Jamie Flinchbaugh, Author at JFlinch

Scott Willoughby, Vice President of Program Excellence at Northrop Grumman and former program manager for the James Webb Space Telescope, joined Jamie Flinchbaugh to share insights on leading one of the most complex systems ever built. With 35 years at Northrop Grumman, a NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal, and membership in the National Academy of Engineering, and we have to include a degree from Lehigh University. Scott brought deep wisdom about managing massive programs where failure simply isn’t an option.

Managing the James Webb Space Telescope meant dealing with a system seven times larger than Hubble that had to operate at minus 400 degrees Fahrenheit, a million miles from Earth. Scott explained that tackling such complexity requires breaking problems down through systems engineering, but with a critical twist: don’t trust yourself. Everything on Webb was done in twos. NASA and Northrop Grumman each built independent models, particularly for thermal and dynamic performance. When pointing a telescope at light from 13.5 billion years ago, stability matters, and even small temperature changes cause mechanical components to shrink and expand. The two teams challenged each other constantly, ensuring they reached the same conclusions before moving forward.

When models disagreed, which happened often during iteration, teams had to get intimately familiar not just with their own work but with how the other side modeled things. Sometimes, differences came down to using different densities or levels of detail. Other times, teams discovered they were working from different versions of test data. Scott emphasized that much of technical work is about getting people to communicate, to say their assumptions out loud rather than keeping them in folders or inside their heads.

Creating a learning culture among world-class engineers and PhDs required leading by example. Scott realized early that being a leader didn’t mean knowing everything. He deliberately asked questions that seemed obvious, sometimes the wrong questions, to get beneath the surface. He echoed back what others said in his own words, creating what he called a safe zone in the middle of dialogue where you don’t have to be right until the end. By showing vulnerability and modeling openness, he encouraged teams to converge on solutions without anyone feeling accused of being wrong.

Testing followed a crawl, walk, run philosophy. Scott stressed taking the hardest punch as early and as low in the system as possible. They qualified components by subjecting them to extremes beyond predicted conditions, building margin into designs for things they couldn’t model perfectly. The hardest day in any satellite’s life is usually day one, which for Webb lasted six months as systems were deployed and activated for the first time.

One of Scott’s favorite stories captured the power of listening to everyone. When membrane tears appeared during sunshield deployment testing, engineers wrestled with an apparently intractable problem. The solution came from a technician who suggested using something like a squid jig from his fishing tackle box to align the 107 pin holes through multiple membrane layers gently. His compliant device solved one of the program’s most complicated problems. Scott learned that elegant solutions sometimes come from understanding how things get built, not just how they’re designed.

For transparency with stakeholders, Scott developed a rhythm of meeting every three months to discuss what had happened since the last time, what they were doing now, and most importantly, what challenges lay ahead. By forecasting risks before they materialized, discussing backup plans, and building anticipation for difficult tests, he made it easier to discuss both failures and successes. What advice would he offer to anyone stepping into similar roles? Take a deep breath, realize it won’t go perfectly, and talk to others who’ve been there. Growth doesn’t occur without discomfort, and leaders get measured not by perfection but by how they respond to adversity.

Is courage the missing ingredient for successful critical thinking, and why is critical thinking still one of the most critical skills for every human? As we start to explore critical thinking, it’s a term that’s thrown around as loosely as leadership or integrity, but it is very much worth examining and understanding. Not only is it important today, as it always has been, but it will very likely be even more important in your future. I will explain why, and also break critical thinking down into fundamental elements that are all important. The pathway to improving critical thinking is in improving the ingredients.

So, before we jump to why, the four ingredients that I’m going to focus on are the cognitive ability or the intelligence, which is the engine that drives critical thinking. That is supported by the breadth and depth of knowledge, whether domain-specific or not. The third ingredient is emotional intelligence and your ability to self-regulate through decision-making, which acts as the steering for your critical thinking. And lastly is the courage and the will to think critically. And this last element is, to be honest, a subset of emotional intelligence. However, it is worth calling out as a separate ingredient, because without it, all the fundamental aspects of critical thinking and independence get washed away. Now, why is improving our critical thinking so important?

Daniel Kahneman, the famous Nobel laureate in economics, said, “We think, each of us, that we’re much more rational than we are.” This points out that our ability to reason is one of the keys to self-improvement and to navigating the complexities of life despite our own flaws, yet despite our opportunities to practice, we may not be as good as we believe.

So critical thinking has always been important, from Aristotle to Thomas Jefferson to getting a job today. But in the future, it’s likely to continue to be even more important.

