What Happens When Ideonomy Meets Altshuller's TRIZ?

This morning I’m doing something a bit different in my newsletter as sort of a follow-up or companion piece to last week’s article.

Rather than write only about ideonomy, provide some biographical color about Patrick Gunkel, or comment on original source documents, I’m going to perform the sort of intellectual labor that is very badly needed with respect to ideonomy—namely, link Gunkel’s science of ideas to other theories and systems outside of Gunkel space.

Case in point: a few observers have commented on the similarities between TRIZ and ideonomy.

In the 2022 academic essay collection Towards a Science of Ideas, Guido Enthoven identified TRIZ as one of three prior efforts to create a science of ideas alongside Gunkel’s effort and the efforts of the original French ideologues.

I don’t have any evidence Gunkel knew about TRIZ.

It could be that during the 1980s, a Russian creative system simply wasn’t on anyone’s radar.

But if Gunkel had known about TRIZ, I can tell you more or less how he would have interpreted it with respect to his own science—and trust me, if you’re a die-hard TRIZ fan… you’re probably not going to like this one bit.

TRIZ is a theory and methodology of invention developed by the Soviet engineer and science-fiction writer Genrikh Altshuller beginning in the 1940s. Its name is a Russian acronym usually translated as the “Theory of Inventive Problem Solving.”

Altshuller’s central insight was that invention is not quite as mysterious as it appears.

After examining large numbers of patents, he concluded that seemingly unrelated inventions often solve the same basic kinds of problems using the same recurring principles. If those principles could be identified and organized, he theorized, inventors would not have to depend entirely on inspiration, intuition, or blind trial-and-error.

TRIZ consequently provides a collection of principles, models, and procedures. These include Altshuller’s famous 40 inventive principles, along with more elaborate concepts.

Underlying all of these tools is a theoretical claim that technological systems evolve according to recurring and discoverable patterns, making at least some portion of inventive thought systematic and teachable.

But although Altshuller referred to TRIZ as a “science of invention” or a “science of creativity,” he did not to my knowledge specifically pick up on the “science of ideas” thread that had been left dangling by the French ideologues during the early 1800s when they were suppressed by Napoleon (see my prior article here for this fascinating history).

And indeed, although TRIZ does have scientific properties, it does not meet most scientific criteria. It exists mainly as a methodology or problem-solving technique as opposed to a science.

TRIZ and Altshuller are certainly better-known than ideonomy today.

Not only did TRIZ have a few decades’ head start over ideonomy, but it’s scoped much more narrowly which makes it much easier to understand and apply.

Specifically, TRIZ is narrowly focused on technological innovation—on the modification of physical things based on underlying principles.

That makes it similar to ideonomy, which also ties the process of invention to underlying principles, but the domain of ideonomy is all mental experience whereas TRIZ is limited only to the material world.

With this background, we can now turn to the original question posed at the beginning of this article: are these two systems, ideonomy and TRIZ, completely separate from each other? If not, how do they reconcile?

This isn’t as large a problem as it might seem at first.

Because whenever you’re confused about what to do with ideonomy, you can always fall back on the concept of lists and list-making and ask yourself, what list can I make here? When you do, you will see that TRIZ is simply a list of 40 design moves that may change or transform a product and—lo and behold!—Patrick Gunkel, in his wisdom, created at least one division of his science for just this exact purpose: TRANSFORMATIONS and diaplastology. (There is also CHANGES and tropology, but let’s just stick with TRANSFORMATIONS because it seems more specific to what TRIZ is trying to do.)

So the first, most basic answer is that TRIZ is a 40-item list—an “organon” or a tool for getting knowledge—that exists inside ideonomy’s divisional structure.

Recall that with these divisions, Gunkel was identifying thematic areas for lateral study.

He literally felt there should be scholarship focused on the concept of transformation as a process itself, and it would be these scholars—these diaplastologists—who would be tasked to take TRIZ, turn Altshuller’s work into one or more lists, and then encourage the application of those ideas to every other organon in ideonomy.

