Evolving Web

Personal Kanban: Tangible Tasks Produce Prioritization

Planning and prioritizing is a wicked problem that has plagued humankind since time immemorial. – Corey Ladas

Human beings want three things in life: sex, money, and effective prioritization.

There appears to be a logical and linear three-stage process of better prioritization as you become familiar with kanban. The process follows the three main characteristics of the cardwall and how they insidiously work their way into your psyche. 

 Stage One: The Visual

Simply viewing the tasks on the kanban cardwall makes them conspicuous. The tasks on the cardwall have a shape or a volume. They consume space on your board, and you can only fit so many on at a time.  Your brain sees this and suddenly - perhaps for the first time - your workload has a coherent form.  It may be overwhelming, but now you can see it, and begin to do something about it.

A necessary drive for prioritization stems from this physical form.  You want to only fit tasks in that finite space that are going to do the most for you. At this point, you’re most likely to do this by sight, as you complete one task you’ll grab the next one that “looks best.” Let’s call this immediate gratification prioritization.  It’s better than letting fate guide you and is an excellent start. 

(Remember, the numbers are your WIP limit. You can't have more in a column than your limit.)

Stage Two: The Permanent

The cardwall should be on the wall (or always visible). It is permanent. You don’t put it in a box at night. You don’t hide it when the boss stops by. The cardwall is your professional superego. It is reminding you of what you are doing, why it benefits society, and what will happen to you if you don’t finish. If you have colleagues, they can see what you are doing. If your personal kanban is shared, they may even have a stake in your task completion. With your kanban staring you in the fact all the time, you may want to start having some logical prioritization scheme that is more thoughtful than immediate gratification.

At this point, you might want to set up columns of priorities.  This might resemble Corey’s Priority Filter.  Corey’s Priority Filter creates “buckets” with limited capacity that show tasks trickling down from your backlog into your ready-queue.  Here, you are starting to plan for future prioritization. At any time, you can rearrange things, but the priority filter lets you set up a prioritization that shares the same permanence as the kanban itself. Let’s call this progressive filtration. 

Stage Three: The Tactile 

The cardwall is tactile. You have to reach up and grab something and move it around. As it moves, it has a flow. You begin to see how you collect, collaborate on, and complete different kinds of tasks. Even in the most chaotic of situations, there are rhythms to types of work. 

What is happening now? You are constantly doing work and therefore constantly physically interacting with the kanban and your backlog. You work with the priority filter for a few weeks and nothice that prioritization itself begins to get a flow. You recognize that as tasks enter your backlog, some will seem more important on some days that others. Some have higher value to the team than others. You will gain an appreciation for the variables of your prioritization.

At this point, your prioritization matures a little more. You now understand not only what you want to prioritize but how you are prioritizing it. You are quickly doing analyses when you look at the priority filter.  These analyses may include questions like "Which task is making me money?" "Which task has a pressing deadline?" "Which task is politically sensitive?"

At one point, Corey and Eric Willeke asynchronously put their heads together and came up with Perpetual Multivote. This process recognizes that good decision making has both temporal and social components. Whereas context shifts over time for people, what seems important to them also changes. Perpetual multivote places backlog items on a visual board. Voters get a certain number of tokens and can vote any time and as much they want for the upcoming backlog items until they run out of tokens. They can likewise reallocate their tokens whenever they want as well. They can see how their peers vote, and can make their decisions based on that context. In the picture above each line is a backlog item and each dot is a vote from a team member.

Perpetual multivote clearly represents the tactile nature of the cardwall.  It might be called contextual prioritization.  You can use it as an individual by identifying your personal elements of prioritization and making those the dots. So where the color blue may have been team member Julie, it can also be an attribute of your personal value needs "income generating" or "deadline approaching" or "politically sensitive".   

Do You See What’s Happening Here?

Right now, some of the most popular games for portable platforms like the Nintendo DS are games like Brain Age that in effect, help you train your brain. They’re like the antidote for cage fighting. These games work not so much by teaching you math or algebra, but by getting your brain to react to certain stimuli that promote attentiveness, appropriate response, and retention.

Your brain can learn to think “better” simply by being sensitized to the actions of better thinking.

Kanban does this as well by creating a physical space (the cardwall) in which these concepts (tasks) can live - where the human brain can grasp and manipulate them better. People learn in different ways. Some of us are visual learners, others are auditory, some contextual, some literal...Vive la différence, sure – but for those who have tried to manage la différence … history is filled with managerial pain and anguish.

Cardwalls tend to equalize varying learning styles by presenting information with a logical flow and cadence. Everyone from your scattered ADHDer to your hyperfocused Asperberger can grasp a kanban – because it does have elements of context for all learning styles.

Like Brain Age, kanban starts to train our brains to see work in a new way. Not as an unfocused pile of tasks and subtasks and  subsubtasks, but as a set of tasks with very real impacts on our lives. As we begin to see the form and flow of these tasks, our abilities to prioritize can improve.

This is post four in my Personal Kanban series.

Kanban examples built in AgileZen, review coming soon.

Multivote image from Corey’s Multivote blog post. (Why mess with perfection?)

The Benefits of Personal Kanban

This is the third in a series of posts regarding personal kanban, or, using kanban to manage your personal tasks. Yesterday’s post discussed the inherent difficulties. Today I'll offer a few benefits of why you’d want to have your own personal kanban in the first place.

Understanding:  A kanban lets you immediately visualize the weight of commitments you've made, and encourages you to limit your work in progress (WIP).  When you can see your current level of commitment, you understand it better. 

Assessing Value: This understanding leads to a deeper appreciation for the real value of your time.  Not only can you now make better risk assessments, but when you promise someone something you know what the personal cost is of that promise. You will have a better idea about when you can deliver on that promise, without losing sleep.

Mitigating Risk: Making your tasks conspicuous leads to introspection – we start to ask if we are capable of finishing something and how that will impact the other tasks.  We can see it on the physical board.  We can re-arrange our tasks at-will to create the most productive day.

Prioritization: Now that we have a better understanding of the value of our work and its associated levels of risk, we can better prioritize what it is that we are doing.  To be sure, prioritization is still not easy, but at least now we can feel like we’re doing more than engaging in guess-work or putting out fires.

The Personal Value Stream: As we work more with our visualized tasks, we can get a better idea of what our personal value stream is. This might be conceptual, and difficult to put into words. Case in point: Last night, I pulled a piece of meat off the grill. The steak didn’t “look” done, but I knew it was. When I brought it in the house, it was perfectly cooked. I couldn’t explain how I knew it would be, I had just worked with meat on the grill enough to know. Your personal value stream is equally learnable, yet hard to quantify. Knowing your personal value stream greatly helps in the selection of work items and defining done.

Next: Personal Kanban Approaches...

Issues that Make Personal Kanban Different

This is the second post in Jim Benson's Personal Kanban series.

Personal kanban is going to have some divergence from industrial kanban. Kanban was designed to visualize products as they moved through a value stream.  The focus is on the product (on the value created) and not on the task. 

But as people, we are highly task based. Personal kanban recognizes that the creation of personal value is often (but not always) in individual tasks. 

Let's take a look at these issues.

