Evolving Web

Finding Credibility in Social Media

It's hard to write about this track without being negative.

When we started the social media revolution, we did not heed Orwell's warning that all revolutions come to resemble that which they overthrew.

We launched blogs, tweeted the first tweets, and ran the first banner ads with the understanding that there was "Netiquette"--a quaint phrase no one remembers.  You if look back into the archives you can posts from 1995-1999 about what our goals and aspirations were.

We had "link-love", re-tweets, and the sharing economy. We were focused on collaborative screen, fact validation, and a drive to meet and understand everyone on earth. The Electronic Frontier Foundation fought, and ultimately lost, to keep the commercialization of the internet as unobtrusive as possible.

Hate speech was discouraged, freedom of interaction was encouraged.

We need to get that back. Not just to clear the animosity in the air, but so the world can actually get back to business.

As for the track: Today was an excuse to experiment with my newly upgraded Izotope mastering tools and a middle-of-the-night inspiration to use Cableguy's filter-shaper tool applied to an entire mix to bring together stuff that shouldn't go together. That in the initial noise generated, I'd find a way to find a credible sound.

 

ourfounder · Finding Credibility in Social Media

Geek Detail

Bass: Ibanez - SR670

Shakery Things: Kontakt .. World

More Percussion: Presonus Impact

Metallic Percussive Noises: NI Evolve (ARP)

DAW: Presonus Studio One

Plug Ins: Izotope Vocal Doubler, Neutron, Ozone / Cableguy's Filtershaper / and NI Guitar Rig 5

Keyboard: NI Komplete Kontrol 61

Human: Ourfounder

Celebrating Doing Cool Things

For the last nine months, we've been in some state of Covid-lockdown worldwide. During which time, we've managed to give airtime to every paranoid person with a keyboard and drive ourselves into a state of global low-spirits the likes of which have not been seen since World War II.

During this time, I've been able, for the first time since high school, really, to devote some time to music.

The questionable, though therapeutic, results can be found on my Soundcloud page.

This poor old Evolving Web blog, littered with posts from more optimistic times, once a top-20 read blog, was just sitting here (mostly due to the fact that Typepad is so hard to get your data out of) and I thought I'd dust it off and just use this space to talk about music. About what I'm recording, what the songs might "mean", what the gear I'm using is, and hopefully spark some good old social media conversation that isn't about being upset with something.

That run-on sentence is saying, "I'm going to talk about making music here."

Part of this is just seeing what I'm capable of doing in Typepad. It's a pretty antiquated system and, right now, that's a good thing. (My posts here, if you look, have del.icio.us links. If you don't know what that was ... google it, it was from when the Internet worked right).

Below is the song I uploaded this morning.

Two tracks of ESP 5 string fretless bass, four tracks of highly mangled drums (primarily using Cableguy's ShaperBox2 for the delicious mangling), wait, I have an idea ... I'll do the inputs below in some sort of repeatable format.

 

ourfounder · Finding Imperfection

 

 

 

 

Bass: ESP-LTD B205 Fretless 5 string

Drums: NI Battery (various settings)

Weird Noises: NI Evolve Mutations

DAW: Presonus Studio One

Plug Ins: Shaperbox 2, Fab Filter Pro, Neutron, Ozone, and Guitar Rig 5

Keyboard: NI Komplete Kontrol 61

Human: Ourfounder

Curbing Crap From Your Mental Diet

It takes 72 hours to fix your feed

Your Facebook feed feeds your brain.  It can feed it with positive messages or real world things.  Or it can act like Cable News and feed you fear of the “other”.

So, stop making Facebook your amplified CNN or Fox News.  Stop eating crap.

You, every day, are amplifying messages that you see.

Facebook likes to tout how sophisticated and mysterious its algorithms are.

They are neither.  It’s a pretty simple equation.

RC*WC = CYS

Read Crap times Write Crap = Crap You See

So, the more political crap you read the comments on times the number of political things you actually write yourself results in your feed.

I altered my diet on Facebook for three days.  I glossed over the political posts and commented on posts that talked about friends, family, food, or fun. Amusingly the only political post I participated in was the one I wrote saying I wasn’t going to participate in any more political posts because it became a discussion about political posts.

This didn’t mean I wasn’t still worried about all the things there are to worry about.  But it did mean that I received most news from sources other than the same source that I use to communicate with people that I love.

In three days, the experiment paid off.

Day I – 10 of 20 or 50% of the posts in my feed were directly political and angry.

Day 2 – 6 of 20 or 30% of the posts were directly political and angry.

Day 3 – 3 of 20 or 15% of the posts were directly political and angry.

During or just before this time, two of my friends, people that I care about, who are on the other side of our current political wall from me (a wall none of us constructed, a wall of assumptions, a wall of unnecessary burden), had personal crises. One of them even said, “I can’t believe you’re helping me with your politics.”  Not like there was a whole lot I could do, but this guy is someone I’ve known since I was a little kid. Not a close friend, but certainly part of the life that made me who I am and he who he is. Extended family, if you will.