While Altshuller was focused on applying his design moves only to material things—and indeed, there is a division for those, too: THINGS (ENTITIES)—Gunkel was saying that these design moves should be matched against every other possible list of ideas: lists of political systems, personality traits, cat breeds, planets, noises, etc.

By universalizing the 40 design moves of TRIZ, we are going beyond what might be applied to a specific invention or product.

We are seeing these moves as modular and applicable to any other idea. 

I know that in one way or another this isn’t going to make total sense to everyone, and that some readers will likely want something neater, more logical.

Ideonomy in a more complete or mature form is actually extremely logical, but I can’t give that to you right now because we’re talking about a prospective rather than extant science. We are talking about a science that requires scientists to create and at the moment I feel like the only one holding down the fort in a ghost town through which a number of interested people sometimes pass.

Gunkel was creating a science from scratch.

If some list of ideas you’re considering doesn’t seem to neatly match with one of Gunkel’s divisions the way TRIZ fits inside TRANSFORMATIONS, there are at least two solutions.

First, you can simply make a list called “X Ideas” and start to use it. That’s what I’ve called personal or corporate ideonomy. This version of ideonomy uses the principles of idea chemistry without having to generate any scientific knowledge.

The second solution presupposes the existence of a scientific community.

Here, you would work with your fellow idea scientists to figure out whether a new division needed to be created to reflect an unrecognized structure of thought.

Gunkel ultimately saw ideonomy’s divisions as a starting point rather than a final form and expected that some would merge, divide, or fade away as others came into being.

Now this may not seem very scientific, but let’s just take a moment and reflect on what we are really talking about.

We are talking about performing experiments on ideas using other ideas.

Meanwhile in the physical world, we’re performing experiments on physical things and processes using other physical things and processes.

Let the analogy play out: one rudimentary physical experiment we could perform to understand the properties of a physical object would be “breaking it” to see what’s inside.

But this breaking could be done a number of other physical procedures including dropping, crushing, or disassembling it. The procedure to select depends on the end-goal. Procedures are created and retired, combined or separated, enhanced or scaled back, depending on the specific investigation. These methods are documented and validated by the scientific community.

Imagine how these basic scientific procedures might seem to an entity from the world of ideas.

Question: “Why do you need to crush an egg AND drop it? In the end it’s just going to be broken.”

Answer: “The procedures may end with a broken egg, but they reveal different properties of the egg with respect to different physical laws.”

With ideonomy, Gunkel was alleging that the cognitive moves that seem so second-nature to us when we are doing intellectual work are in fact universal operations that reveal different properties of ideas within idea space just as science has developed universal operations that reveal different properties of physical things within physical space.

With his divisional structure, Gunkel was simply taking a first cut at identifying analogous systematic methods for experimenting on ideas to find out how they work and what their rules are.

Other than the fact that we are talking about and experimenting on insubstantial phenomena that are not directly observable (i.e., ideas), there is no contradiction here and no special privilege being granted to ideonomy over other sciences other than the fact that ideonomy, as Gunkel acknowledged many times, is still on the way to being born.  

I know there are a lot TRIZ fans out there who are going to go ballistic over this, and I do acknowledge that as a “Gunkelist” it’s indeed somewhat satisfying to absorb an entire methodology (and a more popular one at that). 

But if anything this shows just how much of an expansive thinker Gunkel was.

He wanted to create a flexible science that was so vast it would identify universal methods such as those Altshuller identified, break down boundaries, and allow for future expansion.

I can’t help but note, for example, that several alternate versions of TRIZ now exist, with various practitioners trying to expand or modify Altshuller’s initial 40 moves.

In Gunkel’s divisional structure, there would be a whole science of transformations—diaplastology—and those within it would be tasked with identifying “all possible transformations.”

So the expansion of TRIZ into a second more comprehensive list would not just be interesting, but part of the scientific aims of the practitioners, and anyone who wanted to modify this list would understand how their efforts fit as a part of an overall scientific effort—not just “I don’t like this list, it’s not comprehensive enough” but “The aims of ideonomy compel me to continue until all possible transformations have been discovered, because when this list is put to cross disciplinary use the absence of an important transformation may conceal a discovery in a separate domain; therefore I’m going to propose some additional transformations to my fellow diaplastologists. The initial 40 transformations of Atlshuller can continue existing as an older list, but why would you use it?”

