Jamie Flinchbaugh's Blog

Jeff Robinson, Executive Leadership Coach at Foundational Leadership LLC, brings more than 25 years of experience working with leaders across industries to this conversation on the People Solve Problems podcast. With a background in organizational leadership and development, Jeff is known for his practical, easygoing approach to helping people understand what it actually takes to lead well. The conversation centers on his new book, Leadership SUCCESS: Expand Your Presence, Build Trust, and Increase Your Influence, and the ideas inside it that he returns to again and again in his coaching work.

Jeff opens by reframing what confidence actually means. It has very little to do with how much you know, he explains. Confidence is really about knowing you can handle whatever comes at you. He points out that most people, when they think back through their careers and their lives, have already survived everything that has challenged them. That track record is the foundation. The most trusted leaders are the ones who can look at a new problem and break it down calmly, whether or not they have faced that exact situation before, because they have learned to trust their own ability to figure things out.

Building that confidence, Jeff notes, requires understanding where a person is starting from. Leadership development is not one size fits all. Some people arrive with natural confidence built from experiences completely outside of business, whether from military service, a farming background, or simply a life that demanded adaptability. Others need to build from the ground up, developing their intuition, managing their inner critic, and learning to listen to the right internal voice. The goal is always to identify the gap between where someone is and where they need to be, and then build from there.

One of the most important capabilities Jeff works to develop in leaders is the ability to stay calm under pressure. He is direct about this: if a leader loses composure, the people around them will follow. Staying calm is not passive. Jeff teaches people to recognize the physical signals that precede stress, such as tunnel vision or heat rising in the body, and to interrupt those signals before they take hold. One technique he returns to is asking yourself questions when stress begins to build. Doing so prompts the brain to shift out of fight-or-flight mode and back into the clear thinking needed to actually solve the problem at hand.

Jeff’s coaching philosophy reflects the same kind of adaptability he teaches. He describes coaching as holding up a mirror, asking questions that help people see what they could not see on their own. But he also breaks conventional coaching rules when needed, shifting into mentoring or direct problem discussion when a person needs that first, then bringing them back into a coaching conversation. He adjusts his approach entirely based on the individual, from brand-new leaders who need concrete behavioral guidance to experienced executives ready for deeper reflection.

For new leaders specifically, Jeff identifies the most common mistake as assuming the role requires a sudden transformation. They are still the same person they were the day before, and the most important thing they can do is focus on relationships and on maintaining the respect of the people around them. Respect, he says, is what causes people to start following you. You may not be able to build on it right away, but you cannot afford to lose it.

The conversation closes with Jeff describing Leadership SUCCESS as a practical framework drawn from his most common coaching experiences, targeted at mid to high-level leaders who are stuck and looking for a clear path forward. The book is available in all formats on Amazon.

Connect with Jeff Robinson and explore his work:

Website: www.foundations4.com

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/jeff-w-robinson

Book on Amazon: amzn.to/3MSvbij  

 

 

 

 

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Grace Bourke, Consulting Director at Baker Tilly, has spent nearly four decades working at the intersection of healthcare, quality improvement, and technology. She joins Jamie Flinchbaugh in this episode of People Solve Problems. She shares what she has learned about why technology implementations so often go wrong, and what organizations can do to get ahead of the problems before they take hold.

Grace opens with a fundamental challenge: organizations frequently deploy technology without fully understanding the problem they are trying to solve. At Sutter Health, she saw teams convinced that a new electronic health record system would resolve issues that were actually rooted in communication gaps and unclear standard work. The danger, she explains, is that technology does not eliminate underlying problems. It simply makes the mistakes happen faster and harder to trace once they are buried in a database.

To address this, Grace uses an approach she calls Gap-IT, a structured gap analysis that maps how work is currently done against how it will function in the new system. In one example involving a Pacific Northwest health system undergoing an ERP reimplementation, the process revealed that roughly half of the desired improvements could be made immediately, before the technology ever went live. The other half genuinely required the new platform. Her takeaway: stable processes and the technology designed to support them have to develop together.

On the question of buy-in, Grace draws a useful distinction. When a technology change is non-negotiable, such as when a platform has aged beyond maintenance, people do not need to agree with the decision. But they do need to be invested in making the transition succeed. She argues this requires two layers of communication: senior leadership setting the vision and the why, and trusted voices closer to the front line delivering the messages that affect individual roles and responsibilities directly.

