AUTHOR

David Cox invented FLIPP Explainers* while at Procter & Gamble in the late 1950s. The method has not changed since then. Experience has shown the method to be helpful in picturing complex relationships by using patterns for reasoning. This clarity makes it very easy for people to reason through explanations that contain many IF and OR conditions. 

Mr. Cox grew up in Williamsville NY and graduated from Oberlin College (Ohio), 1952, in Economics. He began work with Procter & Gamble Cincinnati in industrial engineering where he led manufacturing teams to deliberately discover and bring about important changes. He also administered personnel policy and designed production methods in manufacturing.

Later, as part of the corporate Information Systems organization, Mr. Cox was a facilitator of 300 change teams in research, product development, engineering, manufacturing, and marketing. This involved using many different highly supportive, non-competitive game-like team plays. These could be taught on the spot while being woven together to form tailored versions of creative problem solving patterns (processes). This meant that even groups of strangers could immediately team up to multiply their focus, their imagination, their judgment, and their action commitments to make good changes start happening. As a separate effort, people in P&G’s Information Systems organization made many applications of FLIPP Explainers to facilitate their clients’ use of complex business systems that changed constantly.

Mr. Cox’s research identifies FLIPP Explainers as a common denominator for explanation in all fields of knowledge – education, science, medicine, communication, logic, mathematics, philosophy, and artificial intelligence. It allows people to see all the navigational scenarios in any system as complete, individual, stepwise, top-down, contiguous pathway patterns.  This replaces conventional written instructions, symbols, formula-forms, and (usually) all connecting ‘wires’ like those found in flow charts, tree structures, logic gates, and circuit diagrams.

Mr. Cox retired from P&G in 1988. His interest now as a volunteer is to help the 140 mayors in the Cincinnati tristate region to apply the team plays and strategies used by P&G change teams.

e-mail link: Contact David

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*FLIPP Explainers is the name of the new method. FLIPP is the acronym for
Format for Logical Information Planning and Presentation.