All about BRAINSTORMING                       and other creativity techniques

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought”— Henri-Louis Bergson

Beyond insight alone: abstract principle into concrete application:

Creativity in any application, in measured steps or "intuitive" leaps, unpredictably dazzlingly brilliant, even peak experience or "merely" clever, is that common and natural cognitive function which, by the Heuristics of Cybernetics particularly, is recognized to be, in part, an investigation, largely a function of flexibility, meaning the ability and willingness to reflect upon and modify ones own gestalt/frameworks and criteria (for example, as in TRIZ, to cross disciplines, inventively), by which known elements are rearranged into new forms, recognizing similarities and differences, making connections and questioning convention; even though, paradoxically, genius often depends upon not only the greater range afforded, but no less crucially, the further constraint of extensive background knowledge, whereas madness, fanaticism, dogmatism and stupidity, by contrast, are comparatively lacking in the restrictions even of reality checking.

Extras:

TRIZ theory of Inventive Problem Solving

 

 

ideas should compete, bodies should cooperate 

—  John Storrs Hall

 

Pursuant to rigorous Situation Analysis including Sensitivity Analysis:

2a:Cultivate the eustress of engagement in creative tension

which is a Crucial Component of Creativity

by criticism and controversy, by the Valuable Intellectual Traits and in all 35 Dimensions of Critical Thought, by the uncompromisingly honest and realistic assessment of the gap between situation analysis of things as they are and the speculative Visioning of whatever Ideal Result.

twelve differences

Two common and deadly paralytic and heteronymous de-motivators are vagueness in the face of the unknown. And the obvious remedies are the clarification of whatever goals put forth and then simply learning from the successful instead of always metaphorically reinventing the proverbial wheel. But often vagueness is such that it will not even be immediately clear how to sharpen the focus, nor is whatever learning curve in surmounting the unknown always readily apparent either. In such common event, autonomy requires actually to make the vague and unknown your friend!

 

For indeed it is eustress, challenge and thereby tolerance of the awareness of disparity between reality and desire, that may characterize creativity in the individual or the social environment. -Rather than either simply giving up or else continuing, but only in whatever no less ineffectual and fruitlessly paralytic state of self-satisfied denial and anxiety.

 

The so called ideal condition, in Triz creative tension, is more properly the optimum. Hence the benevolently cunning Russian slight of hand, to replace the unendurable tension between the fallible human condition and ideal perfection (by any other name), instead with the challenging and stimulating eustress between engineering trade-offs. -thus replacing the striving with unrealistic perfection in utopist ideology, instead with problem solving to achieve any intrinsically feasable optimum, and replacing blind faith staying the course instead with feasibility study, as impossible and crushing endless open ended godlike responsibility to any goal putting forth of ultimate perfection is redefined, instead, as whatever optimistically motivating but concrete best case scenario. And because trial and error are implicit, and because discrete tasks must be undertaken before grand master plans, even rational democratic progress may yet creep into the realm of acceptance.

 

At whatever level of accomplishment, from the neophyte to the master, the eustress of Emotional decision making remains crucial because it must always be a measure of dissatisfaction that motivates and guides ongoing further progress. And this amounts to a tolerance in order to actually harness insecurity constructively as a real life motivation to creativity. For in the words of Friedrich Nietzsche: “Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings - always darker, emptier and simpler.”

 

Because knowing and gauging the difference between any desired motivating goal put forth, and the current reality, engenders dissatisfaction, an apatite, healthy tension seeking productive resolution, no less than one would in TRIZ, seeking innovation to overcome engineering or other trade-offs, if at all possible.

 

For such is the positive power of negative thinking! 

"People who are convinced that a vision or result is important, who can see clearly that they must change their life in order to reach that result, and who commit themselves to that result nonetheless, do indeed feel compelled. They have assimilated the vision not just consciously, but unconsciously, at a level where it changes more of their behavior. They have a sense of deliberate patience--with themselves and the world--and more attentiveness to what is going on around them. All of this produces a sustained sense of energy and enthusiasm, which (often after a delay) produces some tangible results, which can then make the energy and enthusiasm stronger."

 

Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook

 

 

Many people often tend to interact superficially for the comfort of denial, to avoid deeper and more troubling issues, focusing upon the trivial they neglect the meaningful, a veritable living death of running ever harder just to keep up with standing still.

