Cliff-hanger
In the movie The Italian Job, serial criminal Charlie Crocker chooses a small, fast vehicle, copied and multiplied, to escape with stolen bullion through the narrow streets of Turin. How Croker might choose the British Leyland Mini Cooper for the job, I describe in an earlier article.
However, there is a second puzzle to solve in this movie which demonstrates another innovation tool.
Once these thieves have evaded the police through the narrow streets using multiple small vehicles, the separate loads are once more consolidated into one large horde. The gang are transported to safety using a large enough vehicle that can carry the gold and the crew through the mountains.
A 1964 Harrington Legionnaire bus.
This transport is perfect for the job, whilst all is going well. Transporting the gold and remaining on the road present no particular conflict. Trouble arises when the road is too narrow, too winding, and we are moving too fast.
The vehicle is too heavy and too long to move fast along narrow mountain roads and departs from the road to end up hanging over the edge of a cliff.
The problem is caused by the gold that has been loaded into the back of the bus. Now the gold hangs over the edge of the cliff. To counteract this great mass, the gang of thieves has retreated to the front of the bus. Their fate and fortune now hang in this balance.
What would you do?
This situation results in an unreconcilable compromise. To reach the goal, we must unbalance our stricken bus. To escape from certain death, we must abandon the gold. How can our methodology help us now? How can this new contradiction be reconciled?
Michael Caine himself offered a solution to this problem at the release of this movie. He employed a technique that is part of a formal innovation methodology.
He listed his resources.
When faced with a problem, list everything that you have to hand with which you might solve this problem. Don’t smuggle new components into the problem. Elegant solutions will employ only what you have. Simply make an inventory of everything you have with which you might solve the problem.
Bus,
crew,
gold,
cliff.
List the subcomponents of each. List everything. Absolutely everything.
Chassis,
wheels,
doors,
windows,
engine,
fuel.
Fuel? The fuel tank on a Harrington Legionnaire bus is found at the back, one might assume to partially offset the weight of everything else at the front. This is obviously useful.
I guess this fuel tank must hold a couple of hundred kilograms of fuel. If a full tank was employed to make an escape, as it most certainly was, a weight in fuel of two grown men is potentially hanging from the back of this bus. If half of that tank has been consumed, halfway through the mountains, the weight in fuel of a single man remains hanging over the edge of the cliff.
If our contradiction hanging from this cliff remains perfectly balanced with this tank of fuel, we could run the engine until we have consumed the weight of a single man.
With this weight discarded, the balance is restored in favour of remaining on the road, and the contradiction is resolved. Charlie Crocker should now be able to crawl to the end of the bus and retrieve a gold bar. Was this the idea that Croker mentions at the end of the movie?
If Croker keeps retrieving bars of gold the situation is improved with every bar recovered, and eventually many tons of gold will reside at the front of the bus.
Will this mass be sufficient to ground the front wheels and pull the bus from the cliff? Maybe. Maybe not. However, as all of this gold is probably much heavier than the crew, they can at least disembark in safety. Once they disembark they can find some other means to drag the bus back onto the road. If they can, and they still have half a tank of fuel, they’re on their way.
If they cannot recover the bus, and must retrieve the gold they have a whole new problem to solve, and can once more look to the super system for resources.
They are marooned in a rocky mountain pass, full of rocks. One man can disembark to find a suitably large rock. They could replace the gold, brick by brick, with rocks, rock by rock. The more rocks they load into the bus, the more men can disembark to find more rocks. With the men retrieved, they can gather more rocks and retrieve the gold.
With the gold safely out of the bus, the gang once more have a whole new problem to solve. This gang of bank robbers are stuck at the side of a mountain road with a huge pile of stolen gold and a bus stuck on the edge of a cliff, full of rocks and not full of fuel.
There’s probably a whole sequel movie to be found in solving that problem.