No discernable value stream:  Personal tasks tend to be highly varied. A “normal” kanban is tracking the movement of predictable value through a fairly static or at least evolving value stream. A personal kanban is tracking disparate tasks through what is often a “not done,” “working on it,” and  “done” flow.

What is done: In a normal kanban, "done" is defined as the completed trip through the value stream. But generally, a personal kanban doesn’t have a value stream, so the definition of "done" is highly varied. If your personal task is “call Barry”, which is a legitimate part of your backlog, and you call Barry and leave voice mail, then technically speaking, is that task done? Is it blocked? What is it?  If you have a WIP of 5, and you engaged in 5 phone calls and left 5 voice mails, the tasks aren't done, can you no longer work that day?

Prioritization: Prioritization in normal kanban is the logical function of figuring out which things in a fairly homogenous group to do first. Personal prioritization is more complex. Task size, risk assessments, disparate projects and value judgments all play a very real role in the prioritization of personal work.

Size of tasks: At any point in time, your personal kanban can include backlog items like “take out garbage” and “write Smithfield report.” If the Smithfield report will take an entire day and taking out the garbage will take 5 minutes, the varying sizes of non-divisible personal tasks clearly derails the traditional kanban model.

Risk Assessments: In a traditional kanban, risk assessment is a relatively linear function. Does this task - which largely conforms to the other tasks in terms of size and construction - provide the most value to the organization at this time? The opportunity costs are trade-offs between fairly similar objects.  With personal tasks, risk and opportunity costs are spread amongst all possible things you could be doing at that time. To include resting. Which brings us to value judgments.

Value Judgments: Value judgments are difficult to make when you have no idea what you are doing, or how you are doing it.  With the chaos of personal time management, it is no surprise that people’s personal to-do lists are often wish-lists or responses to crises. Value judgments are easier when you know what’s going on. We tend to habitually overload ourselves with promises, things to do, and things we’d like to do. 

Different Types of Work: A traditional kanban usually has tasks for one project, again making them rather predictable. Your personal kanban can include everything you do from your personal and professional life.

Context Shifting:  Personal kanban is susceptible to the combination of shifts in context and the fact that you aren’t very scalable.  If someone calls you on the phone, your throughput suffers. You need to talk to them. If you get a sudden invitation to coffee from a friend you never see, you want to be able to go – but it will impact your work. If a pipe bursts in your house, you have to deal with it.

Personal kanban is always going to be messier than industrial kanban. The cacophany of tasks that can appear on your board are as varied as life itself. These differences don't make the personal kanban invalid.  In my next post I'll discuss the benefits of personal kanban.

The Next Blog Post: The Benefits of Personal Kanban...

Reflections on Personal Kanban: A Series

The other night over pastries and slowly delivered tea in Seattle, David Anderson and I spent a good deal of time discussing personal kanban.  I said that I had been using them for a while, and didn’t think it was a big deal.  David was adamant that it was in fact a big deal, because the nature of personal tasks is much more complex than team tasks. He then encouraged me to blog about my experiences with it.

For a while now, I’ve been using personal kanbans for myself and for my teams. At Modus Cooperandi, Corey Ladas and I experimented with a variety of them.  While they aren't especially easy to implement, they are nevertheless useful. So over the next month I’m going to discuss the inherent difficulties of personal kanban, how we tried to overcome them, and some strategies for their use.

A kanban is a board where you visualize and track your work in progress. It is also a diagnostic tool, as you watch work be invented and systematically completed, you see where you are doing well and where you are being delayed. These delays are called "waste". You'd like to do as much work and remove as much waste as possible. This is the goal of kanban. 

If you are unfamiliar with kanban in general, I like Karl Scotland's kanban primer. Note his definitions of WIP, swim lanes, flow, and cadence. 

Kanban is supposed to be flexible. If there's a sacred cow, it should be eaten. Corey and I often talked about “Capital K Kanban,” where certain implementations of kanban would become confused with kanban itself – making the processes rigid.  This is what has happened to Agile, and we could see kanban taking the same path. The implementation became confused with the tool.

For me, there are a few key principles for kanban, and after that, you are on your own.

1. Visualization: Primarily, kanban is a visualization tool.  Its goal is to make work explicit.  By making work explicit, we are able to understand where value is created, where waste is hiding, and how we function.

2. Flexibility: Teams and processes are not static. There is no one workflow to rule them all. While most kanban will be similar, they will rarely be identical. Likewise, the way one kanban records activity will be different from another. We can have workflow kanban, task-based kanban, and others too.

3. WIP: WIP stands for Work-in-Progress. Lean techniques like kanban aim to help us limit WIP and streamline our work habits. Kanban exists to help us understand the weight of the work we take on. We never want to lift more than we can handle. Simply throwing tasks on a board means nothing, if you aren’t using that board to be more effective. Even in my task-based kanbans, there is still WIP. In the photo above the (5) is my WIP. I shouldn’t be doing more than 5 things at a time.

4. The Ideal is Unattainable: Personal kanban work will quickly show you that there is no ideal way to manage individual work. Getting a date with Halle Barry or George Clooney is one trillion times easier than perfectly managing individual work. Now, before you start planning your outfit for your your dream date, it is very easy to use personal kanban to manage your individual work a lot better than you probably are right now. Remember, the goal isn’t perfection, it’s making things better.

5. Standard Work: Standard work is meant to normalize the task sizes and types. The more that work is standardized, the easier it is to estimate and schedule. Personal work is tenacious at undermining standard work.

The Goal: Your goal with personal kanban is not to merely have a better to-do list. It is to understand the work you have, the number of tasks you have, how you schedule, and how likely you are to make good on your promises. You will do this by visualizing your tasks, your flow of work, and the differences in types of projects you take on.

Upcoming posts in this series will address:

• Issues that Make Personal Kanban Different
• The Benefits of Personal Kanban
• Tangible Tasks Produce Prioritization 
• An Overview of Personal Kanban Approaches
• The Time Capsule Approach
• The Throughput Approach
• The Subproject Approach
• The Sequestering Approach
• The Task-Based Approach
• Cadence and the Personal Kanban
• Finding Waste in Personal Kanban 
• Measuring Throughput in Personal Kanban 
• Distributed Personal Kanban for Teams

Giving versus Co Creation

It’s 9:30 am at Moderate Technologies. Peter Weinberger, the president, walks into the office, and he’s excited.  Earlier that morning while showering, he had an epiphany – one he believes will revolutionize how moderate people do moderate things. 

He bursts into the office and exclaims, “I have this awesome idea! Let’s do it!”

Now most likely, one of two things will occur here:

One: Peter can “give” his employees the project.  He can devise a sure-fire plan and he can deliver it to them with enthusiasm.

The group will gladly execute, and will feel compelled to do so because he's their boss. But all their decisions from this point forward are Peter-focused:

• Is this what Peter wants?
• I would do something I think is better, but technically this is Peter’s baby.
• I wonder what Peter was going for here, because this just doesn’t make sense. But heck, I’ll do it anyway.
• I’m not sure if I should do this, I’ll go ask Peter.

Even if Peter specifically asks his staff for input, it’s human nature to defer to an owner or creator. So, in this case, Peter has inadvertently owned what he wanted to give or share.

A plan is most often (and usually wrongly) seen as an authoritative document or statement. When Peter came up with the plan, he established ownership, subsequently disempowering his staff.