But is conflict really avoided this way? By dwelling upon petty issues, rather than drama, only petty bickering  arises instead of true controversy, because the crucial impetus to growth and progress has effectively been hobbled. Thus, in fiction no less than in reality, we may do best to welcome conflict so long as it may be important or meaningful. A good process aims to resolve the decisive (and divisive) issues and clear them out of the way. Sometimes putting forth and pressing important concrete motivating goals provides the impetus to move along past conflict. But this tends to reduce drama, an effect while generally soothing in reality and the sooner the better, by the same token harmful to fiction and to be put off as long as possible, because drama is plotted and structured so as to intensify the tension of conflict until reaching climax and resolution, dramatic tension, which, indeed, by either happenstance or cultivation in reality, may sometimes be known as creative tension.

 

Such prefer everything settled, everything neat, everything as it should be. They don't like any questions, uncertainty or ambiguity. All is at peace. All is quiet. All are obviously bored or else obsessive.

 

And this throws us face first into the struggle for open honest disagreement against anti-critical bias, timidity and underhanded consensus manipulation, which even future inter action on the frontiers of  automated Sociometry  might never be able to sidestep. 

 

The Dialectic of Socrates

  THE SIX TYPES OF SOCRATIC QUESTIONS 

 

 

 

2b: Focused Listing

 

Click for pros and cons of Focused Listing.

 

The focused listening method is a word association challenge that may prove somewhat experimental, in that some repetition and modification for the sake trial and error may be required, so that, in the end, the topic will be neither too broad nor too narrow to be workable or illuminating.

 

Where as, in consensus manipulation chicanery including schooling or indoctrination, especially under however relative conditions of captivity, a leader, teacher, Political Commissar or "Facilitator" sets leading question, for true Dialectics, genuine Brainstorming and more honest Visioning, by all means let the floor should be open to prompts from all participants.

Then Focused listing can be utilized in Visioning to help define problems and/or opportunities, beginning with data collection, the compiling of verbal description from participants into Affinity Diagrams according to the Kawakita Jiro method.

Standard example: List words or short phrases that describe or define what a motivated student is or does.

Indeed, further refinement may be derived by Directed Paraphrasing, where in a point or definition must be restated for some specific audience, context or application. Such as any Law of Thermodynamics for children, or what assessment is or should be for stockholders, consumers or regulatory agencies, respectively.

Responses can be grouped into four sets:
Confused, minimal, adequate, and excellent.

Then examine responses within and across the four evaluative categories for accuracy, suitability for the intended audience, and effectiveness in fulfilling the assigned purpose.

 

Highlight the clearest and muddiest points offered. Identify the most unclear points and help clear up the muddy points of others.

 

Click for pros and cons of Muddiest Point procedure.
 
Then the responses can also be grouped to discover emerging patterns of clarity and confusion.

 
Then data analysis follows, wherein the lists compiled can be compared and discussed freely.

 

2c: Focus upon interests rather than positions.

Shared interests may also be found among the motivations behind the conflict of opposing positions in real life drama. Here are points crucial both to real world problem solving with real people in brainstorming and visioning and, no less, in fiction writing with imaginary characters as the events in sequence of plot logic bring the story to resolution:

_{Identify interests and POV:}

_{Ask "why?" (does anyone take whichever position that they do)}

_{Ask "why not?" (haven't they taken any opposing position particularly such of which one might hope to persuade them)}

Force Field Analysis - Understanding The Pressures For and Against Change (origin)

_{Explore multiple interests, as everyone typically has multiple interests and acknowledge competing interests as part of the problem to solve, in interactively reframing the problem to achieve any sort of synergistic win-win scenario, extrication from any zero-sum deadlock.}

_{Be concrete but flexible}

_{Subject all the above to Sensitivity Analysis, Focused Listing and Muddiest Point procedures}

_{Be hard on the problem, easy on the person... unless it's a fictional character!}

For a fictional character the writer must do precisely the opposite: No Powderpuff Pitty-Pat! Throughout the plot, every Technique of Suspense plotting is heightened as things are made more difficult, the personal emotional stakes are raised, and character growth is pressed by worsening complications for an active protagonist. What's good in life, is bad for drama and vice versa. So navigate the various possible paths and dead ends and to find stories always dig deeper for insight into struggle.