As social media has increased, the ability to discern what’s real, what’s fake, and what’s exaggerated is much more difficult. Misinformation campaigns, whether by an individual or by a state, have become commonplace, with bad actors in Russia once generating both sides of competing protests in a Texas town without ever setting foot on the ground themselves.

Going forward, in an AI-based world, the ability to think for yourself and think critically both around the inputs and outputs from AI may become one of the most essential human skills that separates us from the raw intelligence of AI. This is perhaps one of the key moments where raw intelligence is surpassed by AI, and therefore may be one of the least important elements of critical thinking, although we certainly shouldn’t throw it away in the process.

Cognitive Ability: the driving engine

Let’s turn to those four ingredients and start with that cognitive ability. The cognitive ability is the engine that drives things. This is your intelligence. It’s what powers your ability for critical thinking. There is no question that it is insufficient, but it is still what allows you to process what you’re absorbing, to consider more than one variable at a time, and to find new connections and new insights out of a complex world of information. I won’t focus a lot on why it’s important, as it’s fairly obvious, but we’ll highlight some of its gaps.

Diane Halpern, author of Thought and Knowledge, states, “A high IQ is not always an indicator of good critical judgment, since sometimes people with high intelligence are not exempt from biases or rigid thoughts.” That’s what makes these other variables and ingredients so vitally important.

Furthermore, intelligence has some catches that we have to watch out for. The idea of motivated reasoning indicates that highly intellectual people are better at rationalizing their biases. Therefore, while biased, they can create a sound argument supporting that bias, which can fundamentally turn them into what we can endearingly call a smart idiot. So while making people smarter sounds good, we don’t want to end up with a world of smart idiots!

So having a powerful engine can be very valuable. But as anybody who’s driven a sports car can tell you, a powerful engine is not enough. So let’s turn our attention to knowledge.

Knowledge: the navigational map

Knowledge is our navigational map through the world of critical thinking. This begins with domain knowledge in the topic that we’re applying critical thinking within. Understanding the variables, the cause and effect connections, the systems dynamics, and the historical patterns for any topic (whether geopolitical, physical, strategic, or even simply human) is a key ingredient for critical thinking. For example, conspiracy theories are primarily believed by those who lack domain knowledge in the conspiracy domain to understand why it couldn’t possibly be true.

It is, of course, important to recognize that no domain has completed its development of the knowledge base, as science continues to unveil new insights and new understanding of the universe. Most recently, the James Webb Telescope, which I discussed with its Program Director on this podcast, was launched and led to new insights about how the universe works.

Therefore, domain knowledge will never be complete, but the most effective critical thinkers leverage both the existing critical knowledge, as well as holding space for both new discovery and unwinding past assumptions that may no longer be valid.

Beyond domain knowledge, there’s also breadth of knowledge. The book Range demonstrates very clearly the value of a broad knowledge base. The ability to cross over domains can lead to creative thinking, new insights, as well as simply a broader understanding of how the interconnected world works. The book helps us understand the value of generalists who understand many domains, while not discounting the value of specialists with deep domain expertise.

It’s important, therefore, for critical thinking that we read, we study, we learn. This does not mean a college degree, although a college degree has been used as a proxy for having learned certain things. But as the quote from Good Will Hunting demonstrates, that same knowledge is available for $1.50 in late charges at your local library. It’s the pursuit of that knowledge that is the key, by any means you pursue it.

This is one of the places where AI can provide us access to more knowledge. This will allow more people to engage in critical thinking if they learn how to both utilize AI to gain access to previously inaccessible knowledge, but also enough domain expertise to discern whether what they’re reading is sound or not. I, for example, found both the Diane Halpern quote and the Thomas Jefferson quote by using AI tools to do research on this subject.

I also discovered this useful quote from Anatole France: “An education isn’t how much you’ve committed to memory or even how much you know. It’s being able to differentiate between what you know and what you don’t.” Which means the value of the persistent pursuit of expanding our knowledge is a perpetual and worthwhile pursuit.

Emotional Intelligence: hands on the steering wheel

Considering emotional intelligence, Christopher Dwyer states, “If the impact of emotion on thinking is one of the biggest barriers to critical thinking, as I believe it is, then the ability to self-regulate your thinking in a manner that accounts for such potential impacts is of utmost importance. This is because the existence of biases is not related to intelligence. Biases are often based on other factors, such as dopamine, where the confirmation bias allows us to feel good that we were right all along, and can trick us into a false interpretation of observable facts.

This is why emotional intelligence is the steering that helps us navigate our engine through the map of knowledge. It helps us dampen, although not eliminate, our biases. It allows us to stay with a question longer through the chasm from not knowing to finding answers. That can be a very uncomfortable place to be, knowing that knowledge is needed or knowing that a conclusion is needed. It takes restraint not to quickly wrap things up but to stay with discomfort.

