Leaders shape culture, whether they try to or not. And I've had so many conversations with leaders, it's like, I'm not sure I'm ready for some, you know, the culture side. It's like, but you're doing it today. You're doing it every day, every word, every action. And I think leaders underestimate the impact of the words they use, the decisions they take, the actions they take. And they just underestimate how much people are paying attention to those. Hey, everyone. Welcome to another episode of the Leadership Growth Podcast. I'm Daniel Stewart, along with my brother, Peter Stewart. Today, we are honored to have a fantastic guest, Jamie Flinchbaugh, joining us. Jamie, thanks for being on. Thanks for having me. Great to see you both and to join. Absolutely. This is perfect for the topic at hand because the topic at hand is really, how do leaders solve problems? As we dive into that, let me share a little bit about Jamie's background and why it's so fantastic to have him here to talk about this topic. And so Jamie Flinchbaugh is the author of the book, People Solve Problems, and the host of the podcast by the same name. He acts as a trusted advisor and thought partner for leaders through his firm, JFlinch. So Jamie, again, fantastic to have you here. And let me start off with a question to get things going here. What do we as leaders get wrong as we're trying to solve problems? Because leaders are always trying to solve problems. What do we get wrong with this? Talk to us about this. Well, I think the first thing I want to start with is we kind of take it for granted. We take for granted all the elements that lead to success because we've been doing it since we were infants. So I kind of sometimes liken it to breathing, right? We breathe. We don't spend a lot of time thinking about how we breathe. We just do it. But then we find out whether we're training for sports or meditation or other things that there's more to learn about breathing. And when we are thoughtful about it, we can do it better, more usefully. Problem solving is the same thing. I think we're on autopilot so much of the time ourselves as leaders, but then also we take for granted that everybody on our team has been doing it. I've hired them to do this. They should all be able to solve problems. So I think that the number one thing we get wrong is we take for granted what it takes to be successful in problem solving. And then I think building on that, just sort of extending that thought of taking it for granted, I think we also take for granted our role as a leader in that aspect. And so we just jump in and start solving problems. And we aren't always thoughtful about what role we should play and what role we shouldn't play. So that, again, putting ourselves on autopilot, taking it all for granted, just leads to a cascade of errors, I believe. It's true, I think, as we're listening to that process, and even that analogy of breathing. You know, so many actions we perform that we don't necessarily think about, but when you dissect it down for that intentionality, we can sure improve at it. So you're reminding me of a leadership gem, Jamie, that my dad's often shared that we've used from Peter Drucker. And it says, a problem well-defined is a problem half-solved. So I think even before we start diving into problem solving, let's define that a little bit. How do you define a problem? So I think of a problem as a gap, right? Any gap. And so they happen at many different levels, open-ended, ill-defined, strategic problems or gaps are problems, all the way down to troubleshooting. I've got a computer error and I've got to troubleshoot my way through it. So a huge range. But if we define most of the gaps as either a gap to standard, meaning we were performing here and now we've slipped and we have to get back to where we were, or a gap to need or expectation, and that's maybe something we've never achieved before, but we're trying to. And they can be human performance gaps, process gaps, outcome gaps, you know, all sorts of things. But I think of any gap as really a problem. And when we think about it that way, we can liberally apply many of the either methods or behaviors or mindsets that come with more rigorous problem solving to those gaps. Yeah. And I like how you frame that up, this gap idea either to an existing standard or to a desired standard of some sort, a hope, some expectation in the future. And as I've been reading your book, I really enjoy how you frame up the role of a leader in several different ways. And I want to touch upon at least three as we keep talking through this. So I'm just going to mention these three, and then we'll dive back into the first one here. It's really a leader as a system architect, the leader who really is understanding the overall help chain. What does that look like? What does that mean? The second is really the leader as a culture builder, this notion of being able to set the example, create an accountability, a broader cultural set of norms. And the third is really the leader as the shaper of problem solving itself, not just the shaper of the problem, but the shaper of the process by which we go about solving these problems. So with this as a backdrop, let's dive into this first one, this notion of system architect. What in the world does that mean, leader as system architect? Give us, how would you translate that language and give us some examples of