$310 dollars
$260 dollars early bird registration use discount code II76N5W - Feb 9 to May 15.

Hotel(s) offering your special group rate:
Hampton Inn – Santa Clarita/Valencia
25259 The Old Road, Santa Clarita, CA 91381

www.SantaClarita.HamptonInn.com 

• Rate: $149+ per night
  Amenities include: Complimentary parking and Wi-Fi, daily hot breakfast, walking distance to restaurants and shops, outdoor pool and fitness center.

Fairfield Inn – Santa Clarita/Valencia
25340 The Old Road, Santa Clarita, CA 91381

www.Marriott.com/laxvl 

• Rate: $149+ per night
  Amenities include: Complimentary parking and Wi-Fi, deluxe continental breakfast, and outdoor pool.Newly Renovated March 2025

St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church, 24901 Orchard Village Road

FORUM SPEAKERS

Tim Higgins

For the last sixteen years, Tim has worked as a NASA Safety and Mission Assurance representative assigned to the NASA Resident Management Office at Aerojet-Rocketdyne in Canoga Park, California. He has oversight obligations associated with the RS-25 liquid hydrogen fueled rocket engine contract. The RS-25 engine (aka Space Shuttle Main Engine) is a primary element of the NASA Space Launch System for deep space exploration and human missions to the Moon and to Mars. His tasks are directed at elevating the quality of Rocketdyne engine design, fabrication, inspection, and management efforts. His specialty is cause analysis and corrective action (with a minor in creative thinking). His duties include identifying fabrication and inspection risks and determining proper NASA actions to reduce those risks.  In addition to his oversight obligations, he conducts learning sessions for Rocketdyne and Government personnel in cause analysis and in corrective and preventive action implementation. He also conducts training in creative thinking tools and techniques and in people and organizational management. For the twenty-nine years prior to his NASA assignment, Tim worked at Rocketdyne. During his tenure there, he held technical and managerial positions in engineering, operations and quality.  He worked on the Clinch River Breeder Reactor Project, on the Peacekeeper Missile Program, and on the Space Shuttle Main Engine Program. Tim joined others in a partnership, InVista Associates Incorporated. InVista consults with small to mid-sized aerospace companies to aid them in becoming more effective at design, fabrication, and inspection processes; in discovering better ways to manage people and organizations; and in implementing strategies that increase company value.  Tim is the current President of, the In2:InThinking Network, a not-for-profit corporation that has conducted fifteen conferences of from four to six days each. In2:InThinking aims to lead people to increased awareness of their thinking and how that thinking influences their behaviors. 

Speaker X

TBD

Dick Steele

 I grew up in Omaha, NE where I went to Omaha Central High School. I got 2 engineering degrees from Iowa State University, one in Mechanical Engineering and one in Aerospace Engineering. After college went to work for the Electromotive Division (EMD) of General Motors. EMD built about 80% of the locomotives in the country back then. They also made generating sets using the same engine and sold them to utilities in hospitals in large facilities.  Normally when they sold these generator sets to utilities, the utilities use them during peak demand situations. After working for EMD for five years, and with the blessing of EMD and Detroit Edison, I started Peaker Services with two friends, a 2-car garage and three trucks.  Every day I would call down to Detroit Edison to find out which peakers needed attention that day. We would then divvy up the jobs, go out and fix the problems, come back and do the same thing with the next day. By the start of the second year, it became obvious that we were going to need more help. So, I hired another friend from EMD to help with the troubleshooting and repair.  By the time we were five years old we're about 10 employees and we're learning having fun and making a difference. We had our annual business meetings in northern Michigan. After riding our motorcycles or 4 wheelers all day, I would hand out the financial statement and discuss the finances for the year around the campfire. We had one assignment that involved the overhaul three of the diesel generators located near Key West FL. We had 11 employees at that time, so minus my secretary and myself, I split the group into three teams of three people each.  They headed down to Florida at different times to rebuild the engines. Our controller at the time, had a picture taken of him sitting down next to the generator soaking in the sun. He had that picture on his desk for the rest of his career. He's now one of our directors. 

