to look for a solution you have not thought of yet.

How to Solve Problems: Known Solutions

How much originality is there in the design process? It’s all a matter of perspective. You see, there are really only two types of problems you encounter: those with known solutions and those with solutions unknown to you.

One way to solve problems is by using known solutions. Problems with known solutions are solved with basic research into standard solutions that have been used before to solve problems of this nature. Hence, the problem is solved with a known solution. The key effort needed to solve such a problem is research.

For example, let’s say you were an automotive engineer designing a new car that needs to travel well over 100 miles per gallon of gasoline. Standard solutions in the industry would be to reduce the weight of the car using lightweight composite materials or reduce the size and options.

In other words, you may consider weight to be the problem and therefore try to minimize the weight by removing as much of it as possible. But will this produce a car that travels over 100 miles per gallon of gasoline? Probably not, because you are working inside the same paradigm that produced the current design.

Problem Solving: Inventive Solutions

In process improvement it is important to look for unknown solutions. So, how do you find unknown solutions? After all, they are unknown, right?

Problems with no known solution are called inventive problems and require inventive solutions. Inventive problems have no known means for a solution and involve one or more contradictions, a situation where an attempt to improve one feature of the system leads to the degradation of another feature.

Typically we solve such problems using brainstorming and trial-and-error. This is the Thomas Edison method of innovation. According to the National Park Service, Edison earned 1,093 United States patents, a record number for one person that still stands. His works include advancements in telegraphy, the phonograph, a nickel-iron-alkaline battery, and the first commercially successful incandescent lighting system.

To develop the light bulb, Edison and his team worked through thousands of candidate filament materials before they found one that lasted. He believed invention was 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. But wait a second, isn’t there a better way than to try 10,000 times?

Theory of Inventive Problem Solving (TRIZ)

Of course, you can innovate using TRIZ, a method developed by Genrich S. Altshuller. Altshuller’s own account of the work describes screening over 200,000 patents looking for inventive solutions and finding that only 40,000 had inventive solutions. The remaining 160,000 were slight improvements on the original design.

Altshuller found that an inventive problem is one in which the solution causes another problem to appear, causing inventors to compromise between features and thus fail to achieve an ideal solution. But in his study of patents, Altshuller found that many described a solution that eliminated or resolved the contradiction and required no trade-off.

Altshuller categorized these patents in a novel way. Instead of classifying them by industry, such as automotive, aerospace, etc., he removed the subject matter to uncover the problem solving process. He found that often the same problems had been solved over and over again using one of only forty fundamental inventive principles. If only later inventors had knowledge of the work of earlier ones, solutions could have been discovered more quickly and efficiently.

That structure is still how the method is taught. A University of Cambridge Institute for Manufacturing review of the method lists 40 inventive principles, for solving contradictions, alongside trends of technical evolution and a set of standard solutions.

The table below shows why inventive problems are especially difficult to solve.

The table shows how an apparent solution can be found using personal knowledge. You know, the kind you get from experience. But, as we move up the improvement ladder, we must learn more and more until we have learned all that is knowable in order to produce a new discovery. By using TRIZ you can cut through the source of knowledge climb and review only forty fundamental inventive principles.

Remember our automotive engineer? We could use an inventive solution to design a new car that needs to travel well over 100 miles per gallon of gas. Instead of taking weight out we could eliminate the combustion engine and use a different energy system like a hydraulic engine using pressurized fluid. The fluid is pressurized when the car slows down and conserves the lost friction energy in a traditional braking system. The pressure is released to increase speed. A small generator is used to maintain the pressure. But would an automotive engineer think of using a hydraulic engine? This is why innovation is important.

Creativity, Design, and Innovation

We have come full circle back to replication. In design it is possible to replicate using common design concepts like TRIZ to improve our ideas in a systematic way and not have to iterate through 10,000 different ideas to solve a problem. Design flows do differ from manufacturing or cash flows based on the principle of iteration, but we can also find solutions faster by replicating known theoretical solutions to continuously innovate and keep the design cycle moving.

A Five-Step Worksheet for Your Next Stuck Problem

Here is the method in a form you can run in a one-hour working session. Write your answers down, because the value comes from stating the contradiction precisely, not from talking around it.

1. State the result you want, not the fix you like. Write “a car that travels over 100 miles per gallon”, not “a lighter car”. A fix hides the paradigm you are stuck in.
2. Search for the known solution first. Spend an hour on standard industry practice. If a documented answer exists, you have a research problem, not an inventive one, and you are done.
3. Write the contradiction as one sentence. Use the form “improving X makes Y worse”. For the car: reducing fuel use makes the vehicle too small to sell. If you cannot fill in both halves, you have not found the real problem yet.
4. Attack the contradiction instead of splitting the difference. Ask what would have to be true for both X and Y to improve at once. That question is what moved the design from removing weight to recovering braking energy.
5. Borrow from outside your industry. The table above shows that new paradigms come from knowledge outside the industry. Name two unrelated fields that already solve your contradiction and study how they do it.

Run steps one to three before anyone proposes a solution. Most teams jump to step four with a badly stated problem, which is how a group ends up brainstorming for an afternoon and leaving with the option it already had.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does thinking outside the box actually mean in problem solving?

It means changing the paradigm you are solving inside, rather than trying harder within it. A problem that looks impossible when you can only remove weight from a car becomes solvable once you are allowed to change the energy system. In practice, you find the new paradigm by naming the contradiction in the current design and looking for solutions that remove it instead of trading one feature against another.

How is TRIZ different from brainstorming?

Brainstorming generates a large number of ideas and relies on trial and error to find the one that works, which is the Edison approach. TRIZ starts from a stated contradiction and points you at a small set of inventive principles that have already resolved that class of contradiction in other industries. You are searching a catalogue of proven moves rather than the whole space of ideas.

Do you need an engineering problem to use this?

No. The contradiction test works on any process problem where improving one measure degrades another, such as tightening an approval step and slowing the order cycle, or adding a quality check and raising cost per unit. The method came from patent analysis, so the vocabulary is engineering, but the step that does the work is stating the trade-off precisely.

To learn more about implementing continuous process improvement within your organization, work through how to align a system of people and processes for results. Or, learn Writing Policies and Procedures and how to document processes.