Resources

Things you can use before the book ships.

The Field Guide is deliberately built to be used, not just read. Here is what already exists, what is coming with the book, and where to go deeper today.

From the book

The named frameworks

Each of these gets a full working treatment in the chapter that owns it — definition, mechanics, and a real deployment where it was applied.

Chapter 5

5 Pillars of Composability

Bottom-Up, Agility, Democratization, Human-Centric, Compliance. The load-bearing test for whether a system is genuinely composable.

Chapter 6

Business Objectives Framework

Picking a first use-case by marrying business value, operator activity, physical requirements, and business process — starting at the gemba.

Chapter 6

The disposable diagnostic app

A deliberately throwaway app used to test whether a use-case is real before anyone commits to building the solution.

Chapter 7

Minimum Viable Solution

The smallest deployable thing that changes what happens at the station — plus the Diagnostic Test for spotting agile-flavored waterfall.

Chapter 8

Creation, Curation, Composition, Consumption

The four modes of engagement a first project team has to cover, mapped against the five roles a first use-case needs.

Chapter 9

Operational Flow Diagram

The core design artifact — three perspectives on the same operation, rendered so a team can argue about it productively.

Chapter 9

Solution Credo

The design test a proposed solution has to pass before it gets built.

Chapter 9

Composable Agentic Framework

Builder agents and staff agents as composable building blocks — scoped, governed, human in the loop.

Chapter 10

Digital Maturity Model & Escape Velocity

Explore, Scale, and Transform — and how to tell when a deployment no longer needs central pushing to keep moving.

Named patterns

The failure modes, named

Naming a failure mode is what lets a team point at it in a meeting without accusing anyone. These recur across the book.

The Monolithic Trap

One system built on the premise that it can serve every process the same way, so the process adapts to the system. Implemented that way on composable technology, it becomes JAM: Just Another MES.

Lean Theatrics

Lean’s visible artifacts adopted without the routines, relationships, and decision rights that make them work. Digital tools make the same mistake faster and more expensive.

Waterfall Reversion

The sprint cadence survives on the calendar while the actual sequence of work quietly returns to big-bang delivery.

Centralized Authorship

Everything still gets built by one team, so the queue that democratization was supposed to remove simply moved.

Governance Before Value

The governance framework arrives before anything has shipped — so the program is policed before it has proved anything.

The Lone Wolf

One brilliant, unsupervised builder becomes a single point of failure. The difference between citizen development and shadow IT is governance.

Agent patterns

Agents for the frontline

AI is the foundation of the digital technologies Augmented Lean brings to operations, and it amplifies the quality of the operation it runs on. Applied to an operation with daily frontline problem-solving and data captured at the source, AI makes that operation learn faster. Applied to incomplete, context-poor data, it produces recommendations that conflict with constraints only the operators know, and costs the operation its trust in both the AI and the Kaizen practice it was meant to accelerate.

The book treats agentic AI as an extension of composable architecture. A composable solution already works like a multi-agent system: each app has a defined goal, operates within its own scope, and collaborates with the others through shared data. Agents add a cognitive layer to that architecture. Chapter 1 traces the design logic back to the Toyota Production System, and Chapter 9 develops the agentic architecture of an augmented lean project. Every agent the book describes is scoped, governed, and keeps a human in the loop.

Being built alongside the book

The Composable Agent Exchange

The agent patterns in the book are where the Exchange starts. The Exchange is a curated catalog of operational agents and the multi-agent solutions they compose into, organized by the Composable Agentic Framework. Each agent is placed by where in the value stream it does its work:

  • Supporting the operation. Builder, staff, and companion agents that work with engineering, quality, planning, and the citizen developers within them.
  • In the operation. Agents scoped to a physical artifact (a product, machine, or device) or an operational artifact (an order, deviation, or schedule), and system agents that maintain a bounded exchange with ERP, MES, WMS, or a unified namespace.

The Exchange is deliberately deep rather than broad. Its weight falls on classification, composition, oversight, and validation, because in physical operations a flawed instruction produces a defective part. The book gives the method; the Exchange will give the full definition of each agent and how agents combine into a solution.

Four rules govern every agent in the book. Design for the operator who didn't ask for it. Keep a human in the loop. Start with the data you have, not the data you wish you had. Measure the outcome, not the usage.

Available today

Go deeper now

Open resources you can use before the book publishes.

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Start with the chapter.

Everything here assumes the foundation Chapter One describes. It is the right place to begin — and it is open.

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