Two: Peter's other option is to separate in his mind the idea - which is viable and can stand on its own - from the implementation. He can then sit down with his staff and brainstorm new ideas, and float his as one of them.  A couple of things could happen: the staff will choose Peter’s idea, or a better one will emerge.  Either way, Peter wins.

If Peter’s idea is sound enough to make it through his team, then the discussion of implementation is the same. The team discusses the implementation. Peter’s plan then becomes one option; it is no longer a dictate.

By the end of the meeting, Peter’s idea becomes the team’s idea.

It’s tough being Peter.  When you have a terrific idea and a great way to implement it, you can’t help but want to run into the room and share it with everyone. You are enthusiastic and feel your plan is a gift. It's awesome, surely everyone will want it. But the more gifts you give, the more the team has a two-fold reaction. On the one hand they start to feel entitlement: Peter gives us gifts. On the other hand they feel resentment: Here comes Peter with something else for us to do, and I never fully agree with his plans. So there’s this mixture of dependence and resentment that is rapid-fire poison for an organization.

Co-creation can diffuse this dynamic.

Blogged in Ocean Shores, WA

Rare Gifts of Design

This is just a short post acknowledging good design.  One of the most overlooked elements of design are error messages.  Acknowledging problems just isn’t a very interesting part of software design.  Consequently, messages tend to be cryptic and more annoying than the actual problem.

I just received the following error message in CoTweet.  It says that there is a stability issue with twitter and they will notify me when service is restored.  That is simple, well worded, helpful and includes reassurance that they’ll be watching out for me so I don’t have to keep checking.

Simply wonderful.

Technorati Tags: CoTweet,design,software design,fail whale

Have My People Tweet Your People

“You don’t give your Twitter duties to an intern” – Morgan Johnston from Jet Blue at #140TC

 

Business is lazy.  If business doesn’t understand something, it quickly assigns it, outsources it or otherwise gets it off the to-do list.  At the Twitter Conference #140TC in Mountain View this wee, Morgan Johnston talked about how important it was to have someone in the company with authority interacting on social media.

He had several stories about directly helping customers because Morgan had full penetration into the organization.  To the extent that he held the door open on a plane for two extra minutes so a family running from one delayed flight (on another airline) to that flight could make it.  The family had a member who was tweeting his pain while they ran.

Outsourcing your social media activities to an intern or a consultant means you stand a pretty good chance of working with someone who may well know how to use Twitter, but knows nothing about your business.  Don’t get me wrong, I know some people who are free lance community managers, have more than one client and do a great job.  But these people make it a priority to know their client’s business and ensure that they can quickly get to people capable of acting on a customer request.

If you must outsource your social media interaction, make sure that the person you are hiring cares, that you take the time to train them in whatever they need, and that you give them access to resources.

If you can’t do this, then don’t outsource.  Do it in-house – which you probably should be doing anyway.

Technorati Tags: social media,twitter,social media outsourcing,outsourcing,lazy,jet blue,morgan johnston

Know When to Say When

We were tired and little shell shocked.  It had been a trying day – leaving us very late for dinner in a sleepy resort town on a Sunday night.  We finally found a place that was still open and sauntered in.

The musician in the corner was playing a song we both appreciated and that calmed us down.  The waiter came to tell us the specials.

The first two were pretty standard.  The third however was something like aged rib-eye with a balsamic red wine jalapeño chocolate agate thyme basil lavender tart cherry duck blood marzipan shallot béarnaise aioli hollandaise coffee butterscotch malt reduction.

We stared.  By the time he was done with the mile long and seemingly impossible ingredient list we looked back at the menu for something.  It was incredible the number of things they thought they could cram into the dish.  I’m not sure if it really existed, or if the chef just really hated that guy and wanted to give him something hard to remember.

In business we see this type of thing with impossible to decipher Microsoft licensing agreements, mortgage documents, and software packages with 20 million alleged features.  There is a point where people just stop tuning in.  Like us, they will buy what they can comprehend – or buy what they feel forced to.

Either way, the producer’s message isn’t getting across.  It’s not being poorly communicated by marketing.  It’s messaging may not be bad.  It’s buried under the confusing weight of its own feature set.

Chasing Bucky

“Aren’t you a .Net shop?” he asked me.

“No.” I replied

“But you built this in .Net.”

“I would have built it out of rice crispie squares if it were appropriate.”

At Gray Hill Solutions, we don’t subscribe to one coding platform.  To do so would be to lose any advances in software tools – which come at a wonderfully bewildering pace.  It makes sense, then, to not specialize in the tools – but in the application of tools in general.

Society has finally caught up with Buckminster Fuller.  Fuller was on a life-long quest to make the world a better place.  That’s a big ticket item.  It’s difficult to make the world a better place through myopia. 

In his Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (read, buy), Fuller gave a long and impassioned argument about the dangers of over specialization.  He leads this argument with this passage:

Leonardo da Vinci is the outstanding example of the comprehensively anticipatory design scientist. Operating under the patronage of the Duke of Milan he designed the fortified defenses and weaponry as well as the tools of peaceful production. Many other great military powers had their comprehensive design scientist-artist inventors; Michelangelo was one of them.

Many persons wonder why we do not have such men today. It is a mistake to think we cannot. What happened at the time of Leonardo and Galileo was that mathematics was so improved by the advent of the zero that not only was much more scientific shipbuilding made possible but also much more reliable navigation. Immediately thereafter truly large-scale venturing on the world’s oceans commenced, and the strong sword-leader patrons as admirals put their Leonardos to work, first in designing their new and more powerful world-girdling ships. Next they took their Leonardos to sea with them as their seagoing Merlins to invent ever more powerful tools and strategies on a world-around basis to implement their great campaigns to best all the other great pirates, thereby enabling them to become masters of the world and of all its people and wealth. The required and scientifically designed secrecy of the sea operations thus pulled a curtain that hid the Leonardos from public view, popular ken, and recorded history. – Bucky Fuller, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth

The shifts from Leonardos to Pirates and so on were enabled by advances in knowledge.  Merely introducing the number 0 into the human brain created a massive revolution not only in technology and travel, but in how we relate to the nature of work and to each other.  Fuller here was saying that we can all be geniuses in our own way – we just have to pull back the curtain.

To Fuller, the geniuses were not overly specialized.  They could not be.  In order to truly be creative, you need materials from which to create.  Frans Johannson calls this “the Medici Effect”.  The Medici Effect is, in essence, a mashup of ideas that can only come by stepping outside your field of expertise and learning from something radically different.  Fishermen have something to teach Internists.  Astronauts have something to teach pawn shop owners.  You never know, because the nature of insight is that it creatively links ideas that may not seem linkable.

So we are now in a world where we are understanding the world faster than ever before.  Digital technology so vastly speeds up the conversation that innovation and invention are common place.  “What have you invented for me lately?”

We are now all da Vincis.

In order to be da Vincis, we must now embrace Fuller-style generalism. No one is better to examine than Fuller himself for this.  Being a generalist didn’t mean Fuller was mired in reading random books.  Fuller built housing and cars.  He was an author and and artist.  He was practical and theoretical.

Or we can look at Henry J. Kaiser (right).  Kaiser oversaw shipyards, steel mills, automotive plants, engineering firms and a massive health care company.  Dude was hardly stuck in one mode of thinking.