what that looks like? Yeah, so it's maybe academic or aspirational language and probably violates my goal of always being clear. But fundamentally, we're surrounded by work processes and systems. And those processes and systems either help us in our problem solving or distract us from our problem solving, right? And I'll just start with the idea of even just how do we look around at what is a problem, right? I can look at my inbox and kind of go, oh, there's the most important problem, or look at my goals and go, oh, there's my most important problem, or just wait for somebody to enter my office and bring me a problem, and there's my most important problem. And so if we just sort of think about the management system of what are we paying attention to and how is that attention grabbing system drawing our collective attention to the right gaps that need our attention and not to the wrong ones, right? Because we all know what can happen if you just if you live your life as a leader in your inbox, you will you will solve problems. Right. They'll come to you. They'll show up. But that's not a very elaborate or thoughtful system as opposed to here's our goals. Here's our metrics. Here's our gaps. Here's our priorities. And if we understand how all of those things start to stack up, then we can focus our attention on the right problems. So that is perhaps the most important thing. But I think, at least in the management system, I think a lot of it is attention management, just like in the cockpit of your car. You don't have an indicator for everything. There's a whole lot of things it's not telling you about. but it will tell you some things it tells you about all the time because you should pay attention to it all the time. Other things it tells you about only when it needs your attention. And so in the cockpit of a car is your personal driving management system. You know what to pay attention to. How's that work for a team in their day-to-day work so that they are ultimately working on the right problems? And it's a human system. People design it often by accident rather by deliberate action. But that's the leader's job is to make sure by building that right system, the team is focused on the right stuff. And you're reminding us, Jamie, as you're sharing that, just the challenge it is as a leader to not just be reactive, but to be proactive. And so much of the thing, you know, just that example of looking at the inbox. I think the minute you mentioned an inbox, so many of us are drawn right to, yep, we know how that feels. And you know, the fires that come through, okay, here's the crisis here, here's this, and it can feel like you have no control over really where your day's going and where your time is going to be. And it's the tail wagging the dog. And it sounds like the essence of that, you know, system architect as a leader is to one, recognize, take that step back, look at the broader picture. You actually have some choices here over where you spend your time, where you allocate the resources, where you're investing effort and energy so that it can help be accomplishing not just activity, but results. Yeah. And that point you made around we have choices, I think this is something I often have to really emphasize is we do have, we're not a victim, right? We do have choices. They have consequences, right? They have consequences that all choices do. But the fact is, none of us are working on every problem to stay with problem solving or getting everything done. That means, by definition, choices are being made, right? And so there's a list of stuff, and here's the end of the day and some of that stuff gets done and some of it doesn't. Now, a lot of those choices, some of them are being made for us. Some of them we're making consciously. A lot of them we're making out of habits, right? It's a habitual choice rather than a conscious choice, but we are making choices, right? That's the thing. And so I'll share a quick story about this and it's, I guess it relates to problem solving still, but it's around these choices. I was working with a, an IT leadership team and they have two huddles every week, part of their management system. On Monday, everybody writes down their number one priority for the week. And on Wednesday, they just kind of give it a green or red, are they on track to get it done? And this one person in the room put a red, marked it red. And it's like, well, okay, well, and I still can't, it was a while ago, I can't remember if I asked or the leader asked, but it was, well, how long is it going to take to get that done? It's like about, probably have four hours. It's like, well, it's Wednesday. Don't you have four hours between now and Friday? It's like, I don't, I have so many meetings. And it's like, well, hang on. Is this, or is this not your number one priority? And yeah, you're going to have to say no to some meetings and you might have people judging you. You might have people mad at you, but like I said, There's consequences, but are any of those consequences worse than not getting your number one priority done, right? And this huddle was part of that system, right, that management system, the system architect, to help increase the odds that we got our number one priorities done by defining them and then evaluating them before the week ran out. And it worked, right, because the person took different actions coming out of that