TRIZ

What it is

TRIZ is a borrowed acronym. The original TRIZ — Teoriya Resheniya Izobretatelskikh Zadatch, or “Theory of Inventive Problem Solving” — is a systematic engineering methodology developed by Genrich Altshuller in the Soviet Union from 1946 onward, based on an analysis of tens of thousands of patents. Altshuller’s TRIZ is a deep and structured technical framework, still used in industrial R&D. It’s not what we mean here.

Henri Lipmanowicz and Keith McCandless picked up the name for a narrow organizational-behavior adaptation published in The Surprising Power of Liberating Structures (Liberating Structures Press, 2013/2014). The Liberating Structures TRIZ retains only the philosophical thread of inversion — “to find the right answer, first find the most wrong one” — and turns it into a short structured exercise for teams. When facilitators in software and management contexts today say “let’s run a TRIZ,” they almost always mean the Liberating Structures version.

The Liberating Structures TRIZ has three movements, each with its own question:

1. What could we do to make absolutely sure we achieve the worst possible outcome?
2. Which of those things are we already doing? Be honest.
3. What will we stop doing, and what will we start doing instead?

The first question is funny and safe, because no one is actually suggesting the team should do these things. The humor lowers the social cost of naming behaviors the group would otherwise avoid. The second question turns the light back inward. By the time the group is admitting to sabotaging behaviors, they’ve already named those behaviors as hypotheticals — so admitting to doing them feels like confirming what’s already on the board rather than confessing something new. The third question converts the uncomfortable truth into a commitment.

When to use it

Use TRIZ when:

• Psychological safety is shaky and teams won’t name the real problems directly. TRIZ is specifically designed to route around that. If SWOT’s Weakness quadrant keeps coming back empty, run TRIZ first.
• You’re about to run a SWOT analysis or retrospective and want to prime the pump. Fifteen minutes of TRIZ before the main exercise dramatically increases what people are willing to say out loud.
• The team has known sacred cows — rituals or behaviors nobody talks about because critiquing them feels disloyal. Deploy-theater meetings. Backlogs nobody grooms. “Voluntary” weekend standups. TRIZ names them safely.
• A team is new or mixed — different tenure, different backgrounds, different willingness to push back. TRIZ gives newer members permission to name things they wouldn’t call out directly.

Don’t use TRIZ when:

• You need technical problem-solving. The Liberating Structures TRIZ is about behavior, not about inventing products or solving engineering problems — for that, look at the original Altshuller TRIZ, which is a different discipline entirely.
• The team already speaks candidly. TRIZ’s value is in lowering the cost of candor. If candor is free already, go straight to the real exercise.
• You’re short on time and the stakes are low. TRIZ is a 30-minute investment. If the group has ten minutes and a simple operational problem, it’s overkill.
• The facilitator won’t hold the third movement. TRIZ without the stop-doing commitment is just a comedy round. If the facilitator isn’t willing to push the group to actually name what they’ll change, the exercise backfires by making behaviors visible without changing them.

How to run it

Total time: 30 minutes. Can compress to 20 with a small confident team or stretch to 45 on a harder problem.

Frame the outcome (2 min). State, in one sentence, the outcome the team cares about. “High-functioning sprint planning.” “A retrospective that actually produces changes.” “A product we’re proud of.” The worst-possible-outcome question only works if there’s a clear outcome to invert.

Movement 1: Worst-possible-outcome brainstorm (10 min). Ask the inverted question. “What could we do to make absolutely sure we achieve the worst possible version of [the outcome]?” Invite wild, funny, exaggerated answers. Suppress nothing. Silent sticky-writing for the first 2 minutes (1-2-4-All-style), then share round-robin.

The laughter is the point. A group that’s laughing at “we could just cancel the retrospective and send an email instead” is a group that’s becoming willing to say real things.

Movement 2: Honest mapping (10 min). Now ask: “which of these are we already doing? Be honest. Not ‘kind of.’ Doing.” Work through the list from Movement 1. For each item, the team decides: are we doing this, or not? A simple mark — circle it if we’re doing it, leave it alone if we’re not.

This is the uncomfortable movement. The facilitator’s job is to hold silence long enough for honesty to emerge. “Are we doing this one?” … wait … “Yes, sometimes.” … “When?” The circling isn’t rhetorical — it’s a commitment that yes, we actually do this.

Movement 3: Stop-doing commitments (8 min). Look at the circled items. Ask: “which of these are we going to stop doing, and what are we going to start doing instead?” Pick two or three, not all of them. Each commitment has an owner and a concrete first step.

Book the follow-up (1 min). The team decides when to check back. Two weeks is a good default for behavioral commitments. On that date, the group reviews: did we actually stop? What did we replace it with?

Worked example

A six-person product team, running a SWOT analysis as the opener for a planning workshop, produces a Weaknesses quadrant with only two stickies on it — obviously underpopulated for a team of six. The facilitator pauses the SWOT and runs a fifteen-minute compressed TRIZ. The framing outcome: a sprint planning meeting we’d happily invite a new hire to.