A central tool in Grace’s approach is Failure Mode and Effect Analysis, known as FMEA. Her team adapted it specifically for healthcare, condensing it to a half-page card that staff completed, then passed to a colleague for independent validation. That handoff was intentional: it prevented the tendency to simply defer to whoever wrote the card and created a shared responsibility for accuracy. Beyond its risk management function, the practice had a quieter effect. Grace recalls receiving a text from a participant who thanked her for helping her find her voice, because the format gave people a structured, safe way to speak up and stand behind their thinking.

This leads to one of the episode’s most direct observations: healthcare remains deeply hierarchical, and that hierarchy consistently strips agency from the people best positioned to spot and solve problems. Grace points to Toyota’s model as a counterexample, where every person on the floor is expected to be both a problem spotter and a problem solver. In her own experience, frontline staff flourish when given clear boundaries within which they have real authority to act. The obstacle, she notes, is that it takes consistent leadership to hold that space open.

Grace closes with the priority framework that has guided her throughout her career: safety first, then quality, then delivery, then cost. In healthcare, she says, the order is not just a preference. It is the whole point. To connect with Grace Bourke and learn more about her work at Baker Tilly, visit www.bakertilly.com or find her on LinkedIn.  

 

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Skip Steward, VP and Chief Improvement Officer at Baptist Memorial Health Care Corporation, sat down with Jamie Flinchbaugh on the People Solve Problems podcast to share what thirty-four years of cross-industry experience looks like when it’s put to work inside one of the most complex systems in existence, American healthcare.

The conversation opened on the challenge of prioritization, a particular puzzle in healthcare where competing demands and shifting conditions are the norm. Skip traced his team’s solution back to a strategic A3 deployment process he brought to Baptist Memorial nearly thirteen years ago, developed with the guidance of mentor and improvement expert Pascal Dennis, author of Getting the Right Things Done. At the highest level, this process organizes all work under four guiding themes: right care, right time, right place, and right cost. Skip noted that across Baptist’s more than twenty-four thousand employees, almost anyone can finish that sentence from memory, a quiet but telling measure of how deeply the direction has taken root throughout the organization.

But strategy at the enterprise level is only part of the story. Skip described how, at the ground level, he returns again and again to one clarifying question: “What are we trying to accomplish?” He shared a recent visit to a clinic where an enthusiastic manager had a full list of ideas and concerns, and fell completely silent when Skip asked that single question. Her honest answer was that she wasn’t sure. For Skip, that moment is not a failure. It’s the essential starting point. Without knowing what you’re anchoring to, he argued, everything else is just activity.

Much of the conversation centered on how Skip and his team build the human side of improvement. The Baptist Management System is built on eleven guiding principles organized around people, process, and purpose, and Skip pointed to two practices that do the most work in making collaboration real. The first is TWI Job Relations, a framework he described as the best way he knows to turn respect for people from a value on a wall into a daily operational skill, helping teams respond to problems objectively rather than emotionally. The second is humble inquiry, which Skip practices as the art of asking open-ended questions you genuinely don’t know the answers to, to understand someone’s situation before trying to improve it. Whether speaking with a senior physician or someone new to the front lines, Skip described meeting people with curiosity rather than credentials, sometimes literally taking his jacket off to reduce the distance between them.

The final stretch of the conversation turned to healthcare’s broader challenges, and Skip was honest about the difficulty. He called healthcare the most complex open sociotechnical system he has encountered in his career, drawing on the thinking of organizational psychologist Edgar Schein. He pushed back firmly on the notion that any single solution, AI included, will fix the system’s deep problems. What he believes in is a mindset: the patient, hypothesis-driven thinking that takes on one part of the process at a time. He pointed to a striking example from Baptist’s own work, where a daily multidisciplinary patient review meeting that once lasted two hours has been reduced to a focused, information-rich fifteen minutes, the result not of top-down directives but of physicians and nurses experimenting their way forward. One doctor captured the shift with a line Skip clearly treasures: “I learned that it wasn’t okay to wait.” For Skip, stories like that are the reason for hope.

To learn more about Skip Steward’s work, visit baptistonline.org or connect with him on LinkedIn

 

 

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Plato may be an unusual person to turn to for a perspective on AI. In trying to predict where AI goes and what it means for work, for learning, and even for humanity, we look to the history of technological adoption. The internet is the most common reference point, mostly because many of us lived it.

