When 110 Professionals Discovered We're All Solving the Same Problems
- Eric Olsen
- Sep 16
- 5 min read
First in a nine-part series exploring how the FPW Symposium 2025 transformed shared challenges into collaborative action
The manufacturing executive stood up during our first afternoon session in Salt Lake City and made a declaration that silenced the room: "US manufacturing is going to die on the current pathway."
Twenty feet away, a healthcare administrator nodded knowingly. "We're experiencing frontline staff burnout and resignation at rates we've never seen," she added. "Different industry, same crisis."
This exchange captured something unexpected happening at the Future of People at Work Symposium in June 2025. What began as sector-specific discussions quickly revealed that 110 professionals from manufacturing, healthcare, education, service, technology, and other sectors were essentially solving the same problems—just using different language to describe them.
The Morning That Changed Our Perspective
The symposium opened with Impromptu Networking, a structured exercise where participants paired off with colleagues they hadn't met for three-minute conversations. The prompt was simple: "What challenge do you bring to this meeting today? Present? Future?"
In the first rotation, conversations stayed surface-level—exchanging names, organizations, roles. By the second rotation, participants were comparing notes. By the third, something shifted. A university professor discovered she shared the same student engagement challenges as a service manager dealing with customer experience. A hospital administrator realized her change resistance issues mirrored those of a manufacturing engineer.
Within 30 minutes, we'd identified that roughly 80% of the challenges weren't industry-specific at all. They were human challenges wearing different uniforms.
Four Universal Themes from 520 Post-it Notes
Over two days, participants generated more than 520 Post-it notes during our Lean Coffee collaboration sessions. Pink notes captured challenges, green and blue captured potential initiatives. When we stepped back to analyze the patterns, four universal themes emerged across all professional sectors:
1. The Succession Crisis Nobody's Discussing
The most sobering discovery cut across every sector: demographic cliffs approaching fast. In our CI professionals group, less than 15% of participants were under 40. "Look around," one practitioner challenged. "We're planning our own extinction." But this wasn't unique to improvement professionals. Manufacturing can't attract young workers to the field. Healthcare faces mass retirements with no pipeline. Education struggles to make any professional discipline relevant to digital natives. Every sector, every specialty showed the same pattern—an aging workforce with inadequate succession planning.
2. Time Poverty as Organizational Design Failure
"Not enough time to improve and properly lead—always fire-fighting," captured a team leader's frustration. But this wasn't about time management. Organizations have "optimized out all slack," creating systems so efficient they've eliminated the capacity for improvement itself. It's a profound irony: in pursuing efficiency, we've eliminated the very conditions necessary for continuous improvement.
3. Organizational Silos Creating Isolation
The fragmentation wasn't just structural—it was creating profound isolation across organizations. Three types of disconnection emerged consistently:
Professional silos (healthcare's physicians vs. administrators vs. frontline staff)
Knowledge silos (CI professionals isolated from AI developers)
Temporal silos (retiring experts disconnected from emerging workforce)
Technology professionals captured the paradox perfectly: they create connection tools while experiencing organizational isolation as "order takers." The fragmentation itself might be inevitable, but the resulting separation and isolation were destroying organizational capability.
4. Technology Integration Without Strategy
While AI anxiety varied by sector, technology concerns permeated every discussion. But each sector framed it differently: CI professionals feared replacement ("Will AI replace me?"). Technology warned about implementation risks ("Dirty data—AI quickly implemented could be a liability"). Manufacturing saw competitive necessity. Healthcare wanted augmentation while maintaining human touch. Same underlying challenge—how to integrate technology meaningfully—expressed through different organizational fears.
The Fishbowl Breakthrough
The morning fishbowl discussion provided our first collective "aha" moment. Five improvement leaders sat in an inner circle while others observed and rotated in. When Bruce Hamilton mentioned identifying 38 different improvement methodologies in use, the room erupted.
"Don't forget Design Thinking!" "What about Holacracy?" "We use Scrum but call it something else!"
As participants called out more methodologies, someone asked the inevitable question: "Which one is best?"
The room went quiet. Then a voice from the outer circle reframed everything: "You're asking the wrong question. It's not which methodology is best. It's which methodology is best for this specific problem."
That shift—from methodology competition to contextual selection—became a turning point. We realized most organizations already use multiple approaches unconsciously. The challenge isn't choosing winners but building bridges.
Solutions Emerging from Shared Understanding
By identifying common challenges, groups began seeing solution patterns across sectors:
Healthcare's "Flying Under the Radar" strategy (executive sponsorship while implementing quietly) could help technology professionals gain strategic influence.
Education's Creative Engagement proposals (TikTok micro-learning achieving 400% engagement increase) offered manufacturing new ways to attract young workers.
Manufacturing's Competitor Collaboration (sharing proprietary solutions for mutual survival) provided a model for breaking down silos in other sectors.
Team Leaders' Emotional Intelligence focus emerged as the universal bridge for generational divides across all industries.
What This Means for Your Organization
The symposium revealed that workplace transformation isn't held back by lack of methodologies or tools. We have plenty of both. Based on our collective discovery, three interconnected barriers emerged as the real constraints: demographic crisis threatening continuity, structural barriers creating isolation, and the inability to see our common ground across industries.
These aren't definitive answers but starting points for transformation. The path forward doesn't require choosing the perfect methodology or waiting for ideal conditions. It requires recognizing that others have already solved parts of your puzzle—they just work in different industries and speak different professional languages.
The Journey Ahead
Over the coming eight blogs in this series, we'll explore how 110 professionals transformed these shared challenges into eleven collaborative initiatives. You'll discover:
How a simple tree diagram is unifying 38+ competing methodologies
Why manufacturing and healthcare found themselves sharing survival strategies
How structured dialogue generated breakthroughs across nine sectors
What O.C. Tanner's 35-year journey teaches about sustained transformation
Why making improvement accessible to coffee shop managers matters
How eleven initiatives emerged and evolved through self-organization
What infrastructure keeps this movement alive six months later
Most importantly, we'll show how "Better Together" evolved from conference theme to proven methodology for workplace transformation.
Because if a manufacturing engineer and a hospital administrator can discover they're solving the same problem, imagine what your organization could learn from unexpected partners.
Next in the series: "Building Bridges Across Improvement Communities: Two Months Later"—how the August initiative updates revealed concrete progress and the emergence of a unifying framework for all improvement methodologies.
This blog series was co-created by the 110 participants of the FPW Symposium 2025, augmented with Claude.AI to capture and synthesize our collective insights. Part one of nine documenting our ongoing journey toward workplace transformation. For more information or to join monthly community discussions, visit www.fpwork.org.
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