Why do some organizations consistently outperform others—even when they have the same resources, technology, and constraints? In this fast-paced and engaging talk from Prodacity 2025, Steve Spear, Principal at HVE LLC and Founder of See to Solve, breaks down the principles of high-velocity learning, problem-solving leadership, and creating conditions where teams can thrive.

From Toyota’s legendary production system to NASA, Alcoa, and U.S. Navy shipyards, Spear highlights why organizations that prioritize rapid problem identification and iterative learning win every time. If you’re serious about building a high-performing, innovative culture, this is a must-watch session.

🔹 Key Topics Covered:

• The number one predictor of organizational success: rapid problem-solving
• Why bureaucracy kills innovation—and how to fight it
• The Toyota Production System and what makes it different from competitors
• How successful leaders create conditions for high-velocity learning
• The danger of slow-moving problem resolution in complex organizations
• What NASA, Alcoa, and U.S. Navy shipyards teach us about engineering better systems

🕒 Key Highlights & Timestamps:
[00:03] - Introduction: Why some organizations win—and others fall behind
[01:58] - The Toyota case study: Half the input, twice the output
[04:49] - The problem with bureaucratic problem-solving & slow-moving decision-making
[07:27] - How Toyota’s leadership sees their role differently
[10:49] - Why the real job of leadership is creating conditions for problem-solving
[12:35] - The Navy shipyard case study: How one mechanic changed the system
[16:09] - Why problem-solving must be rapid, iterative, and built into daily work
[18:44] - The cognitive science behind great problem-solving teams
[22:10] - Lessons from NASA, Alcoa, and leading industrial organizations
[25:06] - Final thoughts: If you’re not solving problems at high velocity, you’re losing

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Follow us on X: https://x.com/Rise8_Inc
Connect with us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/rise8/

📖 Learn More:
For deeper insights, check out Steve Spear’s work on high-velocity learning and problem-solving leadership:

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Steve Spear (00:03):

So I have 25 minutes to share with you my life's work. So I'm going to go fast, cover a lot and be very shallow. So if you've got any questions, I encourage you to be hyper aggressive and just scream out questions. So in terms of the outline, I'll just get through it. It's 25 minutes. You don't need a read ahead. So I've been a long-term fan of the number four, and this goes back to when I first hit graduate school in the late 1980s, and I got to MIT right around the time this other graduate student was finishing up his master's thesis, his fellow John Krafcik. And John, a lot of us was wondering what the hell is going on in Japan? What's going on in Japan? Because they were kicking the teeth, the competitive teeth out of American industry. So John went ahead and he did a study of all 186 final assembly plants in the world.

(00:55):

And what John found is on any given day, no surprise that most of them, 180, one of the 186 on any given day, most of 'em needed about the same number of people equipped with the same amount of capital equipment and the same amount of physical space to make more or less the same amount of cars. There's no surprise, right? People using the same science and technology, they're subject to the same rules and regulations. They're trying to find a similar opportunity in similar markets. No surprise, everything is the same. However, John found five plants where everything was the same, but for outcomes on any given day. Those five plants with half the people, half the physical space, half the capital equipment, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, had twice the output half in, twice out the number four. Now it turns out that's a gross underestimate of the advantage these five plants had because not only was their output half in, twice out, everything the same but for outcomes, but their quality initial quality was way higher by hundreds and thousands when you measured defects, their durability of their product was much better.

(01:58):

Their agility to switch on model to model to model was about half the time required elsewhere. So whether it was four or 16 or a hundred, who knows, but half and twice out. Now, back in the eighties when you started talking about this half and twice out in those five plants, they were all Toyota plants. People say, oh yeah, but we're not Japanese. Or people say, oh yeah, well we don't make cars. Now, just as an aside, making cars is about the hardest freaking thing to do in the world because a car has a lot of **** parts and the factory that makes cars launches in one a minute and they're competing with anyway, it's a very hard thing to do. But anyway, the thing is, it's not just cars, right? This half in, twice out, because when we start making other pairwise comparisons, there you go.

