Productive friction in a Toyota factory. First moment anything goes wrong, the factory is brought to a standstill – but they freeze it because they need the context so they can do instantaneous problem solving because each one is a single point problem.
Break problems, e.g. how to build a motorcycle, down into bits and then do swarm innovation with different suppliers and sub-suppliers collaborating informally in tea houses. Thus they design a new motorcycle.
if you know what the final object must look like, then you can collaborate and do a sort of open-source design/development by collaboration and compromise so different suppliers understand how their pieces fit in to the whole and can compensate for others’ design quirks.
Not just orchestrating a supply chain, but also learning.
Offshoring is not just about wage rates, but also about access to distinctive capabilities in a niche ecosystem where suppliers are rapidly learning from each other.
Example: Telecare call centre, one of the best in the world. Middle managers purpose is to coach the employees, so each manager has only 8 employees. Leaning becomes a practice, not a process. They spend a lot of time – 25% – doing learning.
Convergence of new IT architectures and tools
– interaction tools: collaboration on demand, social software, wifi
– virtualisation architectures
– services oriented architectures: resources on demand, flexible access to distributed resources, rapid incremental improvements.