Resolve the contradiction.
Remove the trade-off.
Reframe the problem.
Most business problems arrive as a trade-off. Cheaper or better. Faster or safer. Grow, or keep control. The usual answer is compromise, and compromise comes too early. Concede on both, commit to neither, call it realism.
There is another way. It refuses the trade-off and asks a harder question: is the limit even real? It 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. What it brings to the front, for commercial decisions, is this:
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.
By now the shape of it is clear. Before you take it for a spin, one honest filter — because it is a thinking tool, not an answer machine. It rewards a particular kind of problem, and a particular kind of patience.
Abstract method is easy to nod along to and hard to use. So here is the whole loop on a single, ordinary decision — the kind that usually ends in "let's just discount a bit."
A studio wants to raise its prices. Every instinct in the room says the same thing: push the price up and the work dries up. Charge more, or keep the volume. Pick one.
Strip the story down to two forces. What we want to improve, and what it seems to cost.
Stop staring at this studio's prices. The general form is older than any business: capture more per unit without losing how many units you reach. Someone has already solved that — many times.
Change the unit of sale. Stop quoting per project and sell a retainer that bundles strategy, production and revisions. The headline price rises — but there is no longer a like-for-like number to compare it against, so volume holds. The trade-off the room was sure about quietly disappears.
A clever frame is still a wish until the numbers hold. Does the bundle's blended margin survive the inevitable discounting? Does it pay back? Keep only what can be funded.
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.
The method runs on a fixed vocabulary you can inspect. Thirty parameters that business problems are made of, and forty principles that resolve them.
Disagreement is welcome — the method sharpens on real cases. Stress-test it, or bring a trade-off of your own, and let's resolve it together.
If you work in an agency, consultancy or strategy team and see potential in applying The Missing Move™ inside client work, internal problem-solving or workshops, I'd be glad to talk.