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Krista Smith, Director, Project Management Center of Excellence at Sandia National Laboratories, joins Jamie Flinchbaugh on the People Solve Problems podcast to share insights on leadership development and organizational management. As an executive at the nation’s largest national security engineering laboratory, Krista leads Sandia’s project management capability while drawing from her extensive experience in facilities, infrastructure, supply chain, and business operations.
Krista discusses what she calls “the inner game of leadership” – a concept focusing on self-care, positive self-talk, and personal preparation that allows leaders to show up authentically for their teams. She explains that early in her leadership journey, she recognized the need for tools to manage multiple challenges while caring for herself. This awareness led her to explore how leaders can authentically engage with their teams without sacrificing their own wellbeing.
One of Krista’s hardest leadership lessons has been learning to be gentle with herself when making mistakes. She references the Buddhist concept of “the second arrow” – how we often compound our suffering by criticizing ourselves for our initial errors. Krista shares how she’s learned to recognize and interrupt her negative self-talk patterns, particularly when her natural tendency to move quickly conflicts with her organization’s collaborative culture.
When addressing leadership improvement, Krista explains her methodical approach to organizational development. She maintains a “someday maybe” list of potential improvements and assesses organizations against a baseline system that includes prioritization, service delivery, quality assurance, and people management. This balanced approach allows her to address immediate concerns while maintaining focus on long-term development.
Krista offers valuable insights on management operating systems, emphasizing the importance of predictability and stability. She focuses on managing energy versus time and creating predictable meeting cadences that allow team members to rely on consistent anchor points throughout their week. When facilitating problem-solving sessions, she carefully observes engagement levels and adapts her approach based on team dynamics.
Working with highly analytical colleagues at Sandia National Laboratories has taught Krista to accommodate different thinking styles. She visualizes these styles in a multi-dimensional grid, considering factors like learning preferences (visual, auditory, kinesthetic) and strategic orientation (tactical vs. big picture). This awareness allows her to design problem-solving approaches that engage diverse thinkers.
As advice for early-career professionals, Krista emphasizes the importance of understanding your personal “why.” She reflects that outward signs of success haven’t provided the satisfaction she once expected and encourages focusing on finding meaning in the work itself rather than always chasing the next achievement.
To learn more about Krista Smith and her work at Sandia National Laboratories, visit www.sandia.gov or connect with her on LinkedIn
Lean Coffee Episode 3
In Season 2, Episode 3 of Lean Coffee Talk, Mark Graban and Jamie Flinchbaugh both share specific episodes of their other podcasts. Jamie shares his People Solve Problems episode featuring Crayola CEO Pete Ruggiero, and Mark shares a repeat guest for My Favorite Mistake with NFL Players Association Dr. Thom Mayer to talk about the experiment of new kickoff formats and the impact (pun intended) on concussions. We then share our coffees, with the caffeine-laden Red Eye being the drink of choice, including Detroit Lions head coach Dan Campbell’s extreme coffee order.
We then jump into lean coffee discussion format covering a wide range of topics. We discuss why Americans aren’t filling the half-million manufacturing jobs already available, two new lean books on problem solving and hoshin kanri, and why it may be ok for it only to take 2 days to select Pope Leo XIV but five rounds of interviews to hire a remote worker (picking up on a popular meme).
The discussion then turns to the MIT Sloan School of Management Work / 25 online conference, beginning with a bit of a rant about a poorly run event that wraps up in lessons of how to respond to customers when you do make mistakes. Then two speaker topics were explored from the conference, including Sharon Parker’s SMART model for how to prevent burnout in your employees, and then moving to Lynda Gratton’s presentation on the value of mastery in your career.
The final segment of cultural shares includes two items to watch, featuring Paul Rudd and Tim Robinson in Friendship (in theaters now) and National Geographic’s Endurance about Sir Ernest Shackleton journey on Disney Plus. We hope you enjoy the listen!
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How to be an Effective Sponsor
Effective sponsorship can make or break cross-organizational work, whether a major transformation project or just a problem-solving team. Yet, it is rarely, if ever, taught. This video course both provides guidance to sponsors as well as those needing sponsorship.
Watch the How to be an Effective Sponsor videos on YouTube
Discover the hidden power of effective sponsorship—a crucial yet rarely taught leadership skill that transcends traditional delegation. Unlike simple task assignment, true sponsorship creates both accountability and ownership across organizational levels, from major transformations to daily collaborations. Learn why conventional feedback mechanisms often fail sponsors and how mastering this critical skill differentiates high-performing organizations by fostering environments where initiatives thrive through clear accountability, appropriate autonomy, and meaningful support.
