People Solve Problems

David Kaganovsky, Global Head of Product, Brand at WPP, brings a career spent at the intersection of brand strategy, technology, and applied AI to this conversation on People Solve Problems. His perspective on problem-solving is shaped by experiences at some of the world's most recognized organizations, from PWC and EY to Landor, Wavemaker, and GroupM, and sharpened by time at a startup where there was, as he puts it, no safety net. That startup, Go, set out to reinvent how people get a car. Not just the purchase process, but the entire experience of acquiring, using, and returning a vehicle. David describes the breakthrough moment not as a technical one, but as a conceptual one. The team kept failing when they approached the problem through the lens of traditional automotive retail. They only began to succeed when they stopped thinking about selling cars and started thinking about what customers actually wanted: the same frictionless, phone-in-hand experience they had come to expect from every other transaction in their lives. That insight, focusing on the problem behind the problem, is the thread that runs through everything David shares in this episode. Understanding what people are really after, not just what they say they want or what the surface situation suggests, is at the core of David's approach to any problem. He argues that human beings are largely rational, but their rationality is driven by motivations, incentives, and disincentives that are often invisible unless you take time to look for them. This holds in startups, in large organizations, with clients, with colleagues, and even with customers you may never meet. One of David's colleagues has taken this concept and applied it with the help of AI, building persona simulations that allow a team to stress-test ideas against the likely reactions of key stakeholders before those conversations ever happen. David sees this kind of technology not as a replacement for genuine understanding, but as a tool that makes the effort of understanding others faster and more accessible. When it comes to tackling large, complex problems, David pushes back on the instinct to define everything up front. The pace of change, especially in technology, makes long-horizon planning a risky bet. He advocates for breaking problems into manageable pieces and delivering value as early and as consistently as possible, rather than waiting for a fully realized solution that may be outdated by the time it arrives. That said, he does not dismiss vision entirely. A clear direction of travel matters, not because it predicts the future, but because it aligns people and creates the shared understanding necessary to move well together. Changing course along the way is not a failure; it is evidence of paying attention. On leadership, David holds two things in tension that might seem to contradict each other. He believes in giving people real freedom and real trust. And he also believes in staying close. Not as oversight, but as investment. Being present in the architectural decisions, asking questions, showing up: these are ways of signaling that the work matters and that the leader is genuinely alongside the team, not waiting for a report at the end of the month. He closes with a thought on where all of this is heading: as AI-driven agents become part of how teams operate, the skills of a good manager, giving context, staying engaged, holding accountability with respect, are not fading. They are becoming more important. David Kaganovsky is a thoughtful practitioner whose experience spans some of the most demanding environments in global business. You can learn more about his work at wpp.com and connect with him on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/davidkaganovsky.

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

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 at www.linkedin.com/in/gracebourke.

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 at linkedin.com/in/skipsteward.

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