The fact is that today advances in systemic thinking are requiring more holistic visions.  The human body was at one time a collection of fairly autonomous parts that functioned together.  Now, the body is understood more as a system and medicine is reacting to this realization.  But it doesn’t stop there, because the body reacts to lead in your paint, to particulates in the air, to the sun’s rays, to recycled air, to motor vehicles, to stress …  Suddenly being a doctor is even more complicated than before.

Recently when I was in Hospital for pneumonia, the doctors asked me a lot of questions. An not-insignificant number were about stress.  Did I own my own company?  Was business going well?  How was my life at home?  Had I suffered a loss recently?

At that point, at least at that hospital, I knew medicine had turned a corner and that we were starting to embrace Fuller’s wisdom at last.  Our understanding of the world and life is becoming more systemic and holistic.  The advances of technology and the speed of culture are now so fast that expertise is seen as temporal and contextual.  What is our expertise today will be obsolete technologically very soon – but the experience  of learning and applying the technology is what is really important.  The actions are ethereal, the lessons learned are permanent.

Now it’s up to us to let people know those lessons learned and to grow from them.  That’s the new expertise. We are all experts, we are all generalists.

Technorati Tags: Buckminster Fuller,Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth,Frans Johannson,Medici Effect,da vinci,trevor blake

Blogged at My House in Seattle, WA

Quietly Letting History Write Itself

From the “while we were sleeping” desk, the Obama administration has been quietly making good on their promises for a more open and transparent government.

Part of this can be seen on the cover of Today’s NY Times.  The press can now cover the return of war dead from the Iraqi and Afghani theatres.  Prior to this, the press was prohibited from directly photographing the return of dead soldiers. 

As we’ve seen, it’s the policy reversal that’s covered more than the caskets themselves.  The actual daylighting of government actions, is the story here.

In the recent stimulus package, projects included needed to meet specific requirements for transparency.  How the stimulus package was being spent was at the top of that agenda.  It was merely philosophically important to the administration that this money be spent properly. It was actually codified into the package that if you received that money, you needed to make the public aware of how much you spent and how you spent it.  And you needed to make that, and other information, available via RSS so that the public had a better chance of collecting and analyzing that information.

The White House has an official photostream which is creative commons licensed.  What does this mean for bloggers and the general population?  We now have a set of constantly updated photos of what’s happening in the White House to use when writing about what’s actually happening in the White House.

We also have an official glimpse into what goes on in the White House and with key cabinet members daily.  Major news sources will still provide us with details, surely, but the stream is simultaneously a good will gesture, an inexpensive resource, and a catalyst for conversation.

There is certainly a long ways to go.  Information sharing in more complicated (and more vital) areas will certainly take time.  The FBI’s Investigative Data Warehouse is taking some time to find its place in the post-transparency world.  And that certainly isn’t the only area needing an overhaul.

But, to a very real extent, the entire labyrinthine world of the government needs this overhaul and that’s going to take more than a couple months of figuring out.

Technorati Tags: transparency,obama,white house,flickr,new york times,electronic frontier foundation,FBI,IDW

Dreams Deferred

Dream Deferred

What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
Like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore--
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over--
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
Langston Hughes

Years ago, I was sitting in a very posh restaurant in San Francisco’s Mission District with a friend of mine.  He was a very wealthy programmer, working for an incredibly prestigious financial company.  We were talking, eating, laughing and having a wonderful evening overall.

He looked up at me and told me he was going to go back on drugs.  About 7 years previous, he had kicked heroin.  He’d gone from shooting up in dirty houses to having a comfortable townhome in Noe Valley.  He’d built a lot in a very short period of time.

While giving me his reasoned rationale for wanting to go back onto heavy drugs he said, “I’m just not happy now. With everything I’ve achieved I’m just never happy.  When I was using, I was happy for very short periods of time.  I want to be happy again.”  By the time I left him that night and went back to my hotel, he’d already scored and started his slide back to his previous life.  Within a few months, he lost everything he’d worked for.

Happiness is elusive. We chase it, we want it.  Life seemingly conspires against it.  We mask our need for it by watching sitcoms that make us smile for very short periods of time – the over-the-counter version of heroin.

Over the last few years, I’ve met a long string of people who have gone through the 80s and 90s and now almost all of the aughts and have come up empty.  Whether they have money or not, whether the recession is felt by them or not, there is a measurable exodus from lifestyles that fundamentally work at cross-purposes to happiness.

Thankfully, very few of them see drugs as an acceptable solution.

This isn’t drop-out happiness people are seeking.  No communes, no great-american-novels, no buy-a-wineries (well, okay, two people bought wineries)…. This movement to happiness is pragmatic.  People understand that they are better family members, they are healthier, they can help others more, they are more productive team members, etc. when they are happy.

So .. why not be happy?

The Infrastructure of Happiness

Happiness is a construct and a really ethereal one at that.  It is often confused with states it is very similar to like gratification, placation, contentment, etc.  Happiness can be self-serving or it can be effacing and humble.

As managers or business owners or team members, we ignore happiness at our peril. 

Why?  Because there appears to be a tacit assumption that work and happiness don’t go together.  Happiness comes later.  When I retire, when I can take vacation, when I’m … not .. at …work.

In his book Flow, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi discusses the tension between our individual drives and social pressures:

Submission to genetic programming can become quite dangerous because it leaves us helpless. A person who cannot override genetic instructions when necessary is always vulnerable. ….

A thoroughly socialized person is one who desires only the rewards that others around him have agreed he should long for – rewards often grafted onto genetically programmed desires.  He may encounter thousands of potentially fulfilling experiences, but he fails to notice them because they are not the things he desires.

Professional fulfillment is part of happiness.  It has to be.  We all know it.

So, if we’re setting up a team for a project, why not have happiness be a primary goal of the team’s infrastructure?  Maybe even THE goal.  Product second, remuneration third.  Happiness first.

After reading about our endless quest for happiness by neuroscientists, orchestra conductors, Buddhist monks, psychologists, philosophers, humorists, management theorists, and everyone in-between, I’ve come to one conclusion.

People are happy when they know what they’re doing and aren’t offended by it.

There are very few reasons why we would ever do something we were offended by or without cause.  At work, people feel obligated to do what their employer requests – even if they find it offensive, demeaning or perplexing.  Depending on their situations, they may feel that they have no choice but to do as requested – with even quitting being out of the question.

Unenlightened employers may feel this is a position of power and rejoice in the entrapment of such people.  However, if your goal is to have a business that grows and innovates – this mindset is not going to help you.

Business cultures that strike a balance between business and personal health should engender a happier workforce.  People worry a great deal about what happens at the office.  They take that stress home with them.  That stress can negatively impact home life.  This creates more stress, which is in turn brought back to the office.

In 2001, the Seattle Mariners won 116 games, tying the all time record for wins in a single season.  They were mostly the same team they were the year before and the next year when their records were nowhere close to 116.  In 2008, the Tampa Bay Rays went to the World Series after being dead last in 2007.  Again, with roughly the same line up.

There is an attitude of winning that can float or sink a team.  If your team is committed to being happy first, its chances of winning will be bolstered.  True commitment to a healthy culture creates momentum.

