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What You Can Learn From the People Solve Problems Podcast

People Solve Problems

Episode Question and Answer Reference

I asked Claude to review all of my podcast episodes and summarize what questions each episode answers. The People Solve Problems podcast explores how people across industries actually solve problems, lead teams, and build more resilient organizations. Each episode features a conversation with a guest, ranging from senior executives and consultants to authors and practitioners, who shares hard-won lessons on problem solving, leadership, continuous improvement, and organizational culture. This document is a quick-reference guide to the full archive of episodes (so far). 

Laudy Allan, Senior Vice President of Global Operations, Crayola LLC

Episode summary: Laudy Allan shares how she builds cultures where teams meet problems with curiosity rather than avoidance.

Q1. Who should be in the room when a team tackles a problem?

Laudy prioritizes the people closest to the problem over those with the most credentials, and she deliberately mixes deeply embedded staff with naturally curious colleagues. That blend creates the productive tension where the best questions and genuine accountability emerge.

Q2. How should problem-solving be approached when the data does not yet exist?

She starts small, identifying three to five things worth measuring and making the health of the process visible. She treats data not as a prerequisite but as something that, once gathered, generates better questions and opens new conversations.

Q3. How can a team handle having more problems than capacity to solve them?

Her answer is focus. She keeps three to five active problem-solving efforts at a time, chosen by impact and complexity and pursued with genuine follow-through, because spreading effort across thirty items reliably finishes none of them.

David Kaganovsky, Global Head of Product, Brand, WPP

Episode summary: David Kaganovsky treats problem-solving as a discipline of curiosity and humility, built on looking past the obvious problem to the one underneath it.

Q1. How can a team identify the right problem to solve?

He argues that the problem presented is rarely the one worth solving, and that the real work is uncovering the problem behind it. That means resisting the obvious fix long enough to ask a harder question.

Q2. What is a useful approach when a long-term commitment cannot be met as originally framed?

Rather than promising an uncertain future, he focuses on delivering meaningful value in the near term. That delivered value earns the trust and the room needed to have harder conversations about what cannot yet be done.

Q3. Why do management skills matter again?

He sees the habits of a good manager, setting context, staying close to the detail, and remaining invested in outputs, as exactly what working alongside artificial intelligence now demands. A skill set the business world had undervalued is becoming essential again.

Jeff Robinson, Executive Leadership Coach, Foundational Leadership LLC

Episode summary: Jeff Robinson argues that confidence, composure, and strong relationships matter far more to leadership than having all the answers.

Q1. What is confidence actually?

Jeff reframes confidence as having very little to do with how much a person knows. He describes it instead as the trust that you can handle whatever comes at you, built on every challenge you have already survived.

Q2. What do new leaders get wrong most often?

He finds that new leaders assume the role demands a sudden transformation, and many follow advice to come in heavy from people who never actually led. His counsel is to start with relationships and to protect the respect they have already earned.

Q3. How does coaching differ from counseling?

Using the image of a knot formed by everything a person has lived through, Jeff explains that a counselor helps untie that knot and rebuild it, while a coach helps you pick it up and move it somewhere better.

Grace Bourke, Consulting Director, Baker Tilly

Episode summary: Grace Bourke explains why technology implementations so often fail and what organizations can do to surface the real problems first.

Q1. Why do so many technology implementations go wrong?

Grace finds that organizations often deploy technology without fully understanding the problem they are trying to solve. Technology does not eliminate an underlying problem; it simply makes the mistakes happen faster and harder to trace once they are buried in a database.

Q2. What is the Gap-IT approach, and how does it help?

Gap-IT is a structured gap analysis that maps how work is done today against how it will function in a new system. In one ERP reimplementation it revealed that about half the desired improvements could be made before the technology went live, with only the other half genuinely needing the new platform.

Q3. How do you get people invested in a technology change they did not choose?

She distinguishes between agreement and investment. When a change is non-negotiable, people do not have to agree with it, but they do need to be invested in making it succeed, which she supports with senior leaders setting the vision and trusted frontline voices delivering the messages that affect individual roles.

Skip Steward, Vice President and Chief Improvement Officer, Baptist Memorial Health Care Corporation

Episode summary: Skip Steward describes how enterprise strategy and the human side of improvement work together to sustain continuous improvement across a large health system.

Q1. How do you keep an organization of 24,000 people aligned?

Skip uses a strategic A3 deployment process that organizes all work under four themes: right care, right time, right place, and right cost. He notes that nearly anyone across Baptist Memorial can finish that sentence from memory, a quiet measure of how deeply the direction has taken root.

Q2. What question is worth returning to at the ground level?

He repeatedly asks teams what they are trying to accomplish. He shared a clinic visit where an enthusiastic manager fell silent at that question, a moment Skip sees not as a failure but as the essential starting point for any improvement work.

Q3. How is respect for people practiced in daily work?

He relies on TWI Job Relations to turn respect for people from a stated value into a daily operational skill. He also practices humble inquiry, asking open-ended questions he genuinely does not know the answers to before trying to improve anything.

William Harvey, Program Manager for Strategic Initiatives and University Professor

Episode summary: William Harvey makes the case that solving the right problem, and first agreeing it is a problem at all, matters more than any framework a team chooses.

Q1. How do you decide what role to play in a given situation?

William steps into whatever role the moment calls for rather than declaring one in advance. He leads directly during critical moments such as safety incidents, and he creates safe space for others to develop during planned work.

Q2. What has to happen before a team picks a problem-solving method?

He insists on two fundamentals first: confirming that everyone agrees the issue is genuinely a problem, and clarifying where it sits among competing priorities. Without that shared understanding and commitment, he argues, no methodology will produce results.

Q3. Why does asking questions matter so much?

He believes other people hold the better idea roughly half the time, and the only way to surface it is to ask and to go see the situation firsthand. Questions replace argument with mutual understanding and often reveal problems he was not even considering.

Gregory J. Scaven, Chief Executive Officer, Scaven Enterprises, LLC

Episode summary: Gregory Scaven carries critical thinking and rapid experimentation from a career in high-reliability engineering into the demands of profit and loss leadership.

Q1. What matters more than following a problem-solving tool?

Greg cautions against becoming a slave to any form or tool, insisting the real power lies in the thinking process itself. When young engineers fixate on completing paperwork, he redirects them toward what they actually learned.

Q2. How do the problems faced as an engineer differ from those faced as a business leader?

He calls engineering challenges cause problems, where scientific rationale can explain a failure, and business challenges such as sales shortfalls creative problems, where failure modes cannot simply be switched on and off. Creative problems, he argues, call for fast experimentation across a few promising ideas.

Q3. What does a healthy learning culture look like?

Greg looks for naturally curious teams that are not afraid when an experiment fails and that iterate without waiting for permission. He holds people accountable for follow-through rather than results, drawing on the military idea of the commander’s intent.

Steve Brown, Technology Futurist and Author

Episode summary: Steve Brown urges leaders to move past fear and cost-cutting and treat AI as a collaborative teammate for genuine value creation.

Q1. What does being a futurist actually involve?

Steve is clear that a futurist does not make predictions, which he leaves to fortune tellers. The discipline is examining trends, understanding how they intersect over time, and mapping the possible futures that result.

Q2. How should organizations decide where to apply AI?

He uses a framework he calls possibility and purpose. AI opens an enormous landscape of what is possible, so the real leadership challenge is deciding what not to do and focusing effort where corporate purpose and that possibility space intersect.

Q3. What is AI’s role in the workforce?