After 14 or 15 years in business we had 15 to 20 employees and I needed some way to reward each of them according to their contribution to the company. I had gone to four or five seminars by well-respected institutions explaining how to do performance appraisals better. As it happened my mother suggested I read a book called The Reckoning by David Halberstam and it had a chapter about Dr. Deming.  In the fall of 1988, just after I finished The Reckoning, a flyer came across my desk about a Deming 4-day seminar in Washington DC.  At that seminar, I asked Dr. Deming about my dilemma with performance appraisals and his comment was, well just stop it; it's a bad idea. I had never thought about that because it was only common sense.  That started a very long and ongoing transformation in the way Peaker Services is organized and run.  Fast forward to about 1998 but I made one of the best decisions of my career. I said, hey, Ian, would you like to be a company president? He said yes and went on to become the CEO.  And today he and I, Mike Beck and Bill Bellows get together quarterly for board meetings learning and making a real-world difference while having fun. 

Lori Sortino 

Lori Sortino is a photographer, facilitator, and lifelong student of connection, shaped by decades of work at the intersection of community, systems thinking, healing, and the natural world. Her path has included leadership and facilitation in organizational transformation, immersion in indigenous and ceremonial practices, and deep engagement with somatic awareness and relational presence. Through her work with horses—as an equine photographer, observer of herd behavior, and participant in horse–human collaborative spaces—Lori brings a living-systems lens to understanding connection as an emergent, embodied intelligence—one that is continuously negotiated through presence, responsiveness, and relationship. Grounded in lived experience and close observation of the natural world, her work explores connection not as an abstract ideal, but as a survival-based intelligence shared across species. 

John Lenhart 

John Lenhart is the Co-Owner of the technology and consulting company, Flowcess® LLC. He has used his degrees in Chemistry and Chemical Engineering to create models resulting in the formulation and even creation of many consumer products, as well as being the youngest person to receive the Dow Chemical Central Research Inventor of the Year award. In addition to his patents, John has dozens of trade secrets involving how the human brain functions. 

Fazel Hayati 

Fazel Hayati is an educator and a committed proponent and practitioner of W. Edwards Deming’s management philosophy, Walter Shewhart’s methods, and Russell Ackoff’s principles of systems and systems thinking. His teaching, research, and consulting focus on managing organizations and operations as systems, understanding variation and applying statistical process control, developing leadership competencies for organizational effectiveness, and advancing quality and productivity as core business strategies. He has worked extensively with organizations across manufacturing, service, healthcare, and government sectors. 

"My relationship with Fazel Hayati is multi-dimensional. I have been both a student of Dr. Hayati and a teacher of Dr. Hayati. This allows us to collaborate in many efforts for which I will always be grateful.”  Peter Scholtes, Author, The Team Handbook and The Leader’s Handbook 

Dave Nave 

Dave Nave is a graduate of The Deming Scholars Program at Fordham University and has been studying Dr. Deming’s theories and applications since 1985. In 2004, Dave was one of only 12 individuals worldwide selected by the W. Edwards Deming Institute® to reconfigure Dr. Deming's famous "Four Day Seminar" into the 2-½ day seminar “Out of the Crisis. ” He was subsequently named as a training representative for The W. Edwards Deming Institute®, and co-facilitated several “Deming 4-Day Video Seminar for Advanced Studies.” 

Ian Bradbury 

Ian has a B.SC in Mathematics from UEA, a Ph.D. in Statistics from the University of Birmingham, England and an MBA from The University of Michigan. His career started as a statistics professor. Teaching at GM and Ford in Oakland University's Applied Industrial Statistics program, he was introduced to Deming's philosophy of which he became an avid student. He subsequently joined GM Powertrain's engineering staff to help lead the effort to apply Deming's ideas through which he had the privilege of travelling with Dr. Deming during his visits to GM as well as being part of the 4-day seminar facilitation team. Ian led the effort to develop a 4-day seminar from videotape which ran for several years after Dr. Deming's passing at GM that was donated to the Deming Institute. Ian has been President of Peaker Services since 1997 where he continues the legacy of its founder Dick Steele's aspiration for the company to live by Deming's ideals. 

David McCann 

Marie-Louise Thorsen Lind