People Solve Problems

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.

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

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.

Scott Willoughby, Vice President of Program Excellence at Northrop Grumman and former program manager for the James Webb Space Telescope, joined Jamie Flinchbaugh to share insights on leading one of the most complex systems ever built. With 35 years at Northrop Grumman, a NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal, and membership in the National Academy of Engineering, and we have to include a degree from Lehigh University. Scott brought deep wisdom about managing massive programs where failure simply isn't an option.

Managing the James Webb Space Telescope meant dealing with a system seven times larger than Hubble that had to operate at minus 400 degrees Fahrenheit, a million miles from Earth. Scott explained that tackling such complexity requires breaking problems down through systems engineering, but with a critical twist: don't trust yourself. Everything on Webb was done in twos. NASA and Northrop Grumman each built independent models, particularly for thermal and dynamic performance. When pointing a telescope at light from 13.5 billion years ago, stability matters, and even small temperature changes cause mechanical components to shrink and expand. The two teams challenged each other constantly, ensuring they reached the same conclusions before moving forward.

When models disagreed, which happened often during iteration, teams had to get intimately familiar not just with their own work but with how the other side modeled things. Sometimes, differences came down to using different densities or levels of detail. Other times, teams discovered they were working from different versions of test data. Scott emphasized that much of technical work is about getting people to communicate, to say their assumptions out loud rather than keeping them in folders or inside their heads.

Creating a learning culture among world-class engineers and PhDs required leading by example. Scott realized early that being a leader didn't mean knowing everything. He deliberately asked questions that seemed obvious, sometimes the wrong questions, to get beneath the surface. He echoed back what others said in his own words, creating what he called a safe zone in the middle of dialogue where you don't have to be right until the end. By showing vulnerability and modeling openness, he encouraged teams to converge on solutions without anyone feeling accused of being wrong.

Testing followed a crawl, walk, run philosophy. Scott stressed taking the hardest punch as early and as low in the system as possible. They qualified components by subjecting them to extremes beyond predicted conditions, building margin into designs for things they couldn't model perfectly. The hardest day in any satellite's life is usually day one, which for Webb lasted six months as systems were deployed and activated for the first time.

One of Scott's favorite stories captured the power of listening to everyone. When membrane tears appeared during sunshield deployment testing, engineers wrestled with an apparently intractable problem. The solution came from a technician who suggested using something like a squid jig from his fishing tackle box to align the 107 pin holes through multiple membrane layers gently. His compliant device solved one of the program's most complicated problems. Scott learned that elegant solutions sometimes come from understanding how things get built, not just how they're designed.

For transparency with stakeholders, Scott developed a rhythm of meeting every three months to discuss what had happened since the last time, what they were doing now, and most importantly, what challenges lay ahead. By forecasting risks before they materialized, discussing backup plans, and building anticipation for difficult tests, he made it easier to discuss both failures and successes. What advice would he offer to anyone stepping into similar roles? Take a deep breath, realize it won't go perfectly, and talk to others who've been there. Growth doesn't occur without discomfort, and leaders get measured not by perfection but by how they respond to adversity.

Learn more about Scott's work at https://www.northropgrumman.com/, https://science.nasa.gov/mission/webb/, and https://www.imdb.com/name/nm12283488/. Connect with Scott on LinkedIn.

Rick Pedersen, owner of Old Norse Consulting, joined host Jamie Flinchbaugh to explore why product development demands a fundamentally different approach to problem-solving than traditional business processes. During their conversation, Rick explained that while most business functions involve transactional processes that can be documented and repeated, product development centers on building knowledge to solve problems that have never been encountered before.

Rick draws a clear distinction between information gathering and genuine knowledge gaps. He explains that a true knowledge gap exists when answers cannot simply be looked up or obtained from an expert. Instead, teams must invest time and resources in building prototypes, running tests, or conducting simulations to create new knowledge. Rick advises teams facing uncertainty to document potential knowledge gaps quickly, then filter them to determine which require actual investigation versus simple research.

The conversation revealed how knowledge creation serves as the lifeblood of product development, much like flow serves manufacturing. He emphasizes that the real value in product development comes from creating new knowledge and making it reusable. He compares this to compound interest, where teams that fail to document their discoveries essentially discard their gains rather than letting them accumulate over time. This results in organizations repeatedly solving the same problems across different projects, representing significant waste.

Rick advocates for a shift from traditional task-oriented project management to organizing work around knowledge gaps. Rather than focusing solely on completing action items, teams should orient their efforts around closing knowledge gaps through what he calls fast learning loops or fast learning cycles. This approach helps teams understand why they are performing tasks and keeps the focus on building knowledge that enables better decisions.

When discussing learning from industry leaders like Toyota, Rick cautions against simply copying their systems. He stresses the importance of understanding the thinking behind why successful companies use specific tools and behaviors, then adapting those principles to each organization's unique situation. He recommends starting small, selecting one or two pilot projects where teams can experiment with new methods while receiving coaching along the way.

Rick recently launched the LPPD Bootcamp, an immersive workshop designed to accelerate learning about product development principles. He explains that the workshop addresses a fundamental challenge in product development: the years-long timeframe makes it difficult to see results and adjust quickly. The bootcamp compresses an entire product development cycle into less than a week, allowing participants to experience how different improvements interact and deliver benefits. The environment also helps teams practice cross-functional collaboration and establish shared reference points they can draw upon when working on real projects.

Throughout the conversation, Rick emphasized that successful product development requires teams to recognize knowledge gaps, invest in closing them systematically, and capture what they learn for future reuse.

For more information about Rick's work, visit oldnorsellc.com and LPPDBootcamp.com, or connect with him on LinkedIn