This is why most effective problem-solving is designed to slow us down and to force us to think more deliberately and critically, because our instinct is to rush to that conclusion, to check the box, and to close the door. But staying with the problem longer, through a series of steps (as I write about in my book People Solve Problems), is what allows us to dig deeper and uncover new insights, new ideas, and new solutions.

Aristotle states, “It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” This means that we can examine all sides of an argument and examine solutions that are clearly not going to solve our problem, to be curious about what aspects of those are useful, insightful, important, or informative. This is how we understand the other side of an equation. This is how we understand the other side of an argument. This is how we process bad news (whether we got a bad performance review or were fired, or had someone give us a bad review on a speech or a book). We allow that information that may hurt or sting to be examined and understood, and leveraged for future benefit.

“For the great enemy of truth is very often not the lie (deliberate, contrived, and dishonest), but the myth (persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic). Too often, we hold fast to the clichés of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought. Thinking requires effort and responsibility. This means that the prejudices of the present must not be allowed to obscure the truth of the past, nor must we ever assume that the truth is necessarily in the middle of opposing viewpoints, nor must we see merit in both sides of a question simply because they are opposed, nor must we expect that the truth will always be found by splitting the difference between two opposite ideas.”

As we deploy emotional intelligence within our critical thinking, one of those important elements is empathy, which is a key idea for understanding opposing viewpoints. I wrote about the idea of rigorous empathy here, with the idea that it allows us to truly understand someone’s path, experience, and context. That rigorous empathy does not forfeit your freedom to draw your own conclusions and to think critically, but as a tool of more deeply understanding.

Another dimension of emotional intelligence is courage, but I decided here, as part of this framework, to extract courage as its own ingredient, as courage and will provide the fuel for critical thinking.

Courage: the fuel that powers us through

Indira Gandhi said it well: “You have to have courage, courage of different kinds. First, intellectual courage to sort out different values and make up your mind about which is the one which is right for you to follow. You have to have moral courage to stick up for that, no matter what comes in your way.” As she talks about intellectual courage, the idea is that you have a responsibility as well as an opportunity to decide things for yourself.

This begins with discarding identity based on ideas. Identity politics is a practice in which you belong to a broad set of ideas, which is a dangerous trap because you cannot discard one idea without discarding your identity. This leads to rigidity and zealotry, and sometimes dramatic outcomes from those traits.

Carl Jung wrote about this, interestingly, in the context of flying saucers in the 1950s, when there was mass hysteria around UFO sightings based on the Cold War. He wrote, “Thinking is difficult, therefore let the herd pronounce judgment.” This is what allows us to achieve a sense of belonging to a conclusion, but courage allows us to deconstruct that reality and sometimes swim upstream against what those around us believe. That takes courage.

Russ Payne wrote, “We live in an age where not having the right opinions can get you kicked out of your group. Many people would rather die than not belong.” This is where the courage is needed first to have independent thought through critical thinking, then further courage to give voice to that critical thinking, and further courage again to act on it.

At a smaller scale, yet equally important, because it occurs every day, courage is also required to muster the energy for critical thinking. Whether it applies to how we eat, or sleep, or work, or exercise, it is very easy to follow the path of least resistance. The idea of the cognitive miser wants us to preserve our mental energy for when we need it most, but each of those moments where we determine that we should be applying critical thinking means that moment, we must expend the mental energy.

In his book The Diary of a CEO, Steven Bartlett recounts a powerful lesson on the dangers of groupthink and the lack of courageous critical thinking through a story of a high-stakes meeting where a leader asked his team to rate a new idea. While Bartlett privately judged the pitch as a “1” out of 10, he watched as every colleague before him succumbing to the pressure of social conformity, unanimously praised it as a “10.” When the spotlight finally landed on him, the momentum of the room was so overwhelming that he found himself meekly echoing the “10” despite his internal conviction. This anecdote serves as a stark warning that without a culture of psychological safety, the desire for harmony will too often silence the courageous truth, leaving organizations blind to their most critical flaws.

In a famous product launch example, automotive legend Bob Lutz has said the Pontiac Aztek is what happens when internal momentum and deference beat honest feedback. The Aztek bombed in early market research with one respondent saying, “I wouldn’t take it as a gift,” yet the organization pushed ahead anyway. No one had the courage to either think critically about what they were doing, give voice to that thinking, or act on that viewpoint.

Whether that means taking the time, creating the environment, pushing off distractions, or sitting down with a pen and paper, the courage to do the hard work is a daily challenge, but a vitally important one if we are to deploy this most critical skill.

