Problem Solving
Art Smalley is one of the first Americans to work inside Toyota Motor Corporation in Japan, where he learned structured problem-solving from mentors who trained directly under Taiichi Ohno -- a lineage that is genuinely rare. He spent the decades since translating that experience into frameworks practitioners could actually use, authoring Four Types of Problems and co-authoring Understanding A3 Thinking, works that earned him two Shingo Publication Awards and lifetime membership in the Shingo Prize Academy. He is now turning his attention to a different kind of reach: embedding those same frameworks into conversational AI, creating tools that put a structured problem-solving coach in the hands of anyone willing to practice. For Art, the goal isn't to automate the thinking -- it's to make the discipline of good thinking more accessible.
