My background was in automotive manufacturing, so everyone was trying to copy what Toyota did. If you excuse the obvious oversimplification, Toyota used approac

My background was in automotive manufacturing, so everyone was trying to copy what Toyota did. If you excuse the obvious oversimplification, Toyota used approaches from the Training Within Industry (TWI) program [1] to develop internal training. Art Smalley has numerous articles, videos, and documents available ranging from TWI to problem solving at Toyota [2]. Art Smalley shows there is a sort of hierarchy of different problem solving approaches depending on if you’re dealing with a machine stoppage on a manufacturing line all the way up to determining new markets to enter. TWI is broken down into job methods, job instructions, job relations, and a problem solving segment. It does tend to be heavily focused on manufacturing, so you’d need to change the examples for your needs. I don’t think there are any real secrets in the training programs. Almost all of the process improvement / problem solving methods I’ve come across seem to be a variation on the scientific method with catchier naming. Generally two challenges I’ve seen in problem solving are people jumping to solutions directly without understanding the problem, and making multiple changes simultaneously or in sequence and losing the ability to determine cause and effect. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Training_Within_Industry https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Training_Within_Industry [2] http://artoflean.com/index.php/category/problem-solving/ http://artoflean.com/index.php/category/problem-solving/