He describes three kinds of AI agents: offload agents that handle repetitive work, elevate agents that amplify human capability, and extend agents that let people do things they could not before. That framing turns workforce planning from a zero-sum game into an expansion strategy.

Dr. Melisa Buie, Semiconductor Industry Leader and Author

Episode summary: Melisa Buie shares how a personal struggle with failure led her to a practical framework for freeing yourself from failure’s funk.

Q1. What gap can exist in a person’s own relationship with failure?

Although she was completely comfortable with failure in the laboratory, where experiments routinely do not work, she discovered she was terrified of failing in her personal life. That contradiction troubled her and became the catalyst for her book.

Q2. What is the FREE framework?

FREE stands for Focus, Reflect, Explore, and Engage. The first two steps clarify what actually happened and a person’s role in it, while the last two push toward curiosity and experimentation. It grew from the lean principle of Hansei, self-reflection followed by self-improvement.

Q3. What organizational barrier gets in the way of learning from failure?

She points to psychological safety, drawing on the work of Amy Edmondson and Mark Graban. Leaders often shut down learning through their own behaviors even when they sincerely believe they support it.

Scott Willoughby, Vice President of Program Excellence, Northrop Grumman

Episode summary: Scott Willoughby draws on the James Webb Space Telescope to explain how disciplined teams manage problems where failure is not an option.

Q1. How did the teams manage the complexity of the James Webb Space Telescope?

They broke problems down through systems engineering with one critical rule: do not trust yourself. Everything was done in twos, with NASA and Northrop Grumman building independent models and challenging each other until they reached the same conclusions.

Q2. What can be done when two teams’ models disagree?

He has each team get familiar not only with their own work but with how the other side modeled the problem, since differences often trace to different assumptions or data versions. Much of the technical work, he argues, is getting people to say their assumptions out loud.

Q3. How do you build a learning culture among world-class engineers?

He leads by example, deliberately asking obvious or even wrong questions and echoing back what others say in his own words. That creates what he calls a safe zone where no one has to be right until the end.

Rick Pedersen, Owner, Old Norse Consulting

Episode summary: Rick Pedersen explains why product development demands a fundamentally different approach to problem solving than routine business processes.

Q1. How does product development differ from other business problem-solving?

Rick explains that most business functions are transactional processes that can be documented and repeated, while product development centers on building knowledge to solve problems never encountered before.

Q2. What is a true knowledge gap?

A true knowledge gap exists when an answer cannot simply be looked up or obtained from an expert. Closing it requires building prototypes, running tests, or conducting simulations to create new knowledge.

Q3. How should teams organize product development work?

He advocates shifting from task-oriented project management to organizing work around knowledge gaps, closing them through fast learning cycles. He compares documented knowledge to compound interest, since teams that fail to capture discoveries keep re-solving the same problems.

Jason Trujillo, Vice President of Operational Excellence, Stanley Black & Decker

Episode summary: Jason Trujillo brings an art school sensibility to operational excellence, treating problem-solving as a creative process that depends on constraints and specificity.

Q1. What does art school have to do with operational excellence?

Jason traces his problem-solving approach back to studying kinetic sculpture, where he learned to keep asking what he is looking at, what it means, and what he can do with it. He treats problem-solving as fundamentally a creative process rather than a purely technical one.

Q2. Why do constraints and specificity matter?

He believes constraints fuel creativity in the same way a blank canvas can paralyze an artist, and that a vague charge like fixing the whole company cannot be acted on. His guiding rule is that nobody actually has a general problem, so the real work is getting specific.

Q3. How do you coach someone who is not reaching a goal?

He starts by diagnosing the type of gap. A knowledge gap, where a person wants the goal but does not yet know how to reach it, calls for a very different coaching approach than a motivation gap.

Norbert Majerus, Creative Problem Solver, Norbert Majerus Consulting

Episode summary: Norbert Majerus examines why organizations get trapped in a box of their own making and what frees industrial creativity.

Q1. How does creativity differ from innovation?

Creativity, he explains, is generating new ideas and creating something new. Innovation happens when those ideas are brought to market and generate value. Only a few creative ideas make that leap, but creativity remains essential to all problem-solving.

Q2. What is the biggest barrier to industrial creativity?

Fear stands as the most formidable barrier. He shares nearly being fired by a vice president who refused risky ideas, illustrating how leaders focused on protecting their careers create cultures where people avoid taking chances.

Q3. Why does the physical work environment matter?

He contrasts Google, where the environment changed every fifty steps, with his own workplace of uniform white walls and no personalization. Environment shapes culture, and culture shapes creativity.

Maureen (Moe) Rinkunas, Director of Insights Membership, Rock Health Advisory

Episode summary: Moe Rinkunas explains how trust, psychological safety, and a steady test-and-learn habit allow teams to make progress on complex innovation problems.

Q1. What does it mean to be a snowplow leader?

For Moe, leading innovation means clearing the path rather than directing every move. She removes obstacles and navigates organizational politics so her team has the space to do its best creative work.

Q2. How can testing ideas be made manageable for teams?

She frames decisions in short increments, asking what information a team will need after roughly six weeks to decide whether to continue, pivot, or stop. Pairing each potential solution with the question of what must be true for it to be the right path turns uncertainty into clear next steps.

Q3. Where is the biggest opportunity in healthcare innovation?

She observes that many innovators build point solutions for narrow problems, while the larger opportunity lies in connecting those solutions together. She encourages building integrated experiences that reflect how people actually live with their health.

J. Chris White, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, scmBLOX

Episode summary: J. Chris White explains the difference between systems thinking and systems dynamics, and why it matters for managing supply chains.

Q1. How does systems thinking differ from systems dynamics?

He notes that many people embrace systems thinking through Peter Senge’s work without realizing Senge was a systems dynamicist. Systems thinking appreciates the use of data in decisions, while systems dynamics does the math and simulation that actually generate that data.

Q2. When is systems dynamics most useful?

Chris sees it as one tool in the toolbox, best suited to large, interconnected problems where you need the whole system view. As systems grow complex, the relationships between the parts begin to dominate, which is where the approach shines.

Q3. Why is traditional supply chain thinking too limited?

Most companies track only their immediate suppliers and customers, but COVID showed how interconnected supply chains really are. Using a tree analogy, he argues there is little value in optimizing the leaves when you should have been on a different branch to begin with.

Jim Benson, Inquisitor, Modus Institute

Episode summary: Jim Benson makes the case that visual collaboration builds the confidence that lets teams work well and removes workplace toxicity.

Q1. What does collaboration really mean?

Jim defines it as two or more people working toward a common goal with systems in place that let everyone act with confidence. He argues confidence drives everything in business, much as consumer confidence drives the economy.

Q2. How does visual management change the relationship between a worker and their managers?

He describes a procurement agent who once justified every decision to three layers of management. Once his work was visible in an obeya, managers could apply their expertise strategically when needed rather than criticizing after the fact.

Q3. Do longer work weeks actually help?

He challenges the trend, arguing that knowledge workers often operate at three hundred percent capacity but only twenty-five percent effectiveness. The solution is not more hours but better systems and a clearer definition of work upfront.

Dr. Shannon Flumerfelt, Founder, Charactership Lean Consulting; Endowed Professor of Lean, Oakland University

Episode summary: Shannon Flumerfelt shares a systematic approach to coaching leaders through difficult situations and complex problems.

Q1. How do you begin with a difficult coaching situation?

She first determines whether the challenge is external or internal. External issues like skill gaps are often addressed through coaching, while internal challenges call for a deeper head, heart, and hands analysis of knowledge, disposition, and capability.