That’s what this thing should be for.  That’s what social media should be for.

Putin used our naïve social media systems with their touted “social graphs” and alleged algorithms and realized it was information overload that could be easily, trivially, exploited.  Now, he has set up such strong divisions in the US that we do his work for him.

Everytime we take some news article, no matter how correct it might be, and share it, we are playing up Putin’s charge.  Every Occupy Democrats post is doing Putin’s work.  They’re short, they’re pithy, and they are designed to do one thing:  incite.

Americans done need any more inciting.

We need civility.

I have seen friends on both sides gleefully post Obama or Trump videos taken entirely out of context and point and say “see how bad they are?!”

Putin wins. America, democracy, and a civil planet lose with every post.

I am not saying put your head in the sand or ignore what’s going on.

What I’m saying is, write about things in your own words. Reposting is way too easy. It doesn’t help you or anyone else. Use the posts as primary sources, let people know where you got your information, don’t just recklessly tweet, but listen to the last Republican president we had.  For all his flaws, there was one thing that George H. W. Bush was not – he was not clueless.

When he said his silly line above, it wasn’t so silly. Inside us all are opinions, ones we hold on to tightly, even though we feel the fear behind them.  Even though we know they drive a wedge between us and others. 

In three days, I was able to undo Facebook’s insipid little algorithm. I did it by looking at David’s grandkids or commenting on Tonianne’s flower photos or cheering on Kathy as she hits the spa after the most altering of surgeries.

With just a few posts, I can shift it back.

But know this.  When I was a kid, we had feed. It was what you gave to the animals you would later eat.

Right now, we are in Animal farm and we are not in the farmhouse. We are clearly less equal than others. But, we have the ability to set our own diet. Right now, we have feeds.  Let’s take control and turn them into meals.

Finding Human Space

The world is filled with different people.

Wonderful people.

Interesting people.

I have sat on hilltops in Capetown, drinking wine and eating kudu carpaccio.  I’ve felt the random rush of people, all moving on different missions, in Shinjuku.  I have had my leisurely morning breakfast by Hoan Kiem in Hanoi.  I’ve had my daily routine in Manhattan. I’ve written half a book on a deck overlooking the blue waters of Honolulu.  I’ve watched the Broncos demolish the Sharks in Brisbane after a huge Aussie steak dinner. I’ve walked the hilly residential streets of Valparaiso, studying the intentional and invited graffiti, while stepping around cat after cat. I’ve watched the Tel Aviv Mediterranean sunset from the beach. I’ve walked the twisted old streets of Edinburgh and the planned refined streets of Paris. I have a favorite Scotch shop in London. I’ve been quietly terrified driving through Bangalore.

Every place, every moment, was defined by the people.

If these places, these scenes, had no people – they would lose their meaning.

~ ~ ~

In November 2016, I found myself walking familiar streets in Malmö, Sweden.  I walked mechanically, my feet falling one in front of the other.  I knew where I needed to go, even if I didn’t want to get there.

It was a Monday.

I was headed to Vollmers, a beautiful little restaurant I’d been to several times—but never alone.

Vollmers was closed on Mondays.

I looked through the small windows and the hostess was inside.  She was busy.

I went around to the door, which is hidden in a little courtyard.  The door was ajar to let in fresh air and to let her dog wander in and out.

She looked up and said in Swedish, “We are closed today.” I said, “I know.”

She cocked her head, doing what everyone does when I use context as a translator.

I said, “I need to make a reservation for Wednesday night.”

She stood and went to the book and said, “For how many?”

“One.”

“One?”

“Yes, I’ve been here four times, but each time was with a woman and she passed away suddenly.  I am coming to eat and remember and toast her.”

In Sweden, people are stoic. One of my favorite things to do when working with Swedish (or Norwegian) teams or audiences is to get them to laugh. To crack that exterior shell.

She stared at me, she started to cry.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “what time?” She was flustered, simultaneously saying she was sorry for my loss and for her loss of composure. 

We set a time, had a hug of mutual support, and I left.

I left to go back to the conference to make Swedish people laugh.

Ha.

Ha.

On Wednesday, I went to the restaurant.

The entire staff was ready for me. They had a specific table. They paid close attention to me. Not too much. Certainly not too little.

Every member of the staff talked to me. I arrived nearly first, I closed the restaurant.

I gave Jean a send-off.  It was personal, yet it was shared.  It was shared because people, everywhere, care.  It was shared because food is a form of communication.  It allows us to come together, and it provides us space.  Food allows us moments to just…chew.  To taste.  To use our senses. To think. To process.

Even, perhaps, to come together to help a displaced stranger find some closure.