In The Art of Power, Thich Nhat Hanh describes this momentum in his monkly style:

In your professional life, there may be other people you have to be in touch with and work with.  You may be working as a team to make a film, design a produce, or complete another kind of project.  Each person on your team has his own difficulties , his own suffering.  but because you are open, happy, fresh, and concentrated, you can help all of them touch their freshness.  you don’t care only about their work performance, because the quality of their work depends on the peace and well-being inside each of them.  You come to the business as a friend, helping everyone transform, bringing peace, harmony and well-being into their lives at home and at work.

Yes, Master Hahn is a bit beyond what HR might be comfortable with.  The point, however, is that teams made up of happy and psychologically healthy individuals understand that they are working with other human beings.  We are working with people who have lives outside of work and that they are living inside work too.

We are still alive while we’re at work.  We aren’t purchased work-robots who have deferred our dreams to times of not-work.

We have goals and, more often than not, those goals are good for the company.  We want to complete projects.  We want to understand the flow of work.  We want to do what we can.

In Flow, Csikszentmihalyi’s description of what makes people feel happiness is very much in-line with understanding your company’s value-stream.  While there’s deeper issues at play, from a work perspective the value stream is vital.  Understanding the flow of work through your organization satisfies some basic needs to making your workforce happy.

Creating a lucid value stream and expressing people’s places in it gives workers a lot of power.  They can optimize their place in the value stream based on their current skills or skills they wish to acquire.  They can optimize the value stream itself by pointing out areas of improvement.  In short, the clarity provided by understanding what the heck is going on is instantly gratifying.

What is also interesting is, happiness as described by most of these authors is not a static state.  Happiness is, rather, an aesthetic or an amalgam.

In Stumbling on Happiness, Daniel Gilbert starts a long chapter about what happiness may or may not be with this point:

The word happiness is used to indicate at least three related things, which we might roughly call emotional happiness, moral happiness and judgmental happiness.

When all these authors get down to it, they end up describing self-rewarding systems that seem to result in rolling series of Maslovian peak experiences.

A-ha!

Business then, which is loathe to really get into matters of personal mental health, can actually do a few things here.

1. Make business explicit to those doing the work. 

The value stream, the fiscal health of the company, people’s roles in the organization, corporate ethics and goals – should all be made explicit so workers can choose to improve, innovate, and participate.

2. Decisions are free

Free your managers and you from top down decision making.  Give people the freedom to do their jobs.

3. Information Hoarding Will Not Be Tolerated

The fastest way to threaten anyone is to withhold information from them.  Want to kill productivity?  Keep secrets.

4. Make Work a Healthy Game

The goal of work is to create things. Rewarding people for creating things is a healthy game.  Avoid zero-sum games like promotions or winner-take-all prizes.  Incentivize your value stream and not end-goals.

--

Happiness is not fluff and it’s not a “nice to have”.  It’s a central component to a functional team.  Put a little thought into it and see what you come up with.

Technorati Tags: happiness,management,thich nhat hahn,daniel gilbert,abraham maslow,mihaly csikszentmihalyi,lean,langston hughes

Blogged at my house in Seattle, WA

Vision Makes Policy – Collaboration in the Obama Administration

During the Clinton Administration, I had the good fortune to be a certified National ITS Architecture expert.  That meant I could travel around and help local, state and regional governments build their regional Intelligent Transportation Systems architectures.  At the center of this was a cooperative element: regions needed a cooperative regional architecture that had at least a modicum of information sharing in order to get federal ITS dollars.

It worked like a charm.  I saw regions that previously and pervasively were at each others’ throats come together to create partnerships.  When the Clintonian soft-fuzzy handcuffs were taken away by the subsequent administration, many of these partnerships predictably fell apart.

Why? Because it’s hard to collaborate in a combative environment.

Policy, in corporations or business, isn’t a neutered word.  Vision, policy, and culture are often as easy as stating an intent and then putting some good rules behind it.

For Clinton, it was to make money contingent on good regional collaborative governance.

For the Obama administration, it is transparency, collaboration and participation.  The stimulus package has ample hooks in it to support these goals. 

The Obama Transparency and Open Government memo defines the benefits as:

Transparency: Promotes Accountability

Participatory: Improves effectiveness and decision making

Collaborative: Engages the general public in public sector work

I will add a few outcomes I can see here:

Introspection: Government and the public will become less hostile because information and respect is now a currency.

Cost Cutting: Procurement inefficiencies, poorly understood value streams and duplication of effort will become much more visible and less tolerated.

Grumbling, Bitching and Contention: Yay! When you discuss some things they can really annoy you.  Government is huge and it does a whole lot.  If you think you are annoyed at some of the policies of the company you work for … well, this is going to be like working for 30,000 companies simultaneously.  Prepare to have an opinion and for others to have one too.  In short, it’s politics!

Does Grumbling negate Introspection?  Nope.

Collaboration isn’t easy, especially in a political world with hundreds of years of historic drama.  We are bringing in as many people as want to participate, many of whom have felt disenfranchised, have agendas of their own, and are generally undereducated about what they are complaining about. 

There will be growing pains. 

Today’s communications technology gives us a new and unique ability to have an actual participatory democracy.  Recent advances have led people to gravitate to camps of like-minded individuals, creating camps of group think and spin-up.  This is natural.

Government 2.0 initiatives could well be the place where people of differing opinions can come and have good and vital conversations.  Whether Government 2.0 sites will have the savvy community management to foster productive conversation remains to be seen.

Technorati Tags: Government,Government 2.0,transparency,collaboration,participatory government,obama,clinton,intelligent transportation systems

Scrumban Classes Scheduled in Atlanta

Scrumban extends the famliar agile methodologies in Scrum with the rigor and performance improvements of Lean design. The Scrumban hybrid, described in Corey Ladas' popular book, is taught in this two-day course. 

Make the most of your investment in Scrum by employing these techniques which have been proven to increase productivity, improve team communication, and provide managers and the team with meaningful metrics. 

These lead to better prioritization, better estimation, and cleaner organizational relations.Along with our partners at Lithespeed, we have scheduled the first Scrumban training courses on June 11 - 12, 2009 in Atlanta, Georgia. 

Register Today.

The course will cover:

Understanding Scrumban

• What is Lean and Kanban
• Blending Scrum and Kanban

Balancing the Workflow

• Value stream mapping
• Reinforcing productivity (game theory)

Prioritizing demand with throughput

• Lead time
• Cadence of release and prioritization cycles
• Service level agreements
• Metrics and reporting

Launching a Scumban system

• Estimate WIP limits
• Mapping people to processes
• Inventory buffers
• Theory of constraints

Advanced topics

• New product development
• Rolling wave planning
• Defects and rework
• Development workflows

 

Technorati Tags: Modus Cooperandi,Corey Ladas,Scrumban,Lithespeed

Making the Twitter Backbone Usable - CoTweet

People keep talking about making Twitter work for business, but for me it was missing any way to include it into a company’s workflow.  At last, CoTweet allows people to form work groups (centered on a single account) and have permanence for tweets and actions.

Here we see a Tweet where @Sprezzatura has retweeted a question I asked.  I am able to assign that Tweet and annotate it for appropriate action.  This is an instant quantum leap in Twitter usability for business.  Saved Tweets then appear in a personal to-do list.

