It takes more than a one-day workshop to improve your approach.
Problem-solving may be the most fundamental of human activities
By Jamie Flinchbaugh for Industry Week
Picture: Dreamstime
I’ve been rereading, in greater depth, Art Smalley’s book Four Types of Problems. Art and I first worked together about 25 years ago on the transformation of Chrysler. It went from near bankruptcy to the most profitable company in the industry, until it was sold to Daimler and leadership changes reversed much of what had been done.
Art wasn’t a known entity at the time and was part of the consulting team we had hired to help us develop training for the Chrysler Operating System. I found, in numerous sidebar conversations, that he had a keen perspective on lean that went beyond simply being the guy who had previously worked at Toyota, and I learned from our engagements.
In the Forward of the book, written by John Shook, who I met at approximately the same time, writes:
Problem-solving may be the most fundamental of human activities. We breathe, we eat, we sleep. Breathing and sleeping just happen. Then we get hungry or we might get cold. Those are our first problems to solve—how to find something to eat or how to stay warm. Solving problems is how we learned to think. To be human is, quite literally, to solve problems. How to solve problems effectively is fundamental to the reality of our daily existence.