Q2. How can people be helped to see a complex problem clearly?

She co-creates an Ishikawa diagram with the client to break down all contributing factors. Mapping the challenge concretely removes emotional drama and enables logical thinking while still respecting people’s perspectives.

Q3. How do you decide where to start when many problems compete?

She keeps prioritization organic and context-dependent, drawing on Hoshin Kanri alignment, quality function deployment, or Pareto analysis. She also uses interrelationship diagrams to find the issues whose connections create the widest ripple of change.

Nelson Repenning, MIT Sloan School of Management, and Don Kieffer, ShiftGear Work Design

Episode summary: Nelson Repenning and Don Kieffer describe dynamic work design and the five principles behind better ways of working.

Q1. What are the five principles of dynamic work design?

The five principles are to solve the right problem, structure for discovery, connect the human chain, regulate for flow, and visualize the work. They were refined over years of teaching and practical application.

Q2. Why does dynamic work design stress solving the right problem?

Drawing on Kahneman’s work on conscious versus automatic thinking, Nelson explains that people revert to automatic processing under pressure. Experienced problem solvers in particular jump to solutions too quickly, bypassing the work of properly defining the problem.

Q3. What does connecting the human chain mean?

Humans excel at processing uncertainty and ambiguity, especially face-to-face. They contrast huddles, where people work through ambiguity together, with rigid handoffs and scripts that cannot handle unique problems.

Melinda Manente, Process Improvement Coach and Facilitator, GBMP Consulting Group

Episode summary: Melinda Manente shares how to build problem-solving cultures that engage employees at every level.

Q1. What does meaningful transformation require?

She argues it takes both a clear vision and a burning platform, a compelling reason for change that motivates people to step out of their comfort zones.

Q2. How should organizations redefine a problem?

She encourages shifting away from focusing only on large, dramatic issues toward addressing smaller daily challenges. That change makes problem solving part of everyone’s daily job and taps into a company’s most valuable resource, its people.

Q3. What role does respect for people play in transformation?

She treats respect for people as the foundation of effective problem solving. Common lean tools like direct observation and 5S become far more impactful when implemented within a framework of genuine respect.

Dr. Greg Jacobson, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder, KaiNexus

Episode summary: Greg Jacobson connects his medical training to psychological safety and the discipline of continuous improvement.

Q1. What drew an emergency physician into continuous improvement?

In 2004, his department chairman handed him Masaaki Imai’s book Kaizen and said, ” You think like this.” As an emergency physician, Greg saw an entire discipline focused on improving systems and recognized how much low-hanging fruit healthcare offered.

Q2. How does a medical background both help and hinder systematic thinking?

Physicians are trained to treat each patient encounter like an experiment, which mirrors lean problem-solving. But the competition required to get through medical training can create fixed mindsets and reduce curiosity, since many doctors are used to being the ones with the answer.

Q3. What is psychological safety?

He defines it as being rewarded for being vulnerable, whether that means admitting you do not know something or challenging a broken process. He has observed that departments where people feel safe to speak up consistently have better outcomes.

Mark Reich, Senior Coach and Chief Engineer of Strategy, Lean Enterprise Institute

Episode summary: Mark Reich explains how Hoshin Kanri builds organizational alignment while developing leaders.

Q1. What is Hoshin Kanri, beyond strategy?

He explains that Hoshin Kanri goes far beyond a strategy presented in a slide deck to the board. It is a management system that sets long-term direction, builds alignment, manages annual execution, and develops people’s capabilities.

Q2. What are the two kinds of alignment in strategy deployment?

Vertical alignment breaks high-level objectives down so everyone owns problems to solve. Horizontal alignment, the harder task, gets different functions working toward shared goals rather than just their own metrics.

Q3. How should leaders handle plans that meet a changing reality?

Citing von Moltke on battle plans, he argues the value lies not in the plan itself but in building the organization’s planning capability. Teams that practice planning together can realign quickly when circumstances shift.

Laurie Harbour, Partner, Wipfli LLP

Episode summary: Laurie Harbour examines the generational gap in manufacturing and how leaders can bridge it.

Q1. What generational gap exists in manufacturing?

She describes how parents in the 1990s and 2000s steered children toward four-year degrees rather than manufacturing, creating a shortage of workers in the thirty-five to forty-five age range that the Great Recession widened.

Q2. What does the newer generation bring to manufacturing?

Younger workers excel with tools like Excel, Power BI, and programming, and they often spot process inefficiencies that veterans overlook. What they lack is the deep process knowledge experienced workers hold.

Q3. How can leaders close the generational gap?

She advises building cross-generational teams where experienced workers share hard-won knowledge and younger staff contribute technological insight. Companies that let generations collaborate rather than compete see lower turnover.

Kevin Tarrant, President, HR Co-Pilot Consulting

Episode summary: Kevin Tarrant brings four decades of human capital experience to the human side of problem-solving.

Q1. What is the human side of problem-solving?

He stresses that problem-solving is more than tools and processes. Team members must trust and respect each other and understand the different strengths each person brings to the work.

Q2. What shift is happening in hiring?

He sees a move toward hiring for competencies rather than specific experience. Competencies like building relationships, resilience, and adaptability transfer across industries, so he encourages job seekers to show how they have applied them.

Q3. What example shows culture under pressure?

When WABCO lost 42 percent of its revenue in the 2008 crisis, the company replaced cash bonuses with stock options and ran stay interviews with critical talent. It retained its key people, which Kevin credits to a culture that valued diverse, outside-the-box thinking.

Ryan McCormack, Director of Operational Readiness and Optimization, The Wawanesa Mutual Company

Episode summary: Ryan McCormack shares how he leads problem solvers and decides when to coach and when to take ownership.

Q1. How do you decide how involved to be in a given problem?

His role shifts between consulting and facilitation depending on the capability of the people who own the problem and the complexity of the issue. He starts by asking questions to understand both before deciding whether to take ownership or develop others.

Q2. What should you look for when building a problem-solving team?

He looks for people with the will and joy for problem-solving, qualities he believes are hard to teach. He rotates members in and out so they carry skills back into the organization, and he measures success by seeing people he developed move into leadership.

Q3. What makes collaboration genuine?

He argues that collaboration needs a shared problem that everyone is desperate to solve, or it becomes artificial. He also notes that including actively resistant people on a team has worked zero percent of the time, and that strong sponsorship is rarer than leaders think.

Krista Smith, Director, Project Management Center of Excellence, Sandia National Laboratories

Episode summary: Krista Smith shares how leaders can show up well for their teams by first taking care of their own inner game.

Q1. What is the inner game of leadership?

She uses the phrase to describe self-care, positive self-talk, and personal preparation. Early in her leadership journey, she recognized she needed tools to manage many challenges while still caring for herself, so she could show up authentically for her team.

Q2. What leadership lesson is hardest to learn?

Learning to be gentle with herself when she makes a mistake. She points to the idea of the second arrow, where people compound their suffering by criticizing themselves for an initial error, and she works to interrupt that negative self-talk.

Q3. How can a leader bring stability to how teams operate?

She builds a management operating system around predictability, managing energy rather than only time, and creating consistent meeting cadences. Those reliable anchor points give her team something steady to rely on through the week.

Jennifer Peterson, Manager of Continuous Improvement, Muscatine Power and Water

Episode summary: Jennifer Peterson describes how she reduces frustration for coworkers through steady process improvement at a utility that never shuts down.

Q1. How do you prioritize problems at a utility?