huddle. Yes, yes. And so building on this, it's so helpful to identify all of these factors that can influence the decision making that we each go through to figure out what the heck we're going to focus on at any one moment. And what fascinates me is the criteria we use by which we decide. And ideally, of course, goals and priorities, strategies are all cascaded and a lovely, you know, alignment. And we go, oh, this fits here. I will now adjust. And yet in reality, we are these perfect, passionate, fallible humans. And we might actually choose things out of habit, yes, and out of identity and out of preference. And we all seem to kind of enjoy certain types of problems we like to solve more often than not. And we might gravitate, whether we realize it or not, gravitate toward those kinds of problems. Maybe it's because it's some sort of report that you helped create five years ago, and now you're the director, and you just love that report. You want to dive deep into that report. That's you. And yet, as a director, you should spend five minutes on that stupid report, because that actually is the value that you need to gain from it. Jamie, how do we resist as humans? How do we make it more conscious so that we're not overly influenced by those identities and by our preferences for the kinds of problems? And just another comment on that, sometimes it's not dealing with the people side because we prefer the technical side. And yet a leader, they need to be able to deal with the messiness. So how do you balance that criteria? Well, I think there's an inside-out approach and there's an outside-in approach, and we need both. So the inside-out approach is you need to have your criteria sort of pre-established. And how am I making decisions? What are my heuristics for making decisions? So in my small little team, it's like customers come first. Right. So any client has a need to just take care of that. And then here's my goals. Those come next. And then there's all the other stuff. Right. So you need some heuristics that allow you to make some decisions quickly and consistently. And they may not all be optimal, but again, you can do it quickly and you can do it consistently. And so having that to help guide you and make decisions versus overthink each one is, I think, part of it. The outside in is you design the system, going back to system architect, you design the system to help nudge you in the right direction. All right. So I'll use a personal example for me. My browser tabs are lined up where first it's my calendar, because that's the stuff that has urgency to it. Then it's, I use Trello for this, then it's my to-do list, right? And then third is my email inbox, right? And so when I open my computer and log on, right, that's, they're kind of lined up. Like first know what you have to get, pay attention to today, then know what you're working on and what's important and only then end up in your inbox. And that's, you know, easier for me as a, you know, outside person without a big company. But even, you know, as we build, you know, systems for prioritization, whatever that might be, it's like, hey, here's the next bit of work, right? It doesn't matter. Like we've lined it up, right? We've built our system. Here's our queue. You can't jump over other stuff to go grab what you want next, right? We're, we're running the kitchen and here's the next order ticket on the, on the carousel. And you grab the next ticket and you can't put it back and go, I didn't want to do that. So you just build the system to help do what you know needs to be done and make it, make it almost a conscious act of doing the wrong thing, which we still will do sometimes, but, but I'm going to over, I'm going to consciously bypass the system to do what I want rather than what I should do, which, again, sometimes is going to happen, but it's a lot less likely when the system is at least nudging us in the right direction. These are great suggestions and tips of how we can structure the system around us to help encourage us to adopt healthy, appropriate, productive behaviors. I love it. Even just, you know, how you had your browser tabs. That's a great little tip. Little things. Yeah, little things. So let's continue this conversation as we've talked about the system architect idea of the leader. Let's dive into the culture builder part a little bit more and really what role that plays in, you know, helping create environments of accountability for individuals and that example that a leader set. So what role or what actions, behaviors can a leader do to help establish that culture of problem solving? Yeah, so I think first it's important to recognize that good problem solving is enabled through the right behaviors, not the right tools. Tools are useful, but it's the right behaviors that matter the most, right? You have two contractors that come to work on your home and they all have the same tools. One is careful and deliberate. The other is just, you know, they just make it up as they go along. Which one do you want? Right. It's the behavior that makes makes all the difference. And leaders shape culture, whether they try to or not. And I've had so many conversations with leaders. It's like, I'm not sure I'm ready for some, you know, the culture side. It's like, but you're doing it today. You're doing it every word, every action. And I think fundamentally, this kind of goes back to the opening