(02:49):

One of these will work. All right, well I only have 25 minutes, you'll need to see us. So many slides. Anyway, the button, my buttons ain't working there we nope, wait, what's going on? We're on a lag. All right, we had the number four. There we go. Cars, it's not just about cars, right? We see the same thing where you have organizations which are in the same place at the same time, subject to the same rules and regulations. Everything is the same but for outcomes. So you got Nokia, which was once the dominant enterprise and cell phone smartphones, and they're nothing now compared to Apple and even Samsung, apple. And then you've got Google and Yahoo for all those guys were roommates at Stanford, started at the same place, same time, and yet today, I mean, do you know anyone who has a Yahoo email account?

(03:42):

And Google is considered an antitrust threat. So anyway, if you stop the argument there, so we got past the we don't make cars, and if I had more control over my slides, we'd be here. Then you can say, yeah, but we don't have the visionary leader who's creating all sorts of mission, vision, value or whatever the other garble is for my organization. We don't have a Steve Jobs passing the baton over to Tim Cook, et cetera. But then you got you before and afters and you got here. Here's the thing about before and after, it's the same people doing the same thing with the same rules. Regulation, science and technology, trying to find similar opportunities in same art is the same **** people and everything is the same, but for outcomes. And so going through some of these examples, so Alcoa took really high risk, high hazard operations, made them nearly perfectly safe.

(04:32):

Pratt and Whitney, after a series of very, very expensive losses trying to compete to put their engines on somebody else's planes on a pilot program won the contract for the F-35. There's before and afters of high risk, high hazard medical practices taking the threat to patients down to zero in terms of nosocomial infection and patient falls and mismedication, blah, blah, blah. And we had some great examples back when Intel was actually world-class of doing so much more with so much less effort. Now here's the thing. When you start looking at this and saying, well, alright, we've eliminated this as a Japanese thing, we've eliminated this as sector specific is actually all the same people where everything is the same, but for outcome, what's left as an explanation very the same. But for outcome, there's got to be something different. So what's left, what's left is the management system.

(05:31):

Everything else is the same rules of the game, the same resources into the game. The same way to score points in the game has got to be the coaching. And our premise here is when we start thinking through, while you form up organizations in the first place, we form 'em up to solve really hard problems. And I'll build this example further, but what that really shifts is that if you're responsible for other people, your job as a leader is to create conditions in which those people for whom you're responsible can solve really hard problems. Well, how are we doing so far? I just want to offer, I'm coming out of a background where people look really hard at industry and thinking a lot about optimization flows of materials through machines and this thing and that thing or science and technology. But to say that we're competing on our brainpower and that the winners are actually really conscientious about creating conditions, they know their competition is not brainpower.

(06:33):

That's kind of a big deal. So actually I'll throw it in here. I only have 18 minutes left. Anyway, I'm almost at the end. So I was at a Toyota plant. There's a fantastic plant in San Antonio, Texas. They make the tundra and the Sequoia, they have 18 versions of each. They make 'em basically to order, it's like a mass customization situation. So we're down there and we had chance to meet not only the current, but then his replacement. The site president, it doesn't give you a sense of what it means to be a site president at a Toyota plant. You've got three, four, or 5,000 people of your own Toyota employees. You have another several thousand of onsite employees of first tier supplier. So you got an operation of about 10,000 people. And on top of that, just when I talked to my Navy friends, I said, you realize running a Toyota plan is like running a carrier strike group in terms of the number of people.

(07:27):

And it is very competitive. You got to be launching a Tundra or a Sequoia every minute, and that's a $70,000 vehicle which has to be defect free to go into the marketplace. And each one is different from the one that came off the line before it and after it. So it's kind of a big job. So we're asking this woman, Susanna is like, congratulations, you got this new job. What do you want your legacy to be? And she looks at us and said, legacy, legacy. I'm a steward. I am temporarily responsible for the management system that allows all these thousands and thousands of people for their individual efforts to come together in such harmony every day. My legacy, I just want to make sure when I leave this system people can look and say, good thing for Susanna, she left a better shine than she found it.