~  ~  ~   

Over the last decade of nearly constant travel, I’ve been able to go places I doubted I, as a Nebraska kid, would ever see. This is what I’ve found. I’ve found less fear and more interest. I’ve found less hatred and more sharing. I’ve found less selfishness and more humanity. I’ve found people willing, at a moment’s notice, to reach out and lend support.

Malmö, Sweden, is a lovely town that has survived its rough period.  The older ancient streets are punctuated with ultra-modern buildings. It’s a delight to walk, in the sunlight, the dark, or the more-present rain.  But the streets, bridges, and beautiful old town hall would be nothing without the people. 

It would be a shell. A container.  A museum at best, mausoleum at worst.

It’s the people that make this world what it is. They are our friends. They are our allies. They are our trading partners. They are our security.

I have had a lot of wonderful experiences with the good people on our planet. I’m feeling like it’s time to record some of them.  It would probably be impossible to get all of them. 

On uniqueness lost - Anthony Bourdain

There are people I respect immediately.

 

And there are people where I’m like, “Uh, okay, keep going…. Maybe I’ll respect you later.”

 

And almost no one gets to respect from that.

 

One who did was Anthony Bourdain.

 

His first show, A Chef’s Tour was one of a guy who got lucky, right place, right time, low budget, no hope of a long-term run. Everywhere he went, he was like Ally Sheedy in the breakfast club. He just kept being shocked that people were being nice to him.

 

There was no format for shows like his then, there still isn’t. Now there is an industry of people running around eating stuff—but none with the depth or commentary or personal notes that he evolved into.

 

It was certainly an evolution. His second show, No Reservations, is a show where you literally see someone mature out of their own character in a show designed for that character. The show was basically, “I’m a sarcastic dick and I’m going to travel around and eat things and be a sarcastic dick.”

 

There was a moment, or a set of moments, that made him and the show evolve into a much more refined, interested human being. Being through an air strike, natural disasters, and seeing people on return trips (some of whom passed away) were with an evident toll. Episodes visibly changed after each event. His treatment of the planet and the people in it always changed.

 

He was able to put into words and pictures almost everything I love about Vietnam and loved about Hong Kong. Even at the height of his sarcasm, he treated Vietnam with the dignity that it, in its own unique way, deserves.

 

In his newest work, Parts Unknown, occasionally he’d bring out the sarcasm, but to much better effect. The food was always there, but the place and the people gave it deliberate, careful, and caring context. It was an impressive effort by someone who had now seen a lot, understood what is special about our planet (the people), and understood his place in it.

He had now become someone with a distinct voice and a rare opportunity to let us all into the lives of people and peoples that few of us will ever meet.

 

I realized one day, in a kind of shocking way, that he had earned my respect. Not earned it like, “hey, nice job, dude,” but earned it like “You just took every opportunity to make the world worse—and you made it better. You just took a platform to make you money—and you provided understanding. You just took a safe job where you could read scripts—and you provided insights.”

 

Years ago, in 2004, when Spalding Gray jumped into the water, I came to know this horrible feeling. The feeling that an important voice was silenced at exactly the wrong time.

 

With Bourdain, he also talked about his demons, but I wasn’t expecting to wake up to this today. Not at all. I woke up today thinking about how wronged I was yesterday and frustrated I was. I picked up my phone (even though I tell people not to first thing in the morning) and found out about Bourdain.

 

Now I need to do a little more. Be a little more present. Somehow, in my own way, compensate us all for this loss. There is not a voice that can fill the space he has left. He was that individual.

Standing on Giants

This is a short video from Saturday morning.  I've been hearing a lot from people with high constancy of purpose.  They understand what they are doing and why.  

Over the last several years, we've met hundreds who do not have this.

When we launch a Lean or other process initiative...when we tell people to continuously improve...we do them a disservice.

We all must understand why we are here.

 

 

Four Things to Remember When "Planning"

In 1989 I received my degree in Urban Planning. I have studied how to make plans.

In 2007 I received my certification to be part of the American Institute of Certified Planners.  I have been recognized for making good plans.

I have planned subway systems, technology rollouts, urban growth patterns, transportation infrastructure, housing needs, freeway travel patterns, business projects, software development, building houses, building buildings, and on and on.  I have planned.

I have also learned much. About reality. About complexity. About human nature. About how we plan. About politics. About blizzards. About locust plagues.

I understand, despite or perhaps because of my history, that plans are bunk, but planning is essential.  The document (the plan) we create will disappoint us the moment it is completed (if not before).  However, the act of planning, can only help us. 

Planning is knowing what goal we are trying to achieve or what problem we are trying solve (our reason for doing this), what our current workload is (our capacity, our current level of distraction, our likelihood for being derailed), who the current workload is for (how many conversations we have in flight), what that current workload is going to look like in the future, what the other options for other projects we could be doing are, what the expected size of our new project is going to be (day? week? month? Six months? - protip...the longer your project the more wrong you will be about completion times), who we would be working with, and so on.  Planning is knowing, tracking, and fully understanding the evolution of your project.

