People Solve Problems

About People Solve Problems

People Solve Problems is an engaging new podcast hosted by Jamie Flinchbaugh, the author of the book with the same title. In this insightful series, Jamie interviews a diverse array of guests – from thought leaders and authors to practitioners and everyday individuals, delving into their unique perspectives on problem solving. This compact, interview-style podcast offers valuable insights into what constitutes effective problem-solving, the challenges faced in the process, and the strategies employed. It aims to equip listeners with a wealth of ideas, best practices, and approaches to enhance their problem-solving skills. Stay tuned for the upcoming episodes by clicking the follow button and signing up today.

Publisher

Jamie Flinchbaugh

Category

business · business

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

12 Apr 2023

Latest episode

30 Sept 2026

Latest episodes

82 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   30 Sept 2026

   Kathy Coffey Solberg, CEO, CommonUnity Consulting: Why Change Efforts Fail Before They Start

   On this episode of People Solve Problems, host Jamie Flinchbaugh welcomes Kathy Coffey Solberg, CEO of CommonUnity Consulting and author of the new book “Reweaving What Matters.” Kathy has spent 25 years helping leaders across business, government, and nonprofits see what is really happening before they try to fix it. Her central claim reframes most change work: organizations can see the results they do not like, but rarely the patterns producing them. The framework grew out of an actual loom. Kathy is a weaver twice over, a community weaver by profession and a fiber weaver by practice. Looking at a loom fully set up, with its threads and heddles, she saw a system, and she has not stopped seeing systems since. She had planned to write only about reweaving, then made a mistake at the loom, had to go back and undo her own work, and recognized that the phase before the rebuild is the one organizations keep skipping. She named it unweaving. Unweaving has three steps: Notice, Clarify, and Act. Noticing is a hard place to begin, Kathy admitted, because it feels passive when every instinct says to do something. It asks how communication actually moves, whether money is spent in ways that match the mission, and who holds influence that no title reflects. Clarify turns those observations into understanding, following the pattern of what, so what, now what. Act stays small and deliberate: thirty-day experiments that teach something whether or not they succeed. Her example is the standing two-hour meeting where everyone reports out and then leaves, replaced by a fifteen-minute huddle where people ask for what they need. Underneath it all are what Kathy calls the warp threads, the structural pieces an organization hangs everything else on. Policies written for a world that no longer exists. Hierarchies built decades ago. Positions unchanged in twenty years even though the work around them moved on. Reweaving becomes possible only once that space is cleared, and it carries three steps of its own: Envision, Structure, and Weave. Envision asks what is possible with the foundation now in place. Structure answers how, on what timeline, and with which positions. Weave is where people, systems, and programs come together to deliver the work. Kathy usually starts at the bottom of an organization, with the staff closest to the clients, because they see what is needed differently than leaders three levels up. Leaders who react and throw solutions at problems burn trust with the people counting on them, and each new push meets a little more fatigue. Kathy said early readers of her book kept returning to one word: mattering. Belonging tells people they have a place. Mattering sees each person for what only that person brings. Asked what behavior a leader has to show for this work to produce results, she pointed to listening and to naming plainly when something is not working, which she said is often missing because people do not want to look like they might not know everything. You can learn more about Kathy Coffey Solberg at https://www.kathysolberg.com/ (https://www.kathysolberg.com/) and connect with her on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/kathy-solberg-98897730/ (https://www.linkedin.com/in/kathy-solberg-98897730/).

2. 

   16 Sept 2026

   Matt Zayko, Head of Global Lean Office, GE HealthCare: Why Change Fails After It Works

