Evolving Web

Personal Kanban at the World Bank: Modus Cooperandi Info Pak 1

Personal Kanban at the World Bank - Small Team Rapid Development

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This is the first in a series of Modus Cooperandi's Info Paks. They are downloadable, and work like a narrative whitepaper. Think of them like graphic novels for business.

In Info Pak One: Personal Kanban at the World Bank, we discuss the experience we had leading a rapid development project at the World Bank, specifically, how visual controls work with small groups, and why they are preferable to traditional team management. 

This Info Pak is best read by clicking the “Full” button above. It’s also designed to be downloaded to distribute to others. Over the next few weeks, we will post more Info Paks on Personal Kanban. Please feel free to comment and let us know what you think.

Announcing PersonalKanban.com

When I began to write a succession of posts on personal kanban back in July, I thought a few people might benefit from the idea. I never expected that the series would attract tens of thousands of viewers to my blog, Evolving Web.

Less than two months later, there is a growing and enthusiastic personal kanban community which has been posting photos, discussing innovations, and advancing the meme.  In a few short weeks, the community grew large enough to support a dedicated web site.

So I am pleased to formally announce the launch of personalkanban.com, a blog and resource for personal kanban.  Already, about a dozen guest posters and regular contributors have stepped forward to take the meme and run with it.

Those of you who have been reading Evolving Web for a while know I’m all about community, process, and collaboration. Seeing this community form, that it’s based on a lightweight personal process, and that collaboration is already taking place is therefore an awesome birthday present for me this year.

Please give the personalkanban.com a visit and subscribe to the feed. If you have personal kanaban stories to tell, please e-mail me at jim !at! soundbag !dot! com. The community would greatly benefit from your experiences and writing. 

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

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

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

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

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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

Discussing Post-Agile on Yi-Tan on Monday Feb 16th

Monday February 16th at 10:30PST (1:30 EST) I will be doing my second talking-head stint on the Yi-Tan conference call.  This time with my good buddy Bill Anderson.  We’ll be talking about Agile methodologies and what might come next.

Corey Ladas will also be joining me on the line.  All are welcome.  Here’s the invite info from Jerry Michalski:

How might we use the precepts of agile programming in general (non-IT) business settings?

Agile programming has come a long way from its early incarnation as extreme programming on the first wiki. It's been influenced by lean manufacturing and spawned practices like Scrum.

Yet the agile community remains pretty insular. Only lately have people seriously explored how agile principles and practices might be used outside software development.

With agile practitioners Jim Benson and Bill Anderson, let's discuss:

• What does agile mean? What are its core practices?
• How do those practices and principles apply to general management?
• What virtues and new value can this bring?

As always, an IRC Chat will be available during the call, here. Let's continue tweeting, using #yitan. This page is on a wiki, here.

Date:    Monday, February 16, 2009
Time:    10:30 PST, 1:30 EST
Dial-in Number: 1-712-580-1100
Participant Access Code: 778778
Wiki goodness at www.yi-tan.com
Please feel free to forward this note to people you think would be interested in these calls. 

Hope to see you show up in the IRC and maybe hear you on the phone.

Technorati Tags: Yi-tan,agile,agile methods,corey ladas,bill anderson,jerry michalski

Blogged at My House in Seattle, WA

Volere è potere

Will is power.

Aggregated will is aggregated power.

Networked will is networked power.

As individuals we want to achieve.  As groups we can achieve.

Do our organizations reflect this?

Our relationships (professional or personal) should be designed to build networks of communication, respect, responsibility and value.   In organizations, those who lead are responsible for setting vision and culture.  This can be a group of two, where the two people involved understand their destination and are mutually working to get there.  It can work in organizations the size of Microsoft or GE – as long as appropriate leadership happens in appropriate places.

When organizations focus primarily on intangibles (profit, market dominance, public perception), focus is necessarily removed from tangibles (what we do, how we do it, why we do it).  As the focus becomes diffused, the individual is lost.  She no longer has responsibility or a sense of belonging.

Productivity slips.  Attitude descends.

People naturally work for some goal.  If the goal isn’t to innovate or help the company achieve its mission, then their goal is personal.  Income maximization, maximum free time, minimum effort, maximum career path.  If these goals are made outside of the mission of the company, they probably happen at the expense of the company

The fortune cookie says “You never hesitate to tackle to most difficult problems.”  Why isn’t this true for everyone?  Because often we are told that our input is neither sought nor appreciated.

Organizational willpower comes from clarity of purpose and buy-in from those in the organization.  The members of your organization require the elements of the 10 Principles of Social Media.  They need to have an understanding of operations, a good feeling about their status, clarity of corporate governance, rewards for jobs well done, and access to the information and people they need to do their jobs and improve process.

When your org allows for these, your org may earn this fortune cookie.  It too will never hesitate to tackle the most difficult problems.

Technorati Tags: leadership,10 social media principles,social media principles,management,tribes

Written at the Sai Oak in Ocean Shores, Wa.

Photo by Tonianne