 

2d: Ladder of Abstraction

• 
• “A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices..”  — William James

 

• Select a candidate Problem Statement. 
• Forced Lateral Thinking, "assumption smashing", challenge and even violate specific assumptions of a problem or situation. WHY and why else does that action need to be accomplished?  Compile a list of responses with the statement itself.

• Repeat with more problem statements.

• Revise the responses into updated or better defined problem statements.

• Then list the real, hypothetical or dramatic obstacles, as applicable, of whatever sort. What and what else prevents or forestalls progress?  Revise and redefine problem statements yet again.

Click the link above for an exhaustive list and explanation of different problem solving methods and approaches, the emphasis being on engineering. Also browse the Applied Imagination Question Summary and see: TRIZ.

3c: Techniques for working from Random Stimuli

Because the human brain is a self-organizing pattern creation system, always making connections, almost any random word will stimulate ideas on a given subject. Simply follow the associations and functions of whatever stimuli and also aspects thereof as a metaphor or even Forced Relationships/Analogy.

C U T - U P        William Burroughs and the cut-up technique...      C U T - U P       History of William Burroughs and the cut-up technique...              Exterminate All Rational Thought with: DadaDodo and WebCollage         Plato held that patient reflection upon the whys and wherefores any instance or experience of subjective beauty can reveal some meaningful truth in an idea. "When I was a boy I felt that the rôle of rhyme in poetry was to compel one to find the unobvious because of the necessity of finding a word which rhymes. This forces novel associations and almost guarantees deviations from routine chains or trains of thought. It becomes paradoxically a sort of automatic mechanism of originality ..." — Stan Ulam, Adventures of a Mathematician

Stimulation Toolbox
Job Force	Takes inspiration from occupations.
Ricliché	Uses playfully distorted proverbs as prompts.
Sloganeeze	Draws inspiration from advertising slogans.
Web Economy Bullshit Generator	Very clever, but the verbs are often real verbs.
Star Force	Asks how famous people might solve your problem.
	Follow a chain of quotations to inspiration.
WordGizmo	Creates new words to inspire you.
CorpSpeak	Generates random corporate memos.
WriteExpress	Combines word parts and rhymes with your entry.
Naming Prompts	Suggests 100 ways to think about naming.
Idea-A-Day	Over 700 free ideas and growing.
	. Automatically create sets of items from a few examples.
	Free web-based anagram server from your input.
	"All the life's wisdom can be found in anagrams. Anagrams never lie."
Oulipo Definitional Literature	Words of a chosen text are replaced with their dictionary definitions.
Multibabel lost in translation	Any phrase translated by computer back and forth between 5 different languages.
Haiku Writer	Confines itself to Just seventeen syllables. Procrustean, right?
Press Release Writer	Self-absorbed even for a writer, its whole oeuvre consists of press releases announcing itself... and if you can believe everything you read, it's pretty good at it!
Random Plot Points	A companion tool box to this one, First Aid for writer's block in fiction writing.

The Random Surrealism Gennerator  Isn't it splendid?

Bandages are for the wombs
-- Rampant Lady Bunny (1497 CE)

Q. Is Surrealism truly "as beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table"? 

A. "The surrealist use of games, like that of art and literature, is primarily focused on the subversion of premeditation and rational constraints, but in addition it is also a subversion of the artist's ego with the potential for revealing the Marvelous heavily relying on the release of collective creativity." 

         Improv

3d: Reverse Brainstorming: thesis-synthesis-antithesis, also Peripeteia

Premise  with Antithesis or Counter Premise, in the richness and, as in the Zen dualistic opposition of Yin and Yang, the clash of paradoxical reconciliation and balanced accommodation of contradictions, and ambiguity, as a means of creative modification. "In a good play, everyone is right."  Even the emptiest verbal abuse outright may be salvaged via the techniques of topic reclamation.

"The nature of a novel is that it has no opinions, only the dialectic of contrary views, some of which, all of which, may be untenable and even silly." 

— Anthony Burgess   

Then Clarify each idea. Identify and explain different understandings thereof, as this can only better facilitate collaborative filtering from the Affinity Diagram later on.

Build and expand on the ideas of others through out. Add and combine extra thoughts to each idea or and/or change or improve them. Likewise, use other people's ideas as inspiration for your own. Creative people, after all, are also sharp listeners. Synthesize (combine) several of the suggested ideas, even contradicting ones (Antithesis), to explore new possibilities.