For reflection

Critical thinking is more than intelligence. Our cognitive abilities may provide the engine, and our access to knowledge (both retained and pursued) helps us navigate, and our emotional intelligence allows us to steer, but it is the daily courage that allows us to face the moment where critical thinking is important. And those moments happen every single day for every single person.

For self-improvement, don’t focus on developing critical thinking, but instead consider how you can cultivate each of the respective ingredients that make up critical thinking.

Rick Pedersen, owner of Old Norse Consulting, joined host Jamie Flinchbaugh to explore why product development demands a fundamentally different approach to problem-solving than traditional business processes. During their conversation, Rick explained that while most business functions involve transactional processes that can be documented and repeated, product development centers on building knowledge to solve problems that have never been encountered before.

Rick draws a clear distinction between information gathering and genuine knowledge gaps. He explains that a true knowledge gap exists when answers cannot simply be looked up or obtained from an expert. Instead, teams must invest time and resources in building prototypes, running tests, or conducting simulations to create new knowledge. Rick advises teams facing uncertainty to document potential knowledge gaps quickly, then filter them to determine which require actual investigation versus simple research.

The conversation revealed how knowledge creation serves as the lifeblood of product development, much like flow serves manufacturing. He emphasizes that the real value in product development comes from creating new knowledge and making it reusable. He compares this to compound interest, where teams that fail to document their discoveries essentially discard their gains rather than letting them accumulate over time. This results in organizations repeatedly solving the same problems across different projects, representing significant waste.

Rick advocates for a shift from traditional task-oriented project management to organizing work around knowledge gaps. Rather than focusing solely on completing action items, teams should orient their efforts around closing knowledge gaps through what he calls fast learning loops or fast learning cycles. This approach helps teams understand why they are performing tasks and keeps the focus on building knowledge that enables better decisions.

When discussing learning from industry leaders like Toyota, Rick cautions against simply copying their systems. He stresses the importance of understanding the thinking behind why successful companies use specific tools and behaviors, then adapting those principles to each organization’s unique situation. He recommends starting small, selecting one or two pilot projects where teams can experiment with new methods while receiving coaching along the way.

Rick recently launched the LPPD Bootcamp, an immersive workshop designed to accelerate learning about product development principles. He explains that the workshop addresses a fundamental challenge in product development: the years-long timeframe makes it difficult to see results and adjust quickly. The bootcamp compresses an entire product development cycle into less than a week, allowing participants to experience how different improvements interact and deliver benefits. The environment also helps teams practice cross-functional collaboration and establish shared reference points they can draw upon when working on real projects.

Throughout the conversation, Rick emphasized that successful product development requires teams to recognize knowledge gaps, invest in closing them systematically, and capture what they learn for future reuse.

Arianna Huffington was hosted at Lehigh University for a wide-ranging discussion centered on AI, but covered much more. I certainly will not try to summarize the entire conversation, but will focus on three key takeaways and my reflections on them as she told stories and shared perspectives.

Learning from Every Opportunity

The first was fundamentally the opportunity to learn from every experience, even from failure (if failure is even the right word). Huffington states, “Failure is not the opposite of success, it’s the stepping stone to success.” That applies to many different things, but one of my favorite and most compelling stories that relates to this theme was when she ran for governor of California.

She was one of a wide swath of candidates who eventually lost to Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, and she was only in the election for one and a half months. However, during that time, they did an online campaign which got picked up by other media, including national media, and essentially went viral.

She learned from that experience the power of online media, and that insight eventually led to the starting of The Huffington Post, which of course really helped accelerate her career, her influence and impact on the world.

The lesson we should all take away from this is that we should be open to a pivot, open to possibilities, and open to opportunities. We should learn from all of them because you never know when a lesson may appear that may set you on a different trajectory.

Democratizing healthcare coaching with AI

The second takeaway centers on AI and her focus with Thrive AI Health. Her belief is that she can democratize healthcare coaching. It’s important to note we’re not saying healthcare, but healthcare coaching.

In part, her focus with Thrive is on fundamentals of health that are often not treated and ignored by healthcare professionals, such as sleep. In Thrive, in her book, and in Thrive AI, she has a lot of focus on habits, nudges, and microsteps.

The goal is to be pragmatic and make things fit within your life in a way that actually makes sense and is likely to be implemented. As that happens, habits are small, little things that start to become routine. For example, as she focused a lot on sleep, my phone is never next to my bed. It is often two floors away. This is a very significant habit where she believes it’s an excuse that many people use, needing their phone as an alarm clock or a backup alarm clock. But that really just helps support a bad habit instead.

Nudges, of course, are things that just move us in that direction and help us adjust our habits. Microsteps are essentially actions that we take, but they can be very small actions that move us in the right direction, whether that’s around hydration, sleep, or stress.

