Improvement Insights Blog

When your Kleenex box tissues don’t pop up, what do you do? Use TRIZ.

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“Hi, I’m Jay Arthur, author of “Lean Six Sigma Demystified” and QI Macros [software].

“I don’t know about you, but some things sort of bother me, like sometimes the Kleenex gets stuck down in there, you know. You could try and run your hand down in there to pull something out, but that screws up all the plastic in here.

“But I was thinking about TRIZ, and there’s 40-some-odd different rules for coming up with better ways to do something. And so one day I was thinking about it and I thought, well, what if you just turn the box upside down? All the tissues will drop to the top and then you can pull them right out. Simple solution: Invert the box, pull out the tissue.

“So there are lots of ways to get at the outcomes we want without doing it the hard way, sticking our hand down in the box to try and pull things out. So, that’s my Improvement Insight: Let’s see if we can’t use the rules of TRIZ. And you can find the TRIZ [template]… all of those things in the QI Macros. If you put “TRIZ” in the “find tool” [box], it’ll pull up the template that has all that in there.

“So, let’s go out and improve something this week, like how we come up with better solutions that are easier and faster than they were before.”