question of what are leaders getting wrong? I think leaders underestimate the impact of the words they use, the decisions they take, the actions they take. And they just underestimate how much people are paying attention to those. So I think so, so, sticking with problem solving. So I'm a I'm a models guy. I love models. I fundamentally believe all models are wrong and some are useful. So I've used many, many different models for culture change. I don't personally care which one you use. I've been using, I'll say more recently, like the last 10 years, Jeff Grimshaw's five frequencies, just because I found it very interesting and flexible. But you have to be thinking about what are the signals that people are picking up on and what message are they carrying? And so I'll take a behavior of problem solving. I believe curiosity around why are things happening the way that they are, cause and effect, why are things happening, that deep curiosity has to be part of that culture. Right. And so what does a leader have to do? They have to demonstrate that in both sides. One, not pretend they already have the answer all the time. Right. Kind of go, I don't know cause and effect here, but here's what I'm going to go do to find out. And if leaders never say those words, then what people pick up on is, you know, leaders are the people that already know the answer. Right. Whether they intended to or not. And on the other side, with other people owning problems, they have to ask lots of questions. They have to probe not around did you get the right answer, but were you rigorous in your thought process? And so I was just a couple hours ago having a conversation about a particular problem, I was commenting around how much the team did not assume, based on their personal preference, what the causes were. This was around meetings and meeting structure and what's effective. All right, so we all have our preferences. They didn't go down that route. They collected data, did surveys. They kind of went into it with rigorous curiosity. And so as a leader, I want to test how curious were you, not did you come up with the right answer. And if my line of questioning leads to that, it's going to help reinforce the right behavior, which is be curious about cause and effect. So leaders affect culture each and every day. They don't need a three-ring binder worth of plans, but they need some intentionality in their words, their actions, their decisions, and their questions. And that starts to shape the behaviors in the organization. I appreciate your use of the term curiosity. It's one of my favorite words, especially because we've talked on the program here in previous episodes. The opposite of curiosity is judgment. When you have the right answer, and you no longer have a spirit of learning, it's like that's right or wrong, that's good or bad, that's ugly or beautiful, already judged, versus let me probe. Let me ask a little deeper. Let me suspend my hypothesis long enough to be able to entertain alternative ideas and even go so far as to hold two opposing viewpoints at the same time or more and to be comfortable with that for a time to then further explore. And yet that is so dang hard, especially for leaders who have not fully transitioned to becoming a leader, and they might still be having an individual contributor mindset, which is oftentimes, here's the right answer. I'm going to execute and create a technical correct answer, and then give it, and here you go, versus a leader transitioning from one to many options, many ideas. And usually the types of problems that leaders are dealing with, complex, uncertain, and both at times, to be able to then be open and learning. This learning mentality to make sure that a leader is not thinking they're the only ones, they're all that and a bag of chips. No, there is something else and it's being open, but that is so hard to manage for one's own identity and ego. Jamie, keep talking in terms of what other ways can leaders keep that learning curiosity mindset open? I think the words we use are really important. I like to say that some of the most powerful words a leader can use is I don't know. Just to signal there's more to know. When I talk about problem solving, I talk about it's a knowledge gap closing process first, and then it's performance gap closing process. So if we already knew what we needed to know, it's just go execute, right? So, I think fundamentally treating things as experiments, many times, even if we think we know, then it allows for that open mindset, that openness to learning. So, I'll give a simple example. I use this in the book. I don't know if I use it to make this particular point. But if your gasket gauge says E, we're pretty sure we know the answer. We shouldn't act like a learner out of false signaling. Go to the petrol station, fill her up. That's what we do. But we should also then look at the gas gauge and kind of go, okay, is it now full? That's the end of that. It's a very easy, low investment test to kind of go, did it work the way it was always working? And then if not, well, how do we go? What happens next? Right. Being curious about what happens next. So there's problems where we we know the answer. Put put gas in the car, but we still have to be flexible to being surprised. Right. There's ones where we think we know the answer. Don't don't, you know, wrap it all up in all this fancy problem solving