Kepner-Tregoe, Inc. is a multinational management consulting and training services company. It provides consultation and training to companies in industries such as manufacturing, electronics, chemical, pharmaceuticals, and financial services.
The company was founded in 1958 by former RAND Corporation researchers Dr. Charles Kepner and Dr. Benjamin Tregoe. They are best known for their Rational Process technique, and together wrote the book “The Rational Manager” published in 1965 and “The New Rational Manager” published in December 1997.
Initial Research
The RAND Corporation at the time were attempting to improve the effectiveness of the Air Defence system in the US, and had developed a way of simulating various types of air threats; high level attacks, low level sneak attacks and so forth. Kepner and Tregoe were working in a small research group studying the Manual Air Defence System, and for 6 months studied how groups of people process information when they see various types of air threat by watching how those groups processed the incoming information. They noticed a difference in the Commanding Officer’s ability to recognise a problem when it was occurring and then the decisions that they made in terms of how quickly they recognised that they were getting into trouble and in what they decided to do about it. When Kepner & Tregoe left the RAND Corporation they took with them the research hypothesis that “some people were using a mental process that enabled them be better than others at dealing with the information that was being presented” and “the more ability that a person had to articulate how they were making a decision the better they would be”. The research was anthropological – they went into the field, and had managers and CEO’s identify good and poor decision makers. They interviewed them, and tried to see what the differences were, sitting in on meetings and so on. When they found that there was no difference between those who had been identified as good and poor in terms of their ability to articulate how they were going about making decisions, Kepner and Tregoe came to the conclusion that if they were able to make people more consciously aware of the process that they were using, and conscious of a good decision making process they could improve their performance, and enable them to pass this process on to someone else. Interviewing people was not very productive, but sitting in on meetings was productive, they could more easily see the sequence that people were using. At the same time as conducting this research they were developing a simple form of four part business simulation, which they used at the Hughes Aircraft Fire Control Laboratories to track what people were doing and observe the sequence in a controlled environment. They found that there is a very different sequence of events and different information needed when there is something going wrong, in order to come to a successful conclusion, compared with the information required and sequence to arrive at a sensible decision.