Commentary by Ellen Domb

TRIZ Community: Thanks!

The last Thursday in November is the Thanksgiving holiday in the US. Originally a harvest festival with religious roots, thanking God for enough food to get through the winter, it has evolved into a family-oriented celebration of all the things for which we give thanks, usually centered around a holiday meal where each family member makes a specialty dish, and those who don’t cook bring the wine and the flowers. In our family, we go around the table, starting with the youngest child, and each person says what they are thankful for this year—family, good health, new babies, friends, good memories, and one of my nieces has just voted in her first election—she gave thanks for that opportunity, but wouldn’t tell her grandfather who she voted for!

What I didn’t say at the family celebration is that I am also very grateful for my TRIZ family. We have developed into a world-wide TRIZ community that has characteristics of many families—we don’t always agree on everything, but we help each other. Some members observe all the old traditions, some members develop new traditions. Like a family, when someone new joins, we help the new members learn the family traditions, both old and new, then watch as the new member decides which family traditions to observe, or whether to develop new ones. Our family is part-Moroccan, part-French, part-Russian/ German, and part-lots of things, so you can imagine the food at this American feast! And cousin Ariel married Sam from Spain, and he was experiencing his first US Thanksgiving, with all the family and a bunch of friends, and as I was watching him try to decide when to ask questions and when to just pretend he knew what was happening, I decided that the analogy with the TRIZ community was very close.

I am very grateful for the openness of my TRIZ colleagues—we may each think our variant on TRIZ is “best” but we don’t keep the variants secret—we publish them, talk about them, and modify them in public. I’m grateful to all the authors who have contributed to the TRIZ Journal (November is our 12th anniversary issue!) and even more grateful to those who have contributed multiple times. We all learn from your contributions, and from the comments and discussions that are ignited by the articles. The commentators and contributors to the discussion forum have expanded our frontiers of discussion—thanks to you all. And a very big thanks to the people who make it all possible—editor Katie Barry and the technical crew at CTQ Media, and all my co-editors, Jim Kowalick 1996-8, Michael Slocum 1998-2008, and Marco A. de Carvalho and Paul Filmore this year.

And the biggest thanks of all to our readers, who I meet in person at the conferences, and meet on-line all the time. I appreciate your words of gratitude for the TRIZ Journal’s help in your learning TRIZ, and I appreciate your comments and criticism so that we can make the TJ better. I appreciate the opportunity to be part of your TRIZ community. Thanks!

RSS