Kepner-Tregoe

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Kepner-Tregoe Inc. (KT) is a privately owned management consulting firm that focuses on providing consulting and training services to organizations throughout the world, solving issues of concern to senior management in large corporations and organizations.

Headquartered in Princeton, NJ, USA, KT aims to help builds competitive advantage using systematic, rational process-driven approaches to resolve business issues and achieve peak people and project performance.

Since 1958, Kepner-Tregoe has studied how effective business leaders manage difficult business challenges. KT has distilled and incorporated their habits into repeatable, logical, and consistent methods for resolving problems, making decisions, planning ahead, and managing people and projects.

The Kepner-Tregoe rational processes for Problem Solving & Decision Making aim to maximize the critical thinking skills of people. They are easily learned and used at all levels within an organization, from the board room to the shop floor. Not dependent on a specific culture, technology, education level, or other factor, KT processes are flexible tools that provide enduring value in today’s rapidly changing world.

KT helps individuals and organizations to meet everyday business challenges with improved processes and new approaches to quality, competitiveness, cost, cycle time, business strategy, and other issues. Many clients embed KT's systematic methods into the way work is done, transform their organizations, and improve their performance.

KT's critical-thinking techniques are also often used in the engineering design process.

1 History
2 Analytical Methods
3 Industry Issues Addressed
4 External links

[edit] History

While working for the RAND Corporation in the 1950s, Dr. Charles Kepner and Dr. Benjamin Tregoe conducted research on breakdowns in decision making at Strategic Air Command. They discovered that successful decision making by US Air Force officers had less to do with rank or career path than in the logical process an officer used to gather, organize, and analyze information before taking action.

Based on their initial research, they founded Kepner-Tregoe, a company that continues to analyze and develop thinking processes for critical business applications. Kepner and Tregoe spent thousands of hours observing the practices of both effective and ineffective decision makers responding to complex, repetitive challenges. Their findings became the foundation for Rational Process, the Kepner-Tregoe method for effective organization management. Their book, The Rational Manager, (McGraw Hill, 1965) has been translated into many languages and read throughout the world.

From KT's beginnings in Ben Tregoe's garage in Pacific Palisades, California, Kepner-Tregoe built a network of offices around the world and improved the management practices of thousands of organizations. The first to focus on the critical need for training in problem solving and decision making, Kepner-Tregoe emerged more than four decades ago as a leader in the training industry.

Today KT's processes are used to achieve sustainable results by millions of people throughout the world. The first to introduce the "train-the-trainer" concept – which was developed as a methodology for transferring critical approaches to clients – KT revolutionized organizational improvement around the world.

The company remains at the forefront of organizational design, research, and practice – as it has since its founding. Today, KT's approaches transcend organizational, industry, and national boundaries to help business people develop and apply critical thinking skills in a fast-paced, global economy.

[edit] Analytical Methods

Over millions of years, through natural selection, neurological structures that promoted survival have been preserved and passed on by the human race. Patterns of thinking, response, and behavior developed around accumulating answers to four basic survival questions:

What's going on? Why did this happen? Which course of action should we take? What lies ahead?

Civilization developed as humans learned how to deal with complexity, discovered why things are as they are, made good choices, and anticipated the future. The elements that made these patterns of thinking possible became part of human nature.

[edit] Overview

The KT method consists of four steps:

Method	Purpose	Answers
Situation Appraisal	Assessing and clarifying the current situation	What's going on?
Problem Analysis	Identifying problems and their causes	Why did this happen?
Decision Analysis	Generating various alternatives and selecting the optimal one	Which course of action should we take?
Potential Problem / Opportunity Analysis	Identifying potential problems and opportunities to be addressed in the future	What lies ahead?

Kepner-Tregoe processes are universally applicable, regardless of cultural setting or content. Whether people are Japanese, Canadian, or Brazilian, all are equipped — as a result of common human experiences — with identical, unchangeable patterns of thinking. Only the content changes.

In an organizational setting, rational processes can make full use of the thinking ability within the organization, on a continuing basis. Rational processes provide organized ways of applying critical thinking skills to an issue. They constitute an explicit, logical system that can have a far-reaching impact.

The objective is to move an organization closer to its full potential to meet critical business objectives. This is achieved by the continuing, conscious use of common approaches, expressed in a simple language, and directed toward resolution of an organization's important concerns.

[edit] Situation Appraisal

Situation Appraisal is used to separate, clarify and prioritize concerns. When confusion is mounting, the correct approach is unclear, or priorities overwhelm plans, Situation Appraisal is the tool of choice.

Situation Appraisal clarifies and keeps the issues that matter visible. It can create understanding of how concerns should be handled and priorities set, and it tracks the involvement of others through to resolution

Situation Appraisal improves:

Shift changes and hand-offs
Staff and project status meetings
Daily planning
Crisis management
Project planning and status reporting
Taskforce and steering committee planning
Conflict resolution and negotiation
Department or function planning

[edit] Problem Analysis

Problem Analysis is used to find the cause of a positive or negative deviation. When people, machinery, systems, or processes are not performing as expected, Problem Analysis points to the relevant information and leads the way to the root cause. The process is used to gather and analyze just the information needed to find and correct the true cause of a problem, making it particularly effective in today’s data-rich environment. This promotes rapid and accurate issue resolution.

Problem Analysis complements and enhances use of statistical quality tools and data. It is used by organization’s worldwide in their path towards Lean and Six Sigma and helps to maintain customer and supplier relationships by clarifying where problems and solutions lie.

Problem Analysis improves:

Manufacturing quality
Maintenance and repairs
Customer care
Product reliability
Handling people issues
Sales and marketing performance
Investigation and documentation of deviations
Incident reporting and record keeping
Problem “hand-offs”

[edit] Decision Analysis

Decision Analysis is used to identify the best choice out of many. When the path ahead is not clear, when there are too many choices, or the risk of making the wrong choice great, Decision Analysis clarifies the purpose and balances risks and benefits to arrive at a solid and supported choice.

This step-by-step process marries logic, expertise, creativity, and factual information to reveal choices that have the right balance of acceptable risk and reward. By clarifying the thinking behind the decision, highly complex, controversial, or emotionally charged decisions can be made faster and with greater confidence.

Decision Analysis improves:

Personnel selection
Procurement and make vs. buy
Product and project portfolio management
Selecting a fix
Site selection
Product design
Budgeting and capital investment
Process redesign

[edit] Potential Problem/Opportunity Analysis

Potential Problem/Opportunity Analysis is used to protect and leverage actions or plans. When a project simply must go well, risk is high, or myriad things could go wrong, Potential Problem Analysis reveals the driving factors and identifies ways to lower risk. When one action is taken, new opportunities arise that can help you benefit from that action.

Potential Problem/Opportunity Analysis directs experience and creativity to prepare for the future and manage acceptable risk. The analysis helps you deploy resources in a way that ensures the greatest chance of success.

Potential Problem and Opportunity Analyses improves:

Planned shutdowns
Process and system changes
Equipment Installation and supplier changes
Project management
Relocation logistics
Leadership transition
Event planning
Product launches
Sales and marketing planning
Safety
Compliance risk reporting

[edit] Industry Issues Addressed

Using these core processes for rational thinking, KT helps a range of multinational corporate clients resolve issues in the following business-critical areas: