
Jonathan Cromwell
Associate Professor of Entrepreneurship and Innovation at University of San Francisco; expert on creativity and innovation in teams tackling ambiguous problems.
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Jun 1, 2026
The Hidden Power of Messy Teams with Johnathan Cromwell
4:00
4:05
4:23
4:43
5:06
5:13

Mark BlackwellHOST
So maybe you want to go back and tell me how you did the work and what you discovered.

Jonathan CromwellGUEST
And I want to also highlight that a lot of the existing approaches, particularly in the academic literature, at least, will present these sequential steps, and you described them as the chevron boxes that link very nicely together.

Jonathan CromwellGUEST
And while these steps are often summarized or depicted in a linear fashion, there's a pretty open acceptance and an acknowledgement among almost any scholar that you'll talk to that it is indeed highly dynamic and iterative.

Jonathan CromwellGUEST
So if we take the dynamic component as a given, and it's not necessarily a sequence of first define the problem and then solve it, what the study that you're referring to was looking at was not so much the sequencing of the problem versus solving, but which component or which side of that process is taking the lead.

Jonathan CromwellGUEST
So if you imagine a dance, one partner in the dance is leading and the other one is responding.

Jonathan CromwellGUEST
And when you're doing problem solving, either the problem or the solving, the solution can take the lead in shaping the other and in directing what the other, where you might take the other or what you might view or be able to think of on the other side of that process.