While Thrive AI isn’t democratizing healthcare, it is meant to democratize healthcare coaching, where you can get personalized coaching while AI learns your lifestyle, preferences, history, and so on. Most people do not have access to coaching, which means they often end up just learning tips and tricks without verification on social media.

A new scientific dethronement

The third takeaway is that she talked about the history of dethronement, with ideas originating from Freud’s 1917 paper A Difficulty in the Path of Psycho-Analysis, where we essentially dethrone a core idea (almost a collective identity) from a scientific or technological viewpoint, and new ideas and new perspectives come along that dethrone old ones.

The first major dethronement was overthrowing the idea that the Earth was the center of the universe. This was the Cosmological Blow brought about by Copernicus and Galileo. The second dethronement was the Biological Blow brought about by Darmin. The third is the Psychological Blow, which is what Freud was promoting around psychoanalysis and the unconscious mind (which is incredibly bold to position his views and his stature as equivalent to these other giants, but I digress).

But where this leads is that AI is possibly another dethronement moment, where AI essentially dethrones human intelligence as a core part of our identity. If AI fundamentally becomes more intelligent than humans, then we have to have a conversation about who we are. Are we all about our intellect, or are we more about our consciousness?

Do we have to focus less on making a living and more on making a life? She believes this is the key to education and perhaps, in fact, in an AI-heavy world, we need more focus on the humanities, even the study of classics, to help develop that consciousness around what it means to be human.

As many things that are simply jobs to be done, knowledge to be held, or knowledge to be wielded in a raw intellectual world, AI may eventually significantly replace humans. And so humanity actually becomes what’s fundamentally more important.

A last thought…

These were interesting takeaways from the conversation with Arianna Huffington, and I encourage you to go listen to speakers wherever you have a chance, whether you agree with them or not, to help stimulate your thinking and your own ideas around how you view the world.

Jason Trujillo, a transformational leader with a wide range of experiences, joined Jamie Flinchbaugh on the People Solve Problems podcast to share his unconventional path to becoming a transformational leader and his philosophy on structured problem-solving. With a career spanning companies like Stanley Black & Decker, IBM, Intel, and Harley-Davidson, Jason brings a unique perspective shaped by an unexpected beginning—art school.

Jason explained that his engineering studies actually started at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he explored kinetic sculpture and human-machine interaction. This creative foundation became central to how he approaches problems today. He described problem-solving as fundamentally a creative process, always returning to questions like “What am I looking at? What does that mean? What can I do with it?” This artistic lens has stayed with him throughout his career, providing a unique vantage point for tackling complex business challenges.

A key insight Jason shared is his belief in the power of constraints to fuel creativity. He noted that while young artists often rebel against limitations, there’s nothing harder than facing a blank canvas with no boundaries. Jason sees direct parallels between art and business problem solving—just as telling someone to “fix the company” is too broad to be actionable, asking an artist to “make something” without constraints can be paralyzing. He emphasized that frameworks, heuristics, and rubrics provide essential guide rails that allow creative thinking to flourish within defined boundaries.

When discussing his role as a transformation leader, Jason acknowledged the need to wear multiple hats depending on the situation. While he sometimes wishes he could simply fix a broken machine on his own, his current work requires shifting between being an accountable owner in executive meetings and a coach helping others develop their problem-solving capabilities. Jason finds the coaching role most rewarding because he gets to watch people learn, develop, and ultimately succeed—though he candidly admitted that winning doesn’t happen as often as people assume, which makes success even sweeter.

Jason introduced a particularly helpful concept he calls “altitude” when working with teams. He explained that sometimes people are working on the right problem but viewing it at the wrong level of detail. Engineers, for instance, might get stuck in technical specifics that aren’t relevant to the broader business challenge. By helping them adjust their altitude—lifting up to see the bigger picture—Jason can help technical minds engage with problems at a more appropriate scope.

On the topic of ideation and brainstorming, Jason admitted he used to be “triggered” by traditional brainstorming sessions that often devolved into appeasing the loudest voice or rushing to conclusions. Instead, he advocates for structured ideation using frameworks that make clear whether the group is trying to expand possibilities or converge on solutions. Jason stressed the importance of knowing what outcome to expect from an ideation session and preparing accordingly, transforming what could be an aimless discussion into a constructive planning session that leads to concrete action.

Throughout the conversation, Jason emphasized his core principle: don’t solve general problems because nobody has a general problem. Success comes from getting specific, using frameworks intentionally, and helping others build their own problem-solving capabilities.

Connect with Jason Trujillo on LinkedIn to learn more about his approach to transformation and operational excellence.