The personal to-do list, combined with annotation, provides both context for the action and the action itself.  Note that the bottom tweet was a DM, so the app shows regular and direct messages in the same UI – understanding that to me they are both information and the delivery mechanism is simply metadata.

Each tweet-task in the to do list can be DM’ed, replied to, Retweeted, reassigned, e-mailed, or marked done.

My longstanding complaint about using Twitter for any business purpose was simply that Tweets were inherently unmanageable. 

The CoTweet interface is very clean and usable.  Unbelievably so, in fact.  It may be one of the more beautiful interfaces I’ve seen.

The only thing that would make it blast into space and win the X Prize would be an AIR app.  They’re going mobile first which is a shame.  An AIR app gives you access to all users immediately.  Mobile, while necessary, is cumbersome for development and likely only going to benefit iPhone users.  I would have prioritized it differently.

In fact, the lack of an app will mean I will use CoTweet for the time being as a management tool and not as a tool to actually participate in Twitter in real-time.

That being said, I’m looking forward to getting my collaborators on CoTweet and using it to move tasks around and work better with the Modus Cooperandi account.

Technorati Tags: cotweet,twitter,microblogging,management

Blogged in the Alaska Air Board Room, Sea-Tac Airport

10 Recommendations for a Better Restaurant Web Site

Over the last two years, I’ve taken a rather keen interest in restaurant management and operations. Restaurants have incredibly thin margins, restaurant owners are generally overworked and, while they may get praised, they also take way more than their share of abuse from customers.

By and large, restaurant web sites are atrocious and restaurateurs have nary a clue how to make their web sites better. Often they punt and hire hacks who have “done restaurant web sites” and buy their way into quick contracts using the cache of previous clients.

But the sites are crap. They are either completely ugly or they have tons of unnecessary music and animation.  A large number are information poor.  A large number are outdated.

How many times have you clicked on a menu and found it to be from the previous summer or older?

So here are 10 quick recommendations to build a better restaurant web site based on mistakes I’ve seen restaurateurs make over and over again:

1. OWN YOUR OWN DOMAIN

If you are just starting, go to godaddy.com and buy your domain name. If you have hired someone to build your site, CHECK NOW. If they own your domain name, ask them to transfer ownership to you. Why is this #1? Because I’ve seen it happen that often. Your domain is your business – you never want anyone else to control it.

2. DON’T GIVE UP CONTROL

No one should ever control your web site but you.  You can outsource the work, but make sure you know where it is hosted.  Make sure you are paying directly for the hosting and giving access to your contractor.  Do not let the contractor control the hosting contract.  If the contract bails on you and you don’t have access to your site – you lose all that work.

3.NO FLASH

Flash animations are pretty, and pictures of yummy food blending into other yummy food is hot.  But Google doesn’t give a rip about your hot blending images. Google wants content. No content, no good indexing on Google.  Further, your customers want to eat food, not to watch animated food on their laptops. They don’t want to click ‘skip intro’ and they don’t want to wait. Customers want to eat your food.

4. NO PDFs

PDFs are used by many restaurant web sites because they can make the PDF directly from the menu. The layout is consistent, the logos are the same. It’s beautiful.  Except that PDFs also make sites less visible by Google.  PDFs also need to be uploaded – which is a pain.  This means that PDF menus are less likely to get updates.  In turn, this means that information is more likely to go stale. And nothing stale is attractive in a restaurant.

5. NO MUSIC!!!

Look, just no music, okay?

6. USE WORDPRESS.COM

$10 a year buys you a web site hosted by wordpress.com. You provide your domain name (e.g. BakersEscargotHaus.com) and Wordpress gives you easy steps to make a site.  The site will be built on a blog platform. Don’t be scared by the word blog – the only thing you need to know is that your site is now really easy to update. If you want, you can hire any number of people to set the site up – but when it’s done, you can update it, you can edit it, and you control it.

7. YES PICTURES AND CURRENT MENU

Why do you have a restaurant?! TO SERVE FOOD!!!! Let people know what you have. Get pictures (lots of them) up there showing the food, showing people eating the food, showing how much everyone loves the food … AND … always have ALL your current menus on the site – INCLUDING DAILY SPECIALS. The daily special should bring people in – not merely be a surprise for those lucky enough to pop by.

8. REWARD GROUPS AND REGULARS

Start a program for customer rewards that you (again) control. There are lots of people out there who want to take your money to set up a rewards program. Make sure the site details how you love your regulars and how you reward groups.  Not just “groups of 10 or more call for special discounts,” but make a hot dinner for 10 people and make it known that if you come with 10 – it will be awesome.  Out of all the restaurants I’ve been to world wide – it seems only high end Chinese restaurants get this right.

9. BLOG OR BE BLOGGED

This is the toughest one. I think every restaurant should have a blog because every restaurant has formed for a reason.  And those reasons, and the restaurateurs, are individualistic and fascinating.  Blogging doesn’t have to be hard. I could go on about this for hours, so I’ll leave it with this:  Blogging is the best way I know to make Google and other search engines love your site.  Why?  Because I provides constantly updated, new and unique content. Search engines love that.

10. UPDATE UPDATE UPDATE

This may seem like I’m perseverating, here, but web sites must be routinely updated for both customers and search engines to stay interested.  Your web site is now your maître’d.  That site isn’t a brochure, it’s your entry hall.  If it isn’t updated, it is shabby.

So these 10 recommendations for a better restaurant web site should be helpful, if only judging by most of the sites I’ve seen.  I fully understand that most restaurateurs are not web site designers and many wish the whole thing would go away.  But it isn’t, and with a 3% margin – you can’t afford to let any customers get away.

Blogged at the Metropolitan Hotel in Vancouver, BC

Technorati Tags: restaurants,restaurateurs,web site design,social media,flash,pdf,horrific mistakes

Privacy in a Post TMI World

Lisa Hickey has a nice piece today about the bit of our private lives that we are discussing publicly.  The crux of the matter is trust and expectations.  Lisa says:

Anyone who has been on Twitter for a while has seen this phenomena: Spouses, children, boyfriends, girlfriends will say to someone who Twitters a lot: “You’re not going to put that on Twitter, are you?”

Yes, it’s funny. A sign of the times. My kids say it to me all the time. But here’s the thing: there’s a trust issue going on here.

There’s an interplay here.  I trust you with information that I’d rather not be distributed via Facebook.  To the point now that we have FriendDA which was originally created, such that it is, to let friends talk about business ideas, but is now routinely employed as a statement of “Don’t put this on Twitter.”

FriendDAs usually aren’t printed out, people are tending to say, “So I’m invoking FriendDA here….”  The counterpart nods, and the conversation continues.

So, socially, we are creating new conventions to plainly demark where privacy begins and ends.  Whereas privacy was previously assumed, it is now transparency that is assumed.  Information we’d like to keep close now comes with a wrapper.

Photo by Hamed Masoumi

Technorati Tags: Lisa Hickey,Facebook,Social Media,FriendDA,Hamed Masoumi,transparency,privacy

The Hidden Value that is the Admin

One of the first pieces of advice my old boss Bart gave me was, “be on good terms with your client’s EA.”  Bart knew that access and information all funneled through these very tight bottlenecks.

A company’s org chart is about official flow of power – but has little insight for value.  Bart was telling me that my client’s EA was perhaps even more important that the client herself. 