A fine point, how solution finding differs from classical problem salving: Problem solving is often premature, without first adequately precise problem definition. For example, is the technical problem to solve, how to receive electronic notification of visitors, or isn't the entire point how to become aware when people arrive onsite? Because a door bell or even a bay window might more readily suffice. Such the later is solution finding pursuant to  problem definition, district from, as in the former, problem solving as such.

The Pareto Zen: Will you you intelligently prioritize what is most crucially urgent, important, productive or otherwise desirable, or will you only Behaviorally react to the most immediately presenting stimuli, situational forces and the sensation of urgency from whatever or whoever gets in your face first?

1. “The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks, and then starting on the first one.” — Mark Twain 
3. As with much of the information presented here on FoolQuest.com the following is presented in contexts both of reality and real application and also for drama.

Acceptance Finding or Building Acceptance, means reaching collective consent after Solution Finding in order to prepare for action. But what does that entail? When writers brainstorm together, sometimes they complete works in collaboration, and other times they create entirely separate works off on their own. Or one can do both!  And the same principle may or may not apply to individual and collective priorities, strategies and agendas to real action.

For Professor Joseph Agassi, agenda is of clear practical necessity: "The problem of the choice of problems or the critical consideration of agenda enables us to coordinate and be critical - on our view, to be rational - about the selection of problems [and] [...] thus increase the scope of rationality" - 'Rationality, Problems, Choice' with John R. Wettersten, PhUosophica 22, 1978 (2), pp. 5-22.  But the FoolQuest.com agenda challenge advances and explores more surprising considerations.     

In fiction or in reality, putting aside irrational psychology and devious manipulation even at the expense of more dramatic conflict, rational and straightforward agenda instead entails assuming good will and rationality and together coming to decisions so that action can be taken, even persuasive "selling" and persuaded "buying into" ideas, proposals and whatever productive compromise, then arriving at a clear plan of action. And all this should be the focus of an agenda: 

An agenda may be defined as a list of questions/inquiries or objectives to be considered and pursued or tasks to be accomplished. When an agenda item is an objective, the implicit questions are to the wisdom and desirability of such an objective, and then if the objective is ratified, strategically how best to achieve said objective. If the agenda item is already any specific task, then the implicit question is logistical, deciding how best to go about and accomplish said task. And crucially, this this brings us to what is called an  Action agenda . But more later.

Individuals, traditions or institutions all alike, may covertly harbor ulterior motive and howsoever ambivalent or duplicitously undisclosed hidden agendas all their own. Daylight is the best sanitation for hidden agendas, and the best nourishment for honesty in best agenda setting.

In formal parliamentary procedure, an agenda is put on the floor and seconded, then put before the assembly for acceptance or rejection by a voice vote. In this way it assures that the topics to be discussed and acted upon will be those topics of common interest to the majority of the assembly. Once an agenda is accepted by the assembly by vote the only topics to be discussed and acted upon are those that appear on the agenda. Anything else is out of order.

Less formally, an agenda may either be set ahead of time or proposed by a participant in discussion from the beginning. An agenda purposefully and transparently gathers and structures focus upon topics of inquiry, discourse or planning, including issues, priorities and projects for consideration, all bearing in mind motivations and priorities of participants in deliberation and even for preparation as prior to a scheduled meeting or discussion. What goals are set forth? How is discussion relevant thereto? And as to ones own part,  in the immortal words of James Stockdale: Who am I, and why am I here? What purpose is served by ones own involvement? All thereby, an agenda be rendered clearly explicit rather than implicit or actually unclear. Whereas an ulterior agenda in subtext, seeks to smuggle into action, just as taboo exists to obstruct, any such as above, unstated and unexamined. Indeed, for example, Mass Media is noted for its power to set public policy agenda by raising profile of some problems and proposals, while ignoring and banishing other information and ideas into the veritable oblivion and limbo of collective unconscious that is public dismissal and forgetfulness. Thus is established the Media Political Frame which is the very proverbial box, the confinement whereof creative thinking, investigation and problem solving so strives to escape. For autonomy, open ended deliberation upon agenda explores direction in defining voluntary collaboration and participation, thereby filling the gap left in the rejection of heteronymous leadership or convention.