AI should never replace problem-solving, as problem-solving is a truly human skill, or a combination of skills, that is an act of discovery. However, AI can act as a great co-intelligence, helping us broaden our perspective, challenge our logic, or simply get unstuck when our wheels are spinning. In this course, we outline how AI can be used within your problem-solving, walk through a specific example, and share various prompts that you can use to get your problem-solving started.

I will describe my problem, and then I will give you prompts with specific instructions about this problem.

We want to work on product development innovations that are a long way off, likely to take 3 years to develop. We’re a small company and don’t have a lot of excess resources. Most of the resources are tied to current-year projects that have clear objectives and returns, and then those same resources are challenged to take on cost-reduction and component-replacement projects, sometimes on an emergency basis, further distracting them from any long-term focus. We’ve been struggling with this for a few years and need to find a way to get some dedicated efforts on high-risk, high-reward product innovation.

Act as a problem-solving coach specializing in problem framing techniques. I need help crafting effective problem statements for [describe your situation/challenge here].

Finally, recommend which problem statement would be most effective to pursue, explaining your reasoning based on factors like feasibility, impact, and resource requirements.

Now adopt the perspective of an expert in [specify domain: e.g., product development, operations, customer experience, finance, etc.].

For each statement, note how this domain’s perspective shapes what seems important or urgent.

Act as a problem-solving coach specializing in diagnostic techniques. Based on the problem statement we selected: [insert chosen problem statement here]

Three distinct methods for understanding the current state, root cause or causes, or the cause and effect.

Finally, recommend a sequence for using these methods (which to do first, second, third) and explain how they build on each other to create a comprehensive understanding.

Act as a subject matter expert in [specify domain relevant to your problem]. Based on our current state analysis of: [insert problem statement and key findings from current state investigation]

Act as a subject matter expert in [specify domain]. Based on the validated causes we identified: [list 2-3 key causes from previous analysis]

Act as an expert on innovative business strategies. For our problem: [insert problem statement], explore how different companies’ signature approaches might offer unique solutions.

Select 4-5 companies from different categories below that are most relevant to your problem:

Act as an expert on problem-solving methodologies and thinking styles. For our problem: [insert problem statement], explore how different archetypal problem-solving approaches might offer unique insights.

Choose 3-4 figures from different categories below whose thinking style best matches your problem type:

Synthesis: Identify which thinking style is most absent from your organization’s typical approach and explain how incorporating it might unlock new solutions.

In this episode of People Solve Problems, host Jamie Flinchbaugh welcomes Norbert Majerus, a creative problem solver at Norbert Majerus Consulting. With 45 years in industrial creativity and 60 US patents to his name, Norbert brings deep expertise from his years implementing lean product development at Goodyear’s global innovation centers.

Norbert draws a clear distinction between creativity and innovation that cuts through the confusion around these terms. Creativity, he explains, is about generating new ideas and creating something new. Innovation happens when those creative ideas are brought to market and generate value. Not every creative idea becomes an innovation—only a select few make that leap—but creativity remains essential across all problem-solving contexts, whether the immediate goal involves profit or not.

The conversation turns to a pressing challenge: many organizations find themselves trapped in a box of their own making, unable to think beyond established patterns. Norbert identifies several significant obstacles to industrial creativity. Fear stands as the most formidable barrier. He shares a personal story of nearly being fired by a vice president who refused to allow risky new ideas, illustrating how leaders focused on protecting their careers create cultures where people avoid taking chances. When the perceived risk of failure outweighs the potential for success in someone’s mind, creativity withers.

Beyond fear, Norbert points to the physical environment as a surprisingly important factor. He contrasts his experience visiting Google—where the environment changed dramatically every 50 steps, with bikes and stimulating spaces—against his own workplace, which was redesigned with uniform white walls and strict prohibitions on personalization. Environment shapes culture, and culture shapes creativity.

Norbert emphasizes that today’s complex problems cannot be solved within narrow functional boundaries. True creativity requires collaboration across disciplines and departments, bringing together different perspectives. Yet many companies inadvertently educate their people to work against each other rather than together. Breaking down these silos requires intentional cultural work.

To foster collaboration, Norbert developed a powerful exercise involving teams solving five interconnected puzzles. Participants initially approach the task individually, trying to solve their own puzzle first. They consistently fail until they realize they can only succeed by helping each other. Even resistant leaders eventually grasp the lesson. Norbert stresses that behaviors must come before beliefs—lecturing about collaboration doesn’t work, but creating experiences that demonstrate its value does.

For managers who want to move in this direction without the authority to change company culture, Norbert offers practical advice. First, find a sponsor or supporter who can help break down walls and provide air cover. Second, and critically, start with something significant. Rather than working on countless tiny projects that never make a visible impact, tackle a problem big enough that solving it will bring others to your door, asking how you did it. Success with meaningful challenges builds momentum far more effectively than incremental wins on trivial matters.