Executive Assistant’s become vital resources by restricting access, screening information, making meetings happen, coordinating management tasks, performing HR duties, and so forth.  In other words, they are often the only person in a company that has touch in all the usual stovepipes.  They will know marketing, development, HR, taxes, corporate policy, sales, administration, and so on.

But look at the org chart above.  Maggie is merely a dotted appendage to the VP of Importance.  Or so says the org chart.

In reality, Maggie is the go-to person if they want information from Irving, if they need to find out who in another element of the company, what company business partners might be appropriate, office gossip, and so forth.  In order to get what they need from Maggie, they will give her a very valuable commodity – context.

As Maggie gets more context from different parts of the siloed company, she becomes a value reservoir.   Over time, Maggie not only knows what’s going on, but is likely the only person with structural and historic context as to why it is happening.  If anyone would take the time to ask her for an opinion, she’d also likely have some good ideas about how to make whatever is happening better.

This overly simple social graph illustrates the impacts of Maggie’s relationships.  She controls access to Irving (who is very important, we aren’t saying he isn’t).  She has direct access to Bob and Bobby from their group.   But she also has access to accounting, business development and research & development. 

Each time Hamid needs something specific, Maggie learns about R&D.  The same with accounting or the other parts of the company. 

Her role in the org chart is an intentional bottleneck for access to Irving.  Functionally, she becomes a value reservoir that is most often unofficially tapped.  Unfortunately, organizations often value these people at appendages and pay them accordingly.  These valuable reservoirs are not recognized as the business analyst marvels they actually are.

Watch for your value reservoirs, respect them by tapping their knowledge, and reward them.

Technorati Tags: value reservoirs,management,social graph,organizational psychology

Humans are More Fun than Robots

Human are more fun than robots.  Humans tend to have better senses of humor, they like the same foods you do, and when things change they don’t freak out and kill people (usually).

Yet, when a hard problem comes along, managers call for the robots.  They want those amazing workers that you can feed a set of linear instructions to and they will come back with perfect product.

Of course, these robots don’t exist (which makes them even less fun to work with).

As my business partner Corey Ladas says in his book Scrumban:

In the software profession, it is common to hear advice like: “only hire the best and let them figure it out.”  This sentiment is nearly as misguided as command-and-control and antithetical to lean thinking.  “Hire the best” is an elitist and ultimately lazy management philosophy.  … consider that a championship team will almost always defeat and all-star team, because the quality of the relationships between qualified players is usually more important than individual performances.

Robots are rarely interested in conversation or second opinions.  In business, “the best” are robots.  “Normal” people are more likely to rely on each other for support, creating scalable teams of capabilities.  Robots are more likely to chunk through work on their desk assuming they know best (because you’ve told them they are).

Hiring the best is a pipe dream and ultimately self-defeating.  Even the best cannot build the product you envision if you don’t communicate with them.  And if you can communicate with the best – you should be able to communicate with “normal” people too.

Technorati Tags: corey ladas,scrumban,management,lean,lean software engineering,agile,waterfall

Blogged at Modus Cooperandi in Seattle, WA

Open Faced Book

Facebook takes your information and hoards it.  Facebook lets you connect with your friends, but not really great ways to manage them.  Facebook lets you join groups and then makes it hard to ever find them.  Facebook is rather annoying that way.

Today David Recordon said in O’Reilly Radar that he thinks the doors shall fly open and Facebook will join the ranks for the enlightened.

Stranger things have happened.

I am not nay-saying here.

I see David’s logic as quite solid.

But who says business is logical?

Facebook is a company with an energetic, driven staff that firmly believes in the company and its mission.  But what if they believe they have to choose between the company and its mission. 

What if a faction at Facebook sees openness as a threat to the organization?

I guarantee you, these are the conversations happening in Facebook’s Palo Alto glass block right now.  How much openness is too much?  How does Facebook retain its identity if they can be an non-credited information source for other applications?

I have answers to these questions and you might too. But what answers are being put forth from the Facebook corporate culture?  That is what will drive its openness.

Technorati Tags: facebook,walled gardens,community,david recordon

Blogged at Modus Cooperandi in Seattle, WA

Photo by Avlxyz creative commons 2.0 by-sa

Voting With Our Feet – The Ethics of Sponsored Conversations

Today, Jeremiah Owyang posted “A running list of sponsored conversations”.  He has a laundry list of sites and products that engage in various forms of advertising and paid content. 

The article and its comments bring up the ethics of paying for supposed user-generated content.  With user-generated content, the assumption is that objectivity comes from personal experience unhindered by conflicts of interest.  If someone pays for a post, there is an immediate and obvious conflict of interest.  As a reader, you start to lose trust in the blogger and her content.

This ethical question isn't a new one, to blogging or any other form of communication.  All writers and all media have found themselves dealing with this.

Pick up any magazine and there's a good chance you'll find an article that turns out to be an advertisement about half way through.  Other publications run press releases, slightly edited, as stories.

Watch the morning “news” and you’ll find your NBC news staff telling you about new NBC programming.

I agree, Jeremiah, this is growing - it is an obvious win for both marketers and bloggers.  The bloggers are the ones who have the questions to ask of themselves.  How far along the shill-line are you willing to walk?

This is a personal question. 

As readers ... do we wish to read these? If not, we'll vote with our links and our attention.

Update: Read Write Web has an excellent response to all this.

Marshall says:

We respectfully disagree with Forrester's recommendations on this topic. In fact, we think that paying bloggers to write about your company is a dangerous and unsavory path for new media and advertisers to go down. We recognize that it's a complicated question, but we don't feel convinced by Forrester's conclusions regarding those complications.

Defenders of the tactic argue that it doesn't differ substantially from traditional advertising, that it's effective for advertisers, that bloggers want to profit from their writing and that with proper disclosure there's no loss of credibility for either party.

Technorati Tags: Jeremiah Owyang,conflicts of interest,blogging,shilling,shills,spam,splogs

Blogged at Modus Cooperandi, in Seattle

Fear Makes Poor Policy

Montesano, Washington, is a beautiful, small, unassuming city in the County of Grays Harbor.  Nestled in the foothills of the Olympic Mountains, It is surrounded by lush pastureland and drives along highway 8 come with views of small groups of milk cattle amongst the trees.  In Montesano, there is  a little fast food restaurant.  A very normal, family owned, honest, fast food restaurant.

The family that owned the restaurant had two long time trusted employees who served as managers.  The family knew the restaurant was in good hands.  When the long term employees left, the family was worried.  Fast food restaurants hire young, minimum wage workers who often slack off or even steal from the register. 

The owners felt they needed to keep an eye on the restaurant.  So they installed cameras.

Then they’d watch.

If the employees were just standing around talking to each other, they’d call up and say, “Why are you just standing around?  Do something on the chore list!”  For the owners, each time that required a call justified the surveillance.

The chore list, while comprehensive, was very short.  Keep the place clean and the services filled.  Montesano doesn’t have many people.  But rushes require a certain staffing.  Standing around was inevitable. 

So the employees found themselves filling full salts, cleaning clean floors and hiding directly underneath the cameras in the “blind spots” just to have a simple conversation.  They never wanted to appear “not busy.”

