Artful Making: What Managers Need to Know About How Artists Work

characteristic of art; it accounts for some of the difficulty the

industrial-minded have in grasping the principles of art or of

artful making. People working collaboratively, in the kind of

secure workspace we’ve described, create an entity playmak-

ers call an ensemble. This group differs in many ways from a

conventional team. It exhibits the quality of Ensemble, which

we’ve described. The most important single feature of an

ensemble is that it, and the made thing it creates, are larger

and more interesting than any one in it: It’s greater than the

sum of its parts.

Consider the Toyota Production System. When a worker

stops the line and the team leader ...