Indies Education · Business Curriculum
Core Team Management
Build clarity, trust, accountability, and coaching into the way your team works.
Cause-and-Effect Analysis: Test What Matters
A rigorous, practical guide to organize plausible causal hypotheses across system dimensions, test them with evidence, and prioritize mechanisms rather than voting on opinions. It combines a defensible decision model, a worked business case, implementation steps, measurement architecture, ethical guardrails, leadership questions, and field exercises for operators who need to turn analysis into coordinated action.
Interrelationship Diagrams for Complex Problems
A rigorous, practical guide to map complex reciprocal influences, identify leverage and dependency, and design experiments without confusing arrow density with causal truth. It combines a defensible decision model, a worked business case, implementation steps, measurement architecture, ethical guardrails, leadership questions, and field exercises for operators who need to turn analysis into coordinated action.
Creative Problem Solving: From Insight to Action
Creative problem solving moves beyond brainstorming by separating divergent and convergent thinking across clarification, ideation, development, and implementation. This chapter covers the modern CPS model, facilitation, fixation, option development, testing, inclusion, evidence, and the operating practices that turn novelty into responsible value.
Causal Factor Charting: A Practical Guide
A rigorous, practical guide to reconstruct a defensible event sequence, distinguish conditions from actions, test causal claims, and design corrective actions that address the system rather than the nearest person. It combines a defensible decision model, a worked business case, implementation steps, measurement architecture, ethical guardrails, leadership questions, and field exercises for operators who need.
Root Cause Analysis: A Systems-Based Guide
A rigorous, practical guide to investigate recurring or consequential problems through evidence, systems thinking, causal testing, corrective action, and verification. It combines a defensible decision model, a worked business case, implementation steps, measurement architecture, ethical guardrails, leadership questions, and field exercises for operators who need to turn analysis into coordinated action.
The 5 Whys: Find Root Causes Without Blame
A rigorous, practical guide to use iterative why questions quickly while avoiding linear stories, blame, unsupported depth, and false confidence. It combines a defensible decision model, a worked business case, implementation steps, measurement architecture, ethical guardrails, leadership questions, and field exercises for operators who need to turn analysis into coordinated action.
Drill-Down Analysis: Break Problems Into Parts
A rigorous, practical guide to break a broad problem into decision-relevant components without losing interactions, totals, provenance, or system context. It combines a defensible decision model, a worked business case, implementation steps, measurement architecture, ethical guardrails, leadership questions, and field exercises for operators who need to turn analysis into coordinated action.
Organize Information and Ideas Into Themes
A rigorous, practical guide to synthesize complex information into defensible themes while preserving source, contradiction, uncertainty, minority evidence, and action relevance. It combines a defensible decision model, a worked business case, implementation steps, measurement architecture, ethical guardrails, leadership questions, and field exercises for operators who need to turn analysis into coordinated action.
What Is Problem Solving? A Managerial Guide
Problem solving is a disciplined learning cycle, not an ideas meeting. This chapter explains how managers frame performance gaps, test competing causes, choose proportional interventions, measure results, and protect stakeholders from confident but weakly supported action.
How Good Are Your Problem-Solving Skills?
A credible problem-solving assessment examines work products and decisions, not confidence alone. This chapter provides a multi-dimensional diagnostic, behaviorally anchored rubric, simulation, feedback process, and improvement plan for managers and teams.
Improve Solutions by Arguing Both Sides
Structured argument can improve a decision when teams build strong affirmative and negative cases from shared evidence. This chapter explains devil’s advocacy, dialectical inquiry, decision criteria, synthesis, psychological safety, and safeguards against performative debate.
The Problem Definition Process for Managers
The way a problem is defined determines which evidence, causes, stakeholders, and solutions become visible. This chapter offers a rigorous framing process, rival definitions, boundary tests, a worked case, measurement system, and decision-ready problem brief.