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Leaders need to set the conditions for good social interaction and it should be face-to-face. The focal point of interaction is the visualisation of work. That leads to a further point. We need to infuse teams with the ability to break work down so that it can be visualised at a level of granularity where value becomes clear. Work break down is a missing skill and one with very few experts. Visualisation is the forum for critique, suggestion, experience sharing, and ideas about how work creates value. It is the venue for good social interaction.

The same goes for Story Angles--they need to be really small. In fact, they need to be uniform in size, because this is the Holy Grail of flow: you can estimate cost and timescales with great accuracy from the right breakdown.

The Friday Story In one of Fin's departments, Friday afternoons are for storytelling. They are particularly reserved for stories about experiments and tests that people are doing (see The Cool Wall above). These are not retrospectives. They are perspectives on the future, on what can change for the better. Storytelling involves both the business side and the IT side of the house. The objective is to have four or five people do five-minute pitches on what they are learning. These pitches could be about customers, tools, or solutions. The room should be full. We're talking 100 people or more (or for a smaller company, everybody) before they go off for the weekend. It is not a demo (as in Agile).

Right now, however, most automakers have poor platform strategies. Their profitable revenue streams do not lie in car sales. Rather, the cash cow is after-sales service and extra parts. And to capitalise on this, they need extremely good customer retention. Retention issues are critical to profitability.

In the 20th century, writers like H.G. Wells talked of a "world brain". Democracy, in a sense, could be thought of as a collective wisdom. Economists have tried to describe the stock market as basically a collective intelligence system.

In our new age of work, learning is, or should be, a product of group interaction. In an empowered organisation, learning is about the group interacting well to produce good results, then reflecting on its actions as it refines its understanding of the work processes and tools that got it to a good outcome.

Mark each card with a t-shirt size: small (S), medium (M), large (L), and extra large (XL). These will reflect, roughly, the spend on the project. But keep it simple at this stage.

"It's not about the person, it's about the profession." In other words, teams need to be critical of each other's professional work without being hurtful to one another.

The chief method we use in flow is visualisation. By bringing more into the open in a company, we can stimulate more interaction and support people in uncovering more value.

We advocate entirely new work conditions: WALLS, not cubicles. WALLS as meeting places. Hypotheses, conversations and open debate should take place in public at Walls.