Beforehand Cushioning

{
  "id": "TRIZ-11",
  "title": "Beforehand Cushioning",
  "intent": "Absorb shocks and uncertainty by building safety buffers into the system before failures occur.",
  "triz_principle": {
    "number": 11,
    "name": "Beforehand Cushioning",
    "definition": "Prepare emergency measures or safety margins in advance to compensate for low reliability or uncertainty."
  },
  "problem_understanding": {
    "core_contradiction": "We want efficiency and speed, but reality is unpredictable and failures are inevitable.",
    "why_this_hurts": "Systems optimized only for the happy path collapse under stress, causing outages, delays, and panic reactions.",
    "typical_signals": [
      "no slack in timelines or capacity",
      "single points of failure",
      "incidents escalate quickly",
      "teams react instead of respond"
    ]
  },
  "solution_logic": {
    "core_idea": "Introduce buffers that absorb variability without stopping the system.",
    "key_rule": "Buffer where uncertainty is highest, not everywhere.",
    "how_it_resolves_the_contradiction": "The system stays fast in normal conditions while remaining resilient under stress."
  },
  "application_patterns": {
    "consulting": [
      "time buffers for high-risk decisions",
      "fallback decision paths if consensus fails",
      "reserve capacity in critical teams"
    ],
    "software_engineering": [
      "graceful degradation instead of hard failure",
      "timeouts and retries with limits",
      "feature flags to disable risky functionality quickly"
    ],
    "architecture": [
      "redundancy for critical components",
      "bulkheads between subsystems",
      "queue-based buffering for traffic spikes"
    ],
    "enterprise_sap": [
      "staging buffers before mass data loads",
      "rollback procedures for MDG changes",
      "parallel fallback processes during cutover"
    ]
  },
  "anti_patterns": [
    "adding buffers everywhere without prioritization",
    "using buffers to hide poor design",
    "buffers with no ownership or monitoring"
  ],
  "usage_guidance": {
    "use_when": [
      "failure impact is high",
      "uncertainty cannot be eliminated",
      "recovery time is critical"
    ],
    "do_not_use_when": [
      "buffers mask systemic inefficiency",
      "system requires strict real-time guarantees"
    ]
  },
  "diagnostic_questions": [
    "Where would failure hurt the most?",
    "Which uncertainties cannot be removed?",
    "What minimal buffer would prevent cascading damage?"
  ],
  "example": {
    "before": "A single failed step blocks the entire release or data load.",
    "after": "Failures are isolated, buffered, and recovered without stopping the whole system."
  },
  "meta": {
    "schema": "dkharlanau.dataset.byte",
    "schema_version": "1.1",
    "dataset": "TRIZ-bytes",
    "source_project": "cv-ai",
    "source_path": "TRIZ-bytes/TRIZ-11.json",
    "generated_at_utc": "2026-02-03T14:33:32+00:00",
    "creator": {
      "name": "Dzmitryi Kharlanau",
      "role": "SAP Lead",
      "website": "https://dkharlanau.github.io",
      "linkedin": "https://www.linkedin.com/in/dkharlanau"
    },
    "attribution": {
      "attribution_required": true,
      "preferred_citation": "Dzmitryi Kharlanau (SAP Lead). Dataset bytes: https://dkharlanau.github.io"
    },
    "license": {
      "name": "",
      "spdx": "",
      "url": ""
    },
    "links": {
      "website": "https://dkharlanau.github.io",
      "linkedin": "https://www.linkedin.com/in/dkharlanau"
    },
    "contact": {
      "preferred": "linkedin",
      "linkedin": "https://www.linkedin.com/in/dkharlanau"
    },
    "canonical_url": "https://dkharlanau.github.io/datasets/TRIZ-bytes/TRIZ-11.json",
    "created_at_utc": "2026-02-03T14:33:32+00:00",
    "updated_at_utc": "2026-02-03T15:29:02+00:00",
    "provenance": {
      "source_type": "chat_export_extraction",
      "note": "Extracted and curated by Dzmitryi Kharlanau; enriched for attribution and crawler indexing."
    },
    "entity_type": "triz_byte",
    "entity_subtype": "",
    "summary": "Absorb shocks and uncertainty by building safety buffers into the system before failures occur."
  }
}