when you already think you know what you need to do, but treat it like an experiment. Here's the test I'm going to do. I'm going to validate that my intuition, instinct, judgment was correct. And then, yeah, I don't know. Then I'm going really into problem solving. But if you treat all where you're curious about the outcomes and, you know, I'm expecting a certain outcome, but rather than being shocked by not getting it, I become curious by not getting it. So I think that's the predominant thing we do, I think, to stay curious. I think the other thing we can do is to practice by putting ourselves into situations where we're uncomfortably learning. So I'm actually headed very shortly to the National Association of Corporate Directors. And it's not uncomfortable, but it's their annual summit. And it's just filled with top shelf speakers about massive range of topics that I want to be smarter about. But I'm learning. Last time I went, I took 50 pages of notes away. I was just in pure learning mode for three days. So whether it's take a different role or volunteer for a project or just go look at some work that your organization does, I think we have to put ourselves into situations where there's no expectation that we should know what's going on. We can comfortably just commit or submit to the learner's role and be in that mode and absorb information and insight, whatever else we're getting. And I think that just builds muscle. It builds practice reps for being a learner. And there's, you know, I continue to look for, as I take on clients, there's actually, for me, I very consciously stop taking on what I call easy clients. Ones that, you know, their questions are ones that I've heard a thousand times before, and I'm just going to like, you know, I'm just going to point to the gas station. And be like, yeah, this is what you do. You put gas in the car, right? And because they don't keep me learning. So I really see clients that ask me really, really hard questions. And that keeps me in a learner's mindset. So that's easy for me from where I'm sitting. But I think you practice learning by putting yourself into situations. And that's how you maintain your curiosity. There's a fundamental element of humility to our professional development we need to maintain. And I think that really does help keep that curiosity alive. Absolutely. So, Jamie, we've talked about problem solving. We've talked about systems. And let me pose a scenario to you. Would you rather have a good outcome come out of a poor system or a poor outcome out of a good system? Well, it depends on the magnitude of the outcome, to be fair. So some outcomes are very, very bad. But, you know, if you consider the bias of resulting where we judge things based on the outcome versus the input, I think good outcomes from bad systems can be very, very dangerous. Because they lead us to a path of pat ourselves on the back. We're brilliant. We're great. And we are very rarely curious about why we had those successes. So i'm willing to bet at some point i could probably hit a major league league pitch um do i put down the bat and go i figured it out or did i just get lucky? You know the bat happened to make kind of the ball hit the bat rather than the bat hitting the ball so so i think if if you have a good system or more importantly a well-defined system that gives you a bad outcome I think there's two things you get curious about on the bad outcome. One, was it just natural variation? Right. I'm going to do this a hundred times and I'm not going to connect with a baseball every time. And so sometimes you get bad outcomes. Right. I recently working with someone who they if you go look at everything they did, it's kind of like, yeah, that was all the right things. And then they still lost a sale at the end because of this wild aberration of circumstances. Okay. That doesn't mean you change what you do. So that's one thing. The other is that, well, the system was well-defined but not good because it did produce a bad outcome. And then we go back and define or fix the system. So the way I'd rephrase the question a bit is, well, I'd rather have a well-defined system that produces a bad outcome because then I can go back and adjust the system as needed to get better outcomes rather than be falsely convinced of my superiority in the success. You're reminding me, I was kind of chuckling, the old expression, even a blind squirrel can find a nut sometimes. And, you know, to then think, hey, yeah, I can survive the winter. I'll find the occasional nut versus having a good system to find and prepare. So much more effective. Okay, so this leads to that third role of a leader as one who shapes the problem-solving process in general. And helping people recognize that if it's just a Band-Aid, just use a Band-Aid. In other words, if it's simply on empty, go and fill it up. We don't need to go through extensive week-long sprints and re-evaluation and all sorts of just fix it versus something more complex, something unknown, something that hasn't happened before. It has lots of implications. How does a leader know how to best match the process to the nature of the problem correctly? Because that, if it's not done well, of course, can produce all sorts of unnecessary work and waste. Yeah, so I think the one thing you can do that you have to start with yourself for is put the problem into context. And understand, you know, how