I have much more to say about this in a future post, but as we head down this road and begin to see how Gunkel’s vision for ideonomy plays out as a mature science, we begin to gain a clearer picture of its true genius. 

TRANSFORMATIONS and diaplastology is just one of ideonomy’s 236 divisions.

And without realizing it, Genrikh Althusser was the first diaplastologist who did a great job identifying an initial cut of 40 transformations that, when universalized, need no longer apply only to physical inventions.

By presenting his transformations as a list, Althusser was purifying an approach to knowledge that Gunkel later realized could be made universal.

Just think about the implications here—there are likely many other researchers, efforts, bodies of knowledge, and fields where past work can be reformed or refashioned to become extremely useful in the context of ideonomy, but the first steps are to 1) determine what division(s) that knowledge fits into and 2) decompose that knowledge into organons.

For example, many people are familiar with Myers-Briggs personality types. When you zoom out to universalize this substantial field of knowledge, you are left with 16 validated personality types. So this entire body of research fits within the division TYPES as a list, and those idea scientists who study types are called typologists.

Many other bodies of knowledge are going to be widely cross-divisional, i.e., fragmented across other divisions.

This is not surprising at all because every academic field has stored its knowledge “vertically” whereas ideonomy stores knowledge “laterally.”¹

For example, many people have heard of the business analysis framework known as SWOT, which stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. The basic idea is that a business analyst would look at their project through each of these four lenses in order to gather a comprehensive view of how they’re positioned. And yet when you align SWOT with ideonomy, it turns out that the four cognitive moves represented by this mnemonic acronym could be translated in ideonomic terms as four separate lists in the following divisions: GOODS (Strengths), BADS (Weaknesses), OPPORTUNITIES (Opportunities), and PROBLEMS (Threats). This means that any and all historical SWOT analyses could be used to pull together massive lists with all varieties of these ideas included, but since these exercises have always taken place in limited, siloed environments, all of this generated knowledge has been lost. With an ideonomy-centered approach, each one of these comprehensive lists could be matched against an individual project to automate SWOT for any analyst at any time.²

When seen this way, ideonomy becomes both a methodology for idea discovery as well as a vast knowledge structure that is able to hold inside of it all the intellectual efforts of humanity both past, present—and future. Just as all our physical sciences blend into each other at some point, with knowledge of chemistry being required for understanding Earth sciences, knowledge of physics necessary for understanding biology, etc., with our well-known academic disciplines offering a loose framework to help make sense of everything, ideonomy’s divisions are intended as a loose framework to help navigate through the ideocosm, or universe of ideas, even though in reality many domains of overarching ideas also blend together.

In conclusion, ideonomy is like one do those magic eye pictures. 

If you don’t see it yet, keep looking. 

You will.

For the sake of completeness, we conclude today’s newsletter with an organon or list that captures TRIZ but doesn’t specifically reference it.

Let’s have some fun here.

I’m going to use AI (ChatGPT) to simulate what it might have looked like if Gunkel had known about TRIZ and transformed Athussler’s work into an organon.

Of course, any future diaplastologists will need to examine this list much more closely since I am basically just posting AI slop. But in this case, it’s the thought that counts.

The purpose is to provide a list of 40 universal moves that we can apply to any other idea in order to imagine what that idea would look like transformed. To be fully concrete, for example, take one of your favorite movies or books and find out how it can be rethought or changed by considering it in light of these generic transformations.

NOT AN AUTHENTIC GUNKEL DOCUMENT:

1) This approach can be aligned with an entire body of knowledge related to horizontal vs. vertical logic or categorization, but I do not have the space for that here.

2) SWOT is only one of countless other examples. Ideonomy is so vast, and there is so much work that can be done under its rubric, that any such systematic method for idea discovery can be reinterpreted and used with ideonomic framing. This is just one of numerous realizations I’ve had about ideonomy that have helped me realize its immense potential, as Gunkel surely must have also recognized