08 — What to Do Monday

If you lead a team that must invent on a schedule, you do not need a conversion experience. You need a minimum path that respects learning cost and problem type.

Teach SCAMPER as literacy. Everyone. Minutes, not months. Require a filter step equal in time to generation. Measure whether anything entered an experiment backlog.

Train product and process owners in SIT as the default inventive kit. Days of practice, not a poster. Insist on a written Closed World inventory before tools. Celebrate subtraction of sacred modules when the virtual product earns its keep in tests.

Keep TRIZ expertise for contradiction-heavy technical portfolios. Build or buy depth deliberately. Prefer light stacks — contradiction, Ideal Final Result, short principles — before full algorithms. When someone says “we use TRIZ,” ask which school and which tools.

Integrate rather than replace. Design Thinking keeps empathy and iteration. Lean Startup keeps validated learning. Stage-gate keeps governance. Structured methods occupy the ideate and hypothesis-generation sockets those containers often leave empty or fill with unstructured brainstorming.

Governance can be light and still real. Require structured ideation when the decision is high-cost, safety-critical, patent-adjacent, or stuck in repeated trade-off arguments. Allow free exploration when the frame is still fog. Never require a method as identity theater.

Measure what matters.

• Novelty relative to a baseline session
• Closed World compliance for SIT
• Validated contradiction removal for TRIZ
• Advance-to-experiment within thirty days
• Kills that still improved the brief

If happiness scores rise and advance rates do not, you bought entertainment.

Reading stack, primary over secondary: Osborn’s Applied Imagination for the brainstorming root; Eberle’s SCAMPER for the mnemonic; Altshuller’s TRIZ literature and a modern practitioner guide for contradictions and principles; Boyd and Goldenberg’s Inside the Box and the 2003 HBR “Innovation Sweet Spot” article for SIT; specialist sites such as triz.co.uk and sitsite.com for living practice, read with commercial eyes open.

The mental model to carry out of this book is smaller than the tool catalogues.

Creativity stalls on fixedness and fluent clichés.
Structured methods change search policy.
SCAMPER widens axes quickly.
SIT edits nearby structure under resource law.
TRIZ dissolves named contradictions with patterned operators.
Evidence and experiments still own reality.
AI accelerates operators; humans still own frames, audits, and tests.

Empty the box on purpose. Then check whether the candle stays on the wall.