2019 HPRCT Conference

 In keeping with the theme this year “Creating Connections,” this presentation is intended to highlight the ways in which the letters in “HPRCT” can work together to help people solve problems faster and easier:  The world we live in today is more complex than at any other time.  This complexity is largely due to technological advances in nearly every aspect of our global society.  From cars that drive themselves to automated fulfillment centers to connected “smart” homes that we control from our “smart” phones, our world today is vastly more complicated than the world of our parents or grandparents.  And the rate of technological advance is accelerating exponentially.  According to Ray Kurzweil, technology is an evolutionary process in which the tools of prior generations are used to create those of the next.  As these tools improve, the time between advances decreases exponentially.  While it’s hard to know exactly where we are on the curve, there is no question that it’s getting steeper every single day.  Over time, accelerating complexity results in an increasing number of possible outcomes, both positive and negative.  Positive outcomes represent fresh opportunities.  But complexity leads to an increasing number new problems as well.  Attendees of the HPRCT conference share a common interest in Structured Problem Solving.  We help people solve problems faster and better.  And the importance of our contribution is accelerating in lock-step with complexity.  Therefore we need to innovate, collaborate, adapt, and – when required – rip up the playbook altogether in order to stay in front of the wave.  Our predicament has its roots in our own human intelligence.  And while we often think about intelligence in the context of the individual, a group whose members act intelligently together is much smarter than any single member.  The term “hive-mind” is one way to describe a collective group intelligence.  It took a hive of human minds to get to the moon or to develop an iPhone.  And it’s going to take a hive of human minds, operating through an intersection of methods and tools, to stay on top of the wave of accelerating complexity.  Presentation to include specific examples of how Human Performance, Root Cause, Trending, and High Resiliency intersect to form the basis for hive-mind solutions.