So, I promised four things to remember:

Thing 1: Your Estimate, Your Schedule, Your Gantt Chart is Always a Lie

I have built schedules for 20 years in Primavera.  I have made Microsoft Project files that would make your head spin.  Beauty in both complexity and foolishness. 

Before you start any project you need to know Hofstadter's Law and the Planning Fallacy.  

Do we want to estimate?  Absolutely.  Without some sort of guess at the amount of time something will take we have much less of an idea of its opportunity cost.  

But we need to remember that our estimate is made at the time we know the least amount about our project.  We haven't started. We've learned nothing yet.  As we begin to work, if we are tracking our work and measuring rates of completion, we can - in the future - forecast completion dates fairly accurately.  But we need to start working.

Remember...the longer the schedule, the less accurate your estimate. You schedule will always wishful thinking. Your Gantt chart is always fodder for long meetings and poor discussions.

Thing 2: Your Current Workload is Worse than You Think

If you ever take on a project without understanding your current workload, you are starting at an extreme disadvantage.  You must understand your capacity and your current workload before thinking your new plan has a chance.  You are likely already overloaded. That means you have existing relationships with customers and colleagues to complete work. Every one of those relationships takes up time and energy. The more you add, the more unpredictability you have added to your day.  Unless you are limiting your work in process and understand how much work you have on your plate (perhaps using a Personal Kanban), your new project is going to be as successful as the annual Hades Snowball Fight.

Thing 3: No Plan Survives Contact with Reality

Reality bites. I have seen projects derailed by locust plagues, acts of congress, tornadoes, blizzards, SARS, staff attrition, and...strangely enough...not understanding the complexity of our work.  We simply don't know what is truly involved in completing our work. Again, the larger the project, the more likely you will find delays due to the interactions of everything with everything else.   

Thing 4: You Forget Tons of Stuff and Remember the Rest Wrong

If you think doing something in the past makes you an expert in how it's going to work in the future, you are right.  People who haven't are just guessing when they are wrong.  You, the expert, are right about a lot of things...but you are wrong about a lot of other things.  This means your schedule will end up looking slightly better than someone who is guessing.  Rosy Retrospection and the Zeigarnik Effect combine to create one simple truth we don't remember the past accurately. We remember bad things as better than they were (which might impact both risk assessments and estimates) and we forget that a lot of work occurred at all.

State of the Planning Art

There's a lot of posts floating around the Internet about how to plan your work.  There are products to help you make lists or organize your thoughts.  That's all great, read them, take wisdom from them.  But know this: the larger the project, the larger the margin of error. If you want to plan well, create small projects.  Learn fast, adjust often.

If you want to build a real project, engage in planning. Build a system that asserts, acts, learns, and re-learns.  Build a system of honest work like this:

Goal - Have one ... know what problem you are trying to solve or value you are going to create. Know why you want to do this and whom it will help. Let this goal and the options around it evolve as you learn.

Options - Create small projects to help you achieve your goal.  Each one moves the needle a little.  The faster these are completed, the faster you get value realize your goal.  This could make it possible to achieve your goal incrementally. These are Options, make them, throw them out, use them like Lego to build value. You can only learn and adjust this way.

(Flag Waving: This is the point of the blog post. Many small adaptable batches beat big plans every day.) 

The Work - Do the actual work.

Learning - Ask yourself how the work went. Was it done in the time you thought it would be? Is it the outcome something you are professionally satisfied with? What did the customer think? What did you learn that will make the next Option you pull easier?

If this seems a lot like PDSA ... it is PDSA with a slightly better push towards small batch thinking. 

Last word

As always, if you can't describe what you are doing as a system (thanks Dr. Deming) and if you don't visualize your system, you have an assumption, not a system. 

 
  

Focus and Finish

Be like Mark: Ignore Facebook.

Today I have three things to do: write this blog post, format a follow up package for our classes in Iowa last week, and get my cleaning to the cleaners so I have clothes for New York next week.  Oh, and get a ticket to New York.  Okay ... four things.  Five if you count being available for a client call if they schedule it today and not Wednesday.

So .. five things.

Anyway, I sat down about an hour ago to write the blog post. It went all over the place and was deleted ... in about 15 minutes. Then I went for a second to see what reply happened on Facebook and now it is an hour later.

I didn't follow my own rule of not touching an open social media channel until I was done with my focused work.

One thing needs to be clear here ... we give Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and that picture thing too much credit - the social media most people are distracted by first thing in the morning is e-mail.  I think most people have given up on inbox zero, but that's not the point ... the point is actually when to inbox at all.

So, your brain starts each day with a certain amount of creative energy.  If you start each day in e-mail or social media, you are likely sending that creative energy (cognitive capacity) in the wrong direction. Yes, sometimes my first task is writing an email or responding to one - but it is a directed task with one recipient for a specific purpose (like a proposal or other "deliverable").