(08:21):

It is very different way. But then people said, well, in terms of your stewardship, what are your concerns? You say, well, the thing is, if you want to get a car to launch off a factory every minute, there's a lot of **** parts. And that's just an example. To give you an example, a seat set has 900 parts. They come from 126 suppliers in 22 different countries. And those **** things managed to fly together every minute without fail, without fail. And that's just the seeds. I can't even talk about the transmissions and the rest of the powertrain and all that. And that's just systems for parts. And you have all the systems that support all the production equipment, which may be 10,000 pieces of capital equipment, which run over 90%. The operational availability is way in the high nineties, and that stuff just keeps running.

(09:10):

We were looking at an engine line, we said, well, how do you keep this thing running? They said, well, we've got a lot of well-trained people, but we also have 50,000 parts in stock so if something breaks, we can fix that sucker right away. And we said, you got 50,000 parts on these machines. They said, oh no, it's many more. But we also have a machine shop which can whip out the ones we don't stock. But anyway, there is a lot of complexity. So when Susanna says, I worry, do we have systems to get everything to flow together at the right place at the right time? You realize that's a non-trivial concern. But then Susanna says, she says, to get all those systems designed and built and operating and maintained and improved and diagnosed, you've got to have a lot of problem solving. We've got a lot of systems.

(09:55):

So then she says, but that's my second level concern. But because of the number of problems we have, I got to make sure we got a lot of good problem solvers. And she says, that's my concern, that's my paranoia. Are we developing people everywhere all the time to be wicked? Good problem solvers? If we're not, something is going to blindside us. So I just want to leave that with you as a key point is that when we start looking at the really great organizations in the world, they're leaders are worried about the brain power of the organization, how well it's being developed, how well it's being expressed. And then, and I'll get into a little bit, I only have a little bit left, how those individual expressions of ingenuity, creativity, problem solving skill, how that meshes together into integrates into collective action, towards common purpose.

(10:49):

How are we doing so far? Alright, so anyway, in the new book, and I'll just mention this real quick. We give an example of two guys doing a job. And the point of this example early on in the book is to for people to say, oh no, well our job is not to compete on brain power. We give an example of two guys trying to move a couch just rushing ahead on that. We all had this experience of moving something big and heavy and awkward. And we know if the first thing you do is you look at the couch or the dresser or the bureau, whatever else and say, oh, this is a bra problem, and you try to then start moving it, someone's going to get hurt. Hey, what are you doing? Pinch my finger. The way to move the couch successfully is before you even touch the couch, you think and discuss about all the problems with moving with the couch.

(11:35):

Where do I lift it? Where does it balance? Where do I get a good hole? Do I have to go through a door? Do I have to tip it up through the door? Are there stairs involved? Do you go up the stairs first? Or what I do if you're going up the stairs first, who's setting the pace going up the stairs? Is the person pushing or pulling, going down the stairs is the same person, the other one, there is a lot of problems to solve if you want to move a couch successfully. So anyway, we use that as a setup to say, well, if moving a couch is so much brainpower and the success between moving it well and not moving it well is how many problems you solved before you got into production? And how about real work? So how are we doing so far?

(12:09):

Alright, so anyway, then we start this other thing, and this kind of connects to mass talk about culture here is a lot of times we think about, oh no, we're a really good problem solving organization. And yeah, a lot of that problem solving is on the objects, technical objects and nerds and geeks. They love objects. If you focus on an object, you don't have to talk to another person. I watch a big bang in Sheldon, there's a lot of Sheldon's in the world. And then there's a lot of ingenuity applied onto the instrumentation by which we act on objects. So on the Big bang, I guess that's Leonard, he's got a laboratory, he's got a lot of lasers and gadgets and stuff, but there's another bit in enterprises which I think is the unattended to engineered set of systems. And that's what we call in the book, the social circuitry overlay.

