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    Troubleshooting: How to Solve Unsolvable Problems (Short Summary)

    Sergey Faer's pocketbook on applied TRIZ: ideality, contradictions, the Ideal Final Result, and limitations in modern engineering contexts.

    Book summaryworking25 minevergreen · reviewed Aug 13, 2026
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    Траблшутинг. Как решать нерешаемые задачи, посмотрев на проблему с другой стороны

    Authors: Сергей Фаер
    Publisher:
    Length:

    Sergey Faer's pocketbook on applied TRIZ: ideality, contradictions, the Ideal Final Result, and limitations in modern engineering contexts.

    Book cover — original coverOriginal

    Brief

    The essential idea

    Sergey Faer's pocketbook applies TRIZ-style thinking to management and organizational cases. Instead of smoothing over conflicting requirements, it formulates the contradiction directly—what must improve and what gets worse—and searches for an Ideal Final Result with minimal cost, risk, and side effects.

    The toolkit includes the Ideal Final Result, paradox methods, ARIZ-style decomposition, and troubleshooting stratagems. Resource thinking asks what data, process capacity, roles, constraints, residual capability, or infrastructure already exists before requesting additional budget or accepting a weak compromise.

    A practical protocol defines the symptom and boundary, isolates the core contradiction, maps available resources, generates options that remove rather than hide the conflict, compares effect, risk, implementation time, and reversibility, then records ownership and measures so the problem does not return unchanged.

    Decision lens

    Key takeaways

    Contradictions are useful inputs to design, not merely conflicts to compromise away.

    The Ideal Final Result clarifies direction and filters expensive low-value activity.

    Resource thinking searches the existing system before demanding more people or budget.

    ARIZ-style decomposition reduces discussion chaos and structures hypothesis testing.

    TRIZ is useful for architecture deadlocks, production incidents, organizational conflict, and cost optimization.

    Copied cases are dangerous when their contradictions and resources differ from the local context.

    Workplace experiment

    Apply it at work

    1. 1

      Add an explicit statement of what improves and what worsens to each complex RFC or postmortem.

    2. 2

      Create a resource map before escalating for additional budget or headcount.

    3. 3

      Run a weekly TRIZ review for one or two apparently unsolvable problems using a shared protocol.

    4. 4

      Archive the contradiction, resources used, decision, and resulting operating rule for later reuse.

    Choose one action, define the observable effect, and keep the first test small enough to reverse.

    Evidence

    Sources and further reading

    Additional sources

    Channel, aggregator, and commentary links confirm the work; they are not the primary source.

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