E-mail, Facebook, etc. aren't a problem because of their structure, they are a problem because they are streams of context switching. From personal to political to project A to planning to project B to spam to cats to cats to cats to cats.  Streams are context switching and our brains love it because we are saying "New New New New New!!!"

But what your brain is not doing is creating something of value that will make someone happy, you money, or solve some problem - maybe even all three. 

That stuff ... the good stuff ... comes actually completing things and focusing on them. We don't get sucked into social media and email holes because they build anything ... we get sucked into them because they are high-yield distraction.

So, this pomodoro is done.  Blog post is delivered. Now going to get some coffee and jump into that formatting.  Where is that Illustrator icon?

Losing Yourself in Awesome

You can lose yourself in awesome. Awesome itself is overload ... boredom is seldom awesome.

For the last 10 years, I've been traveling the world, working with all kinds of companies, eating great food, staying in (sometimes) posh hotels, speaking at conferences and it's been awesome.  But it has also been all consuming.

Two years ago, Toni and I decided to be more picky about clients - work to ensure success, find companies that are willing to do the hard work of building a culture - not ones that simply want to by a box of Agile or someone else's canned Lean journey. By and large, that's worked pretty well. ... Which is awesome.

But I remembered this morning that I had this blog, called Evolving Web, which at one point was one of the most highly read blogs on the internet. I wrote this blog because I was a writer. Blogging led to books. Books and blogging led to travel and new work.  And ... strangely to be alienated from writing.

So, what did I write in Evolving Web? 

Whatever I wanted.  

Read back through the archives and you'll find explorations of collaboration, governance, design, food, relationships, movies, art, music, and so forth.  I simply can't do those things on the Modus Cooperandi or Personal Kanban blogs.  Because of that, I've kind of lost who I am.  I find I read less, I'm doing less extra-curricular things, because my writing outlets have been over-focused. 

That originally meant that I wasn't writing about the things I saw while traveling. However, recent trips have made me question how a lack of a blog and the preponderance of Facebook means that all my observations are fleeting and succinct.  "This is a pretty flower" "It's snowing" or "Look at my hair cut."  That means I, too, am falling prey to becoming less observant, less present, less the person I consider myself or want to be. 

Strangely enough, social media has made it easier to ignore the world by being inundated by the world. We are becoming desensitized to everything good and react to everything bad.  We are less thoughtful, I am less thoughtful. 

This morning, my Adron Hall, whom I rarely see because I travel too much, posted this post on Medium. In it he is talking about Medium, where I have my Agile Heretic project, but he's really talking about communication, being a writer, and about being Adron - a human being. (And even if he didn't write that, it's what I read into it.) 

When I was running Gray Hill and at the start of Modus, I blogged every morning.  No matter where I was, I would wake up and blog.  Because of that, I was always both present in what I was doing (learning) and present in what was happening around me (not .. on .. line). I want to get back into that, and this is the place for it. 

So I welcome you back to the resurgence of Evolving Web ... and maybe a more whole Jim Benson. 

Milgram and Orwell's Love Child Works at Heathrow

I woke up this morning in Malmö Sweden. I am coming off a quick set of trips to Cape Town and Malmö. Wonderful trips. A lot of flying, but both destinations were wonderfully worth it. I met amazing people, saw the disparate beauty of both cities, got some personal processing done, and even made a little money here and there.  

Now, I have a standing policy not to bitch or whine about travel difficulties because they are both inevitable and simply part of the payment for being blessed with the ability to travel around the world.

Since Heathrow Terminal 5 was completed and Charles de Gaulle was upgraded, there have been very few reasons to pitch a fuss. Yes, flights have been delayed or cancelled here or there, but nothing really beyond the pale.

This morning, however, was bizarre. This isn't so much a complaint as it is a retelling, as might a guard or a prisoner from the Stanford experiment might provide. 

We arrive from Copenhagen and the captain gleefully tells us as we stand to deplane that we are 10 minutes early. Then he tells us that we are at the wrong terminal and need to take a bus to Terminal Five. It is pouring out. We all work our ways out of the jet and onto the bus which shuts its door when it's half full and drives away. I was lucky enough to be in the bus, but many people were just standing there in the rain all singing a song in unison, the only lyrics to which were "What the fuck?"

So I watch them recede into the haze as we drive around the curvy track to T5. Upon arrival (and you can't make this up), the bus stops just shy of the canopy in front of the door and we all walk out, again, into the rain, under the canopy, and then into T5. After that most of us went up the stairs (yes stairs) through T5 and then down the escalator to catch the bus to Terminal Three. 

The bus arrives and, you guessed it, parks a few meters down from the canopy and we walk out again into the rain and onto the bus. The bus fills about 70% and we drive away. Then we stop at another door at T5 and about 30% more capacity comes along. Mind you, this is after the first bus left people in the rain half full.