Throughout his career, Norbert learned that subtle approaches work better than direct mandates. Taking teams to visit other companies nearby, exposing them to different ways of working, proved transformative. Within six months, teams that initially fought and blamed each other were asking, “How can I help you?” when problems arose.

Sometimes, CEO succession goes horribly wrong, and that’s very often public. We see the failings of the CEO selected and think, as they fire them, “How could they get this so wrong?” That’s convenient Monday morning quarterbacking, because the reality is that it is very tricky, and no one (except maybe search firms) gets a lot of practice at it. Some of those that made it less than two years: Hein Schumacher (Unilever), Michael Conway (Starbucks), Ted Christie (Spirit Airlines), Pat Gelsinger (Intel), and finally, Kohl’s Ashley Buchanan, who only lasted 100 days. A PwC study found that $112 billion in shareholder value is lost annually because companies pick the wrong people to lead them.

I recently went to Philly (or Philadelphia, PA if you’re proper) to attend a discussion on CEO succession hosted by the National Association of Corporate Directors at the brand new KPMG offices. I didn’t take a picture at the event, so you just get my picture of Philly.

On the panel included CEO, Spirovant Sciences, Dr. Joan Lau; Consultant at Egon Zehnder, Jeremy Lisnoff; Chairman and former CEO of J.G. Wentworth, David Miller; and retired Philadelphia Office Managing Partner, KPMG, Frank Mattei. This was a fantastic program and the reason I value my NACD membership, and while I won’t summarize the entire discussion, I do have some important reflections worth sharing.

We may be undervaluing internal candidates, and overvaluing external “superheros”

CEOs have in the past been considered superheroes in a way that they are good at everything. But that’s rarely true, or sufficient. Some may be more of a people leader, some more business execution, and others great strategists. But you’re not likely to get the superhero, and even if you could, it still doesn’t mean they’re a good fit and the right individual for the job. As Gallup has stated: “The great leaders we’ve studied are not well-rounded individuals. They have not become world-class leaders by being average or above-average in different aspects of leadership. They’ve become world-class in a relatively limited number of areas of leadership.”

An absolutely amazing stat for me is that the average tenure of an internal candidate CEO is 6.7 years, and for an external hire is 3.7 years. Sure, there are circumstances that skew some of that data, but just on the surface, it’s a powerful stat that suggests internal candidates should be given major consideration.

If you were already supporting the current CEO, who do you think was the mentor of that internal candidate? If you want stability and consistency, at least for some of the most important things like culture, then an internal candidate can be a great choice, IF you are supporting and developing them correctly (more on that later).

That doesn’t mean putting the “heir apparent” tag on someone as that has lots of complicated consequences. For example, you are starting a clock under which that individual will expect to be elevated. Don’t make promises that you can’t, or won’t, keep. On top of that, the CEO can start to look like a lame duck, or at least less engaged, as the heir apparently begins to throw their new weight around.

Egon Zehnder finds that the #1 predictor of success in the CEO role is an extraordinary curiosity about themselves and the world around them. That doesn’t surprise me, and it’s how you future-proof around a strategy, or competitive environment, or crisis that you can’t predict. By developing potential internal candidates, you can certainly test for that extraordinary curiosity.

Finally, remember that not everyone who looks like a candidate is a candidate. Someone might be a candidate at age 55, but by 57 they are starting to think differently about their life. Circumstances change. Motivations change. Have conversations without making promises, because if you assume too much, you will likely make mistakes.

Said another way, if your CEO announces their retirement or departure and then you begin a search for a new candidate, you are certainly doing it wrong.

As just indicated, internal candidates are fantastic choices if your development of senior-level positions is “always on.” In my opinion, at senior levels, you are either exploiting existing talent or developing future talent.

But we also have to be aware that we are asking boards of directors to exercise a rarely used muscle and do it flawlessly. Boards should not have a lot of experience replacing CEOS, and if they do, something is likely wrong. Of course, they have experience and judgement, but that doesn’t mean they’ve practiced applying it to this particular decision. Go around the table and ask how many have actually done this before.

Once you do, you need to be developing a profile for the CEO rather than a job description (since that job description is “you’re accountable for everything”). This is one of those moments where it’s extremely valuable to get input independently from each of the board members and then compile, and debate, and debate further, that input. Heindrick and Struggles states: “The development and assessment process starts with creating the future CEO profile, which the board should develop in conjunction with the current CEO. The profile is based on the company’s strategy and defines the crucial CEO skills and attributes for the next phase of company growth.”