Because the utility provides critical services and never shuts down, prioritization is essential. Safety concerns come first, followed by reliability issues, as when her team installed special pole wraps to stop squirrels from causing outages.

Q2. How should collaboration be approached?

She prefers having more stakeholders in the room rather than too few, and she prepares by learning about participants beforehand, sometimes through their supervisors. She uses facilitation techniques to make sure quieter voices are heard.

Q3. How can people be helped to take on intimidating problems?

She breaks large problems like safety and reliability into smaller, less intimidating parts. When a problem feels less overwhelming, she finds people are more willing to embrace solutions and consider other perspectives.

David Edelman, Executive Advisor and Senior Fellow, Harvard Business School

Episode summary: David Edelman explains how AI-powered personalization can transform the entire customer experience, not just marketing.

Q1. How does today’s personalization differ from the mass customization of the past?

Mass customization of the 1990s focused on modularity and letting customers select options. Modern AI-powered personalization is proactive, analyzing data to anticipate customer needs and create new value before the customer asks.

Q2. What example shows the payoff of personalization done well?

He points to Sysco, whose app uses customer data to deliver personalized recommendations within milliseconds, even suggesting menu items built on discounted ingredients nearby. That approach helped Sysco grow well above industry averages.

Q3. What should executives who did not grow up with AI do?

He recommends getting their hands dirty with the technology rather than only setting a strategy from a distance. At Aetna, he partnered with a digitally savvy colleague on personalized plan videos, which most members watched and which cut call center volume.

Chuck Wisner, President, Wisner Consulting

Episode summary: Chuck Wisner explains how more conscious conversations lead to better collaboration and better problem-solving.

Q1. What is the conversational bypass?

He describes it as the common habit of jumping straight from telling a story about a problem to taking action, skipping the middle steps of collaboration and creativity. That rush leads to hasty decisions and missed solutions.

Q2. What four elements are worth examining in a conversation?

He points to desires and goals, concerns about the future, authority issues, and standards. Looking at these helps people understand the thinking behind their own perspective and share it more clearly with others.

Q3. What is the real product of a conversation?

He argues that while making a decision feels like the goal, the real product is the learning that occurs. To keep learning central, people have to set aside their judgments and truly listen.

Brian DeVries, Senior Advisor, Lean Fox Solutions

Episode summary: Brian DeVries shares how a clear problem statement and a safe environment build a genuine problem-solving culture.

Q1. How does the nine-box methodology begin?

It begins with what he calls a rally cry, a clear and concise problem statement that the team can return to throughout the process. He recalls a meeting where team members each wrote down the problem and discovered no two descriptions matched.

Q2. When should a problem be broken into smaller pieces?

He watches for triggers, such as a team struggling to measure improvement or an unclear path forward. He compares the approach to personal health goals, where large objectives are reached through smaller daily steps.

Q3. How does a leader build psychological safety?

He recalls his early days as a manufacturing supervisor, when admitting to his team that he did not have all the answers built trust and led to real improvement. He believes leaders should be intentional about making it safe to make mistakes.

Liz Guthridge, Managing Director, Connect Consulting Group

Episode summary: Liz Guthridge applies brain science to leadership, including how and where good ideas actually form.

Q1. Why is traditional group brainstorming worth challenging?

She points to research showing that gathering people around a table to throw ideas at each other is not particularly effective. Our best ideas often arrive during showering, cooking, or walking, when the mind is free to make unexpected connections.

Q2. How should teams generate ideas instead?

She advocates giving people autonomy to think independently, often over thirty-six to seventy-two hours, so they can work when and where they think best. This particularly helps introverts who can feel overwhelmed in group sessions.

Q3. How are physical health and leadership connected?

Drawing on brain-based coaching, she emphasizes that sleep, movement, and diet significantly affect performance. She encourages leaders to block calendar time for reflection and thinking.

Melia Tourangeau, President and Chief Executive Officer, Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra

Episode summary: Melia Tourangeau shares how she led the Pittsburgh Symphony through a financial crisis and a strike.

Q1. What problem came to light soon after new leadership joined the Symphony?

What first looked like a manageable one-million-dollar deficit turned out, on deeper analysis, to be closer to five million dollars a year. As a newcomer in a city where most of the budget depends on charitable giving, the situation was especially complex.

Q2. How do you lead through a musicians’ strike?

A fifty-five-day strike, the Symphony’s first since the 1970s, was one of the hardest periods of her career, and she notes leaders rarely survive such conflicts. Her ability to rebuild relationships and trust afterward is reflected in a successful ten-year tenure.

Q3. How should complex decisions be approached?

Rather than trying to get everyone in one room, she gathers small groups of board members with diverse expertise. That collaborative approach helped her develop solutions such as a new endowment strategy.

Scott Post, Operational Excellence and Lean Leadership Coach, S Post Consulting

Episode summary: Scott Post makes the case that listening and curiosity matter more to problem-solving than rushing to a fix.

Q1. What is a common pitfall in problem-solving?

He points to poorly defined or misunderstood problems. He shared an example where emotional attachment to a product design issue led a team to spend years jumping to solutions without understanding the core problem.

Q2. How much effort should go into understanding the customer?

For product design challenges, he suggests spending eighty percent of the time understanding customer requirements and fundamental needs before moving toward solutions. That understanding makes creating the product far more straightforward.

Q3. Why should problem-solving center on listening?

He believes solutions often already exist within an organization but stay buried under daily firefighting. His role is to quiet the noise and bring different voices together, and he warns that the moment you stop being curious is when problem-solving weakens.

Jason Schulist, Executive Director, Fox Valley Data Exchange

Episode summary: Jason Schulist explains how matching the right tools to the right kind of problem changes what is possible, including in fighting poverty.

Q1. What framework helps categorize problems?

He introduces the Cynefin model, which sorts problems into clear, complicated, complex, and chaotic domains. Different domains call for different approaches, since a manufacturing problem with clear cause and effect is not handled like a shifting community problem.

Q2. How can this thinking apply to poverty in a community?

His team found that eighteen dollars an hour was a stability threshold and identified three factors that helped people escape poverty: some post-secondary education, having or expecting a child, and consistent employment for six to twelve months.

Q3. How can the work on a complex problem like poverty be structured?

He ran twenty-seven parallel experiments rather than betting on one solution. One identified a set of certification programs, the Elite Eight, that consistently led to stable employment above the target wage.

Danyel Bischof-Forsyth, Chief Technology Officer, 7 Brew Coffee

Episode summary: Danyel Bischof-Forsyth shares how she leads technology through the explosive growth of a fast-scaling company.

Q1. How do you manage problems during rapid growth?

With locations multiplying quickly, she combines technological and human systems, including daily stand-up meetings on a Kanban board led by a certified project manager. Team members were skeptical at first, but came to value how quickly the practice surfaces issues.

Q2. How do you decide which decisions need rigorous analysis?

She uses the metaphor of pouring concrete, separating decisions with long-lasting implications from those that allow for experimentation. She weighs system interconnectedness, organizational impact, and reversibility.

Q3. What should be prioritized when building a team?

She looks for high learning agility, knowing team members will handle diverse responsibilities in a fast-paced environment, while also bringing in specific expertise in areas like project management and cybersecurity.

Pete Ruggiero, President and Chief Executive Officer, Crayola

Episode summary: Pete Ruggiero shares how perpetual optimism and a culture that celebrates problems have driven the transformation of an iconic brand.

Q1. Why does perpetual optimism matter in leadership?

Citing Colin Powell’s line that perpetual optimism is a force multiplier, he sees that mindset as central to Crayola’s growth and diversification. It has helped the company expand toward a global audience, since most of the world’s children live outside North America.

