OCTOBER 2026: When TRIZ Fails

When TRIZ Fails: Meta-patterns from $1B in lost value – and how to avoid them

We've delivered over $6B of documented value creation using Systematic Innovation. We've also watched close to $1B slip into oblivion – projects that should have worked, didn't. Teams that had the right tools, failed anyway. Innovation attempts that solved the technical problem, but died in implementation. This workshop examines the meta-patterns behind those failures. Not individual mistakes, structural patterns that repeat across industries, team types, and problem domains. Patterns you can learn to recognise early, before they become irreversible. Every success looks the same. Every failure is different. But when you map thirty years of case studies, the patterns and underlying principles become visible. And once you see them, you can design to avoid them.

What you'll gain: A failure taxonomy: the six structural patterns that kill innovation projects (and the early warning signs for each)

- the organisational contradictions that matter more than technical ones, and how to resolve them before they escalate

- Diagnostic frameworks you can apply to live projects to identify which pattern you're in and what interventions will actually work

- Strategies to immunise your projects against repeat failures

Workshop structure (two half-day online sessions):

- Case studies across sectors: technical, organisational, and implementation failures

- Pattern recognition exercises: What's actually killing these projects?

- Breakout work on your own troubled or at-risk innovation projects

- Systematic avoidance strategies: Building failure-resistance into project design.

Taught in the usual SI style: short, sharp theory injections and hands-on breakout exercises. This isn't autopsy tourism, it's practical immunisation.

Dates: 7 and 14 October.  Precise timing will depend on time-zones of participants, but likely to be around the middle of the day GMT.

The workshop will be facilitated by Darrell Mann

Price: £108.00 per person including VAT

(15% discount for the second and subsequent delegates arriving from the same organisation)

Delegates will receive an electronic copy of the workshop slides and meta-pattern templates.