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.
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.
Soft Systems Methodology: Practical Guide
Soft Systems Methodology helps groups learn their way through messy situations where goals, boundaries, and success are contested. This chapter explains rich pictures, CATWOE, root definitions, purposeful activity models, comparison, accommodations, and ethically defensible change.
8D Problem Solving: A Rigorous Practitioner Guide
The 8D method organizes a cross-functional response to serious recurring defects. This chapter explains each discipline, containment, root-cause and escape-point verification, corrective-action testing, prevention, governance, measurement, and the difference between a closed report and a solved problem.
The Simplex Process: Robust Creative Problem Solving
The Simplex process connects problem finding to implementation through eight iterative stages. This chapter explains divergent and convergent thinking, problem ownership, fact finding, challenge framing, ideation, evaluation, acceptance, action, measurement, facilitation, and the limits of treating innovation as a workshop.