Q2. What are the elements of a strong company culture?

He points to five: bias for action, collaboration, celebration of successes, perpetual optimism, and celebrating problems. Making problems visible rather than hiding them has become a cornerstone of how Crayola improves.

Q3. What shaped a leadership journey at Crayola?

He moved from a CPA role at Deloitte into operations, a transition that taught him the value of connecting with employees on the factory floor. He advises aspiring leaders to say yes to opportunities and keep learning.

Jamie Flinchbaugh, Founder, JFlinch (Solo Episode)

Episode summary: In a solo episode, Jamie Flinchbaugh makes the case that visible problem-solving builds stronger teams.

Q1. What leadership mistake hurts a problem-solving culture?

He cautions that leaders often keep their problem-solving process hidden in their heads. As he puts it, you cannot be a role model if nobody sees you do it, and when the work stays invisible, others assume problem-solving is just intuition.

Q2. Why does writing things down matter in problem-solving?

He explains that the act of writing engages different parts of the brain and can break through mental blocks. He encourages people to write down a problem they are stuck on, whether on a whiteboard, paper, or in digital notes.

Q3. How should getting stuck be viewed?

Through his From Stuck to Solved approach, he treats getting stuck as inevitable and even useful, since those moments often precede a breakthrough. He also warns against over-standardizing, which can push teams into autopilot thinking.

Heidi Wachs, Managing Director, Stroz Friedberg

Episode summary: Heidi Wachs shares how to lead problem-solving through the pressure of a cybersecurity crisis.

Q1. What makes a cybersecurity incident hard to manage?

Heidi explains that an incident creates multiple layers of interconnected problems that have to be solved at once under intense pressure. The first priority is understanding what is happening and stopping the immediate threat.

Q2. How do you keep a crisis response coordinated?

She translates among technical teams, legal counsel, and business stakeholders, who are often the most surprised. She also finds the person who quietly gets things done, often the one tracking everything in spreadsheets, regardless of their title.

Q3. How useful are incident response plans?

She has seen a wide gap between polished playbooks and reality, since real incidents rarely follow the script. Like a soccer game that never matches the practice drills, response plans demand flexibility and adaptability.

Daniel Stewart and Peter Stewart, Stewart Leadership

Episode summary: Daniel and Peter Stewart share how trust shapes both how they assess talent and how they solve problems.

Q1. What should you look for when assessing talent?

They look for exceptional competence, genuinely good people who treat clients with empathy and generosity, and the agility to adapt rather than be a one-trick pony. They gather multiple perspectives rather than trusting a single judgment.

Q2. What small signals are worth watching for in a candidate?

Daniel notes that behaviors outside formal interactions, like email communication and scheduling flexibility, reveal how someone may perform under pressure. They also value candidates who can honestly name their real weaknesses.

Q3. How does trust shape problem-solving?

Their level of involvement depends on the trust built with a person, staying closer in newer relationships. Daniel weighs two variables, the technical solution and the level of buy-in, and would rather have strong buy-in for a good solution than a perfect solution with no engagement.

Nick Katko, Owner and President, BMA

Episode summary: Nick Katko explains how lean accounting reconnects financial information to the way a business actually runs.

Q1. What is lean accounting actually?

He describes it as more than debits and credits. It is a system covering both continuous improvement within the accounting function and the transformation of the information used to run the business, so it stays relevant for lean operations.

Q2. Why should lean accounting be treated as a system?

He explains that it brings together people, analysis, decision-making, and operational practices to establish cause-and-effect relationships. Improving financial performance requires operational change, and lean accounting connects the two.

Q3. How should the question of hard versus soft savings be handled?

He avoids the trap of soft savings by focusing on tangible outcomes such as time saved, then exploring how that freed-up time can be used to create real value.

Alex Senchak, Managing Partner, Duarte Pond Investments

Episode summary: Alex Senchak shares how leaders can meet the moment and stay agile when external factors keep shifting.

Q1. What does meeting the moment mean?

He urges leaders to stay flexible rather than rigidly following a pre-set plan. Unexpected external factors increasingly reach every level of an organization, so leaders must be ready to pivot.

Q2. What kind of playbook works in uncertain times?

Rather than trying to anticipate every scenario, he suggests designing clear principles and understanding the organization’s talents and risks. The goal is to be proactive and creative in planning instead of purely reactive.

Q3. What does an early-stage investor look for?

He weighs three factors: the leader, the business idea, and the differentiating technology or angle. Since it is rare to find all three aligned, he tends to favor strong leaders and solid business ideas, because technology and market conditions change fast.

Cheryl Jekiel, Chief Executive Officer and Founder, Lean Leadership Center

Episode summary: Cheryl Jekiel explains how leaders empower teams by shifting problem-solving from their own desk to the people around them.

Q1. What is the CORE leadership development system?

CORE is Cheryl’s system for building coaching skills and helping organizations put strategy into practice. It gives leaders tools to facilitate participation so the responsibility for problem solving shifts from the leader to the team.

Q2. What shift do leaders struggle with most?

She finds the hardest transition is moving from a directive leadership style to a participatory one. While a few leaders naturally empower their teams, most need training and ongoing support to make that change stick.

Q3. How should leaders be developed over time?

She compares leadership development to athletic drills, where even skilled athletes keep practicing the basics. Her program has grown from a two-day session into a year-long development system that continues as leaders progress.

Crystal Y. Davis, Chief Executive Officer, The Lean Coach, Inc.

Episode summary: Crystal Y. Davis shares what it takes to guide leaders and organizations through genuine cultural change.

Q1. What is hardest about cultural change work?

The most difficult part is helping leaders see that their own role must evolve to support cultural transformation. She points to a facility that appeared successful but quickly backslid once it lacked sustained management routines and accountability.

Q2. How should problem-solving be approached with clients?

She uses a dual approach, combining established methodologies with curiosity-driven exploration, and tailors it to each leader. Because coaching depends on permission and trust, getting leaders to fully engage is often the hardest part of the job.

Q3. What structured method supports problem-solving?

She continues to use the A3 process even after years of experience. It gives her clarity, helps her see the whole picture, and surfaces gaps in a problem that might otherwise be missed.

Jacob Stoller, Founder, Conversation Builders

Episode summary: Jacob Stoller explains why organizations hide their problems and how rethinking productivity brings those problems to light.

Q1. How is productivity commonly misunderstood?

He notes that people often reduce productivity to a single metric like output per worker. In his book Productivity Reimagined, he redefines it to weigh quality alongside quantity, since more output means little if it comes at the cost of quality.

Q2. Why do organizations struggle to deal with their problems?

He argues that top-down hierarchies discourage the open discussion of problems and that issues that cross departments get managed in separate pieces. Solving them takes a culture of trust where people can raise problems without fear.

Q3. How do conflicting KPIs get in the way?

He gives the example of a mining company where the operations team’s equipment availability target clashed with the maintenance team’s goal of preventing breakdowns. He advocates a value stream approach so all stakeholders work toward a common objective.

Dr. Wendy Smith, Professor, University of Delaware

Episode summary: Wendy Smith makes the case that embracing paradox, rather than choosing between competing demands, leads to more creative solutions.

Q1. What is both/and thinking?

Wendy explains that people constantly face tensions and competing demands, which are usually framed as either/or choices. She argues that this framing limits creativity, and that a both/and approach, which embraces the tension, leads to more innovative and sustainable solutions.

Q2. Why does the framing of a question matter?

