On this episode of People Solve Problems, host Jamie Flinchbaugh welcomes Dr. Rebecca Teeters, Senior Vice President of Business Supply Chain and President of Chemical Operations at 3M. Over more than three decades at 3M, Rebecca has led plants, global operations, enterprise strategy, and business transformation. The conversation, something of a reunion for two people who go back a long way, shows how a self-described systems thinker keeps a very complex organization pointed in the right direction.

Rebecca began with the sheer volume of problems that surface every day across her two roles. Rather than sorting them one at a time, she relies on connected systems: supply chain design tied to value stream improvement plans, change management practices, and a daily management system that runs from the shop floor to the top floor. When something new appears, it moves through that same system, and the team decides deliberately whether it deserves attention now or can wait.

She described a framework introduced by Paul Gallagher, who leads 3M's Enterprise Supply Chain, that sorts work into three categories: Run, Improve, and Transform. Run gets a fifteen-minute standing meeting every Friday. Improve is reviewed monthly against a twelve-month horizon, and transform follows a monthly and quarterly rhythm. Rebecca sees a clear role for AI here, not as a decision maker but as a way to digest large amounts of information and spot early warning signs across dozens of projects.

Asked how she divides her own attention, Rebecca explained that her business supply chain team should spend about ninety percent of its effort on improving and transforming, with clear lines drawn about which processes the team belongs in. Personally, she is working to flip a balance that historically tilted toward keeping the business running. A well-designed daily management system makes that possible, she said, because she can trust that decisions happen at the right level and that problems are raised before they require a recovery effort.

On competing priorities, Rebecca pointed to operational excellence principles, noting that a flow problem deserves attention because the rest of the organization feels its waste quickly. She admitted that gut instinct still plays too large a role in trade-off decisions, so her team is building a capital allocation model that frames options in clear financial terms. She uses AI to challenge her own assumptions rather than to make the choice for her.

On blind spots, Rebecca believes the best defense is inviting outside perspective on a regular schedule, chosen with intent. Her team recently spent a day with Amazon and AWS. To cut down on fires, she has sent teams to learn from NASA. To understand flow, she points them to quick service restaurants. The lesson, she said, is to study the principles behind how others design their systems rather than dismissing them because their products look nothing like yours, and then to be humble enough to act on what you see.

Reflecting on her career, Rebecca shared that she never plans for the next role. She focuses on doing today's job as well as she can, keeps learning, and lets opportunities come, including a period leading environmental stewardship that she counts among the most educational of her career. She and her son share a phrase about being humble enough to be bad at something long enough to become good at it. And for all her senior responsibilities, she admitted she still misses being a plant manager.

You can learn more about 3M at https://www.3m.com/ and connect with Rebecca on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/rebecca-teeters-8870b917/.

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/ and connect with her on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/kathy-solberg-98897730/.

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, connect with him on LinkedIn at 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.