The Rugby Ball Is Still in Play

Forty years ago, Nonaka and Takeuchi described the future of organisations. Most companies still haven’t caught up.

In January 1986, two Japanese professors published an article that would reshape how the world thinks about innovation. Not through a grand theory, but through a rugby metaphor.

Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka had spent years studying how the most competitive companies in Japan and the United States actually developed new products. What they found contradicted everything the management world assumed. The dominant model at the time was sequential: R&D hands off to engineering, engineering to manufacturing, manufacturing to sales. Orderly. Structured. And, the authors argued, dangerously slow.

The companies worth studying (Fuji-Xerox, Canon, Honda, NEC, Epson, Brother, 3M, Xerox, Hewlett-Packard) did something different. Their product teams didn’t pass the baton. They moved downfield together, overlapping, improvising, learning in real time. Like a rugby team. And they were winning.

What They Actually Said

Forty years on, it is tempting to reduce “The New New Product Development Game” to a checklist. That would miss the point. The article’s power lies in what it says about organisational character, not process.

The companies Nonaka and Takeuchi studied shared six features. Leaders created built-in instability by setting ambitious, sometimes near-impossible goals without prescribing how to reach them. That tension, rather than paralyse teams, activated them. Around it, self-organising project teams formed: not committees, but small groups who took genuine ownership and felt the full weight of the challenge.

These teams practised overlapping development phases. Engineers discussed design before the specs were finalised. Production was in the room before manufacturing began. This wasn’t chaos. It was deliberate friction, surfacing problems while they were still cheap to fix. Multilearning ran through all of it: individuals acquiring skills outside their specialism, teams learning from customers and from failure, knowledge crossing every boundary it could find.

Subtle control replaced formal management. Leaders held strategic direction; teams held execution. When projects ended, companies actively transferred what they’d learned (the sixth characteristic) so the next team wouldn’t start from zero.

Reading this in 2026, you could be forgiven for thinking: this sounds like Scrum. It does. That’s the point.

The Lineage Nobody Talks About Enough

Jeff Sutherland, co-creator of Scrum, has publicly acknowledged that Nonaka and Takeuchi’s article was foundational to his thinking. The cross-functional team, the sprint, the daily standup, the emphasis on empirical learning: all of it traces back to what these two researchers observed in Japanese product development in the early 1980s.

That lineage gets buried in footnotes. Companies adopt Scrum, scale it with SAFe, run sprints, hold retrospectives, and lose the philosophy that makes any of it work. Nonaka’s later concept of “knowledge creation” is the key: competitive advantage doesn’t come from processing existing information more efficiently, but from generating new knowledge through human interaction. A sprint is not a time-box. It’s a container for collective sense-making. A cross-functional team is not an org-chart convenience. It’s a deliberate collision of perspectives that surfaces what no single expert could see alone.

When organisations forget this, agile becomes theatre. The rituals remain. The learning stops.

Forty Years On: Deeper, Not Dated

The world Nonaka and Takeuchi wrote about (fast-changing markets, pressure on development timelines, the inadequacy of sequential planning) looks modest compared with today’s. Digital disruption, AI, supply chain fragility, and competitive cycles measured in weeks rather than years have made the conditions they described feel quaint.

Yet the insight has aged into something more fundamental, not less.

Adaptive organisations, the term that has emerged over the past decade for companies capable of responding to continuous change, are distinguished by three capacities. They learn faster than the environment changes. They reconfigure without losing coherence, and they distribute decision-making to wherever the relevant knowledge lives.

That is what Nonaka and Takeuchi described at team level in 1986. A rugby team doesn’t wait for the coach to call every play. It reads the field and acts. Authority follows information, not hierarchy.

What has changed in 2026 is scale and urgency. Nonaka and Takeuchi were writing about elite product teams at exceptional companies. Today, those principles must apply to whole organisations operating in volatility as a baseline condition, not an occasional disruption.

Three Things Leadership Still Gets Wrong

Ambiguity is not a problem to be solved. Nonaka and Takeuchi were clear: the best teams received goals that stretched beyond their current capability, with no detailed roadmap for how to get there. Most organisations remain deeply uncomfortable with this. Roadmaps get locked. Plans get elaborated. The rigidity that leaders mistake for discipline is what kills innovation. Adaptive leaders set direction and hold the tension. They don’t resolve ambiguity; they work with it.

Overlap is not a sign of poor planning. The instinct to sequence, to finish one phase completely before starting the next, feels disciplined. In practice, it delays the most important conversations until they’re most expensive to have. By the time manufacturing discovers that a design can’t be built at scale, months of work unravel. Overlapping phases force those conversations earlier, when the cost of changing course is still manageable. This holds as true for organisational transformation as it does for product development.

Knowledge transfer is not a debrief. Of the six characteristics Nonaka and Takeuchi identified, organisational transfer of learning is the most consistently neglected.

Companies invest heavily in project management and almost nothing in organisational memory. Teams finish projects, disband, and walk out the door with everything they’ve learned. The next team starts close to zero. The fix isn’t better documentation. It’s cultures and structures that make knowledge sharing continuous: communities of practice, cross-team retrospectives, leaders who ask not just “what did we deliver?” but “what did we understand?”

The Game Has Changed. The Rules Have Not.

Nonaka and Takeuchi weren’t describing a moment. They were describing a principle: that organisations built around learning, overlap, and distributed intelligence outperform those built around control and sequence. The relay race was always an illusion of order. The companies that understood this in 1986 outcompeted their rivals. Those that understand it now will do the same.

Why This Article Is Canonical for Adaptive Organisations

The Society for Adaptive Organisations builds its work around three pillars. Product Orientation: customer value over silo complexity. Fast Improvement Cycles: learning as the primary competitive mechanism. Organisational Ambidexterity: holding exploration and exploitation in productive tension.

Each maps directly onto the 1986 article.

Product orientation is impossible without cross-functional collaboration. The rugby approach didn’t dissolve silos as an act of culture change. It dissolved them because value can only be created when functions think together rather than in sequence. The silo is the relay race.

Fast improvement cycles are the institutionalisation of multilearning. Honda’s City team sent to Europe with no brief beyond “look around.” NEC engineers spending weekends at a hobbyist centre in Akihabara. These weren’t learning initiatives. They were organisations that refused to treat learning as a scheduled activity. The cycle wasn’t something they ran. It was something they were.

Ambidexterity finds its earliest practical expression in built-in instability. Setting “extremely challenging goals” while granting “a wide measure of freedom”: that is the tension ambidextrous organisations must hold. Structure enough to exploit what works, pressure enough to explore what doesn’t yet exist. A Honda executive described it as putting the team on the second floor, removing the ladder, and telling them to jump. That’s not a motivational metaphor. It’s an organisational design principle.

The rugby ball is still in play. The field is larger, the game faster, the stakes higher. But the team that moves together, learns continuously, and trusts itself to adapt: that team still wins.

Forty years on, Nonaka and Takeuchi’s paper is not a historical artefact. It is the founding document of the adaptive organisation, written before the term existed. Every leader serious about building one should have read it by now.

Nonaka, I. and Takeuchi, H. (1986). “The New New Product Development Game.” Harvard Business Review, January–February 1986.