Set-Based Thinking™ workshops and training services

You can easily learn about Set-Based Thinking™ in a day; but to learn how to do Set-Based Thinking™ requires you to experience it, wrestle with it, and be mentored in it. To do that, academic examples are of little use; you must use examples with which you have deep, personal expertise. And you need to be challenged by other team members with similar and/or complementary expertise.

Hence, our Set-Based Thinking™ training is not just a workshop or two where you work through a few examples to learn some new techniques. Rather, it is a semester-long course for a working engineering team, where the team practices and is mentored on the techniques as they apply them to their real engineering problems on their own products. That gives you a team of people with expertise in a common area, who have the time and the interest to develop out deep, rich, Set-Based Knowledge on a particular product. There are just a few workshop days spread through that semester; almost all of the time is spent doing real work, but doing it a new way.

Fortunately, the effort invested in learning the new techniques is typically easily paid for by the increased insight and superior solutions that emerge on your real team's real and immediate design problems.

Topics covered include construction of Set-Based Knowledge Maps, the LAMDA learning cycle, A3-thinking and Knowledge Briefs, Set-Based Problem Solving, Set-Based Trade-Off Analysis, Design Reviews, Design Checklists, and lean task monitoring.

All of the above is taught using our manual product development worksheets. However, as teams progress, they typically start to employ some software aids. We offer software designed specificaly to support Set-Based Thinking™, but it is certainly not necessary to utilize the techniques taught in these workshops.

To get started, we recommend "Learning-First": start by sending just one to three teams through the Set-Based Thinking™ training; based on that, you'll learn precisely how much your teams will benefit and how much effort will be required, and will be able to then make well-informed decisions on how and when to proceed.