The fundamental thesis many present is that humanity survives technological adoption and often thrives through it, but this isn’t a foregone conclusion. Each wave of technological advancement comes at a cost, or a risk, that is up to us to overcome. Therefore, passively letting technology unfold is a path likely to minimize the gains and maximize the risk. Adoption of AI cannot be unthinking.

In past technological waves that threatened human cognition, we could turn to the internet, the calculator, the printing press, or the invention of writing itself.

Plato’s Phaedrus, a dialogue between Socrates and Phaedrus, includes an Egyptian myth. In it, the god Theuth presents the concept of writing to King Thamus, stating:

“This invention, O king, will make the Egyptians wiser and will improve their memories; for it is an elixir of memory and wisdom that I have discovered.”

The response from Thamus, in part, includes this warning:

“For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise.”

While this seems like it could have been written about AI, it is about the seemingly innocent technology of writing. Professor Neil Postman, in Technopoly, states, “Every technology is both a burden and a blessing; not either-or, but this-and-that.”

Will AI make people appear wise, or smart, or informed, or productive, when they are in fact not? Does it produce a lack of critical thinking while encouraging deference to whatever AI tells us? Does it create misplaced trust? All of these risks are already true in part.

But the gains from writing far outweighed any harm. We, of course, wouldn’t have the views of Socrates and Plato without it. Maybe writing did hurt people’s memories, as my dependence on a grocery list would demonstrate, but the gains were transformational.

AI will surely have a cost to humanity, but if we seek to preserve critical thinking, discernment, creativity, and so on (both beyond and within AI), we can maximize the gains and minimize the risks.

This isn’t a take on whether AI is good or not, as it is here to stay. This is about what we do as a society in a world in which AI exists.

We must change education, at all levels, to help elevate critical thinking and collaboration. The ability to own your thinking while engaging with others (whether that means another human or AI) will be increasingly essential. Quoting the writer Wendell Berry, “It is not from ourselves that we will learn to be better than we are,” and therefore why can’t AI be part of bettering ourselves? 

We must not value production of materials as an indicator of work. Already in organizations, people are working harder because they can produce more material, which also leads to everyone else having to consume more of it. But besides the fallacy that more is better, much of what is being produced has been called workslop, a term coined by researchers from the Stanford Social Media Lab and BetterUp Labs to describe AI-generated work content that lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a given task. Its creation actually adds to the work without advancing it. We have historically treated being in more meetings, writing more emails, and producing more presentations as signs of being productive. Peter Drucker challenges us to remember that “There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.”

We know that AI is here. We know that its path forward is not yet fully determined. We know that it carries risks to humanity, both individually and collectively. And what I propose is that we must put more focus on how humans evolve in an AI world than we do on shaping AI itself.

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William Harvey, Program Manager for Strategic Initiatives and University Professor, brings a refreshingly practical perspective to leadership and problem-solving. Throughout the conversation, William shares how his diverse background—from the Marine Corps to manufacturing to academia—has shaped his approach to developing people and tackling complex challenges.  

William’s philosophy on leadership centers on flexibility and situational awareness. He describes his approach as stepping into whatever role the moment demands, whether that’s ownership, delegation, coaching, or sponsorship. Drawing an analogy to the movie “300,” where King Leonidas steps into missing spots, William explains that he doesn’t declare his role upfront but instead reads the situation and fills gaps as needed. For critical moments—safety incidents, major quality investigations, or when someone is truly struggling—he leads directly. But for planned activities, he creates safe spaces where people can develop new competencies without the pressure of real-time crises forcing immediate action.  

One of William’s most compelling insights challenges a common assumption in problem-solving work. Before jumping into any methodology or framework, he insists on establishing two fundamentals: does everyone agree it’s actually a problem, and where does it fit in the priority list? Without that shared understanding and commitment, all the problem-solving methods in the world won’t matter. William also emphasizes diversity of thought as critical to collaboration, pointing out that perspectives shaped by education, family upbringing, international experience, and other life factors often matter more than visible diversity markers alone.  

William has learned to manage his own influence carefully. Recognizing that as a senior person, he can easily sway a group, he’s developed tactics like voting before discussion and speaking last. He presents ideas as straw man arguments, deliberately inviting critique by asking what’s wrong with the plan rather than assuming he’s considered everything. This approach reflects his understanding that mental models are never fully accurate—they only become more accurate through constant refinement based on the gap between expectation and reality.  

The conversation reveals how William has built learning directly into organizational rhythms at multiple levels. In daily huddles, one-on-ones, and formal after-action reviews, he creates space for reflection. But his most powerful discovery came accidentally when he started asking, “Who’s done something worth recognizing since we last met?” before discussing what needs improvement. Within about 30 days, finger-pointing disappeared. By layering genuine praise first, William found that people became far more willing to collaborate on problems, seeing issues as process failures rather than personal attacks.  

William also shares his practice of using pre-mortems, taking insights from past post-mortems to identify what could fail in new projects before they launch. This forward-looking application of learning prevents teams from repeating mistakes. He references the “zoom in, zoom out” systems thinking model, noting that while most people excel at zooming in on technical details, they often forget to zoom out to see handoffs between functions and other systemic issues that could derail success.  

Looking ahead, William is exploring how AI can make learning content more effective by customizing delivery to resonate with diverse learners—matching accents, appearances, and contexts to help information land more powerfully. It’s a natural extension of his commitment to intentional inclusion and meeting people where they are.  

Connect with William on LinkedIn  

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Part 2 of Answering Listener Questions

In Episode 7, Mark Graban and Jamie Flinchbaugh talk about the Olympics, French Press coffee, answer listener questions, discuss Starbucks plastic stoppers, and try to figure out if The Muppet Show has a future. If you can’t find the theme, don’t worry, because this is Lean Coffee Talk and we can explore all sorts of things without a theme. 

We each pour a French Press Coffee in our new Lean Coffee Talk mugs and explore the differences between immersion and percolation brewing (hint: French Press is immersion). We explore some of the nuances but also the inherent simplicity that sometimes makes coffee easy. We then get into listener questions focusing on two topics: KPIs and change management. We explore both topics in terms of when it works and when it doesn’t, how rigid or flexible to be, and what behaviors help enable success. 

We then talk about product design and customer experience through the lens of the plastic Starbucks cup stopper. Or is it a stirrer? Or is it a fluid dynamics damper? OK, probably not the last one but this little piece of plastic gives us plenty of questions and insights regarding waste, the jobs customers need done, and customer personas. 

We end hoping that the single episode of The Muppet Show is turned into a green light for a full series. 

French Press coffee can be easy, but if you want to go a little deeper here’s a video Mark’s post about Starbucks coffee stoppers, or stirrers? Walter Isaacson’s The Greatest Sentence Ever WrittenPodcast feed at LeanCoffeeTalk.com or jflinch.com/leancoffeetalk

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Gregory J. Scaven, CEO, Board Director, Partner, and currently President at Scaven Enterprises, LLC, brings over 30 years of technical engineering leadership and more than 20 years as a P&L leader to this conversation about problem-solving. With deep expertise in pyrotechnics, explosives, and propellants across automotive, aerospace, and defense industries, Greg shares how his approach to problem-solving evolved from the lab to the boardroom.

Greg’s introduction to problem-solving came through the lens of high-reliability engineering, where devices that “go boom” must do so only when intended. Working in an industry demanding “six-nines” reliability or better, he learned the discipline of corrective action processes, where finding the true root cause wasn’t optional. Greg emphasizes that his early training taught him to demonstrate the ability to turn failure modes on and off, then prove the effectiveness of preventative actions. This rigorous foundation shaped everything that followed.

The transition from engineer to business leader brought formal problem solving training through the Danaher Business System. Greg describes how Danaher focused on training leadership teams, not just front-line workers, because problem solving is a critical leadership skill. The emphasis was revolutionary for him: spend 70% of your time defining what the problem actually is. Greg explains that coaching teams to frame problems correctly became more important than diving into technical details, and he learned to limit his organization to no more than three major problems at any time, integrating them into regular leadership reviews.

Throughout the conversation, Greg returns to a central theme: critical thinking matters more than following forms. He cautions against becoming a slave to any tool, insisting the power lies in the thinking process itself. When young engineers worry about filling out corrective action paperwork, Greg redirects them to focus on what they’ve learned. He consistently asks teams to reframe their problem statements as new learning emerges, recognizing that the problem definition itself can evolve.

Greg draws a clear distinction between what he calls “cause problems” and “creative problems.” As an engineer, he dealt with cause problems where scientific rationale could explain failures through tolerance stack-ups and environmental conditions. As a P&L leader, he faces creative problems like sales shortfalls, where turning failure modes on and off isn’t possible. This is where experimentation becomes powerful. Greg encourages teams to quickly test their top three ideas, look for early returns, and double down on what works while abandoning what doesn’t.

Creating a learning culture under P&L pressure requires deliberate effort. Greg believes great businesses are naturally curious, filled with people who aren’t afraid when experiments fail. He looks for teams that iterate without waiting for permission, teams that come to him saying, “We tried this, it didn’t work, so here’s what we’re doing next.” That’s his definition of success. Greg emphasizes accountability for follow-through rather than results, building on concepts from his military background around the commander’s intent. Teams that understand the big picture, maintain discipline, and show bias for action don’t wait for scheduled reviews when critical issues arise.

Greg’s approach reveals how curiosity, discipline, and real-time responsiveness create problem-solving cultures that deliver. His journey from engineering to executive leadership demonstrates that while the problems change, the principles of critical thinking, experimentation, and learning remain constant.

To connect with Greg or learn more about his work, visit his LinkedIn profile at www.linkedin.com/in/gjscaven.

 

 

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Steve Brown has spent years helping organizations see around corners. As a former executive at both Intel Labs and Google DeepMind, where he served as their in-house futurist, Steve brings a unique perspective on what happens when rapid technological change collides with practical business reality. In this conversation, he challenges leaders to move beyond fear and cost-cutting mentality to embrace AI as a tool for genuine value creation.

Steve explains that being a futurist isn’t about making predictions—that’s for fortune tellers. Instead, it’s a discipline of examining trends, understanding how they intersect over time, and mapping possible futures. But the landscape has grown increasingly complex. The pace of AI development has accelerated so dramatically that projecting even six months ahead has become challenging. What makes AI particularly difficult to forecast isn’t just the technology itself, but the ripple effects of having powerful intelligence available on demand at low cost. As Steve puts it, this changes everything about everything.

When it comes to implementation, Steve grounds his approach in a framework he calls “possibility and purpose.” He sees AI creating an enormous landscape of what’s possible, but warns that the real leadership challenge is figuring out what not to do. By finding the intersection between corporate purpose and this expanded possibility space, organizations can focus their efforts where they’ll create the most value.

Steve offers a fresh perspective on AI’s relationship with human qualities, such as empathy. While acknowledging that AI simulates rather than truly experiences emotions, he points to promising applications like AI therapists that can reach people who would never seek human help. The key is understanding when simulation serves a genuine need versus when it creates friction in developing essential human skills—like learning to navigate relationships and failures.

The heart of Steve’s message centers on reimagining AI not as a replacement for humans, but as a collaborative teammate. He describes three types of AI agents organizations should consider: offload agents that handle boring repetitive work, elevate agents that amplify human capabilities, and extend agents that enable people to do things they couldn’t do before. This framework transforms workforce planning from a zero-sum game into an expansion strategy. Steve points to Jensen Huang’s vision at NVIDIA—growing from 30,000 employees to 50,000, supported by 100 million AI assistants—as an example of thinking about amplification rather than reduction.

Steve argues that AI project failures typically stem from three core issues: immature technology, poor change management, and messy data. Organizations succeed when they start small with bounded projects, balance short-term wins with medium and long-term initiatives, and treat AI implementation as fundamentally a change management challenge rather than just a technology deployment. He emphasizes that everyone owns the AI transition—from line of business to HR to IT—though having a Chief AI Officer can help drive the organizational transformation required.

Rather than obsessing over traditional ROI calculations, Steve encourages leaders to focus on the human challenges that AI can solve. When the average knowledge worker spends 32 days per year just searching for information, cutting that time in half represents massive value that goes beyond simple efficiency metrics.

Learn more about Steve’s work and access his several resources:  

AI Resources

https://beacons.ai/aifuturist

AI Course

https://www.stevebrown.ai/ai-course

AI Workshops

https://www.stevebrown.ai/workshop

Keynotes

https://www.stevebrown.ai/keynotes

YouTube

www.youtube.com/@futureofai

Amazon book “The AI Ultimatum: Preparing for a World of Intelligent Machines and Radical Transformation.”

https://a.co/d/1YoFV5C

Connect with him on LinkedIn 

https://www.linkedin.com/in/futuresteve/    

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Dr. Melisa Buie brings a fascinating perspective to the challenge of failure, one forged through decades of building high-powered lasers and leading manufacturing transformations in the semiconductor industry. With a PhD in Nuclear Engineering and Plasma Physics from the University of Michigan and over 15 years at Coherent, Inc., Melisa has spent her career solving complex technical problems. But it was a personal struggle that led to her latest book, “Faceplant: FREE Yourself from Failure’s Funk,” co-authored with Keely Hurley.  