   On this episode of People Solve Problems, host Jamie Flinchbaugh welcomes Matt Zayko, Senior VP and Head of the Global Lean Office at GE HealthCare. Matt brings one of the broadest lean backgrounds in the field, and the conversation traces how that breadth shaped his thinking about what makes change actually last. Matt describes his lean origin story as being in the right place at the right time. As a graduate student in industrial engineering at the University of Michigan in the early 1990s, his advisor connected him with John Shook, who had just arrived from Toyota. Surrounded by thinkers like Jeff Liker, Al Ward, and Durward Sobek, Matt studied how Toyota developed products in half the time and with better quality, then applied that learning in industry roles at Chrysler, Delphi, and Pall under Danaher. He later spent fifteen years with the Lean Enterprise Institute, including work on Jim Morgan's lean product and process development team, before joining GE in 2021 and ultimately leading lean for GE HealthCare. Jamie notes a shared concern from their parallel paths: too many practitioners lock in what they learned early and apply it as dogma. Matt agrees, calling the confusion of principles with dogma one of the lean community's real failure modes. Asked about a particularly difficult problem, Matt goes straight to a lesson from his early career. Being technically right, he explains, is only half right. As a young engineer, he was convinced his solution was correct, and on paper it was. But the same idea had been proposed before and never sustained, so people had lost trust that anything would stick. The deeper insight followed: the problem is rarely improving; it is sustaining. Ideas are often only 80% right, and without a management system that catches the remaining 20%, the old problems return, and the people who invested in the change lose hope. Matt calls this the go slow to go fast approach, and he argues the sustainment side of change still gets far less attention than it deserves. The conversation then turns to breaking down problems in complex environments like product development and healthcare, where feedback arrives slowly, and the consequences of decisions may not be felt for months. Matt's advice is to recreate the gemba. Because a development program is a learning cycle rather than a repeating system, teams have to deliberately reconstruct how the work really happened on something real, such as a recently launched product. Visualizing that work, he says, is one of the most powerful starting points available, and from there a team can diagnose, set a target condition, and run the play again. On collaboration, Matt is direct: problem solving is a team sport. He credits GE's consistent problem-solving process as a standard that lets everyone read a problem the same way, but he stresses that the paper only matters if people build it together. When colleagues see their fingerprints on the document, ownership replaces resistance, and implementation moves fast. Matt closes with what inspires him about GE HealthCare: proof that a company more than 125 years old can transform. If it can be turned around there, he says, it can be turned around anywhere, and the lean community needs more examples like it. Learn more about Matt's work at www.gehealthcare.com (http://www.gehealthcare.com), connect with him on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/matt-zayko-b3522811, (linkedin.com/in/matt-zayko-b3522811,) and find his book, The Power of Process: A Story of Innovative Lean Process Development, on Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/dp/0367690306 (https://www.amazon.com/dp/0367690306).

3. 

   2 Sept 2026

   Bob Rogers, Chairman, BRC Imagination Arts: Why Your Message Is the Wrong Place to Start

   On this episode of People Solve Problems, host Jamie Flinchbaugh welcomes Bob Rogers, Founder and Chairman of BRC Imagination Arts and author of the new book Deep Story: A Complete Guide to Creating Transformational Visitor Attractions. Bob has spent five decades building visitor experiences for some of the world's best-known brands and museums, work that has earned more than five hundred international awards. It started somewhere smaller. At eighteen, he performed magic in the Magic Shop at Disneyland, where the job was to amaze people and then sell them the trick while they were still amazed. The lesson that stuck came after a customer bought a trick, read the instructions, and returned to expose him. A senior magician he admired told him the shop was not a temple built to display his skill. People came not to admire him, but hoping he would help them find some magic in themselves. Bob has treated that ever since as the foundation of selling, of hospitality, and of any attempt to communicate. This is where he believes most business communication goes wrong. Organizations decide what they want to say and build outward from the message, but wanting to say something does not create anyone's desire to hear it. Deep story runs the other direction. You look far into the audience for an emotional truth that already moves them, and far into the brand for the same thing, and the part people miss is that you are not looking for two triggers. You want the one that already exists in both. He frames it with a formula he admits sounds silly for creative work. An audience, A, enters a triangle, the delta symbol of change, and comes out as A prime. A prime minus A is the whole assignment, and that difference is almost always a change of heart, not a change in what people know. The Johnnie Walker experience in Edinburgh shows what that looks like in practice. It runs nine stories, and most guests arrive believing they do not like whiskey. Rather than teaching them the correct way to drink it, the experience asks what flavors they enjoy and builds a first cocktail to match. Bob reports net promoter scores in the low to mid eighties and a brand conversion score of ninety-one. Bartenders are trained never to push their own tastes. When the Milwaukee Brewers wanted an experience honoring founder Bud Selig, the team passed over his complicated public record for something smaller. Selig fell in love with baseball because his mother took him to games, which is how much of the crowd came to the sport too. That, Bob says, is the trigger you cannot manufacture, only find. For listeners whose reach extends to rearranging conference room chairs rather than commissioning a building, Bob suggests finding someone who will guide the process rather than decorate it, and starting with the heart rather than the technology. Fifty years have convinced him that people settle on emotion first and arrange the facts to fit afterward. To learn more about Bob's work, visit BRC Imagination Arts (bobrogers.com/brc-imagination-arts ) Connect with him on LinkedIn (linkedin.com/in/bob-rogers-34a193146) You can also follow BRC Imagination Arts on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/brc-imagination-arts/) and Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/brcimaginationarts/), and find the book at deep-story.com (http://deep-story.com).

Who has been a guest on People Solve Problems

Names identified in recent episode analyses. Showing up to five guests.

• Kevin Tarrant
• Ryan McCormack
• Krista Smith

Reach and audience

Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

Apple Podcasts (US)

5.0 / 5

5 ratings

Spotify

5.0 / 5

2 ratings

Podcast Authority Score: 39 / 100

A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.

Quality

55

Social presence

0

YouTube

0

Engagement

60

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Guest appearances

Does not typically book guests

Based on episode analysis; this does not confirm that the show is currently accepting guests.

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