Uncover why selecting “the boss” as your sponsor often dooms projects to failure. Learn the three essential criteria for choosing the perfect sponsor: someone who can provide valuable input, genuinely cares about the results, and has the right organizational position—not necessarily the highest. This strategic approach to sponsor selection creates the optimal foundation for project success by aligning capability, commitment, and context rather than defaulting to hierarchical authority.
Expose the critical missteps that derail even well-intentioned sponsors. Discover why having co-sponsors often results in diffused accountability, how sponsor unavailability stalls progress, why generating solutions yourself undermines team ownership, and how misunderstanding your power as a sponsor can sabotage project outcomes. Understanding these common pitfalls helps sponsors create the right conditions for teams to thrive through clear accountability, appropriate involvement, and balanced authority.
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Jennifer Peterson, Manager of Continuous Improvement at Muscatine Power and Water (MPW) in Muscatine, Iowa, joined Jamie Flinchbaugh on the People Solve Problems podcast to share insights about her approach to problem solving. Jennifer’s mission at MPW is to reduce frustration for coworkers through process improvement and problem solving.
Working in a utility that provides critical services and never shuts down, Jennifer explains that prioritization is essential. At MPW, safety concerns come first, followed by reliability issues. Jennifer shares a practical example of how they tackled the recurring problem of squirrels chewing through utility lines by installing special pole wraps that prevent squirrels from climbing, significantly reducing outages. Rather than accepting this as an inevitable issue, her team actively sought solutions.
When it comes to collaboration, Jennifer believes in inclusivity. She prefers having more stakeholders in the room rather than too few, aligning with Jamie’s philosophy that problems can’t be solved in isolation. Jennifer employs several facilitation strategies to ensure all voices are heard, especially from quieter team members. Her preparation includes learning about participants beforehand, sometimes through conversations with their supervisors, and creating a comfortable environment for contribution during sessions.
Jennifer connects problem-solving effectiveness to the organization’s mission. MPW revised their mission statement in 2023 to empower Muscatine residents and businesses to thrive, which has helped employees see the direct impact of their work. This connection to community creates natural motivation, as employees often serve their family members, friends, and neighbors.
For tackling complex problems like safety and reliability, Jennifer recommends breaking them down into smaller, less intimidating parts. She draws a powerful connection between this approach and psychological safety, noting that when problems seem less overwhelming, people are more likely to embrace solutions and understand different perspectives.
After 17 years at MPW, Jennifer recognizes the challenge of blind spots that come with long tenure. Her team documents processes for potential single points of failure and questions long-standing practices. They also use benchmarking and comparative data to challenge themselves, recently shifting from measuring against industry averages to top quartile performance. She notes that MPW’s culture embraces holding themselves to high standards, with leadership promoting a standard of excellence throughout the organization.
Jennifer combines her MBA from Western Illinois University, Bachelor’s in English from St. Martin’s University, and certifications as a PMP and Lean Black Belt to bring both analytical rigor and clear communication to her continuous improvement work. Learn more about Jennifer and Muscatine Power and Water at www.mpw.org or connect with her on LinkedIn.
Lean Coffee Episode 2
In Season 2, Episode 2, Mark Graban and Jamie Flinchbaugh begin with Mark sharing about his Australia and New Zealand workshop tour with the Association for Manufacturing Excellence. Even koalas find their way into the conversation. We then shift to our coffee selection of the day – pour overs. This old school method has found a resurgence not for being inexpensive but for giving you more control over the extraction process making it the best method for the best coffees. Jamie explains and demonstrates the process with enough details to get you going.
We then get to our main topics, beginning with some interesting statistics. 80% of Americans believe we’d be better off with more people working in manufacturing, but 25% of them believe that they would be better off if they worked in manufacturing. Whether skilled trades or engineers, we discuss why jobs in manufacturing are still getting a bad wrap. Continuing with manufacturing, we discuss the possible defunding and impact of the Manufacturing Extension Partnerships, a nationwide network of support centers for small- and medium-sized manufacturing businesses, which gets a significant amount of their funding from the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
Boeing is announcing a new, or refreshed, culture in an effort to turn the company around from a seemingly never ending parade of crisis issues over several years. Are declaring values enough? Do they need to be better defined? How do you back them up? We discuss all of this including a mention of Jamie’s video course on culture change. While discussing blue chip names, this is the 40th anniversary of New Coke, an introduction that was likely never needed. Was it a mistake, and how do you recover when the product and the brand is this iconic? We do not include a taste test of New Coke, or Coke Classic.
