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People Solve Problems: Daily Summaries Delivered
by Jamie Flinchbaugh
People Solve Problems is an engaging new podcast hosted by Jamie Flinchbaugh, the author of the book with the same title. In this insightful series, Jamie interviews a diverse array of guests – from thought leaders and authors to practitioners and everyday individuals, delving into their unique perspectives on problem solving. This compact, interview-style podcast offers valuable insights into what constitutes effective problem-solving, the challenges faced in the process, and the strategies employed. It aims to equip listeners with a wealth of ideas, best practices, and approaches to enhance their problem-solving skills. Stay tuned for the upcoming episodes by clicking the follow button and signing up today.
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- 4 days ago22 min
Matt Zayko, Head of Global Lean Office, GE HealthCare: Why Change Fails After It Works
On this episode of People Solve Problems, host Jamie Flinchbaugh welcomes Matt Zayko, Senior VP and Head of the Global Lean Office at GE HealthCare. Matt brings one of the broadest lean backgrounds in the field, and the conversation traces how that breadth shaped his thinking about what makes change actually last. Matt describes his lean origin story as being in the right place at the right time. As a graduate student in industrial engineering at the University of Michigan in the early 1990s, his advisor connected him with John Shook, who had just arrived from Toyota. Surrounded by thinkers like Jeff Liker, Al Ward, and Durward Sobek, Matt studied how Toyota developed products in half the time and with better quality, then applied that learning in industry roles at Chrysler, Delphi, and Pall under Danaher. He later spent fifteen years with the Lean Enterprise Institute, including work on Jim Morgan's lean product and process development team, before joining GE in 2021 and ultimately leading lean for GE HealthCare. Jamie notes a shared concern from their parallel paths: too many practitioners lock in what they learned early and apply it as dogma. Matt agrees, calling the confusion of principles with dogma one of the lean community's real failure modes. Asked about a particularly difficult problem, Matt goes straight to a lesson from his early career. Being technically right, he explains, is only half right. As a young engineer, he was convinced his solution was correct, and on paper it was. But the same idea had been proposed before and never sustained, so people had lost trust that anything would stick. The deeper insight followed: the problem is rarely improving; it is sustaining. Ideas are often only 80% right, and without a management system that catches the remaining 20%, the old problems return, and the people who invested in the change lose hope. Matt calls this the go slow to go fast approach, and he argues the sustainment side of change still gets far less attention than it deserves. The conversation then turns to breaking down problems in complex environments like product development and healthcare, where feedback arrives slowly, and the consequences of decisions may not be felt for months. Matt's advice is to recreate the gemba. Because a development program is a learning cycle rather than a repeating system, teams have to deliberately reconstruct how the work really happened on something real, such as a recently launched product. Visualizing that work, he says, is one of the most powerful starting points available, and from there a team can diagnose, set a target condition, and run the play again. On collaboration, Matt is direct: problem solving is a team sport. He credits GE's consistent problem-solving process as a standard that lets everyone read a problem the same way, but he stresses that the paper only matters if people build it together. When colleagues see their fingerprints on the document, ownership replaces resistance, and implementation moves fast. Matt closes with what inspires him about GE HealthCare: proof that a company more than 125 years old can transform. If it can be turned around there, he says, it can be turned around anywhere, and the lean community needs more examples like it. Learn more about Matt's work at www.gehealthcare.com, connect with him on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/matt-zayko-b3522811, and find his book, The Power of Process: A Story of Innovative Lean Process Development, on Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/dp/0367690306.
