The concept of knowing a design will work early in a project (rather than after the production prototypes have been tested) and will satisfy the customers, such that projects essentially never fail, was first observed at Toyota (along with other measurable benefits). But the name the authors have given to that concept, "Success Assured," was born from a pair using those design practices over a century ago: the Wright Brothers. Before their first successful flight, despite that brilliant highly-qualified engineers all over the globe had been trying to achieve manned flight and consistently failing, the pair of bicycle shop owners with only a high school education had proven to themselves that they would succeed. Where did that confidence come from? Early in their design process, the Wright Brothers identified three key knowledge gaps that needed to be filled in order to design an airplane that you knew would work:








"the construction of the sustaining wings."







"the generation and application of the power required to drive the machine through the air."







"the balancing and steering of the machine after it is actually in flight."





They then set about methodically learning the causal relationships between the different design decisions they needed to make and the performance of the airplane.


The key take-away from their story: the Wright Brothers fundamentally transformed the front end of development into a sharply-focused learning and decision-making process, and thereby eliminated the late-process rework in which their competition was stuck.


Toyota built an amazing manual product development system that was able to consistently create a cadence of high quality products that customers want - all orchestrated at Toyota City. Myriads of Lean principles, jargon, and tools have been introduced and applied with minimal impact on design loopbacks, engineering productivity, and knowledge reuse within small to midsize engineering companies - and almost no penetration within highly complex engineering companies. New paradigms must be discovered to relentlessly expose knowledge gaps and tradeoffs early and optimize results before detailed design begins. The result will ensure success early - not later after extensive firefighting and engineering rework. This book presents new thinking and methodologies to convert the chaotic front end of product development into a convergent process of set-based learning and continuously innovating - a game changer for Engineering.