Melisa shared a compelling story that became the catalyst for her book. Despite being completely comfortable with failure in the laboratory, where experiments routinely don’t work, and models need constant refinement, she discovered she was terrified of failing in her personal life. When she took a Spanish class at Stanford and tried speaking her first sentence to a friend, the friend burst out laughing. Melisa’s immediate reaction was to shut down completely. She realized she had developed a fixed mindset about failure outside the lab, and this contradiction troubled her deeply.   

She spent years reading everything she could about failure, learning, and growth, ultimately developing the framework that became “Faceplant.”  The book’s title came from Melisa’s co-author, Keely, who has a gift for turning her own missteps into hilarious stories. For Keely, every failure was just another face plant to laugh about, and the metaphor stuck immediately.   

The subtitle’s use of “FREE” isn’t just clever wordplay; it’s an acronym for a practical framework: Focus, Reflect, Explore, Engage. Melisa explained that the framework grew organically from her lean manufacturing background, particularly the principle of Hansei, which emphasizes self-reflection followed by self-improvement. The first two steps help clarify what actually happened and understand your role in it, while the final two steps push you toward curiosity and experimentation.  

When asked about organizational barriers to learning from failure, Melisa highlighted the critical importance of psychological safety, pointing to the work of Amy Edmondson and Mark Graban. She noted that leaders often unintentionally shut down learning through their behaviors, even when they genuinely believe they support it. Melisa offered concrete examples to watch for: Is it easier to get approval for a half-million-dollar piece of equipment than to run a five-thousand-dollar experiment? If equipment purchases are immediate but experiment proposals sit unopened for weeks, that reveals the organization’s true priorities. She also pointed to meeting dynamics when brainstorming sessions fall silent except for one voice, or when only a single idea emerges, and everyone rallies around it without discussion, those are warning signs.  

Perhaps most striking was Melisa’s deliberate choice to use the word “failure” throughout her book, rather than softer alternatives like “learning opportunity” or “mistake.” She explained that failure makes us deeply uncomfortable, and she didn’t want to step over that discomfort. When one friend admitted to only failing once in life, Melisa felt sad for them, because without taking risks and chances, we miss the rich opportunities that failure provides. She acknowledged the irony: in the lab, ten failed experiments in a design of experiments might be considered a beautiful success because of what was learned. But she wanted to be honest about calling things what they are, pushing past the positive platitudes about failure to actually embrace it.  

Learn more about Melisa and her work at www.melisabuie.com and www.faceplantbook.com, or connect with her on LinkedIn 

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“Mark and Jamie Answer Listener Questions”

In Episode 6, Mark Graban and Jamie Flinchbaugh bring “lean coffee” to Lean Coffee Talk, kind of. But first, we haven’t caught up in a while, so we recap various items like Christmas, college football playoffs, and the other football played in England. They discussed coffee, specifically the most important element of coffee…the roasted beans! Yes, everything else does matter, but fresh beans are vital. Both of them buy local and share one of their favorite spots each. 

Mark and Jamie then took audience questions, although not live. Listeners had the opportunity to submit questions (and might win a free Lean Coffee Talk mug in the process) that we would answer on the show, and that form is still active, so you can submit questions for future episodes. We discuss higher education, psychological safety, getting lean going in your department when the company might not be supportive, and how to push back or redirect lean requirements that are misguided or misapplied. Balance was a strong theme in this discussion. 

We close out with our typical cultural share. Jamie was building custom playlists on Spotify using ChatGPT. Mark watched Brandi Carlile’s holiday streaming special from inside her own home with family and friends, and will see her in concert. 

Ask us a question for a future podcast episode. Submit questions hereLaurie Olin In Italy bookMark’s local Unataza CoffeeJamie’s local Toasted and Roasted ChatGPT’s History of Jazz playlistBrandi Carlile’s streaming holiday specialPodcast feed at LeanCoffeeTalk.com or jflinch.com/leancoffeetalk

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