- 2 weeks ago26 min
Bob Rogers, Chairman, BRC Imagination Arts: Why Your Message Is the Wrong Place to Start
On this episode of People Solve Problems, host Jamie Flinchbaugh welcomes Bob Rogers, Founder and Chairman of BRC Imagination Arts and author of the new book Deep Story: A Complete Guide to Creating Transformational Visitor Attractions. Bob has spent five decades building visitor experiences for some of the world's best-known brands and museums, work that has earned more than five hundred international awards. It started somewhere smaller. At eighteen, he performed magic in the Magic Shop at Disneyland, where the job was to amaze people and then sell them the trick while they were still amazed. The lesson that stuck came after a customer bought a trick, read the instructions, and returned to expose him. A senior magician he admired told him the shop was not a temple built to display his skill. People came not to admire him, but hoping he would help them find some magic in themselves. Bob has treated that ever since as the foundation of selling, of hospitality, and of any attempt to communicate. This is where he believes most business communication goes wrong. Organizations decide what they want to say and build outward from the message, but wanting to say something does not create anyone's desire to hear it. Deep story runs the other direction. You look far into the audience for an emotional truth that already moves them, and far into the brand for the same thing, and the part people miss is that you are not looking for two triggers. You want the one that already exists in both. He frames it with a formula he admits sounds silly for creative work. An audience, A, enters a triangle, the delta symbol of change, and comes out as A prime. A prime minus A is the whole assignment, and that difference is almost always a change of heart, not a change in what people know. The Johnnie Walker experience in Edinburgh shows what that looks like in practice. It runs nine stories, and most guests arrive believing they do not like whiskey. Rather than teaching them the correct way to drink it, the experience asks what flavors they enjoy and builds a first cocktail to match. Bob reports net promoter scores in the low to mid eighties and a brand conversion score of ninety-one. Bartenders are trained never to push their own tastes. When the Milwaukee Brewers wanted an experience honoring founder Bud Selig, the team passed over his complicated public record for something smaller. Selig fell in love with baseball because his mother took him to games, which is how much of the crowd came to the sport too. That, Bob says, is the trigger you cannot manufacture, only find. For listeners whose reach extends to rearranging conference room chairs rather than commissioning a building, Bob suggests finding someone who will guide the process rather than decorate it, and starting with the heart rather than the technology. Fifty years have convinced him that people settle on emotion first and arrange the facts to fit afterward. To learn more about Bob's work, visit BRC Imagination Arts Connect with him on LinkedIn You can also follow BRC Imagination Arts on LinkedIn and Instagram, and find the book at deep-story.com.
- Jul 22, 202619 min
Jamie Flinchbaugh, Solo Episode: Why Pulling Big Levers Rarely Solves Big Problems
In this episode of People Solve Problems, Jamie Flinchbaugh steps up to the microphone without a guest to talk about a pattern he keeps seeing in organizations: leaders trying to solve big problems by pulling big levers. Whether the problem shows up first and the lever follows, or the lever is pulled in hopes of solving something, Jamie states the result is usually the same. The connection between cause and effect gets lost. Jamie starts with a distinction that frames the whole episode. Most big problems are not really single problems at all. A budget problem, he explains, is actually a thousand small budget problems: overspending here, under-earning there, all adding up to something that looks like one giant issue. That aggregate is a theme, not a problem, and themes cannot be solved with one sweeping move. Real progress comes from understanding the details underneath. The first big lever Jamie examines is AI, a topic he recently explored in his blog article titled “AI Fragility: Why I’m Not Pro-AI or Anti-AI, but Pro-Thoughtfulness.” He uses AI regularly and never presents its work as his own, but he sees organizations rushing into adoption without a clear problem statement. When he asks what problem an AI strategy is meant to solve, the honest answer is often fear of missing out. He points to Starbucks pulling out an inventory control AI after nine months of building, deploying, and training as an example of what happens when the lever comes before the problem. His counsel is reassuring: it is very hard to be truly left behind, the tools keep improving, and there is plenty of time to catch up. What matters is being specific about what each deployment is meant to accomplish and whether you can evaluate the result. The second lever is organizational design. Jamie offers two truths that apply every time. First, an org change is