FFC NL 2025 TALKS
FFC NL 2025
Be the lone nut: how to unleash high-velocity discovery in your organization
The larger and more complex an organization is, the more impediments exist to human creativity, productivity and collaboration, and the longer it takes for organizations to find and address disruptions in the system and continuously improve processes to stay competitive.
In her talk Maria lays out a practical step by step guide for leaders, in particular leaders who find themselves leading from the middle of an organization, who want to create momentum wiring a winning organization as described by Steven Spear and Gene Kim in their book Wiring a Winning organization.
Maria shares 6 ingredients that when put together create the inertia needed for a movement that helps organizations gain and sustain a strategic competitive advantage by accelerating their continuous improvement work with a human-centered approach, prioritizing wellbeing, productivity, and interconnectivity of people while helping leaders build a high velocity learning culture as described by Steve Spear in his book The High Velocity Edge.
Core to the approach is using collaborative process mapping of the sequence of activities, handoffs, and breakpoints across people and time as a vehicle to practice the concepts of slowification, simplification, and amplification.
Process mapping this way empowers and develops the capabilities of people and organizations to see problems real-time, swarm and solve problems to gain new knowledge, and then share the learnings systemically across the organization such that an organizational high-velocity discovery dynamic is developed.
This practical recipe is derived from decades of experience helping thousands of people in a variety of business functions putting into practice the behaviors and capabilities that drive strategic competitive advantage as guided by Steve Spears' work with the Toyota Production System, Alcoa and other High Velocity Learning Organizations, and by Marias own work with a wide variety of organizations the past 2 decades.
MEET THE SPEAKERS
Maria Mentzer
Chief Marketing Officer at See to Solve - I help leaders create more value faster by embedding dynamic learning into their operations i.e. implement a continuous improvement culture
Maria Mentzer is the Chief Marketing Officer of See to Solve LLC, responsible for helping customers implement and sustain a high velocity learning and continuous improvement culture based on See to Solve founder Steve Spears research and methods. Maria is a strategic leader with over 20 years of broad business experience spanning leadership roles in engineering, manufacturing, supply chain, operations, sales, marketing, business development, IT, organizational development, DE&I, coaching & mentoring.
She is known for growing people, teams, and organizations to thrive and deliver operational excellence, and for being a passionate champion and driver of continuous improvement culture.
Maria holds an MBA and a S.M. in Civil Engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, both degrees as a fellow of MIT’s Leaders for Global Operations Program. She also holds a M.S. in Material Science and Engineering from North Carolina State University and a B.S. in Civil and Environmental Engineering from the University of South Florida. Maria was born and grew up outside of Stockholm, Sweden and now resides with her family in northern California.
Maria meets leaders on their continuous improvement journey, working hands on with leaders who want help embedding a culture of continuous improvement in their organizations. She applies a practical proven incremental approach to gradually embed collaborative process improvement, problem solving, and discovery into leaders daily work and their peoples daily work for sustained cultural change.
The methods she uses are based on the work of her MIT professor and See to Solve colleague Steven J. Spear. Together they have honed a proven formula based on facilitating hundreds of hands-on sessions coaching teams and leaders to practice the behaviors and organizational capabilities of high velocity learning organizations until they become part of how they do their daily work.
Maria loves facilitating workshops and brings energy, fun and passion to the room. With decades of experience in coaching and facilitation she empowers organizations to discover and apply a high-velocity learning dynamic in their work and daily operations. Maria has facilitated transformation across a variety of business functions (engineering, manufacturing, supply chain, operations, sales, marketing, finance, human resources, business development, IT).