The High-Velocity Edge

by Steven J. Spear

They specify in advance what (a) outcomes are expected; (b) who is responsible for what work in what order; (c) how products, services, and information will flow from the person performing one step to the person performing the next step; and (d) what methods will be used to accomplish each piece of work.

No team can design a perfect system in advance, planning for every contingency and nuance. However, as Alcoa realized, people can discover great systems and keep discovering how to make them better.

“see a problem, solve a problem, share what you have learned”

Alcoa moved from an approach in which problems are accepted as unavoidable—the “one thing after another” we expect with complex operations—to an approach in which problems are clear signals, beneficent warnings, the system saying, “There’s something important you don’t know about me, but if you listen, I’ll tell you.”

Ultimately, Rickover was driving toward developing a cadre who understood “the discipline of engineering,” the approaches necessary for managing the design, operation, and improvement of systems of great complexity, of great benefit when run well, and of great consequence were they to fail.

It was not that individual Eurasians were brighter in terms of their capacity to retain existing information and invent new ideas. Rather, over the course of generations, Eurasian societies kept running into ideas that, when combined with what they already knew, were useful and allowed for the amalgamation of ever more complementary ideas that were of increasing value.

When we look closely at the Toyota paradox research, we once more find that Toyota’s excellence comes, in part, from organizing its efforts in order to (a) create knowledge by solving particular problems and (b) make that new knowledge part of the company’s collective expertise.

“[T]he firm appears to have taken strong steps away from a pure functional organization by investing substantial responsibility in the hands of relatively heavyweight project managers and project organizations. These managers, in turn, have increased the amount and breadth of team-based decision-making to achieve substantially higher levels of design consensus, synchroneity, and coordination.” In short, LH was Chrysler’s best shot at doing the “right thing” in product design by using techniques championed by a number of researchers, such as teams that were (a) co-located for brisk, frequent collaboration, (b) cross-functional to bring multiple perspectives to bear on problems, (c) with heavyweight project managers to assure alignment of objectives across disciplines.