She finds that framing significantly shapes how a problem is perceived. Instead of asking whether to focus on quality or quantity, asking how to achieve both opens up a more holistic understanding and new avenues for solutions.

Q3. What is the ABCD framework?

Drawn from her book, the ABCD framework outlines four areas for cultivating a both/and mindset: assumptions, or how we think; boundaries, or the structures we create; comfort, or how we feel; and dynamics, or the practices we implement.

Russell Watkins, Co-Founder, Sempai

Episode summary: Russell Watkins explains how matching the right approach to the right type of problem makes lean problem-solving effective.

Q1. What is essential to solving a problem well?

He stresses understanding which type of problem you are facing. Drawing on Art Smalley’s four types of problems, he explains that troubleshooting, gaps from standard, target conditions, and open-ended problems each call for a different approach and mindset.

Q2. How does troubleshooting differ from a gap from standard?

Troubleshooting deals with urgent, unexpected issues that demand a structured approach to diagnose and resolve quickly without major disruption. A gap from standard is about identifying where performance has deviated from an established norm and restoring it.

Q3. Where can inspiration for problem-solving come from?

He points to an unexpected source, his love of movies. He finds that the narrative arcs of films often mirror the challenges and triumphs of business, offering lessons in perseverance and creativity.

Patrick Elwer, Senior Principal Engineer, Intel Corporation

Episode summary: Patrick Elwer shares how a large engineering organization operationalizes structured problem-solving at scale.

Q1. Where should you begin when solving a problem?

He starts with a deep understanding of the current state and a clear articulation of the problem, and he defines what success looks like from the outset. He expects the problem statement itself to evolve as more information is gathered.

Q2. How do you keep problem-solving from dragging on?

In a technical environment where precision is prized, he sets an initial target, such as cutting defects by half, rather than chasing an unattainable ideal. That keeps the work moving and the learning continuous.

Q3. How does Intel handle problem-solving across global teams?

Patrick describes solving problems in pairs, pairing a mentor focused on the process with the owner of the problem. The approach improves resolution and builds problem-solving skill across the organization.

Art Byrne, Retired Chief Executive Officer, The Wiremold Company

Episode summary: Art Byrne reflects on decades of lean transformation and what it takes to lead one well.

Q1. What is lean really?

He is firm that lean is not merely a cost-reduction strategy. He describes it as a comprehensive, strategic approach to running a business better than the competition, a theme he develops in The Lean Turnaround Answer Book.

Q2. What example shows the role of leadership in transformation?

At Wiremold, he challenged a team to cut a machine changeover from fourteen hours to under ten minutes, and through kaizen, they reached six minutes. He argues that challenging teams with seemingly impossible goals produces extraordinary results and deep buy-in.

Q3. How does lean problem-solving contrast with the traditional approach?

Where the traditional approach favors lengthy analysis and planning, Art favors immediate, hands-on experimentation and iteration. Empowering employees to stop the line and solve problems on the spot builds a culture of continuous improvement.

Frank L. Douglas, Chief Executive Officer, Safe Haven Dialogues

Episode summary: Frank L. Douglas shares a reframing methodology for turning experiences of discrimination into shared solutions.

Q1. What is the reframing methodology for addressing discrimination?

Drawn from his book Until You Walk in My Shoes, it shifts the focus from individual grievance toward solutions that benefit the broader team. He traces it to his own experience of discrimination at Xerox, where he chose to focus on getting assigned to a good project.

Q2. How can collaborative problem-solving work during a major merger?

Tasked with merging pipelines and downsizing across merging pharmaceutical companies, he brought the heads of research together to set evaluation criteria jointly. Shared criteria made the decisions fair and transparent.

Q3. How should organizations examine their culture?

He looks at culture through the lenses of equity, meaning values and principles, and inclusion, meaning behaviors and actions. He also distinguishes the aspirational culture, the actual culture, and the experienced culture.

Lee Moore, Director of Foundry and Fab Materials, Qorvo

Episode summary: Lee Moore shares how he builds a culture of proactive problem solvers in a demanding technical organization.

Q1. How should collaboration on a problem be approached?

He starts by clearly identifying the problem, understanding who it affects, and determining who has the influence to drive a solution. He stresses that solid data, not just complaints, should guide decisions and the allocation of resources.

Q2. How can roles on a problem-solving team be clarified?

He uses a RACI matrix to make responsibilities explicit, which is especially helpful as he integrates newer employees into problem-solving work and assesses their skills and mindsets.

Q3. How do you coach someone resistant to feedback?

He leans on empathy, taking time to understand a person’s past coaching experiences and adapting his approach to their individual needs and learning style.

W. Henry Yaeger, Managing Principal, Banner Group LLC

Episode summary: W. Henry Yaeger shares how to weigh commitment and risk when deciding whether to pursue a new opportunity.

Q1. How do you decide whether to fully commit to an opportunity?

He assesses the risks and deliberately embraces the worst-case scenario before making a significant commitment. Facing the downside honestly is central to his decision-making.

Q2. What is portfolio thinking?

He suggests managing life’s opportunities the way one manages a financial portfolio, balancing risk across different stages of life and being ready to adapt or defer opportunities based on current circumstances and long-term goals.

Q3. How should major decisions be made?

He pairs intuitive judgment with thorough research, tapping personal instinct while also seeking advice from more experienced people and drawing on available information.

Jamie Flinchbaugh, Founder, JFlinch (Reflections Episode)

Episode summary: In a reflective episode, Jamie Flinchbaugh shares lessons gathered across the podcast’s many conversations.

Q1. What matters most in problem-solving?

He returns to the idea that understanding fundamental first principles matters more than mastering numerous methods. A firm grasp of principles lets people adapt and select their own methods effectively.

Q2. What is the nature of problem-solving?

He likens it to breathing, a natural and ongoing human activity that nonetheless always offers more to learn and ways to improve deliberately. He also argues it spans far more than formal methods, reaching into strategic thinking and decision-making.

Q3. Whose work is highlighted in this reflections episode?

He honors the late Daniel Kahneman, noting how Thinking, Fast and Slow has influenced economics, management theory, and everyday practice, and he encourages listeners to explore it.

Jeff Grimshaw, Principal, MGStrategy

Episode summary: Jeff Grimshaw explains how organizations can cultivate agile cultures by treating calculated risk as part of the work.

Q1. What are the two kinds of organizational space?

He separates play it safe spaces, where strict adherence to regulations and standards is essential, such as safety and quality, from go for great environments, where innovation and calculated risk can drive growth.

Q2. What gets in the way of a more agile culture?

He points to the natural human tendency to avoid risk out of fear of failure or retribution. Building a culture that supports calculated risk and learns from every outcome is essential to becoming more agile.

Q3. What tool helps with learning from outcomes?

He values retrospectives, or after-action reviews, as a way to learn from results, whether they look like successes or failures, which helps counter the biases that distort decision-making.

Cheryl Stokes, Chief Executive Officer, CNEXT

Episode summary: Cheryl Stokes shares what inclusive leadership looks like and why it drives engagement.

Q1. What is inclusion?

She describes it as the intentional creation of an environment where all individuals can contribute productively. It requires moving beyond simply assembling a diverse group toward ensuring genuine participation and listening.

Q2. What traits define an inclusive leader?

She points to humility, self-awareness, curiosity about others, cultural intelligence, the ability to collaborate, and a visible commitment to inclusion. Together, these let a leader unlock a team’s full potential.

Q3. How does inclusion connect to organizational results?

She frames diversity as a fact and inclusion as an act, one that creates a sense of belonging. That belonging drives the engagement linked to lower turnover and higher productivity.