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Lean Operating Systems
This 3-video course explains the concept and practice of an operating system. You’ve heard of examples such as the Toyota Production Systems and the Danaher Business System, as well as a couple Jamie Flinchbaugh was heavily involved in such as the Chrysler Operating System and the DTE Energy Operating System. This is your playbook, your common approach, your common language, for how an organization performs their mission.
Watch the Lean Operating Systems videos on YouTube
AI-Powered Personalization with David Edelman of Edelman Advisory
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David Edelman, Executive Advisor and Senior Fellow at Harvard Business School, joined Jamie Flinchbaugh on the People Solve Problems podcast to discuss personalization and customer strategy in the age of AI. As the founder of Edelman Advisory Services, David brings over 30 years of experience as a thought leader in marketing, personalization, and technology.
David emphasized that AI in personalization goes beyond marketing to transform the entire customer experience. He explained the distinction between mass customization of the 1990s and today’s AI-powered personalization. While mass customization focused on modularity and customer selection, modern personalization uses proactive data analysis to anticipate customer needs and create new value.
To illustrate this, David shared the example of Sysco, the food delivery company. Their app uses customer data to identify a restaurant’s menu style, price points, geographic considerations, and purchasing patterns. Within 300 milliseconds of opening the app, Sysco can provide personalized recommendations, even suggesting new menu items that incorporate discounted ingredients from nearby warehouses. This approach has helped Sysco grow 50% faster than industry averages since launching the app.
When discussing how the C-suite should approach AI and customer engagement, David noted that while organizational structures vary, many companies now designate someone to lead customer experience initiatives. This might be a Chief Marketing Officer, Chief Experience Officer, or Chief Digital Officer. He stressed that whoever takes this role must prioritize empowering customers rather than merely manipulating them or cutting costs. Companies growing fastest through personalization consistently start with the goal of addressing customer challenges.
For executives who didn’t grow up in the AI age, David recommends getting “hands dirty” with the technology. While having a strong sense of strategy remains essential, leaders need to pair this with understanding the art of the possible in AI. He shared his experience as CMO at Aetna, where he identified that customers struggled to understand their health insurance. By partnering with a digitally savvy team member, they implemented personalized videos explaining each member’s specific plan. This resulted in 70% of people watching the videos and a 20% reduction in call center volume.
David addressed the challenges of integrating AI with legacy systems and data quality issues. He explained that generative AI is increasingly able to integrate disparate databases, but organizations must still prioritize data as an asset. At Sysco, for example, salespeople must input detailed account information, including menus and prices, before receiving credit for signing a new customer.
On the topic of data privacy, David noted that perceptions vary widely – “one customer’s creepiness is another customer’s ‘wow’.” He recommends small-scale, rapid-cycle testing to determine appropriate boundaries for different customer segments.
David concluded with advice for leaders looking to explore AI: spend 15 minutes daily using Large Language Models as assistants, experiment with image generation capabilities, and challenge functional teams to improve throughput by 30% using AI – not to eliminate jobs but to scale operations and create new customer value.
For more insights from David Edelman, visit his website at https://www.edelmanadvisoryservices.com, learn about his book “Personalized: Customer Strategy in the Age of AI” , or connect with him on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/daveedelman/.
Strategic Thinking
Strategic planning is done in a static moment to look forward, and strategic decisions are made, sometimes frequently and with great impact, between those planning windows. Both of those activities require a critical element: strategic thinking. This is one the most sought-after capabilities in leadership roles, yet one of the hardest to develop. This video series is a combination of 10 videos, 6 interviews, and a webinar recording included at the end. It was developed early during the pandemic to help the many companies, large and small, who were going through dramatic and rapid strategic shifts. There are many ways to be a strategic thinker, and this series doesn’t propose a singular method but helps you find and development the approach that best fits you.
Watch the Strategic Thinking videos on YouTube
Effective strategy requires mastering multiple dimensions—Plan, Ploy, Pattern, Position, and Perspective. See how leaders like Bezos and Branson integrate all five elements, why single-dimensional strategies fall short, and how to develop more flexible strategic thinking capabilities.
Chuck Wisner of Wisner Consulting: The Art of Conscious Conversations
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Chuck Wisner, President of Wisner Consulting, joined Jamie Flinchbaugh on the People Solve Problems podcast to share his insights on improving human dynamics in conversations. With 25 years of experience advising Fortune 200 companies, Chuck has developed a unique approach to understanding and enhancing how people interact.
