Description: This seminar was designed to explore the philosophies of a variety of management theorists; (including but not limited to) Russell Ackoff, W. Edwards Deming, Edward de Bono, Genichi Taguchi, and Tom Johnson; as they apply to the performance of products, processes, and the delivery of services.  Among the topics of discussion will be the concepts of “better thinking about thinking” and “thinking together.”  A deeper understanding of these ideas and examples of their everyday use will provide direction for organizations to learn together and work together in new ways.  The seminar will introduce you to these ideas through a series of questions that are specially selected to create awareness of a new approach to working together, learning together, and thinking together. 

Target Audience: Anyone who is concerned about improving the effectiveness of individuals and organizations will gain from this seminar and leave with a new and deeper knowledge of the organizational environment, and connect to a growing network of participants across the U.S. and around the world.  Past participants include individual contributors, teams, senior managers, managing directors, managers, engineers, designers, artists, graduate and undergraduate students, human resource professionals, secretaries, office administrators, purchasing agents, accountants, health care professionals, civic leaders, university deans, and professors.

Organizational Issues: Individual and group proficiency in the principles and examples of "thinking together” is fundamental to organizations that “work together, learn together, and think together.”   In the new economy, the proficient utilization of thinking will be a necessary condition; fundamental to business competitiveness.  The aim of this seminar is to elevate the consciousness of individual and collective thinking about sub-systems, variation, knowledge, numbers, interactions and thinking patterns. 

Objectives: At the completion of the seminar the participants should have the ability to better identify, characterize, and interpret the vision of seamless organizations, wherein working together follows from the ability to better learn together and think together.   The objective of the workshop is to explore the potential of "InThinking" organizations and to reveal the conversations of such environments. 

Cost: None

Handouts: Available for download after the Forum

Bill (right) with Jon Bergstrom (left) and George Sereno (center)

Biography: Bill is an Associate Fellow in the InThinking Network at United Technologies’ Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne business unit in Canoga Park.  Bill is known within Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne and his previous employer, The Boeing Company, and for his efforts to provide insights to the advantages of thinking together, learning together, and working together. Audiences for his classes have also reached after-school program in elementary schools, graduate students at Northwestern University, public workshops at the University of Richmond in Virginia and California Polytechnic State University in California, as well as, corporate, university, and public classes across the United Kingdom. 

Away from work, Bill serves as a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Leeds in England, and as a board member of the W. Edwards Deming Institute, and the Volunteers of America – Los Angeles chapter.  He is also a founding board member and current President of the In2:InThinking Network, a non-profit company dedicated to the pursuit of “better thinking about thinking,” for individuals and organizations.  Bill earned his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York.

Contact: Bill can be reached by e-mail at william.bellows@pwr.utc.com for additional information about this Pre-Conference session.

Biography: Tim Higgins spent nearly 29 years employed by United Technologies’ Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne (PWR) business unit in Canoga Park.  He retired, and returned to the same Canoga Park location as part of the NASA Resident Management Office. Departmental assignments took him from engineering to manufacturing operations to the Total Quality Management Office, to quality in the position of focal point for cause and corrective action.  He now represents NASA’s interests from the System and Mission Assurance viewpoint.   All was preceded by 8 years teaching high school English and mathematics. 

Tim claims that the company paid him to mess with the frontal lobes of those trapped in the prevailing style of management, though they thought he had a different assignment.  In support of PWR's "InThinking Roadmap" efforts, he conducts sessions in Six Thinking Hats, Lateral Thinking, Problem Solving and Decision Making and organizes discussions of Deming’s last book, The New Economics, obtaining local participants as well as participants from the U.S., Canada, and the U.K.

Tim spends three days a week playing soccer, some portion of  each day adoring a Brazilian wife who saves him a fortune shopping, and some time loving a trilingual-History-Channel-watching-19-year-old son.  He is especially fascinated with books describing the probabilistic and downright weird behavior of the universe and the people in it.  Tim has a Masters degree in English, has an A.S.Q. Certified Quality Engineer card, and a rather large collection of Brazilian soccer jerseys.

Contact: Tim can be reached by e-mail at timothy.t.higgins@nasa.gov for additional information about this Pre-Conference session.