Now safely operating at 110% capacity, the bus wobbled its way to T3 where we all got off, walked through some more puddles, and into the building. 

One would think this was the end, but the train of inconvenience had now pulled into Bizarroville. Don't stop reading here.

We walk up the stairs and toward the gates. There are friendly people in the hall asking who is on American Airlines. This is a very rare case where I am (it might not happen again) and I say, "I am." They say, "Are you in business class?" I say "No." They say, "Do you have status?" I say "Yes." And they point me to a line.

This is okay because I very much want to get new seats.

I get into line and things just feel wrong. Something malevolent lurks here. 

The people in front of me seem to be getting a lot of questions simply for changing planes.

I approach one agent. In the line next to me I hear:

"Why were you in Berlin?"

"I live there."

"Why do you live there? "

"What?!"

"Why do you live in Berlin? "

"Why do you care? "

"These are security questions,  sir.  Why do you live there? "

"It's my home! "

"How long will you be in charlotte? "

" 90 minutes"

"Why so short? "

"I'm transferring"

"Where are you transferring to? "

"YOU ARE HOLDING MY TICKETS! "

"Where are you transferring to, Sir?"

"New Orleans, its right there on the ticket."

"What do you do for a living?"

"Why do you want to know these things?"

"Sir, these are security questions."

And ... this was just a normal German guy.

The punch line,  when he was about done the woman told him that he could refuse to answer the security questions if he wished.

Mind you. .. this was an American Airlines desk, not TSA, not border control.

They did this to everyone. Except me. I walked up and said, "Hi, I'm Jim Benson. I'm headed on to Seattle. I'd really like to get new seats, but the web site and the app both wouldn't allow it. It's strange because there are a lot of seats."

"Why aren't you in business class?"

"My clients booked coach tickets this time."

"You usually don't fly coach."

"Sometimes things work out this way. I'd just like seats that allow my legs to stretch a bit."

He then typed for a time long enough to allow the entire conversation above to happen. Then he said, "What seats would you like?"

I smiled a little ... "Well, I don't know the exact ones that are available but I'd like a bulkhead window seat."

He typed for an equally impossible time, during which the poor German guy next to me was about to explode.

The guy then said, "Okay I got you this seat on the flight to Philadelphia. It's window and bulkhead."

"Perfect."

He then prints out all my boarding passes and shreds the previous one.

Then he types for a crazy amount of time. Maybe four minutes. Then looks up and says, "Okay, let's see what we can do about the Seattle leg."

What he could have possibly been typing can only be the stuff of conspiracy theories.

So he pounds on keys for a good long time and comes up with a better seat to Seattle.

GREAT!

Then ... he prints out all my new boarding passes and shred the other ones HE JUST PRINTED.

Meanwhile, the German guy is somewhere between tears and violence.

The guys hands me my boarding passes and says, "Next time make sure you are in business class." But he says this as a warning, not as a recommendation or good natured ribbing.

I walk out into the hall and find three directions I can go. There is a person in each hallway saying "Departing flights this way." I stop, I find myself there with a lot of other lemmings looking at three leaders and having no idea which cliff to run towards.

As we stand, the yelling people become more impatient. They yell louder and don't seem to recognize that they represent options of equal and terrifying weight from the lot of us who have just been perplexingly interrogated.

I finally just start walking, everyone follows.

I get to the American Airlines lounge and hand them my ticket for entry. The woman says, "DO YOU HAVE YOUR CARD?!"

"My ... business card .. sure ..."

She glares, angry that her vague and nonsensical request was not met with immediate understanding and compliance.

"YOUR FREQUENT FLIER CARD! THE PHYSICAL CARD!"

"Ummm .. I don't think so, it's printed on the ticket."

"Anyone can put numbers on a ticket!"

"It's your ticket! Printed from your machine!"

"I need the card ..."

"You know, this is seriously the weirdest airline I've ever experienced."

So I'm fumbling around for a card while this woman insists I can't get in to have the American Lounge Pudding before I find my Alaska Gold Card.

So she finally ejects me from the lounge.

I walk to the BA lounge and say, "Look, I've been flying BA planes for nearly a month non-stop. I'm technically on an American flight, but it's BA codeshared. Can I just sort of come in ... those people are crazy."

The BA woman looks at the American tickets and says, "Your frequent flier numbers aren't even on these tickets." 

The American tickets are covered in so much information they are unreadable.

I pull out a handful of older BA boarding passes from the last month. She looks at them and looks up at me like, "You poor dear."

And here I sit typing this in the BA lounge.

There was so much Milgram and so much Orwell in that experience. There were so many known elements of torture and brainwashing. There was so much intentionally violent customer service, that is just seems deliberate. 

Like American Airlines specifically designed the most uncomfortable, disconcerting, and dehumanizing process possible.