For happiness, Epicurus espoused freedom, friendship and thought. Indeed: Happy people talk more seriously together, freely, and with less small talk. Because otherwise, to quote Olmstead: “After all is said and done, much is said and little is done.” And to quote Benjamin Disraeli: "Action may not always bring happiness, but there is no happiness without action.”  Indeed, one feature of serious conversation is agenda. Moving from the abstract and general, to the concrete and particular, characteristics of agenda are questioning open endedness, the practice of criticism and controversy, strategic planning into expanding collaborative action. Agenda is therefore taboo. In any bureaucracy, especially as in any way influenced by or affiliated to what passes for education, if calls to agenda cannot simply be ignored or condemned, they will typically be countered with call for compromise in the name of convention and sensitivity, all amounting to the heteronymous annihilation of all the aforementioned responsible and liberating characteristics of agenda.

• Action agenda
• Tips For  Developing Effective Tight Agendas
• Specific Measurable Attainable, Agreed upon Realistic Timely and Tangible  

Including the tools of Attribute Listing and Morphological Analysis, most succinctly, TRIZ, The Theory of Inventive Problem Solving, the method of Semyon D. Savransky, is a discipline of solving complex problems systematically and how existing solutions can be reapplied to different but similar problems.

In 'TRIZ made simple,' Graham Rawlinson exposes the common misconception in practice of how incorporation of various TRIZ activities into whatever process of arriving at solutions, often blithely looses sight of the over all TRIZ process as a whole.

There are forty TRIZ principles most often applied to inventive problem solving, even in the widest variety of patents. TRIZ Contradiction Analysis identifies the particulars of how most inventions, like unto fairytales, must strive at the resolution of contradiction, conflicts inherent to situation. The difference is in Reverse Planning, retreating from sheer Fantasy, imaginatively, step by step, via Science Fiction speculation, into practicality, rather than flirting with normatively Surreal self deception as in fairytales.

• Einstein’s Three Rules of Work
• systematic inventive thinking techniques Versus Brainstorming
• unrecognized philosophical and political contribution and implications of TRIZ

TRIZ and social engineering

The under recognized Philosophical and sociopolitical significance and contribution of TRIZ

 

FoolQuest.com is the subversive website of social engineering towards optimal social stimulus struggle.

 

First of all, merely for purpose of disambiguation,  social engineering more often nowadays refers to scams and deceptions of imposture for purpose of identity theft and illicit access for purposes of hacking. But that is not the original meaning of the term: 'social engineering.' And social engineering can be entirety benign. Indeed, whatever guise, individually or institutionally, may be assumed quite transparently, garnering public sympathy and cooperation as by transforming homeless vagrant panhandlers into newspaper vendors under First Amendment protection, and even naming the publication: Spare Change. However, Social engineering more properly, is a discipline in social science that refers to efforts to influence particular attitudes and social behaviors on the scale of whatever society, in order to produce desired results for said target population. Indeed, find here on FoolQuest.com, CliqueBusters TM: touted as a concept of guerilla social engineering! One way or another even laudably revolutionary and beyond whatever stogey mainstream, the word: 'guerilla' here refers to howsoever insurgent, subversive and often impromptu or even strikingly theatrical actions or activities, often entirely without authorization. Not to digress. For good or ill, any endeavor to alter or modify the operations of institutions or individual behavior in order to achieve an intentional objective, constitutes Social Engineering. Social engineering, alas, has also often become associated not only with failed central planning, but with with Utopian and even Utopist ideology in all of its amoral folly and wholesale destructiveness. However the very word: 'Utopian' remains at all ambiguous: On the one hand, 'Utopian' may only refer to any noble aspiration for change bringing about any conceivable excellence in circumstances in the world. Or else Utopism may refer more specifically to a doctrine of infallibility derived from reference and focus upon a perfect ultimate objective, whereby typically the ends are thought to justify the means, with willfully blind and obsessively unflagging fortitude ever to stay the course.

   

Thus by promising the impossible and the unnecessary, do high-minded scoundrels ever evade even the most minimum accountability and pedestrian expectations of minimal responsibility to which private citizens, service providers and public officials are held accountable under democratic civility and the rule of law. Such malignant slight of hand is typically accomplished by entirely removing responsibility not only from sensible concretely feasible minimum standards of conduct and performance, but also from foreseeable consequences, into a realm of perfect and pure abstraction. Such mad and dangerous Utopist thinking remains entirely distinct from what is simply Utopian merely in terms of even laudably embracing high ideals or altruistic ambitions even entirely without the mad dogmatism of Utopist ideology.

