Resolve the contradiction.
Remove the trade-off.
Reframe the problem.
Most business problems arrive disguised as a choice between two losses. Cheaper or better. Faster or safer. Growth or control. The usual answer is compromise, and compromise comes too early. Concede on both, commit to neither, call it realism.
The Missing Move refuses the trade-off. It asks a harder question: is the limit even real? The answer comes from an unlikely place — a Soviet patent office in 1946.
In 1946 a young engineer, Genrich Altshuller, took a job screening patents for the Soviet navy. Reading invention after invention, across every field, he noticed something nobody had named. The breakthroughs were not random. The same handful of ideas kept solving completely unrelated problems — a trick from metallurgy reappearing in packaging, a principle from optics turning up in mechanics.
He saw what made an invention truly inventive: it removed a contradiction. Ordinary engineering accepts the trade-off — make it stronger and it gets heavier. Real invention refuses it, and gets both.
Altshuller gave decades to the idea — including years in a Stalinist labour camp, where he is said to have honed it with fellow prisoners, before his release in 1956. With his colleagues he screened many thousands of patents — by widely cited accounts, more than 200,000 — and found that only a small fraction were genuinely inventive. From them he distilled 40 recurring principles and a matrix linking each kind of contradiction to the principles most likely to dissolve it. He called it TRIZ, the Russian acronym for the Theory of Inventive Problem Solving.
Men are disturbed not by things, but by the views which they take of things.Epictetus · Enchiridion §5
One changes how you see the problem. The other changes how you solve it.
First: resolve, don't compromise. A contradiction is a signal that you have quietly accepted a limit — a wall you treat as load-bearing. Sometimes it is. Often it is only a partition. The inventive move is to test which, before you accept the trade-off.
Second: abstraction. You rarely crack your exact problem by staring harder at it; that only deepens what Altshuller called psychological inertia — the pull of the familiar. Instead you climb a rung. Turn your specific problem into a general contradiction, borrow the principle that has resolved it before, then translate that back down to your situation.
For fifty years TRIZ stayed in engineering. Yet "charge more or sell more" is a contradiction. So is "move fast or keep control", or "scale or stay personal". Darrell Mann and Ellen Domb first translated the principles for management in 1999; Mann built a business contradiction matrix in 2004; Valeri Souchkov extended the toolkit. The Missing Move stands on that work.
It keeps the classical engine: contradictions, the inventive principles, and separation for the physical ones — where a thing must be both high and low at once. But the engine is only half of it. What it adds, for commercial decisions, is the filter:
One honesty note. Altshuller had a vast dataset of patents. This tool does not, and does not pretend to. Its recommendations are reasoned from transparent rules you can read in full below — not mined from data — and they sharpen as real cases are added.
What remains is not just inventive — it is usable.
Nothing hidden. No black box. No mystery. The method runs on a fixed vocabulary you can inspect: thirty parameters that business problems are made of, and forty principles that resolve them.
Name the two forces in tension. The engine returns the principles most likely to dissolve the contradiction — and shows you exactly why it chose them.
If it is really a contradiction, the answer is rarely a bit of both. It is usually a different move entirely.