never the only way to solve a problem; process design, culture and behaviors, or new capabilities can usually address the same issue, and often better. Second, every org design creates new problems. He calls it the shell game: waste gets moved around rather than removed. Solid lines on an org chart do not equal control, and leadership and culture still have to do the real work after the boxes move. The third lever is the return-to-office policy. Jamie describes it as a generic solution to a generically defined problem, usually labeled culture. Bringing people back may make culture easier to observe, but it does not fix it. When employees commute in only to sit through a full day of video meetings, the experience undermines the policy. He points to the book “The Year Without Pants” as an example of a fully remote company that was deliberate about how people spent time together in person. Jamie closes with three questions worth asking before any big lever gets pulled: What problem are you fundamentally trying to solve? Are there other pathways to that result? What new problems will this solution create? The details, he reminds us, are where the work is done and where the results are found. Read Jamie's AI Fragility article at https://www.jflinch.com/ai-fragility-why-im-not-pro-ai-or-anti-ai-but-pro-thoughtfulness/ and learn more about his work at https://www.jflinch.com. Check out the book Jamie was referencing in this episode
- Jul 8, 202623 min
Renee Kaspar of Renee Kaspar Labs: The Skill That Keeps You Steady When Everything Changes
On this episode of People Solve Problems, host Jamie Flinchbaugh welcomes Renee Kaspar, Author and Workplace Strategist at Renee Kaspar Labs. A thirty-year veteran of human resources and the author of the forthcoming book HR Confidential, Renee has spent her career in the rooms where the most significant decisions about people get made. She joins Jamie to talk about what she calls The Great Transition, the period we are all living through, in which the foundations of work are shifting beneath our feet. Renee describes The Great Transition as a systems change rather than a single event. When one part of the system shifts because of AI, she explains, everything connected to it shifts too, which is why changing work also means rethinking education, hiring, pay, benefits, and how performance is measured. She likens the experience to raising a child, terrifying and constantly changing, with one crucial difference: a new parent has some kind of roadmap, and right now, no one does. To navigate a system in motion, she suggests finding an anchor and working outward from it, asking what has to move freely for that anchor to reach its next stage. Much of the conversation circles around agency, and Renee is candid about what its absence feels like. Lost agency, she says, shows up as anxiety, fear, burnout, and a loss of trust, the sense that control over one's own way of being has slipped away. She traces part of that to a vanished kind of stability, the era when a single employer could anchor an entire career. Drawing on a conversation she had just before the interview, Renee shares an idea that clearly moved her: agency is learned, not given. It comes from quieting the fear, looking inward to understand your own value, and knowing what you can carry with you from one place to the next. Renee and Jamie examine how this fear varies across generations, and she is careful to say that every group is anxious for its own reasons. She sees a younger generation entering an uncertain world without a playbook their parents can hand down, a middle generation exhausted and worried about whether the next rung on the ladder will still exist, and her own peers more willing to embrace change yet uneasy about ageism. Understanding those reasons, Jamie notes, is itself a step toward reclaiming agency. On how to practice agency, Renee points to self-advocacy, resilience, and curiosity, the kind of steady learning that builds confidence to face the next challenge. Jamie adds that writing things down, breaking problems into smaller pieces, and honestly weighing what might actually go wrong tends to shrink anxiety down to a workable size. Renee builds on that with a habit she picked up secondhand from Warren Buffett: for anything you face, name three positive things that could come from it. She is careful to distinguish this from forced optimism, and she offers a pointed warning that fear sells, that it is being aimed at us constantly, and that consuming it without care is one of the fastest ways to lose your footing. In the final stretch, Renee turns to her own profession and makes the case that human resources needs to reinvent how it shows up. Rather than remaining the function people fear, she argues, HR can become the steward and conscience of the organization. This part recognizes that people are burnt out and helps build something more stable and more human. For those who want to continue the conversation, watch for Renee's forthcoming book, HR Confidential. You can learn more about Renee Kaspar at https://reneekasparlabs.com/ and connect with her on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/reneekaspar/.