Movement 1 — “What could we do to guarantee the worst-possible sprint planning?” The team lands a dozen ideas, laughing:

• Start planning 30 minutes before the sprint begins
• Let the loudest person set priorities by default
• Skip estimation entirely, commit to whatever’s on top of the backlog
• Invite nobody from QA or design
• Leave the meeting without naming a sprint goal
• Keep last sprint’s carryover hidden
• Make the whole meeting a silent Jira-grooming session
• Don’t prepare stories in advance; discover them live
• Let the PO dictate; suppress engineering pushback
• Skip the retrospective’s action items when planning
• Move planning to Friday at 4pm
• Have no explicit end-of-sprint definition-of-done

Movement 2 — “Which of these are we already doing?” After ten minutes of careful, sometimes painful conversation, the team circles six of the twelve:

• Let the loudest person set priorities by default ✓
• Skip estimation entirely, commit to whatever’s on top of the backlog ✓
• Leave the meeting without naming a sprint goal ✓ (in the last two sprints)
• Keep last sprint’s carryover hidden ✓
• Don’t prepare stories in advance; discover them live ✓
• Skip the retrospective’s action items when planning ✓

Six out of twelve is a lot. The room is quiet for a bit.

Movement 3 — “What will we stop?” The team picks three to commit to, with owners:

• Stop skipping the retrospective’s action items. Owner: Scrum Master. First step: retrospective action items become the first agenda item of the next planning.
• Stop leaving without a sprint goal. Owner: PO. First step: sprint goal is drafted before the meeting and confirmed (not authored) in it.
• Stop hiding carryover. Owner: Tech Lead. First step: the carryover list is the second agenda item, in full.

What the TRIZ unlocked. Returning to the SWOT, the Weaknesses quadrant filled in within five minutes. The team wrote down the six circled items from TRIZ as weaknesses, plus four more that hadn’t surfaced before. The Weaknesses went from two items to ten. None of the additions were surprising to anyone — they’d all known. The TRIZ made them sayable.

What TRIZ didn’t do. It didn’t fix the behaviors. Two weeks later, the team checks in. Two of the three stop-commitments had held. The third — carryover transparency — had slipped. They run a short 5 Whys on why, and the answer is that the tech lead hadn’t been in the planning meeting that sprint; the commitment had no backup. They add a backup owner. That’s the normal pattern: TRIZ surfaces behaviors; the follow-up work keeps them changed.

Common failure modes

• Stopping at Movement 1. The team laughs their way through the worst-possible brainstorm and the meeting ends. Symptom: no circling, no commitments, no change. Fix: the facilitator must explicitly push into Movement 2. If time is tight, shorten Movement 1, don’t skip Movement 2.
• Circling dishonestly. The team marks only the behaviors they’re comfortable admitting, not the ones that actually apply. Symptom: Movement 3’s commitments feel safe and don’t address the real dysfunction. Fix: silence is the facilitator’s tool. “Are we sure this one isn’t happening?” … wait. Often a team member will quietly correct the group after 20 seconds of silence.
• Committing to everything. The team tries to stop all six circled behaviors at once. Fix: pick two or three. Behavioral change doesn’t scale; trying to change everything at once means nothing changes.
• No owner on the commitment. “We’ll all stop doing this.” Symptom: nobody stops doing it. Fix: every commitment has one owner and one concrete first step. Shared ownership on behavioral change is diffused responsibility, which is no responsibility.
• Using TRIZ as the entire workshop. TRIZ is a primer, not a replacement for real work. Fix: it’s 30 minutes. Follow it with the real exercise — SWOT, retrospective, 5 Whys, whatever the team actually needs. TRIZ opens the floor; the main exercise does the structural work.
• Confusing with engineering TRIZ. Someone on the team has read Altshuller and expects a technical inventive-problem-solving session. Fix: clarify up front. “We’re running the Liberating Structures version, not the Altshuller version. Behavior, not engineering.”

References

In the playbook

• SWOT analysis — the natural partner; TRIZ primes the Weaknesses quadrant when a team can’t name its own shortcomings.
• Pre-mortem — a different take on the same problem; pre-mortem uses prospective hindsight, TRIZ uses inversion. Both route around the self-censorship that plain risk-brainstorming triggers.
• 5 Whys — the follow-up when a TRIZ commitment slips; use it to investigate why the stop-doing didn’t hold.
• My formula for running a successful workshop — the meta-framework every workshop in the Guides section follows.

External references

• Henri Lipmanowicz & Keith McCandless, The Surprising Power of Liberating Structures (Liberating Structures Press, 2013/2014) — the canonical source for the organizational-behavior adaptation of TRIZ used here.
• Liberating Structures, Making Space with TRIZ — the free online reference with full facilitator notes.
• Genrich Altshuller, The Innovation Algorithm: TRIZ, Systematic Innovation and Technical Creativity (Technical Innovation Center, 1999 English translation) — Altshuller’s own treatment of the original engineering TRIZ, for context on where the name came from.
• Darrell Mann, Hands-On Systematic Innovation (IFR Press, 2002) — a modern practitioner text on engineering TRIZ, for readers interested in the original.
• SessionLab, TRIZ — workshop-ready facilitator notes for the Liberating Structures version.