After a wide-ranging review, Watts concludes that "plans fail, not because planners ignore common sense, but rather they rely on their own common sense to reason about the behaviour of people who are different to them". He urges central "planners" to abandon the conceit that successful plans can be developed on the basis of intuition and experience alone. In its place, he sites the successful ""measure and react" approaches inherent in bootstrapping concrete solutions to local problems - much like the famous (just-in-time) Toyota production system.

This got me thinking about customer feedback systems and particularly the advantages of large organisations with branch networks. Once you are measuring the right things about the customer experience, the potential is then to let a thousand flowers bloom. Ok... measuring customer experience does not perhaps have the exactitude of  a production system... but the same practices of identifying failure points, tracing problems to root causes and searching for problems outside the confines of existing routines - are all possible. And, particularly in a large branch network, this can transform an organisation into a network of local collaborators.

The mindset then becomes: "that no matter what the problem is - chances are that somebody out there already has part of the solution and is willing to share it with others"; and "how can I allocate resources to finding these solutions and spreading their practice more widely".