- Jun 24, 202623 min
Brittany Irwin, AI Engineering Manager, NFI Industries: Why Your AI Rollout Isn't Really About AI
On this episode of People Solve Problems, host Jamie Flinchbaugh welcomes Brittany Irwin, Applications and AI Engineering Manager at NFI Industries. With an industrial engineering degree from the University of Pittsburgh’s Swanson School of Engineering and a career spanning large-scale third-party logistics and fast-moving B2B SaaS startups, Brittany offers a grounded view of how people, processes, and technology fit together. The conversation centers on a theme she has presented publicly, including at the Lehigh CSCRL Spring Symposium: how organizations move AI from hype to habit. Brittany makes a case that runs counter to a common assumption. Most AI and automation efforts in logistics do not stall because the technology falls short, she explains, but because the business was never ready for it. The industrial engineering instinct to find waste and standardize it is the same discipline AI demands, since a tool can only return a reliable output when it is given a reliable input. So before moving any process toward automation, Brittany asks a pointed set of questions: where the process begins and ends, what the top exceptions are and why they happen, and whether any of it is actually written down. That last question leads to what Brittany finds most underestimated, which is language itself. Being on time, she notes, can mean leaving the dock to one team and reaching the customer to another, and AI cannot reconcile a definition that people have never agreed on. This is why she puts such weight on a single source of truth. Consistent data definitions, documented exceptions, and shared context are what let a team build trust, reduce rework, and prepare the ground before automation is switched on. Just as important, and far less often discussed, is the politics of change. Brittany asks two questions of every process: who gains power if it is standardized or automated, and who loses it. The first reveals a natural champion. The second reveals the person most likely to slow things down, and she reads withheld information and dragging feet as signs of exactly that. When the resistance outweighs what a project can overcome, she takes it as a cue to redirect her energy elsewhere. Brittany is also reassuring about the fear underneath that resistance. AI, she insists, belongs in the second chair, not the first. It will suggest a course confidently and sometimes be confidently wrong, which is why a human must stay accountable for every decision, approval, and exception. The real risk she sees is not the technology but the person who trusts it more than their own judgment and waves work through without reading it. When colleagues feel exposed, she reframes the change as something that lets them handle more, not something that erases their value. Asked how she balances speed with thoroughness, Brittany describes a patient crawl, walk, run approach, one bite of the elephant at a time. Her team automates a single painful workflow first, works to earn a positive reaction to it, and only then scales to the next phase. Adoption cannot be forced, she stresses; a technically flawless project still fails if people push back. It is a fitting throughline for someone who counts standardizing her own role until she was replaceable as a point of pride, then carrying the same playbook somewhere new. Throughout, Jamie keeps the spotlight on Brittany and the human ingredients that decide whether AI succeeds, which reach well beyond prompt engineering. To learn more about Brittany’s work, visit NFI Industries at nfiindustries.com and connect with her on LinkedIn.