(13:02):

So we invented some nice terms, social circuitry, overlay of processes and procedures. And this kind of ties back to Matt's talk about bureaucracy because what is a process and a procedure, it doesn't transform anything. All it does is make connectivity. And why does it make connectivity? Because most of the work we do, whether it's moving a couch or anything else, more complicated, difficult than that, most of the work we do can't be done unless we somehow harmonize individual effort into collective action. And it's the processes, the procedures, the routines, the norms of an organization that let us do that well or not. And so in a book we say we really got to pay a lot of very deliberate attention to processes and procedures with the question always, are they letting us or are we creating conditions? That's a better way to say it. Are we creating conditions in which the people for whom we're responsible, are we creating conditions in which they can give the fullest expression to ingenuity their creativity and their problem solving skill?

(14:00):

How are we doing so far? All right. Again, you have been invited to interrupt, and I know we're sort of in the south here, but I'm from New York, so you could just say, Steve, that's the stupidest **** thing I've heard. That's love language to me, alright? It is. I got a side story with my grandma when she hangs up the phone, why are you hanging up the phone because you're stupid right now. You're getting me upset. Click. All right. So anyway, I'm not going into politics right now, but when Donald Trump first ran for president in 2015 before he said anything about policy and people were all offended about his personal style, he's from Queens, that's where I grew up. I didn't get the complaint. I was like, the way he talks to people, that's Thanksgiving. He's like, who made this **** Turkey? It sucks. It's like, oh, I'm sorry, how about the gravy? Why is the gravy all clumpy? Anyway, anyway, anyway, we've learned more about the man. I'm not making judgment. We've learned more about the man, but his table matters, I think are fine. So anyway, he'd fitted in my family. So yeah, uncle Murray.

(15:10):

Anyway, what we say is if we're really concerned, like Susanna at the Toyota plant in San Antonio, they really got to think hard about the conditions in which we ask people to solve really hard problems. And sometimes inadvertently, sometimes deliberately, we put people in situations in which it's just impossible to solve problems so **** complex. And we don't give people a lot of time and we tell 'em, oh, come up with a really good formula. But you only get one shot at it, which is like the whole notion of problem solving is iteration. And oh by the way, if you touch anything, it may is very a lot of risk to touching anything. So you can't expect that we often ask people to do so. We can't expect in those conditions to get very good problem solving even by individuals, let alone by collectives.

(15:53):

What we really want to do is get people out of that danger zone, that danger zone where conditions that is really abhorrent in terms of solving hard problems and getting people back into a winning zone where the conditions are much, much better. And as a theme of the book where we really explore well, how do you get people out of the danger zone? And in some regards, if you got sort of a little neurodivergence, you want to think this is an engineering problem, but it's certainly a cultural problem like Mack was referring. So in the book we talk about first thing first, if you want to solve really hard problems, you got to make sure you're not asking people to solve problems in a very fast moving environment. It's just impossible. So we made up a term, we call it slow ation, but the idea is you want to get people in a situation where they actually have some control over time versus time having control over them.

(16:39):

And why is that? Well, there's actually cognitive reason for that. Our brains can do things very quickly, but the only things our brains can do quickly is stuff that's already muscle memory. We've got the sets and the reps, we've got the habits, we've got the routines, we've got the stimuli response triggered, reaction, whatever else. But when you walk into a situation where you're not wired for that situation and you get triggered, God knows you're going to behave very, very badly. I grew up doing a lot of sports and I got to say the stimuli response you get from being on a male sports teams does not prepare you for the stimuli response you should have when you're dating for the first time. And so what you got to solidify, you got to get into some slow thinking, be deliberative, creative, generative.

(17:25):

In my early dating years, it was not only self-critical, I got a lot of criticism on it. But the point is you got to be in a situation where it's safe to call out problems. And so connecting back to what Matt said about culture, this whole notion of safe to call out problems, part of that is an engineered thing. If you're responsible, you've got control over how other people spend their committed time, then you have some control. Whether they're spending their committed time in a fast-paced environment where it is really stimuli response trigger reaction, or do you have control where they're actually having committed time in space where things are slow or moving, where you have opportunity for repetition, you have opportunity for contemplation, you have opportunity for feedback to process it, consider it so on and so forth. So how are we doing so far?

