In Wiring the Winning Organization authors Gene Kim and Steven J. Spear propose a theory of performance that explains how exemplary teams and organizations consistently outperform mediocre organizations. This performance theory is based on the authors’ research across a broad array of fields to address the question of what separates high performing organizations from poor performing organizations. Most readers will find this book exceeds even the very high expectations they may have based on previous work such as The High Velocity Edge by Steve Spear.

The core of the book’s message is that leaders of high performing organizations focus on the ‘social circuitry’ of the organization. Social circuitry is defined as the sets of processes, norms, and standards through which individual efforts are coordinated to serve a common purpose. In designing social circuitry successful organizations employ the three mechanisms of slowification, simplification, and amplification. Within simplification are the techniques of incrementation, modularization, and linearization. Together these create a compellingly congruent collaborative performance framework.

The book provides many case studies to describe the framework, along with some very straightforward, less complex scenarios to reinforce the core concepts at work. While the authors suggest that some of the detail case studies can be skipped by readers preferring to take in the big picture concepts, I recommend you read through all the case studies in the book to reinforce how elements of the framework operate. The case studies are well written stories and the time invested reading all of them worthwhile.

People working authentically with lean design and construction practices will recognize that they employ certain parts of the framework Gene and Steve are describing. For example, takt planning advocates and practitioners will recognize takt planning as an approach to the technique they call linearization. The authors do an excellent job at describing how their theory is at work in practices that include the Toyota Production System, DevOps, Agile, Resilience Engineering, and work of W. Edwards Deming, along with several other well- regarded practices.

One big ‘aha’ building professionals will take from the book is that when milestone planning and phase planning for a project, we should be focusing on is the design of the project’s social circuitry. The more successful milestone and phase planning conversations in which I played a part did implicitly map a healthy social circuitry for parts of the project. Other insights that knowledge professionals should appreciate are ideas on how to structure work to reduce cognitive load, which is especially taxing for people working on multiple projects.

One value of learning the Wiring the Winning Organization theory of performance is that it provides grounding for developing improved standards for project planning and execution. When projects can be more explicit about the design of a project’s social circuitry throughout all elements of project work, teams will set new standards for performance.

The theory is also applicable for the internal executive operations fundamental to managing organizations in the Owner-Architect-Engineer-Constructor industry. Perhaps more so, given that enterprise lean lags even project lean in the building industry.

Every foreman, superintendent, project manager, project executive, and firm principal will benefit from reading Wiring the Winning Organization. Discuss and apply the concepts described in the book to continually improve the social circuitry at work in the teams for which you have responsibility.

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