- Jun 10, 202622 min
Joan Tafoya, Former Director at Meta, Intel & Sandia: Why Swarming Every Problem Slows Teams
Joan Tafoya joins Jamie Flinchbaugh on People Solve Problems for a conversation built around one deceptively simple question: how do you coach problem solving when the person in front of you is difficult to coach? Joan, a former director at Meta, Intel, and Sandia National Laboratories with nearly 38 years of experience, brings a perspective shaped by leading large, globally dispersed teams and by watching problem-solving succeed and fail at scale. Joan opens by describing her own growth as a leader. In her early years as an engineer and manager, she was focused on results and often grew frustrated when people did not solve problems the way she would have. Over time, she recognized that she could not advance until she taught others to think differently, not to think like her, but to think more deliberately about problem-solving itself. She points to a turning point while running a manufacturing line at Intel, where a constant stream of people asking for the next step left her burning out. The shift she made was to narrate her own thinking out loud so others could follow it, and to ask people what they were thinking rather than supplying every answer. That experience leads to one of the central themes of the episode. Joan is honest that her move toward coaching began partly as self-preservation, but she came to see it as something larger. She realized her team did not always share the same picture of success, and that alignment on both the problem and the desired outcome mattered as much as effort. Coaching, in her telling, became the way to build a group of trusted people who could carry the work forward and free her to take on new challenges. Joan also reflects on the challenge of coaching highly credentialed experts. At Sandia National Laboratories, she built a department focused on lean and problem-solving practices in an environment where nearly everyone held a PhD. Rather than pretending to match their technical depth, she earned credibility by listening carefully, reflecting what she heard, and asking sharper questions, especially about the knowledge gaps standing between the team and its next breakthrough. Prioritization is another area Joan explores in depth. Drawing on her time at Meta, she describes a culture that was learning to balance speed with reliability. Her first prioritization question is not whether a problem is important but whether her team is the one best suited to solve it. She warns against the instinct to swarm every visible problem, comparing it to a kindergarten soccer team chasing the ball. She also looks for quick wins that build momentum and morale without draining resources from larger work. On ideation, Joan emphasizes starting with clarity. She often opens sessions with a silent exercise in which everyone writes down the problem statement and what success would look like, which surfaces a wider range of views and avoids groupthink. She values bringing contrarians into the room, while noting that a contrarian works best when given clear expectations about how to contribute rather than simply being allowed to push back. Joan closes with advice for young engineers hoping to lead in fast-paced, demanding environments. She believes people grow most while they are struggling and pushing past what feels comfortable, and she encourages giving yourself grace during those stretches while still choosing to step into the discomfort. It is a fitting end to a conversation that treats problem-solving as something every person can learn and every leader can nurture. You can connect with Joan Tafoya on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/joantafoya.
- May 27, 202623 min
Eric Harding of Republic Services: When Having a Methodology Matters More Than Which One
Some problem-solving wisdom comes from advanced frameworks. Other wisdom comes from eighth-grade science class. Eric Harding holds onto both. In this episode of People Solve Problems, host Jamie Flinchbaugh sits down with Eric Harding, Vice President of HR Operations and Systems at Republic Services. With more than twenty years across HR, manufacturing, and product development, Eric has seen what works, what fails, and what gets dressed up as something more sophisticated than it really is. The conversation moves through methodology, coaching, culture, and measurement, returning again and again to a single truth: the fundamentals do most of the work. Eric describes how his thinking about problem solving traces back through Intel's seven-step method in the early nineties, through Six Sigma belts and DMAIC, through Lean, and through more recent labels. He prefers the term methodology-based improvement because it removes the anxiety that surfaces the moment a specific brand name appears in the room. What he has noticed across organizations is that the named system matters less than the discipline of being systematic. And he is direct about where most teams fall short. Defining the problem clearly, he argues, is where the largest gains live, and it is also where most organizations are weakest. A story from early in his career illustrates how seriously he takes context. As a Lean manager overseeing multiple factories, Eric tried the same approach in two buildings sitting across the same parking lot. It thrived in one and failed in the other. Culture matters. The situation matters. He pairs this lesson with the situational leadership framework, reading both where the organization sits in its development and where the individual being coached sits in their understanding of problem-solving. The conversation turns to learning, where Eric makes the case for the A3 as a coaching surface that lets him see how someone thinks. He shares a moment from a strategy session with a shared service center team in Costa Rica, where nearly every problem statement returned by his teams contained the word manual. Eric now has a rule for his HR A3s. The word manual is not allowed in a problem statement because the moment it appears, the team has already decided that automation is the answer and has stopped thinking. He extends the same caution to artificial intelligence today, arguing that AI cannot rescue a process that has never been standardized in the first place. He also recounts a recent example where a team had spent years trying to solve what they believed was a roles and responsibilities problem. Once the process flow was mapped and the right questions were asked, the actual issue surfaced. Nobody was doing the work the same way. It was a process problem all along, and only the right kind of coaching brought that to the surface. On the subject of managing the problem landscape, Eric talks about the move from reactive firefighting to meaningful KPIs and monthly operating reviews. He shares the background check story, where loud complaints were shaping the narrative until a data analyst built the data set that showed the ninetieth percentile was on target and only the outliers were creating the noise. Data, he explains, lets you stop arguing and start solving. He encourages teams new to measurement to start somewhere, even imperfectly, and let the indicators mature over time so that operating reviews become a place for coaching and learning rather than reporting. To learn more about Eric Harding and his work, visit www.republicservices.com or connect with him on LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/eric-harding-9627736.
