What makes CAEDENCE's workshops so effective?

We often help clients out of crisis situations, but our passion is preventing crises from occurring in the first place. This means (a) establishing robust systems, (b) empowering leaders, and (c) upskilling teams.
This post reveals the science and art behind our approach to lasting skills development.
We’re practical people. It’s not enough for our students to understand theory. If they haven’t incorporated our proven techniques into their day-to-day behaviors, we have failed.
CÆDENCE has decoded decades of business experience to reveal the intuition and practices of top performing teams and individuals to radically accelerate people and teams toward excellence. We know the theory, but we've also lived everything we teach and honed best practices for decades. This arms us with tons of real-world examples to engage students and clarify techniques.
But being experts in engineering, quality, manufacturing, communication, and management isn't enough. We also understand teaching and learning. We know what it takes to guide students through the stages from becoming aware of a skill to having that skill engrained in their intuition to use flexibly and consistently. That's what's covered in this infographic. If you want to dive deeper, check out the links below.
References supporting teaching philosophy:
Motivation: https://eagleman.com/podcast/what-sticks-in-your-brain-and-what-doesnt/
Environment: https://pubs.aip.org/physicstoday/article/67/5/43/414732/Psychological-insights-for-improved-physics?searchresult=1
Communicating with non experts: https://podcastaddict.com/episode/42996216 and https://podcastaddict.com/episode/42996217
Design of materials for clarity: https://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/books_pp
Spaced repetition: https://www.supermemo.com/en/blog/did-ebbinghaus-invent-spaced-repetition and https://www.wired.com/2008/04/ff-wozniak/ and https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/BF03194050
Mentoring: https://www.caedenceconsulting.com/blog/don-t-train-do-this-instead and https://www.caedenceconsulting.com/blog/confucius-and-gladwell-were-partially-correct
Over the years we’ve been exposed to Six Sigma, Juran, Deming PDCA, 8D, Dale Carnegie, A3, Shainin, and more. Each technique works pretty well, and has been demonstrated many times in a wide variety of industries and circumstances. At the core they are all essentially the same!
Each approach relies on an underlying logical flow that goes like this: [a] make sure the problem is clearly defined; [b] be open to all sources of information; [c] vet the information for relevance and accuracy; [d] use the process of elimination to narrow down all possible causes to the most likely few; [e] prove which of the suspects is really the cause of the issue; [f] generate a number of potential solutions; [g] evaluate the effectiveness, feasibility and risk of the potential solutions; [h] implement the winning solution(s); and [i] take steps to make sure your solution(s) don’t unravel in the future.
The differences between the paradigms resides in supplementary steps and toolkits. For example, 8D contains the important “In
Your primary role as a manager is to ensure your team’s success. Internalize this. Make sure your team members know this. Build an environment of trust and collaboration. A direct report of mine would frequently leave me out of the loop as problems escalated, preferring instead to “work harder”. It was clear that he felt uncomfortable delivering bad news to me (his boss) when things were not going according to plan. Let me tell you the rest of the story.