As a team, the employees only could rally around one thing – their hatred of the cameras.  They couldn’t talk to each other, learn about each other, or learn from each other.  They could all merely mindlessly perform the already-satisfied chore list.

One by one, the other employees all left.  None of them would ever become the new long-time and trusted employees because trust was never allowed to develop.

Technorati Tags: bad policy,management,bad management,fear,FUD

Lean Management and The Pull of Goals

Life can be pulled by goals just as surely as it can be pushed by drives.

~ Viktor E. Frankl

In lean management, a pull system is a natural flow of activities driven by the natural pace of the work that produces value.  Today I stumbled across this quote from Viktor Frankl, whose book Man’s Search for Meaning is surely one of the top 10 influential books on my world view.  In this quote, Frankl suggests that goals are a pull system.

Goals are indeed a pull system.  Goals come from internal processes.  We have individual and shared goals that motivate us to act.

In between goals is a thing called life, that has to be lived and enjoyed.

~ Sid Caesar

Goals pull us, we ideally act based on goals.  These individual actions are tasks.  The tasks we take on are in service of the goals.  However, if we don’t actually enjoy what we’re doing in service of these goals or, worse yet, act contrary to our goals – we are squandering our lives.

In a business context, if goals are clear amongst teams and the organization, the work involved in achieving those goals is more likely to be rewarding.  We are happier in doing it.  And this is a pull process.

A beneficial by-product of pull systems is they reduce waste.  Pull systems do this by highlighting where we are operating in ways that stymie our goals.  Pull systems reward innovative thinking to remove these points which are constraining our goals.  Pull systems say “The constraint is here, it is obvious, are you going to do something about it?”

Though I still have no semblance of a life outside of Nine Inch Nails at the moment, I realize my goals have gone from getting a record deal or selling another record to being a better person, more well-rounded, having friends, having a relationship with somebody.

~ Trent Reznor

Trent Reznor here is saying, “Look, I don’t live to work or work to live.  I live to live.  I am a musician and it’s my life.  But my goals aren’t fame oriented, they are happiness oriented.”

Making music makes Trent happy.  Making people laugh made Sid Ceasar happy.  Understanding where people found meaning made Viktor Frankl happy. 

In an organization, creating good product or solving a problem may make us happy. 

At heart, though, the successful application of our talents is what makes most of us happy.  When our organizations have no clear definition of goals or work contrary to individual goal achievement – waste is the result.  We end up with, as Frankl says, the “push” of drive.

The push of drive is the artificial force necessary to apply to people to get them to work contrary to their own goals.

Enter here the concept of friction.  When you apply an external force to an object to get it to move, friction occurs.  The amount of friction is the amount of energy lost in the transfer of momentum from one object to another.  Loss of energy = waste.

In a pull system, things operate faster by removing friction or constraints.  In a push system, things operate faster by applying more force.

For Reznor, the push would be more money, the pull would be self-improvement.  Money may drive him, self-improvement motivates him.

When creating rules in organizations or devising ways to get things done – ask yourself “What are the push and pull elements here?  What motivates people, and what drives them?  Where is friction created?  How much friction can we withstand?  What friction can be avoided?”

Technorati Tags: Viktor Frankl,sid ceasar,trent reznor,management,lean software engineering,lean management,waste,muda,organizational psychology,pull systems,goals,yes I just quoted frankl sid ceasar and trent reznor what are you going to do about it

Blogged at Caffe Appassionato in Seattle’s Interbay Neighborhood

Powered by Muse

The 10 Principles of Social Media for Education

After the 10 Principles of Social Media for Business came out, people began to engage us on different real-world applications.  One of these was the University of Lisbon who asked for a brief thought-exercise.  They wanted us to think of ways the 10 Principles would apply to education.

We applied the 10 Principles to educations’ need to:

• Broadcast Value
• Streamline Publication
• Increase Communication
• Increase Access to Information and Resources

Modus Cooperandi’s Paper on Social Media for Higher Education for the University of Lisbon can be downloaded from the Modus Cooperandi site.

Technorati Tags: University of Lisbon,social media principles,10 social media principles,social media for education,social media for higher education,Modus Cooperandi

Blogged at Modus Cooperandi in Seattle, WA

Applying the Principles of Agile to People other than Coders

Agile methods have been applied for the last decade or so to programming teams.  The goal with Agile was to take a group of people who were famous for poor communication, unrealistic expectations, and unpredictable deliverables and give them a structure that minimized these elements.

Agile primarily focuses on the following:

1. Acknowledging that change is part of any endeavor
2. Greatly increasing the frequency of discourse and review
3. Assumptions are the rope from which the noose of business is tied

Bill Anderson and I guest-hosted a Yi-Tan call covering how Agile was formed, what its central tenets are, and what it can teach the rest of business.

Listen to the recording of that call.

Technorati Tags: Yi-tan,Jerry michalski. Bill Anderson. Jim Benson,Agile principles

Blogged at Modus Cooperandi in Seattle, WA

Stop Banging Your Tanker – Corporate Microclimates

A microclimate is a small area that has differing weather than the surrounding area.  Architects often design buildings specifically to avoid or create a microclimate.  Anyone who ever saw a baseball game in San Francisco’s Candlestick Park quickly learned how poor design and building location could turn a hot day into a cold / windy one.

In business, work groups can easily become cultural microclimates.  The degree to which this happens is directly related to the design of your organization.  Microclimates can be good or bad.  They can make for a windy cold baseball game, or they can shelter you from the elements.

When poorly designed, they can run contrary to your organizational goals.  They can either create minor fiefdoms where one person obtains full dictatorial control over a situation, or they can create groupthink in a subgroup that is harmful the company.

The thing is, often we set these up intentionally. 

An example of intentional fiefdoms is in the shipping industry.  Despite the fact that there are many people working on a ship, true power over the movement of the ship is concentrated on the Master and the Pilot. 

The predictable outcome of this intentional centralization happened one foggy morning in November 2007, when a 901 foot long freight ship called the Cosco Busan struck the Bay Bridge between Oakland and San Francisco.  According to The Examiner,

Investigators told the National Transportation Safety Board Wednesday that the ship's captain and pilot developed no "shared mental model" on how the ship should pass under the bridge in a heavy fog. For example, the safety officials said there was no discussion of the proper speed.

In this case, a breakdown of communication between two people led to a massive oil spill that cost tens of millions of dollars to clean up and over a hundred million dollars in collateral damage. 

The incredible distillation of authority here created a very tiny microclimate.  The ship’s pilot was unfamiliar with the waters and didn’t check for fog conditions.  The fog was particularly thick and, as you can see in the photo, there’s a lot of room to drive your tanker and not hit the bridge.

By allowing the distillation of power to this point, the system became very brittle.  One person was responsible for moving a 901 foot floating ecological and economic disaster.   One would have to think that a distributed system of power on the boat would have resulted in a few key changes.  Someone would have likely suggested that they ask how bad it was.  Someone else would have noted that the pilot wasn’t familiar with the Bay and said, “let’s wait a few hours for the fog to burn off.”

We should watch for microclimates when creating groups. Are they beneficial and sheltering the members so they can do good and focused work?  Or are they malevolent, insular or detrimental?

Technorati Tags: cosco busan,microclimates,tribes,management,decision making,hierarchy

Blogged at my house in Seattle, Wa.

Inspired by muse.