bad is it? How critical is it? How much does speed matter? How important is success or what's a success look like? So just to overextend your squirrel analogy, if the leader of the squirrels said, we need a system to go find every nut. And then you build it and you're like sometime in February, you're OK, now we're ready. And we're like, well, we're too late. It's too late. What we actually needed was only this many nuts and we needed it by November. Right. And because the context says winter's coming. And so being a recovering engineer myself, this is an example of, will a team over-engineer, over-design, seek perfection when that's not what we need? And can a leader draw them back from that and define a different finish line for them? So we have to understand enough about the nature of the problem. So I'll give another example of that. You might have a problem that feels cross-functional. Right. So the problem depends on inputs from other teams and other factors. And so then instantly you're thinking, oh, I need to build a cross-functional team. But as a leader, you also know that this is our team's number one priority, their team's number 100 priority. We're not going to get their attention and we can try all we want. It's just not going to happen. And it actually shouldn't happen because they are focused on other things. So, what we need to do is we need to redefine the problem around how can we be successful even when we're getting, let's just say, garbage from the other team that we work with. And let's be prepared to process garbage and be really good at that. So, a good example of this would be an IT help desk. An IT help desk gets all kinds of tickets coming at them that are really poorly defined. Well can we go teach everybody how to better define their IT problems so that they put good tickets in or do we make the system more flexible and adjustable so we can learn what we need to learn right so that's an example of of what that means so whether it's the front door, do we need a team, do we just solve it on our own, are we trying to compensate for other messes or solve the root cause like, that's sort of the front door we need to define as a leader. And again, as I said, the finish line, you know, how good do we need to get to before we can hit launch or move forward? It's so many great ideas to think about. And as you're reflecting on the challenge, I love your extension of the squirrel analogy. We can, with all due respect to Jim Collins, sometimes great is the enemy of good enough. And we don't need perfection in every system we create. You know, that minimal viable product idea. Let's get something in place and iterate from there. Right. Especially in a fast-changing world, it's like, well, it could be perfect for like five minutes, right? And so I've recently been writing on this a little bit more around supply chains. Supply chains used to be all about optimization in a stable environment. I don't think – I think we're going to be long-term in an unstable environment. Nothing to do exclusively with COVID, but we saw dock workers strike and floods and all sorts of reasons. And so don't design for optimal because it's going to be optimal for like an hour. So that's one of those reasons that perfection shouldn't be pursued. Yeah, that's fantastic. And so as we're kind of wrapping up here around this topic of helping leaders solve problems, let's do a quick Lightning Round here. Here's a question for you, and you could kind of briefly answer it. What comes top of mind for you, Jamie? And the question is, what is that one thing? What is the one thing that leaders need to pay attention to to help them be able to solve problems effectively as a leader with their organizations? What would you say? I'd say be conscious of your role. Am I the sponsor? Am I an advocate? Am I the director? Am I the owner? Am I the coach? And if you get clear with your role, you can be more effective in whatever role you decide rather than ambiguous in all of them. Yeah, that's a great response. So it helps clarify that. So we've been chatting with Jamie Flinchbaugh. His book "People Solve Problems“ it's a great, great read a lot of nuggets and a lot of the conversation we've had today pulls from that and i have to to shout out the fact that you have some little cartoon diagrams in there which i for me as a reader whose brain is always going a million places it helps keep me focused in there so thank you for adding those in for learners like me. Great. Where can people get a hold your book and learn more about some of this, some more about this topic. Well, the easiest way to get the book is on Amazon. We have, you know, paperback, Kindle, audio book, we kind of released all at the same time. And they can also go to JFlinch, where they can, you know, read, read more of my stuff. And, you know, learn about the podcast, the book, other things like that. So they can find me at jflinch.com. This is fantastic. Jamie, it's been a pleasure to have you here to talk about how leaders can solve problems on the Leadership Growth Podcast. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. Absolutely. And all to our listeners, thank you for joining us at the Leadership Growth Podcast here today. We welcome you to join a future episode, to like and subscribe, and we look to have you join in the future. All the best on your leadership journey. Take care, everyone. Thank you.