What if we could predict the future? Wouldn't it be great? For that matter, why can't we predict the future? Frankly, our tools for prediction are primitive and they don't have to be, at least according to Jim Kowalick, who recently told me there is no problem that can't be solved, no future event that can't be anticipated. The tools to do so already exist, and all we have to do is learn how to use them. These tools originally came from the former Soviet Union. The fact that we don't do a better job of creation and prediction is just because we are untrained.

There are two separate challenges here. First is inventing new stuff, and second is anticipating where events will take us. For inventing new stuff we have mainly had two tools at our disposal — trial and error, and brainstorming. Trial and error was popularized by Thomas Edison in the 19th century. Once Edison had decided to use an incandescent element in his electric light bulb, he had no idea what material to use for that filament. No problem: Through trial and error, Edison and his helpers worked through more than a thousand materials before settling on a carbonized cotton thread. Trial and error took no brilliance, just determination. Brainstorming takes brilliance and nobody really knows how it even works, though without it there would be no TV sitcoms.

But neither trial and error nor brainstorming helps us to predict the future. For that we use trend analysis, gut instinct, and a fair amount of plain old BS, which is probably why few predictions are very good, and why I make so many of them.

Understand that what we are talking about is not simple creativity. There are ways to stimulate that. Red Smith, the sportswriter, said, "There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein." Funny, I always attributed that quote to Robert Benchley. Gene Fowler said, "Writing is easy. All you do is stare at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead." I thought that one came from D.H. Lawrence. Figures, given that my personal muse is Old Bushmills, which has never let me down (that I can remember).

We have crude tools for creation, like Lateral Thinking, which tells us, for example, to grab inspiration from random words in the dictionary. And we have equally crude tools for prediction, like Moore's Law, which is the basis of a half a trillion dollar industry, yet can be written in a single sentence. But Jim Kowalick says we can do so much better.

Kowalick, who lives in the Gold Country north of Sacramento, California, was a designer of rockets and nuclear weapons for Aerojet, then a professor at CalTech, but now he just travels the world teaching how to solve problems. His tools for problem solving were originally developed in the former Soviet Union by a patent examiner who was curious about how ideas actually come to be. This was half a century ago, and began with a statistical analysis of world patents — an analysis that continued right up to the fall of Communism. If we want to know where we are going, it is best to first know where we have been, right? Yet before the Russians, nobody had done such a patent analysis, looking at 3.5 million patents as a roadmap for both how people think and where that thinking is going.

From that patent analysis came rules and techniques for creation and prediction that are generally known under the name TRIZ. There is a quite large TRIZ community, including TRIZ teachers and TRIZ consultants, and Jim Kowalick was among the first of both types. He assisted in the translation of 21 Russian books about TRIZ. Do a Google search on TRIZ and you'll find plenty.

But even as a TRIZ pioneer, something about the technique bothered Jim Kowalick. For one thing, if TRIZ was so good, why didn't Communism prevail? And why isn't TRIZ better known than it is? The Soviet Union may have devised TRIZ, but it apparently wasn't used very much, for one thing. What politician would use a tool that concludes the very basis of that political system is unsound? But going beyond this, Jim Kowalick found that TRIZ was riddled with errors and certainly wasn't easy to use.

At this point I will hear from members of the TRIZ community claiming what I have written is nonsense and TRIZ is a simple and elegant set of tools. Maybe so, but I certainly don't see TRIZ being widely taught in the U.S., despite having been available for more than a decade.

So Jim Kowalick fixed the parts of TRIZ that seemed to be wrong, created a syllabus and materials for teaching the techniques, built software that embodies the principles of what Kowalick calls "Next-Generation Thinking," then hit the road, helping U.S. corporations and government agencies. He calls his program "Present Vision." For only $23,000, you too can have your very own three-day Present Vision course taught by Kowalick. While that may seem like a lot of money, it didn't deter more than 150 corporations and government agencies from signing-up. Present Vision clients run from General Motors to NASA with the conspicuous absence of Silicon Valley companies. Maybe they think Moore's Law is enough.

Present Vision has lots of laws — acres of rules and principles for getting from here to the answer. Sitting in their tiny apartments, the Russians had figured out that getting from here to there required passing through a number of steps that could be characterized — a pedagogy. Rules can't be skipped or taken out of order, but by following them in the right order, important conclusions can be drawn. Present Vision is a navigation tool for organizational creativity.

Following a set of these rules devised in Russia solely for predicting political and military nastiness, Kowalick claims that the September 11th World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks could have been anticipated right down to the airplane hijacking and building-smashing. Too bad nobody did just that.

Whether September 11th could have been avoided or not, it is true that we as companies and governments and educational institutions are usually flying blind. We spend millions on projects where the technique for actually solving the problem is left to chance, relying on innate brilliance and intuition, just expecting that somebody will come up with a good answer. No wonder more than 50 percent of major IT projects fail completely.

By the way, I have no business or financial relationship with Jim Kowalick or Present Vision. I just like him. We had lunch a couple weeks ago, and I paid.

American businesspeople will talk about nearly anything except how they screwed-up. We keep our catastrophes private, if we can. We hide them like weird cousin Harold, in the attics of our businesses, taking up a plate of food now and then and a fresh supply of comic books. We generally don't finish-off our mistakes, killing them cleanly, because death demands a funeral and a public admission that we have failed. No, we live with our mistakes and sometimes — just occasionally — we learn from them.

We are especially good at burying our information technology mistakes, both because it's easier to hide something hardly anybody really understands, and because we have so many such mistakes to hide. When it comes to computer systems, we screw up a lot.

In a survey of more than 600 large companies, Peat Marwick of KPMG discovered that 65 percent of those companies had at least one computing endeavor that had gone grossly over budget, was incredibly late, or when delivered was found to be incapable of doing anything at all. At Peat Marwick, they call these projects "runaways," as in "runaway train." Amazingly, half of these companies thought such a lousy return on their IT investment was normal — not a major concern. No wonder there is such a problem!

And it is getting worse, not better.

Whether the problem is solving IT nightmares or predicting where technology will be a decade from now, we generally don't have a system to rely on. Jim Kowalick has a system and there are probably others just as good, but the fact is that hardly anyone is actually using them. Take a look at just two companies — Microsoft and Oracle. These outfits have many common characteristics. They are involved in high technology, have vast resources, and under the surface are incredibly screwed up. Any company that is guilty of monopolistic behavior and is in too much denial to even admit that following a conviction is screwed up.

Neither company has a system for even assessing its level of peril or a plan for improvement. Simply hiring smart people is not enough, but they don't know that. They need Jim Kowalick. We probably all need Jim Kowalick, but he's not available right now. Jim's back in Russia this week, teaching the Russians how to use their own tools.