Rebecca Snelling, Owner, RS Consulting

Episode summary: Rebecca Snelling shares how inclusive collaboration and a lean team strengthen problem-solving.

Q1. Why do outside perspectives matter in problem-solving?

She shares how a painter unrelated to a construction project offered a breakthrough solution during a planning session. The story illustrates the value of external perspectives and of welcoming half-formed ideas that can spark innovation.

Q2. How do you balance inclusion with effectiveness?

She describes touching the outside of a problem, drawing in the right perspectives without overcrowding the work. She uses pre-discussions and smaller breakout groups, and warns against involving so many people that a team loses agility.

Q3. How should speed and thoroughness be balanced?

She notes the pendulum tends to swing between extremes, and she looks for a middle ground that maximizes efficiency without sacrificing quality.

Sarah Tilkens, Senior Manager of Operational Excellence, GE Healthcare; Chief Executive Officer and Founder, The KPI Lab

Episode summary: Sarah Tilkens blends analytical rigor with human insight to help teams solve problems.

Q1. How should identifying a problem be approached?

She advocates a methodical approach to problem identification that prioritizes empathy and deep listening. A clear understanding of the problem comes before any move toward solutions.

Q2. How should KPIs be understood?

She sees KPIs not just as metrics but as narratives, stories that guide and motivate teams toward continuous improvement and innovation.

Q3. What does effective problem-solving require?

She describes it as blending analytical rigor with a genuine understanding of human behavior and team dynamics, supported by curiosity, a learner’s mindset, and leaders who let teams experiment and learn from failure.

Durward Sobek, Vice Provost, Montana State University-Bozeman

Episode summary: Durward Sobek explores how to bring creativity to ill-defined and open-ended problems.

Q1. How should open-ended problems be approached?

He encourages a wide lens that embraces the complexity and ambiguity of real-world issues. Generating a diverse range of ideas, rather than following a linear method, is key to uncovering novel solutions.

Q2. What role does empathy play in open-ended problems?

He treats empathy as central to understanding user needs. By actively listening and observing, innovators gain deeper insight into the problem and reach more user-centered solutions.

Q3. Why does diversity of thought matter?

He finds that bringing together people with different backgrounds and areas of expertise enriches the creative process and leads to more comprehensive solutions.

Joshua Ehrig, Professor of Practice, Lehigh University

Episode summary: Joshua Ehrig shares how root cause focus and experimentation support problem-solving in entrepreneurship.

Q1. Where should problem-solving begin?

He emphasizes identifying the root cause, starting with a deep understanding of the problem before jumping to solutions. That means asking the right questions and combining analytical tools with empathy.

Q2. How do you handle several problems at once?

He advises prioritizing based on impact and urgency, weighing the significance of each problem against the organization’s overall goals.

Q3. What role does experimentation play in problem-solving?

He champions adopting and integrating new problem-solving techniques, with a mindset of continuous learning. Experimenting with different methods helps people discover what works best in a given situation.

Andrea Jones, Founder, AJC

Episode summary: Andrea Jones shares how her Executeagility framework brings structure and clarity to project management.

Q1. What prompted the creation of the Executeagility framework?

Early in her career, she struggled with a lack of clear expectations and frameworks in project management, including a pivotal moment when the absence of structure created significant challenges. Executeagility grew out of that experience to provide clarity and structure.

Q2. How should prioritization be approached?

Her framework involves listing all opportunities, scoring them against criteria that matter to the business today, and reassessing them regularly. This keeps the most important work moving promptly.

Q3. How can Agile be adapted for mid-market companies?

She runs sprints with cross-functional teams whose members are not fully dedicated to a single project. The approach respects the resource constraints of mid-market companies while keeping the responsiveness of Agile.

Frank Nestore, Vice President, Mathtech

Episode summary: Frank Nestore shares how problem-solving works inside government agencies and the frameworks that support it.

Q1. How does problem-solving in government differ from the private sector?

Frank points to the need to prioritize problems in complex and often politically charged environments. He weighs the urgency of each problem against the resources available, a balancing act he has refined over the years.

Q2. How can long-standing operational issues be addressed?

He has led agencies from manual, paper-based processes to automated systems, which means managing change in large and sometimes resistant organizations. He relies on stakeholder engagement, transparent communication, and phased implementation.

Q3. What decision-making framework helps in government?

He adapts the OODA Loop, originally developed for military strategy, to the public sector. It supports the rapid, responsive decision-making that dynamic environments demand.

Steve Spear, Founder, See to Solve LLC; Senior Lecturer, MIT Sloan School of Management

Episode summary: Steve Spear shares how organizations can be wired for collective greatness through better problem-solving.

Q1. What is the focus of the book Wiring the Winning Organization?

Wiring the Winning Organization centers on liberating an organization’s collective greatness through what he calls slowification, simplification, and amplification. The ideas draw on his study of the Toyota Production System and his teaching at MIT.

Q2. What is intentional problem solving?

He stresses identifying and addressing critical moments thoughtfully rather than reacting at random. That deliberate focus is what makes solutions sustainable and effective.

Q3. What makes a solution sustainable as conditions change?

He advocates for adaptable solutions that can evolve as scenarios change, and he treats every challenge as an opportunity for individual and organizational growth.

Mel Zehnpfennig, Managing Partner, Dynamic Improvement Group

Episode summary: Mel Zehnpfennig shares a two-phase approach to leading change and solving problems in manufacturing.

Q1. What are the two phases of an effective problem-solving approach?

He first works to comprehensively understand the problem from the client’s perspective so that everyone shares the same view. He then assembles a diverse, cross-functional team that includes key stakeholders such as plant managers and operators.

Q2. How do you handle several problems at once?

He prioritizes issues by their impact and the effort required to resolve them. He values quick wins for the way they build team confidence and sustain momentum.

Q3. How has the role of data changed in manufacturing problem-solving?

He sees data as increasingly central to problem-solving. Historical data helps establish baselines and uncover root causes, a shift away from more traditional methods.

John McCullough, Director of Continuous Improvement, Sharp Services

Episode summary: John McCullough shares a pragmatic approach to problem-solving drawn from the pharmaceutical industry.

Q1. What makes a problem worth solving?

He emphasizes clearly defining a manageable problem, ideally supported by data, so that it becomes measurable and actionable. He also stresses understanding the problem’s depth to find actionable root causes while avoiding irrelevant details.

Q2. How should potential solutions be explored?

He favors a brainstorming environment where all ideas are welcomed, then tests promising solutions through experiments. Learning from both successes and failures is central to his approach.

Q3. What can be learned from poorly executed problem-solving?

He treats missteps as instructive, using them to refine his approaches and strategies. He also emphasizes finding the right balance between speed and thoroughness.

Dr. Zach Zacharia, Associate Professor and Director of the Center for Supply Chain Research, Lehigh University

Episode summary: Dr. Zach Zacharia shares how intuition, adaptability, and culture support effective problem solving.

Q1. What role does intuition play in problem-solving?

He values intuition and fosters an environment where it is welcomed. He treats it as a useful data point that, combined with logical reasoning, gives a fuller picture, and he encourages leaders to validate intuitions through direct observation.

Q2. How do you decide what role to play in a given situation?

He stresses knowing when to take charge, delegate, sponsor, or coach. The decision should be flexible and dependent on the specific scenario.

Q3. How do you balance speed and thoroughness?

He believes quick decision-making is often necessary but should not come at the expense of depth and quality. Holding that balance matters in both personal and professional settings.

