ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how to move from the tradeoff to the inherent contradiction, and how to intensify the contradiction. It also shows how to formulate inherent contradictions. The chapter presents examples of how to go from the visible drawback to the intensified inherent contradiction. One important group of inherent contradictions is made up of situations in which the object should be present to get some useful feature, and absent to keep the system simple or to avoid some other problem. Tradeoffs and inherent contradictions appear in all endeavors—engineering, commercial, organizational, educational, social situations, and such. Intensifying the contradiction is the key to the solution. Analyzing the extreme contradiction helps one break out of conventional thinking into the realm of ideas that get rid of the contradiction and solve the problem. Inherent contradictions represent higher-level abstractions of problems and, therefore, usually result in better and more elegant solutions.