(18:15):

Alright, so second mechanism we talk about in the book is this idea of simplification. And that's basically it's taking really big problems and breaking 'em down into smaller pieces because the pieces are manageable even if the hole is not. And again, with six minutes left, I won't go into a lot of example, but when we write a lot about the man missions to the moon and how Neil Armstrong, he steps down on the moon, he says Giant Steph for man, man, small step for man, giant leap for mankind. And at first glance as we are you in the book, it sounds very poetic, but then we say, yeah, but it's actually quite accurate. We documented in the book, so I won't go into all it now, but when Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon, it really was a small step. He stepped off a ladder and he started looking well, what had been established before that?

(19:09):

Well that was Apollo 11. On Apollo 10, that crew had gone all the way to the moon. They had orbited the moon, they had actually gotten into the lunar excursion module and descended towards the moon. And it was at 47,000 feet that they aborted the landing. They weren't planning on it. Rumor has that there was a sign taped to the window like, guys, remember you don't have fuel to go all the way down and all the way back up. But at 47,000 feet they returned to lunar orbit rendezvous with their command module and came back to earth. Now the reason they were able to do that is on the previous flight, which Apollo nine, someone had already tested out all the rendezvousing of all this different equipment, but in earth orbit and Apollo eight, that crew had gone all the way to the moon in orbit of the moon and then come back without any attempt on landing.

(19:56):

And that was the one where you get that reading out of Genesis on Christmas Eve and the picture of earth rise over the moon. That was Apollo eight. What's the point is when Neil Armstrong steps down and says, small step for man, giantly for mankind, he's actually alright. 47,000 feet, no small step, but that's what was novel. Apollo 11 verses 10 and then back to nine and eight and seven and so forth. It was that taking the very big problem of sending a man to the moon and having him come back safely the earth within a decade, NASA figured out how to break that into millions and millions of little steps because the little steps, at least retractable, but going on the moon and coming back when John Kennedy said that in 1963, that's freaking impossible. So anyway, how we doing? Alright, so you got to give people time and space to think, not just react when you ask 'em to think, you got to break things down so they can think about things, they can actually wrap their head around.

(20:52):

And then the other term, and this goes back to my immersion and being a student of Toyota for 30 years and lessons from Alcoa, is that what you have to also do is if you're really competing on your collective ability to solve really hard problems, you got to make it evident that there's a problem to solve. And I'm grabbing a phrase that I learned from a colleague who's in the naval reactors program. He said he is had a 35 year career of trying to see little problems before they have a chance to become big ones. And this gets back to the culture thing, right? Because the culture here requires that you not only let but almost encourage, even require people who are closest to the work, closest to the work. And this is a term I freaking hate to the point of having a fit.

(21:48):

People say, oh well the people at the bottom of the organization and the people at the bottom organization, what are you the freaking czar chairman ma? The people at the bottom of the organization, the people at the bottom of the organization, the people who actually doing the creative work. If you're at the top of the organization, the only job you have is to serve the people at the bottom of the organization. But anyway, the reason I play on that term now, which like I said, I think is a fundamentally undemocratic term and it is horrible. I mean we have documents, we say we hold these truths of self and everyone's created equal. Oh, but the people at the bottom of the organization, it's like pick one, right? They're mutually incompatible. Ideas all are created equal, but we have people at the bottom of the organization.

(22:30):

There's no freaking way all. So anyway, but anyway, but you get back to what Matt was talking about, culture and bureaucracy. Once we start getting a culture and bureaucracy and all this sort of top down stuff, then we say, oh no, well you're at the bottom of the organization, you can't raise your **** hand. Alright? So anyway, I got two minutes left. I got a lot of this stuff. I'm going to jump to the end. I just wanted to pick up on this thing. I got wound up now on this we have values as Americans, we should live the **** things. So anyway, just a quick, y'all have to do innovation. Clay Christensen, he talks a lot about it just here. Lemme just, it was a mentor of mine for like 20 years. It's a little, so clay's point about innovation, it wasn't technological, it was behavioral and it was some of these aspects that make the problem solving easier.