- May 13, 202623 min
Laudy Allan, SVP Global Operations, Crayola: Stop Solving the Wrong Problem
Laudy Allan, Senior Vice President of Global Operations at Crayola LLC, brings nearly two decades of operational leadership to a conversation that challenges some of the most common assumptions about how organizations approach problem-solving. Responsible for U.S. manufacturing, global logistics, transportation, customer service, engineering, and facilities, Laudy has spent her career building the systems, cultures, and habits that allow teams to face problems with curiosity rather than avoidance. In this episode of People Solve Problems, she shares the principles behind that work. One of the central ideas Laudy returns to throughout the conversation is the importance of involving the right people early. For her, that means prioritizing those closest to the problem, not necessarily those with the most credentials or experience with structured tools. She describes how mixing people who are deeply embedded in a process with those who are naturally curious and driven creates productive tension. That diversity of thought, she argues, is where the best questions emerge and where genuine accountability takes root. Structured problem-solving is what makes that collaboration possible, because it gives people a shared process to move through together, opening up communication and keeping the conversation grounded in facts rather than abstract debate. Laudy also addresses the relationship between data and problem clarity. In manufacturing and logistics, data tends to be structured and measurable. But in areas like global new product development, the problems are fuzzier, and the data often doesn't exist yet. Her approach in those situations is to start small: identify three to five things worth measuring, make process health visible, and let curiosity drive the next question. She sees data not as a starting requirement but as something that, once collected, generates better questions and opens conversations that weren't possible before. When it comes to the tools of structured problem solving, Laudy is deliberate about not being attached to any one approach. A3s work well on the manufacturing floor because of their accessibility and simplicity. But her deeper conviction is that the tool matters most as a vehicle for developing mindset. People don't arrive with the right problem-solving instincts already formed. The structure of a tool gives them the scaffolding to build those instincts, and the mindset follows. Prioritization is another area where Laudy offers a perspective shaped by real experience. Faced with hundreds of potential problems to address, her answer is focused. Three to five active problem-solving efforts at a time, chosen based on impact and complexity, pursued with genuine follow-through. The logic is straightforward: spreading effort across thirty items is the most reliable way to complete none of them. The conversation closes with one of its most personal moments. When asked about the hardest adjustment she has made moving into senior leadership, Laudy describes the shift from doing to coaching. For someone known for tenacity and a strong bias toward action, learning to step back and let others work through problems without jumping in has been both the most difficult transition and the most rewarding. She connects that shift directly to the culture she is building at Crayola, one where people are genuinely excited about problems rather than inclined to hide from them. Laudy holds Project Management Professional and Agile Project Management certifications, is a Six Sigma Green Belt, and earned her degree in information systems from Penn State University. She is currently pursuing her MBA at Lehigh University. To connect with Laudy and learn more about her work, visit www.crayola.com or find her on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/laudyallan/.
About People Solve Problems
People Solve Problems is an engaging new podcast hosted by Jamie Flinchbaugh, the author of the book with the same title. In this insightful series, Jamie interviews a diverse array of guests – from thought leaders and authors to practitioners and everyday individuals, delving into their unique perspectives on problem solving. This compact, interview-style podcast offers valuable insights into what constitutes effective problem-solving, the challenges faced in the process, and the strategies employed. It aims to equip listeners with a wealth of ideas, best practices, and approaches to enhance their problem-solving skills. Stay tuned for the upcoming episodes by clicking the follow button and signing up today.
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