Part of those sets of activities is being prepared for the “hit by bus” scenario, although these days it seems more likely a “went to a Coldplay concert” scenario. Who will take over in a pinch? Knowing that someone is ONLY an interim candidate, versus an interim-to-permanent candidate, is important, because it very quickly changes the process. At the very least, whoever took over as interim should not also be on point for the replacement search.

As part of these processes, be prepared for a more-than-thorough background check. It’s amazing when a CEO is fired for ethical lapses, how many employees say out loud: “I can’t believe it took them this long,” because it seemed like everyone knew. You know that your employees are starting their own background check the moment an announcement is made.

Your next CEO hire is vital and hard. Get the best help you can, be rigorous, take it seriously, and once you make it, do everything possible to ensure it is successful.

Section 5 from the People Solve Problems Book
The Culture of Problem Solving: How Leaders Shape Success

A problem-solving culture isn’t built on processes alone—it’s built on behaviors. Key Behaviors of a Problem-Solving Culture explores the role leaders play in shaping environments where critical thinking thrives. From leading by example to architecting systems that support continuous learning, this series uncovers the essentials of building a culture where solving problems is second nature.

The Leader as a System Architect

Learn why leaders must design local problem-solving systems that work for their context. Discover four key elements: managing the problem landscape, creating effective help chains, prioritizing problems, and building capacity and capability for solutions.

Build the Culture for Problem Solving

Discover why leaders must shape behaviors to create an effective problem-solving culture. Learn to create experiences that reinforce learning, role-model desired behaviors, and remove friction that prevents good problem-solving practices.

Shaping Problem Solving

Good leaders don’t just assign tasks—they teach their teams how to think through problems. Find out how to set clear boundaries, connect the right people, and decide whether you’re treating symptoms or fixing the real issue.

The Leader Solves Their Own Problems

Most leaders try to solve all 25 problems their team faces. But those 25 problems usually come from just 5 root causes. Learn how to spot those patterns—and when jumping in to help actually makes things worse.

In this episode of People Solve Problems, host Jamie Flinchbaugh speaks with Maureen (Moe) Rinkunas, Director of Insights Membership at Rock Health Advisory. Moe brings over 20 years of experience spanning corporate innovation, venture studios, and advisory leadership at organizations including DuPont, Accenture, Dreamit Ventures, and Redesign Health.

Moe opens the conversation by sharing her fundamental belief that everyone possesses problem-solving capabilities, shaped by evolution itself. However, she emphasizes that people bring different strengths to the table. When working with teams, she takes time to understand individual styles and leverages them strategically throughout the innovation process. Moe explains how naturally optimistic team members excel at generating ideas and maintaining energy during brainstorming sessions, while more skeptical individuals prove invaluable when narrowing options and making final decisions. By understanding these diverse strengths, she creates environments where different personalities contribute at the right moments.

The conversation shifts to collaboration and the messy nature of innovation work. Moe stresses that psychological safety forms the foundation of effective problem-solving. She explains that trust must be built over time, creating a reserve that teams can draw upon when facing uncomfortable challenges. She shares a powerful example from her time at DuPont, where leaders instituted a “Dead Project Day” on the Day of the Dead, encouraging people at all levels to share their failures. Initially met with skepticism, this practice became an annual tradition that normalized risk-taking and built lasting trust within the organization.

When discussing innovation leadership, Moe introduces the concept of leaders as snowplows. She describes how innovation leaders must clear paths for their teams by navigating organizational politics, communicating effectively with senior leadership, and helping others understand that innovative projects require different metrics and timelines than traditional initiatives. This protective role helps create safe spaces where teams can do their best work, even when external pressures threaten psychological safety.

Moe advocates strongly for test-and-learn approaches in innovation work. She emphasizes developing minimal viable solutions paired with “what must be true” statements that guide testing priorities. Her teams create learning plans with clear testing commitments, specific metrics, and defined timeframes. Moe suggests framing decisions around manageable increments, asking what information teams need to decide whether to continue, pivot, or stop after six weeks rather than demanding absolute certainty. This approach makes testing feel achievable and keeps teams moving forward with practical confidence.

Looking at healthcare innovation specifically, Moe identifies significant opportunities in an industry facing mounting pressures around staffing shortages and affordability challenges. She notes that while many innovators develop point solutions addressing specific problems, the real opportunity lies in creating connections between these innovations. She encourages entrepreneurs to think about integrated, holistic healthcare experiences that reflect how people actually live with and experience their health.

Throughout the conversation, Moe demonstrates how thoughtful attention to team dynamics, psychological safety, and structured learning processes enables innovation work to flourish. Her insights offer practical guidance for anyone leading creative problem-solving efforts in complex organizational environments.

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