Most generally, that which is Utopian is anything of, relating to, aspiring towards, or having the characteristics of a Utopia; especially but not necessarily embodying impossibly ideal conditions especially of social organization. Utopism in particular, as distinct from Utopianism more generally, is ideology, much like any traditional religion, despairing of uncertainty, and staving off Nihilism only by partaking in perfectionism and infaliblism, the opposite of which being faliblism which embraces human fallibility and uncertainty with equanimity, even optimism in freedom and autonomy: As Richard Feynman so famously declared:  Better unanswered questions, than unquestioned answers! Thus the opposite of Utopian, let alone Utopist, need not be cynicism at all. As Karl Popper observed, whereas sweeping grand schemes inspired by far ranging ideology have failed so catastrophically, in the alternative there is also great progress every day, in decentralized social evolution via incremental improvement or even simply harm reduction, via faliblism and piecemeal engineering that has inspired the George Soros doctrine of constructive positive intervention, all predicated upon the deliberate shortsightedness of addressing immediate and tangible crying human needs and problems in the short term, taking small reversible steps, small actions yielding big results, with evolving falibistic ongoing error detection and course correction made possible by controversy which is the free exchange of criticism among equals.

 

In the famous words of Helmuth von Moltke the Elder, noted disciple of Carl von Clausewitz: "No battle plan survives first contact with the enemy." -nor, for that matter, whatever other sort of antagonist, obstacle or complication. Indeed, to quote Dwight David 'Ike' Eisenhower: "Plans are nothing, planning is everything." And in the words of Karl Popper: "The piecemeal engineer knows, like Socrates, how little he knows. He knows that we can learn only from our mistakes. Accordingly, he will make his way, step by step, carefully comparing the results expected with the results achieved, and always on the look-out for unavoidable unwanted consequences of any reform: and he will avoid undertaking any reform pf a complexity and scope which makes it impossible for him to disentangle causes and effects, and to know what he is really doing.... Holistic or Utopian social engineering, as opposed to piecemeal social engineering...aims at remodeling the 'whole of society' in accordance with a definite plan or blueprint."
 

But another important response to Utopism from the field of engineering, is TRIZ, the Russian theory of inventive problem solving. A notable key observation of TRIZ remains in how quite aside from entirely new scientific discoveries, the rarest most important and powerful innovations arise in the transfer and reapplication of knowledge and methods across disciplines. After all, we are all only ignorant in different ways.

 

Alas how as even Socrates anciently observes, experts in any one field all too often therefore think that they know everything, or at least everything important. Compartmentalization and outright contempt towards one another's differing knowledge sets and skills, rather than competent consultation between experts, remains sadly all too common. Indeed, exactly such acrimonious professional competition instead of responsible cooperation, routinely compromises healthcare. And similarly, contempt and suspicion between technical experts such as engineers and programmers on the one hand, and financial experts, MBAs and marketers on the others, is the frequent kiss of death for otherwise promising entrepreneurship and innovative new venture creation (various business startup) which of necessity, remains interdisciplinary.

 

Living under terrifying oppression and censorship, people become more circumspect and learn to express themselves and communicate obliquely, even to think more deviously. TRIZ dangerously teases and challenges fanatical pseudoscientific Marxism to live up to its scientific pretensions. The full philosophical and political contribution and implications of TRIZ and the bold political science experiment only hinted at, remains unrecognized: nothing less than the cache of science employed in a covert method of redeeming Utopism from infalliblist dogmatism by the surgical substitution of engineering feasibility study and scientific rationalism, for the open ended commitment to ever greater cult dedication, staying the course, that typically characterizes fanatical Utopist ideology.

 

To this end, TRIZ employs the same vocabulary as Utopism: 'ideal,' but instead as defined in engineering jargon (including social engineering?), denoting not any impossible perfection, but merely any optimum to be discovered, that will first of all be feasible even in very principle. For by that very linguistic intellectual slight of hand, the slippery Metaphysical guiding light and sacred cow of fanatical Utopist ideology, is substituted with something more real and analytical.

 

Likewise, in Marxism, the quintessential Utopist ideology, contradiction as distinguished from conflict most generally, remains more specific even than the logical incompatibility or incongruity within self contradicting statements, even as so lauded as vehicles of purported Mystical Zen enlightenment, or simply between assertions that disagree, or just generally speaking situations in which inherent factors, actions, or propositions come into conflict, inconsistent or contrary to one another. Indeed, most specifically, contradiction denotes such brutal conflict of interest as will be deemed inherent to the drama of inevitable class struggle. Whereas in engineering, contradictions are simply design tradeoffs to be resolved by inventive solution finding. You can't eat your cake and have it too, meaning that it is unreasonable to expect to have things both ways and therefore compromise and sacrifice are inevitable. Or so the saying goes. And yet, by inventive solution finding, the aphorism stands refuted every day, by the inventive resolution of design tradeoffs or contradictions: inverse dependence between parameters or characteristics of a machine or a technology. Likewise in political science, and by similar culinary metaphor, it is has been so often advanced that one must break eggs (meaning people) to make an omelet (meaning the achievement of policy objectives). Thus are the means justified by the ends. But perhaps such fixated fanatical brutality is simply uninventive.

 

The above may all too readily be dismissed as harkening back to the unrealistic Utopian hopes and expectations of the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, dashed in the disillusioning rediscovery of daunting human irrationality and madness. As the saying goes: You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink! It remains that more inventive, effective and less destructive alternatives have long been known and available for the mitigation of whatever conceivable contradictions. What other desirable design parameters increasingly diminish, with improvements to whatever other desirable design parameters? Such are the challenges to inventive problem solving. E.g., a stronger container becomes heavier, and a more light weight container, more fragile. So: how can a container be designed to be both strong and lightweight? Or in social policy: how can both individual freedom and public security each me maximized simultaneously? How can both the economy and the environment each be optimally nurtured? How can new medicines be better regulated for optimal protection of the public from lethal risk, but with the least detriment towards all freedom to benefit from life saving medical innovation with the minimum of delay? How can providing for the poor and liberating the oppressed become actually productive and profitable, instead of prohibitively expensive and violently destructive? And so forth.

 

Alas, the mad unreason of Utopism is consistently characterized by pipedreaming often going nowhere. But when repressive Utopist pipedreams actually ever do catch on, there is Hell to pay! -brutality and dogmatism in the fixation of fanatical doctrinal faith that simply ignores the refusal of reality to correspond with the failed expectations of dogma.

 

Because instead TRIZ offers guidelines for the human endeavor of inventive problem solving, particularly as involves whatever cooperation and collaboration, therefore TRIZ constitutes social engineering as much as mechanical engineering. Appealing to the cachet of technology in surreptitious protest under Stalin when open criticism in Empirical observation of uncomfortable reality were most harshly punished by law, TRIZ makes subtle and subversive import and substitution of linguistic definitions for the same vocabulary, and thereby Epistemological Methodology, all cross-discipline, by which TRIZ all thence undertakes the application of very central responsible engineering question so taboo and anathema in the pipedreams of any Utopist ideologue, also to social engineering: Assessment of both the ideal conditions, meaning whatever feasible optimum even in principle, as well as of current conditions, followed by measuring of the distance between them, in order to begin flexible inventive problem solving, realistic and strategic to bridging that gap and resolving contradictions, meaning design tradeoffs. And contradictions in the sense of dramatic conflicting interests even as characteristic of class struggle, can be and often are likewise brought into synergy, inventively.

 

Alas instead the Utopism of Communism in quest of the New Soviet Man overcoming selfish and sinful human nature, became entirely as Moralistic as Catholicism that it strove to supplant. Whereas Capitalism seeks productive results from amoral enlightened self interest, reason and materialism. Infamously to quote Gordon Gecko: "Greed is good!" In truth, the market place trades only in whatever values we bring. What is proposed to the agenda here on FoolQuest.com, is any protocol of fairly immediate scale social engineering in order to identify and to better and more fully address actual human social stimulus appetites, often still so poorly served by whatever milieu or prevailing socioeconomics.

 

Real life World-Building:

Social engineering design thinking in application to better optimization of social and intellectual stimulus struggle,

ever remains core objective of FoolQuest.com