Chuck introduced the concept of the “conversational bypass,” a common pitfall in problem-solving and decision-making. He explained that people often jump from storytelling directly to action, skipping over the crucial middle steps of collaboration and creativity. This tendency can lead to hasty decisions and missed opportunities for innovative solutions.
To combat this issue, Chuck emphasized the importance of conscious effort in conversations. He suggested that both individuals and groups need to take responsibility for fostering more productive dialogues. For individuals, this means being willing to set aside one’s ego and perspective, opening up to different viewpoints. In group settings, leaders should encourage taking extra time to hear all perspectives without judgment or bickering.
Chuck shared four key elements to consider in conversations: desires and goals, concerns about the future, authority issues, and standards. By examining these aspects, people can better understand the thinking behind their perspectives and share them more effectively with others.
The discussion then turned to the importance of learning in conversations. Chuck stressed that while making decisions is often the perceived goal, the real product of these interactions is the learning that occurs. He advised that to ensure learning is at the center of a conversation, individuals must set aside their judgments and private conversations to truly listen and absorb others’ positions.
Chuck also explored the role of self-awareness in changing conversational patterns. He shared a personal anecdote about recognizing and altering his own trigger responses with his children, illustrating how awareness can lead to positive change in communication habits.
The conversation shifted to creativity and intuition, with Chuck highlighting the importance of embracing the right side of the brain in problem-solving. He encouraged listeners to give themselves permission to dream and wonder about possibilities, moving away from resignation and towards openness.
Chuck also discussed his journey in writing his book, “The Art of Conscious Conversations: Transforming How We Talk, Listen, and Interact.” He revealed how the process helped him overcome his own limiting beliefs about his writing abilities and provided a structure for connecting various communication tools and concepts.
For those interested in learning more about Chuck’s work and insights, his website can be found at chuckwisner.com, and his book is available at https://a.co/d/5dw54us. You can also connect with Chuck on LinkedIn.
Setting Goals for Lean / CI / OpEx TeamsMany organizations have formed teams dedicated to the work of Lean, Continuous Improvement, OpEx, or whatever other term you prefer. These teams range from large centralized teams to distributed resources, to sole individuals. Regardless of the size and structure of the team, goals likely have to be set. While one might be tempted to explore how goals can be counterproductive, this isn’t the place for that exploration, as most organizations are firmly entrenched with a formal system of goal-setting at some level.
What are the appropriate goals for these teams? You will need to strike a balance between internal customer goals and vision-oriented goals.
When the team’s entire work output is focused on serving internal customers and helping those internal customers be more successful, your goals should be based on their goals. What is the organization trying to accomplish? Is it focused on increasing margins, improving speed, or being more agile? Alignment to what the organization needs to accomplish from a performance perspective allows you to serve those internal customers.
The other side of the balance is the ideal state. The lean team exists in part to bring the organization along its journey toward an ideal state. This includes the evolution of your systems and processes, the shaping of culture, and the building of capabilities such as problem solving. You can’t achieve this vision while jumping from problem to problem, playing organizational whack-a-mole. To maintain your trajectory toward the ideal state you need goals that focus your attention on the work of building the organization.
You must balance these two sets of goals. Consider your set of goals like a slider between 100% “customer need” focus and 100% “build the organization” focus. The extremes should be avoided. When CI teams focus entirely on internal needs, they often become very short-term focused and lose the essence of the vision. These groups frequently deteriorate to the least common denominator of their work, becoming on-demand facilitators and project managers.
Just as dangerous is being too focused on your vision at the expense of the needs of your internal customers. These teams tend to lose relevance and build too much infrastructure which increases the burden on the organization rather than helping it perform better. It is well intended but misguided in application.
Stay somewhere between 80/20 and 20/80, but where you fall on that spectrum should depend on the situation and will likely change over time. So, what kind of situations are we talking about? It requires a lot of organizational savviness to make a real determination, but several factors have an impact. One of the most important is how passionate and powerful your most senior-level support is. Another is how much transition the organization is challenged with, whether that transition is driven by an organizational change, a crisis, or even rapid growth. Consider how many advocates you have distributed within the organization, who can help bridge the gap between your vision and their needs.
A powerful variable in all of this is the relative maturity of your lean journey. A very mature lean organization (a) has full confidence in the effectiveness of its lean thinking and skills and (b) can handle the majority of the application on its own. This allows a central lean team to focus on the capability, systems, and culture that enables that maturity to sustain and grow.
The last thought to leave you with: be flexible. I have observed too many groups that get stubbornly locked into a singular strategy and fail to adjust as their situation changes.