(23:19):

So one of clay's great examples is the displacement of the steam shovel business by backhoes. And clay's point, or his narrative is that no one said, oh, instead of steam shovels for mining excavation, we're going to have backhoe instead. The first problem that motivated the invention of backhoe was some dudes in California had to dig irrigation dishes. And they were looking at it like, who wants to do this? Literally backbreaking work of pickaxes and shovels. And the guy says, well I got a tractor, it's got a lot of horsepower, maybe we can rig it up to do your irrigation ditch. Right? So you start thinking about it, that's the amplification of a problem. Then offline, some slow ation to the problem solving. And the first problem was a very simple one was just convert the tractor to do something that a human being can do.

(24:04):

Alright? But then what happened was a friend walks in and says, Hey man, that backhoe thing you got, I don't even know if they called it a backhoe. Then the thing you got there that's doing such a good job on irrigation ditches. Can we do trenches? And they said, well not the thing we have here, but maybe if we buttress it up. So they made a ditch digger and anyway, on and on and on. And then you get these backhoe excavators and tapping clay's points is that if you try to go from nothing to backhoe to displaced steam shovels, you're never going to get there in the danger zone. But what did those folks do? They did it bit by bit, bit, bit simplification. Each bit was a response to the amplification of a particular person's problem and they got to a good answer. Alright, so I got 10 seconds left, so chance for a question. Alright, so let me just summarize real quick.

(25:06):

Like I said, life's work. I get carpal tunnel. I just want to finish one last example. There's a lot of good stuff in the book, but I just want to say back to the people at the bottom and I apologize for going over, I'll grab a minute. So we're doing a lot of work in the shipyards now. And as you navy folks know, you have fewer ships on station than you would care to have. And that has national security consequence. It also has consequence on people who join the Navy to see the world and they're sitting in kit remain. That's not a good trade off, but one of the ways we're trying to repair that is the condition had been that the wrong things were showing up at the wrong time or the right things weren't showing up at the right time in the right place.

(25:48):

And it meant that machinists and mechanics, the people at the bottom of the organization were having to scramble to get stuff done. And it was initiative carried out and it started off again, back to simplification, ification, they pick one valve. Any submariners in the room? Well, it turns out there's a thing called trim and drain and there's a valve called trim and drain valve. 43, I guess there are 42 other ones, who knows. But this woman, Emory was asked, she said, look, when you start this job on trim and drain valve 43, unless you think the job is actually ready to work, and this is the key part, start to finish uninterrupted, refuse to work. She said, what? She said, yeah, I know you're an industrious New Englander, but refuse to work. And then her supervisor, Shane, he said, look, and rather than doing hunting, gathering, foraging to find the stuff, Emory needs to actually be ready to work somewhat, start to finish.

(26:37):

Don't do that. What we want you to do is amplify the problem and amplify the problem to the senior leader in the shipyard. This guy coincidentally also named Steve, and Steve kept showing up and said, what's the problem? And when he found out, he grabbed the heads of the other codes, the other departments to say, Hey, y'all aren't supporting Emory over here. Get your *** in gear rigging, craning. You're not lifting this stuff that she needs. You're not giving her the apparatus she can lift on her own qa. Your forms utterly suck. No one can fill these things out. Can you get with Emory and work these things out? Engineering, there's a technical direction she needs. You're not given it in a timely fashion. Get your heads together with Emory. So long and short on this thing, and the reason I want to end here, all are recreated equal, the people at the top decided that they had this thing misconceived and they gave Emory the people at the bottom voice to complain when her situation was imperfect. And they responded in the way they responded was in a very non bureaucratic fashion because they try to create connectivity across the silos into well-functioning systems. So anyway, that's our thesis is that if you do that, like Susanna Toyota or the folks in the shipyard and other people who've set, great example is you win all the time. And if you don't do that well then you don't. So that's my story. I'm sticking to it and thank you very much.

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