Learning in the field — where management systems come alive.
Reconnaissance is a deliberate word choice. These are not benchmarking tours or study trips. They are carefully designed field learning experiences where the real subject of study is your own organisation — its assumptions, its culture, its architecture — seen with fresh eyes because you’ve encountered systems that work on fundamentally different principles.
Field Reconnaissance is not limited to Japan, they also venture to Australia and the USA. Details Below also on the Defence Consortia.
Field Reconnaissance Offerings 2026 – 2027
AME Japan Leadership Experience:
See Lean at its source. Transform how you lead improvement.
Join an elite cohort of senior leaders on a unique, immersive exploration of operational excellence deeply rooted in Japanese organisational culture.
This not a study tour, but a leadership transformation experience.
Japan Reconnaissance OAC:
The Organisational Architecture and Culture Program
The flagship program is an eight-phase journey that integrates structured learning, cultural immersion, and guided reflection around field visits to exemplar Japanese organisations. After the field component, guided application work helps leaders translate what they’ve discovered into actionable change within their own organisations.
February 2027
Leadership in the Mist (LITM) Oboro
Leadership in the Mist — a framework for understanding Australia’s distinctive management identity as something that exists in its own right. The ‘mist’ is the cultural fog that makes it difficult for Australian leaders to see their own management practices clearly. The Japan experience provides the contrast that burns the mist away.
February 2027
AUKUS Consortia:
AUKUS demands a supply chain that doesn’t yet exist. The Defence Manufacturing Excellence Consortia builds it — connecting Australian, British, and American manufacturers through structured capability development, cross-border learning, and the shared discipline of companies committed to making the journey together.
March 2026
Mogami Consortia:
Japan doesn’t offer Australia a model to copy. It offers a mirror — one that reveals the invisible architecture of how we organise, coordinate, and build. The Japan Manufacturing Consortia develops the cultural intelligence and supplier coordination that sovereign capability actually requires, beginning with the Mogami-class frigate and extending across the full spectrum of Australian-Japanese industrial collaboration.
AME International Conference Field Reconnaissance
Milwaukee
The AME International Conference is not a conference you attend. It is a field reconnaissance into the heart of American manufacturing excellence — four days inside the systems, practices, and leadership thinking that drive the world’s most advanced continuous improvement organisations.
October 2026