Where to Look First

A method needs a starting point, and "everywhere" is not one. When people first see the map from chapter 5, they either freeze (too many possibilities) or they fall in love with the most exotic match they can imagine and skip the obvious one next door. Both are cured the same way: search in a fixed order. Inward first. Then nearby. Then across.

Inward: your own chain first. Before you trade with strangers, walk your own value chain with the scan question in hand. Lay Porter's old diagram on the table (the support functions above, the primary flow below) and annotate it with two ribbons, the way I have drawn it for audiences since 2017: excess capacity running along the top, byproducts (waste, energy, information) running along the bottom. Every box in your own operation leaks into one ribbon or the other. Some of the best exchanges never leave the building: the department drowning in data next to the department starving for it; the machine idle on Fridays next to the team renting capacity elsewhere. Chicago's health inspectors found their best predictor of failing restaurants in the city's own 311 complaint line: data collected by a different department for a different purpose, exhaust turned into fuel without a single new sensor.¹ Inward exchanges are the training ground: same walls, lower stakes, and you learn the method's grammar before you negotiate with outsiders.