Boeing Speaker Series – Commander’s Intent and Leading in a Complex World

About the event

Abstract: Complex products and complex business relationships can’t be entirely planned in advance. There will always be uncertainty and emergent, unplanned events. One way to deal with that is to get better and better at collecting data and filtering it up to decision makers. Another is to create a system in which local groups can act independently towards an aligned goal.  Starting with Frederick Winslow Taylor, much of business chose to go the first path. But, military units had already started going in the second. This Speaker Series event will discuss how that happened and why the model that the military created is often going to be a better solution for today’s complex products and business relationships.

Speaker Bio: Steve Holt is a Socio-Technical Systems Engineer and Technical Fellow at Boeing. He has a special interest in how to lead large scale, complex projects and why success requires both technology and people. Steve is a member of the Theory of Constraints International Certification Organization and learned Theory of Constraints from WSU.