Wow, I was just informed that I have the opportunity to attend Kepner-Tregoe Problem Solving and Analysis training. You can imagine my delight! Or you could, if you also have no idea what Kepner-Tregoe Problem Solving and Analysis is.
Having set through Myers-Briggs and assorted other mumbo-jumbo, I’m not excited to waste a couple of days on another name-name experience without knowing a little more about it.
Anyone have opinions?
It’s not mumbo-jumbo like M-B. K-T is more or less common sense with a funky form to fill out. Be sure to drink a lot of coffee or wear those eye glasses that make it look like you’re not sleeping.
No, he needs these!
My dad works for K-T. He is one of their top trainers. Companies like General Motors and Honda pay big bucks to have him go to their plants and train their management in K-T’s Problem Solving courses. They are one of the top management consulting firms in the world.
You will be attending one of the best Problem Solving courses available. Even if you don’t like it and it is all “mumbo jumbo” to you, realize that these are skills that Fortune-100 companies are paying top dollar to learn.
Companies paid big bucks for Myers-Briggs, but … 
I’ve just never heard of Kepner-Tregoe and have been subjected to some amazingly trendy (and useless) seminars in my years at this outfit. If it’s not another rah rah session with HR types cheering for team building while 30 programmers mumble at their shoes, it’ll be an improvement.
I notice in their pamphlet that KT was used to troubleshoot Apollo 13, or something. And I also discovered that asking your manager what the heck K-T is all about is apparently the same as volunteering to take the training.
We did this last semester in my Problem Solving class. Suffice it to say that it is genuinely useful, and using it will probably help you see stuff that you would have overlooked otherwise, but it is moderately annoying to carry out.
That’s a pretty good description of me - “Useful, but moderately annoying”
The reason for the “Moderately annoying” is because it is very thorough. It is a step by step process that forces one to look at every aspect of the problem and consider things that you may not have considered.
Funny story:
When I was in college and my dad was still in training with K-T, he decided to run me through one of his “Problem Solving” courses to help me figure out how I would graduate within the next 2 years. I already knew it was impossible for me to do that because of the credit load I still had to finish, but he wanted to go through the K-T process of figuring this out with me anyways. Looking back on this, I can see he was just a concerned father trying to genuinely help his kid to graduate on time, but at the time I thought it was a complete wast of time. Two hours later after he went through the process, he came the the conclusion that it was impossible. Gee, dad, I could have told you that and saved myself two hours of boredom.
So maybe using the process for figuring out graduation requirements is not so good, but for more complex situations, like running a multi-million dollar international corporation, it is a very good thing to learn.
I’ll go in your place and give you notes and everything. You can go sailing or mountain climbing or just relax. It’s perfect!
See, we’re solving problems already.
KT was one of the best courses I’ve done in terms of applicability in my day to day job. That said, like others mentioned, it’s very thorough, and kind of feels like a 2 day course stretched into 3 days.
A lot of it is common sense and very intuitive, but it’s good to put a formal framework around it (I find, anyway).
And the most important part of any training course: the venue for the Melbourne course does a good buffet lunch. Don’t know about other venues 
I went through KT about 15 years ago. I HOPE I remember the training well enough to be correct in the following:
On the plus side, it does give you a framework or algorithm for solving a problem. But it only solves a particular kind of problem, namely, everything was going along just fine and suddenly we can’t make or do X anymore. What KT does is impose a thorough enough approach on the problem that you can probably figure out what it is that changed that messed things up for you.
Getting inner city children the medical care they need is a problem. Figuring out which way is North is a problem. Increasing network speed without replacing cables is a problem. Getting the USB ports on my PC to support USB 2.0 again is a problem. KT is only applicable to the last of these examples.
Also, even though my company has sent dozens (maybe hundreds) of people through this training, I don’t remember anybody ever organizing a KT problem solving session.
I think it did get us to embrace the idea of trying to list things that might have changed around the time the problem appeared, and talking to all the people who might have noticed such things. But it might be that that is all that has changed for us.