I'm certainly putting them on my own personal do-not-book list for clients in the future.

Personal Kanban Wins the Shingo Prize

Personal Kanban won a Shingo Prize for Operational Excellence this year. This is the highest honor in Lean and we share the award with some pretty august company.

This award is humbling. Shingo awards are usually focused on manufacturing or applications of specific Lean principles with many direct nods to Toyota.

Personal Kanban is strongly rooted in Lean ideals, but it much more focused (as the name implies) on the individual – on us as people.

Tonianne and I are greatly energized by this award and look forward to seeing Personal Kanban continue to grow and thrive.

Read about it on CBS News and the Lean Systems Society sites.

Starting 2013

It’s been awhile since I’ve blogged here on Evolving Web. This is becoming a personal blog for someone who has invested a lot of his “person” in his work as of late.

I’m vowing to change that this year and this post is a start.

All my life, I’ve wanted to be a writer. In some ways, I always have been one. But, it’s strange. Commerce seems to often validate when we can call ourselves something.

Two years ago, with my collaborator Tonianne, I wrote the book Personal Kanban. This year, it won a Shingo - known by some as the academy award of Lean. And, despite the fact that I had written this book now two years ago, I feel I can finally call myself a writer.

Now, I can also call myself a publisher.

This is part of my analytics screen on Amazon. Modus Press has a catalog now. Small, but growing. Small, but greater than one or two. Small, but increasingly noticed. There are five authors represented in the list so far.

Today, as I write this post, I lie on my bed in Saigon. In a few days Toni and I will do what has become routine. Together with over 100 other people, we will be responsible for changing people’s lives for the better. Our field of process improvement may sound stolid and overly professional, but the ramifications are purely human.

By the end of our class, in this case together with our friends Mary and Tom Poppendieck, we will help people understand, control, and improve their work. Most of what we do is “work” and we tend to do too much of it. Unfortunately, like any addiction, we can’t get it under control unless we understand it and our relationship to it.

It is hard not to feel successful today, we just published Beyond Agile, we have a healthy portfolio of books, Toni and I were honored by the Shingo board of examiners, and our calendar for the year is filling up. I lie on a bed in one of my favorite places on earth, preparing to walk the streets and eat the food. Soon Tonianne will show up at my door and we will head out.

I strive to find the apparent balance Mary and Tom have found. They schedule a set number of trips a year and are scrupulous with their personal time. If you look at their website, see their calendar? There’s time set aside specifically to write.
What comes next in this space? I think Evolving Web will still focus on the social aspects of work, as it always has, but there will be more personal missives like this one, more images of these trips we are blessed to take, and more discussions of food. In short ... more Jim.

Preparing for a whole lot of Kaizen

The last few weeks have been busy. We’ve launched Kaizen Camp which is bustling with activity. We have three Kaizen Camps scheduled for New York, Los Angeles, and Boulder – with more on the way in Tel Aviv, Sydney, Melbourne, and Ho Chi Minh City.

We started Kaizen Camp here in Seattle in 2011, now we’ve held three and the requests to host these worldwide are like a flood.

A Kaizen Camp discusses continuous improvement – at the office, at home, and anywhere else. No matter which way we approach our work (from process, from waste reduction, from psychology, from economics) the fact is that we create better product when we can improve our processes and enjoy our work.

Past Kaizen Camp topics can be found in this lengthy list. The low-down on Kaizen Camp is also interesting, but deep.

Right now, I’m just looking forward to some great conversations, deep problems to solve, and to meet people actively improving, creating, and innovating.

Putting Some Lean Planning in Lean Startup

This was originally an answer I posted in a Quora group, but I thought I would repost it here with some edits. Read the original, in context, here.

 

After working with and owning several startups, it is clear that startup owners regularly overload themselves with work. It’s part of the startup mythos. The problem is, overwork kills lots of startups. The pace set is unsustainable and the endeavor collapses.

A few very important things where Lean Startup can be informed by Lean Lean.

First - Limiting work in progress is key to finishing things. You can't do more work than you can handle.

Second - Visualize the work - get it out of your head. There are too many variables and too many changes in context. You can better manage what you can see.

Third - Manage the flow, not the tasks - you are a startup, you will always have tasks. Working yourself to death will only result in your death. The flow of work is what is important - what can you produce, at what rate, and of quality.

Fourth - Kill Lists - Lists lack context, they age-out within hours, they leave you with no reasonable record of work done. They are the index of a map - even if read the entire index, you'll never understand the terrain.

Fifth - Prioritize Last - Making a long list and prioritizing up front is un-Lean. Most of your listed items will change in substance and priority as you do your work. With a visualized system, you prioritize / select work on-the-fly.

Sixth - Learn Cynefin - Understand that you will never know which of your tasks are simple, complicated, or complex. Some of them will bite you in the ass. If you outsource a task and think it's simple, but it is complicated or complex, you will end up working harder to manage the contractor than you would have doing the work.

