With a bit of persuasion, Will and Grant reluctantly agreed. This wasn’t the way they were accustomed to working, and their concession came with a litany of ways this would never work. Nevertheless, they found a place where they could sit and work together, and they started the clock. They sat side by side, working autonomously together. While Clare entered the order, Will assembled the bill of materials and Grant prepared the specification drawing. Predictably, questions arose. {These questions would previously result in anonymously dropping the ‘job jacket’ back into an inbox for rework. Jobs queued up in inboxes: the constant shuffle obfuscating visibility and exacerbating delays.} To make a long story short, with a cooperative effort focused on an outcome, the job was entered, planned, proofed and back out to the customer. In twenty minutes.

In this scenario, all three team members happened to be physically co- located. Geography notwithstanding,

Their criteria for successful autonomous team play oriented around: aligning around the objective, planning the experiment and overcoming a reluctance to break status quo and get ‘uncomfortable’ in service to a better outcome.

Given that pre-work, the experiment could have just as easily (potentially much more cost-effectively) been carried out remotely as a digital team.

Unwittingly, Clare, Will and Grant networked cross-functionally to form an Agile team, reducing the order-entry lead time from 26 days to 20 minutes. It’s a true story. X-factory was not a “Lean” or “Agile” organization.

Clare, Will and Grant worked in typical painful silo conditions separately for over a decade before the emboldened experiment.