Pam Klyn, Executive Vice President of Corporate Relations and Sustainability, Whirlpool Corporation

Episode summary: Pam Klyn shares how intuition, timing, and culture shape problem-solving across an engineering career.

Q1. How can intuition guide a leader through uncertainty?

She describes tapping into intuition as something of an art, one that has often guided her through moments of uncertainty across her work in engineering, product development, and innovation.

Q2. How should decision-making roles be approached?

She emphasizes knowing when to take the reins and when to trust others with responsibility, and she points to the importance of timing when balancing swift decisions with thoroughness.

Q3. How should coaching be approached?

Drawing on more than twenty years of experience, she evaluates those she mentors by understanding their skills, capabilities, and mindset, reflecting a deep commitment to nurturing talent.

Cindy Hinds, Global Director of Enterprise Excellence, A.O. Smith

Episode summary: Cindy Hinds shares how coaching, done well, becomes a force for continuous improvement.

Q1. What is at the heart of good coaching?

She highlights open-ended questioning, which empowers individuals to find their own solutions and make their own decisions. She also distinguishes coaching from mentoring and instructing, each with its own purpose.

Q2. What is a practical technique for coaching?

She counts to ten silently before responding, giving the person being coached ample space and time to process and reflect. She focuses on the person, not just the problem.

Q3. How can coaching spread across a large organization?

She uses a multi-pronged approach, training key leaders, supervisory team members, and continuous improvement leaders so that the coaching ethos permeates the whole organization.

Andy Bailey, Founder, Petra Coach

Episode summary: Andy Bailey shares how purpose and a focus on solutions help leaders guide their teams.

Q1. Why do diverse perspectives matter?

He believes that harnessing a variety of viewpoints leads to richer understanding and more holistic solutions. Drawing out those perspectives is part of how he approaches the work.

Q2. What truly motivates a team?

He emphasizes the power of purpose and the importance of aligning individuals and organizations with a greater mission. Recognizing growth and setting clear expectations matter, as does a purpose that reaches beyond personal ambition.

Q3. What is the parking lot strategy?

It is a tangible method for visualizing and prioritizing problems. The point is to stay solution-focused rather than becoming problem-obsessed.

Lorenzo Gutierrez, Director of Enterprise Excellence, Sandia National Laboratories

Episode summary: Lorenzo Gutierrez shares how a learning mindset, intuition, and coaching come together in his approach.

Q1. What does a learning approach to problem-solving look like?

He emphasizes a learning approach in which both failures and successes offer valuable lessons. For him, the work is not just about finding a solution but about understanding the nuances of the issue and applying what is learned to future challenges.

Q2. How can intuition and data work together?

He advocates a balanced approach that integrates intuitive thinking with data-driven analysis. He sees intuition as a crucial data point and encourages leaders to validate it through direct observation rather than following gut feelings blindly.

Q3. What belief should ground a coaching relationship?

He starts from the conviction that the person he is coaching is naturally creative, resourceful, and whole. He then crafts powerful questions designed to lead them to their own answers, adapting to each individual or team.

Ron Pereira, Co-Founder and Continuous Improvement Leader

Episode summary: Ron Pereira shares why the human side of teamwork matters more than any single method.

Q1. How can individual differences strengthen a team?

He explains that individual differences can be a company’s greatest asset when leveraged properly. He and Jamie both stress setting aside ego in favor of collective success.

Q2. What does it mean to have a coach be a coach?

The phrase captures the importance of empowering others to solve problems rather than taking over. He reflects on his early-career tendency to do tasks himself, which he came to see as neither scalable nor efficient.

Q3. What is at the core of good leadership?

He returns to his late father’s lifelong advice that it is all about people. Trust, comfort, and authentic human interaction matter more than any specific method.

Elisabeth Swan, Co-Founder, Just-in-Time Cafe

Episode summary: Elisabeth Swan shares how collaboration, role clarity, and open communication strengthen problem-solving.

Q1. What does research suggest about how ideas flow?

She has found that people often do not do their best thinking at work, so it helps to give them time and space for ideation on their own. Team members can then come together to expand on innovative solutions.

Q2. What story illustrates the value of event-driven roles?

She describes work with Starwood Hotels and Marriott, where a shift in problem-solving roles produced a lasting improvement in workplace safety. She favors event-driven roles that focus on the immediate situation rather than rigid job titles.

Q3. How can blind spots be surfaced?

She relies on one-on-one conversations to uncover unspoken concerns, and she describes a fishbowl approach that brings difficult topics into open discussion to build a culture of transparency.

Justin Max, Founder, Spark DSG

Episode summary: Justin Max shares how a defined process helped him scale his agency and solve client problems.

Q1. What is the IDEAS process?

IDEAS stands for Initiate, Discover, Execute, Assess, and Support. He created it to address process gaps at Spark DSG, where work had become too custom and poorly documented.

Q2. How can a defined process change a founder’s role?

It helped him move from practitioner to leader and get out of the weeds of the firm’s work, giving him a way to scale the business rather than handling every engagement personally.

Q3. Where does most client problem-solving happen?

Much of it takes place in the Discover phase, understanding the client and their needs. He also credits a culture where people are not afraid to try things.

Jim Huntzinger, Founder and President, Lean Frontiers

Episode summary: Jim Huntzinger traces the history of problem-solving methods and how Lean techniques connect.

Q1. How have problem-solving techniques evolved over time?

He traces a path from the World War II era Training Within Industry program, through the genesis of the Toyota Production System, into modern Lean and Kaizen practice. These techniques have been continuously adapted to the changing needs of organizations.

Q2. How do the various Lean techniques relate to one another?

He argues that elements such as Training Within Industry, Kata, and coaching are not independent. They form an intertwined framework within the broader Lean ecosystem, and understanding that connection is key to applying them well.

Q3. What is the vision for Lean Frontiers?

He is committed to nurturing and promoting Lean methodologies on a global scale, positioning Lean Frontiers as a resource for practitioners around the world.

Mark Graban, Author and Speaker on Continuous Improvement

Episode summary: Mark Graban shares how risk analysis and an understanding of mistakes strengthen problem-solving.

Q1. How is failure modes and effects analysis used?

He uses FMEA to identify potential failures in a system, product, or process by weighing the likelihood, severity, and detectability of a mistake. Despite its subjective nature, it helps organizations prioritize and manage risk.

Q2. When does the minimum viable product approach fit, and when does it not?

He suggests an MVP approach can suit low-risk ventures, but it may not fit high-stakes industries such as banking or healthcare, where the cost of failure is extraordinarily high.

Q3. How can mistakes be categorized?

Citing Amy Edmondson, he describes three types: mistakes that should not occur in routine processes, mistakes that are unanticipated due to differing circumstances, and mistakes at the frontiers of innovation where uncertainty is high. Distinguishing among them helps organizations learn.

Andy Carlino, Problem-Solving Advisor and Coach

Episode summary: In the podcast’s first episode, Andy Carlino explores precise language and tiered structures for problem-solving.

Q1. What makes a strong problem statement?

He stresses that without a clear problem statement, efforts to solve problems often fall short. A strong statement defines not only what is wrong but also the problem’s impact and the value of resolving it, and it should remain fluid as new information emerges.

Q2. Should everyone be expected to solve complex problems?

He challenges that assumption. While not everyone has the capability to master complex problem-solving, all members of an organization can contribute within a structure that is tiered to match different degrees of complexity.

Q3. What is ideal state thinking?

It involves envisioning the best possible outcome in order to expose barriers and surface additional problems, which leads to progressive future states. Andy finds it adds inspiration and motivation to a challenging process.