Startup work is inventive - it is creative. Spend your time inventing the product and not reacting to the workload. Again, as Adrian said, this may mean some long days, but don't overdo it. Your brain is the only thing you have to make money from here. If you overwork it, it will underperform for you.

So learn from Lean, set up a Personal Kanban or any other type of kanban, and start visualizing your work.
Steve Blank says "Get Out of the Building."

I say, "Get Out of Your Head."

What Does Control Really Mean?

We say that kanban is a visual control, but we also eschew external control (rules) being placed on us by others. So what does control really mean? We when we look at it, we have a lot of depth here.

(1) Like a dial – a controller

We can use our kanban as a controller for our work. We can adjust our WIP limits, the people doing the work, the throughput of various work-item-types, the granularity at which we track our work. We have a number of dials we can tweak to control our work.

  (2) Controlling action through constraints

The kanban itself places constraints on our work. It enforces policies we have set. The WIP limits, the value stream, what is allowed and when, and so forth are controlled using the board.

(3) Controlled experiments

When we hypothesize something can be done to alleviate a bottleneck or some other item inhibiting flow, we can run controlled experiments using sour board as the laboratory. We can make small changes and measure their impacts directly.

(4) Communications Control

The board, in real-time, is a control center – communicating status, activity, bottlenecks, completion rates, issues, staff availability, and more. It is the switchboard of your team.

It’s important for us to grasp that “control” means many things. This helps us envision more creative and robust controls.

Kaizen Camp: Seattle 2012

Following last year’s excellent “Seattle Lean Camp”, we are now nearing Kaizen Camp:  Seattle 2012. (We did have a name change, so as not to confuse us with another set of camps with the same name.)

This year, Kaizen Camp is the July 24-25. Again we are at the beautiful Center for Urban Horticulture. We also have award-winning food trucks (with vegetarian options) catering the event. So, no boring food! The event is nearly half full already, with attendees from software, government, health care, manufacturing, education, and more.

The diversity of ideas and voices are unparalleled – which is exactly what we were searching for. Lean ideals and principles will be discussed. People share success stories as well as challenges. Different disciplines work together to create new ideas. Continuous Improvement is explored.

Last year we were blessed with great conversation, learning, food, and near gender parity. This year looks even better.

What to expect

1. Great sessions
2. Conversations with other smart people
3. Learning about what is working
4. Strategizing about sticky problems
5. Learning ways to create better working environments, systems, processes, and policies

What you will be spared

1. Boring speakers
2. Bad boxed lunches
3. The inability to speak
4. Canned presentations
5. Sales pitches from consultants pretending to be speakers

See you there!

Money and Good Copy

This song was recorded in 1985, it was likely the 20th version of the song. It’s not our best song, but it is my favorite. Corey Smith, David Fisher, and myself in Corey’s living room. We all played just about everything on it. Yes, those are my vocals, with Dave doing rap and backup.

In those days, I could walk into a room of my friends and start making crazy strings of noises. Corey, I want you to take the guitar and go ba ba tssst tssst tssst babababa wham. And Corey would do it, except a lot better and with an actual guitar. Dave, I want you to pound on those things over there like this tap tap bam taptaptap bamBAM. And he’d do it.

And soon we’d have a song, or something like a song. Doing overdubs on it until we’d either reached perfection or total audio breakdown.

You have no idea how much I want to go back to that time, if only for a few hours.

Now when I listen to this song, I am struck by how I am the only one left alive. I’m not quite old enough to say this, I think.

Corey left us in 1990 in a car accident. Sudden, extreme, painful – like a shotgun blast. I was still in Michigan and flew back to Nebraska for his funeral. At that time, Dave was getting his law degree from the University of Nebraska.

Corey’s funeral was more than likely the most painful day of my life.

While I was there, I had a conversation with Dave’s then girlfriend Melissa. She was taking me to task for writing zines that described Dave’s and my misadventures in Colorado. Most of these stories involved me hauling Dave’s overly drunk body out of one situation or another.

She yelled at me across a table at an Italian restaurant: “I would kill you if you wrote things like that about me, but you know what Dave says?”

“I’m just glad I make good copy.” Dave said, taking a sip of beer.

But those stories were prescient. Corey died suddenly, unexpectedly, shockingly. Dave died very slowly, painfully, and perhaps worst of all, boringly. The initially funny stories of Dave’s antics led ultimately to annoyance. Dave stopped making good copy.

In 1985 in Denver, on the Denver University campus, Simon Bone yelled at Dave, “Goddammit, you’re an alcoholic at 20 years old!” (Back then, the drinking age in Colorado was 18 for ‘3.2 beer’.)

Dave’s heroes were Neal Cassady, Jack Kerouac, and Charles Bukowski. In Denver, we’d stay up late talking about literature, music, and thought. