TRIZ For Dummies

Chapter 7

Breaking Psychological Inertia with the TRIZ Creativity Tools

In This Chapter

Spotting psychological inertia and breaking out of it

Enlisting the help of Smart Little People

Using Size–Time–Cost thinking

If you want to learn how to think creatively on demand, it’s important to understand what stimulates and what gets in the way of creativity.

We all fall into a mental rut from time to time, and in TRIZ we call this developing psychological inertia, which is one of the biggest blocks to creativity. All of the TRIZ tools help you challenge your psychological inertia, but before you can get out of your mental rut, you have to realise you’re in it.

Psychological inertia is the TRIZ term for being stuck in a particular way of thinking. TRIZ gives you methods for stimulating your creativity as well as ways of examining your thinking, challenging your assumptions and thinking creatively. The TRIZ tools help you look at and understand situations in a new way and to find creative solutions to your problems.

In this chapter I also outline two powerful, standalone creativity tools in detail: Smart Little People and Size–Time–Cost. Both Smart Little People and Size–Time–Cost illustrate ...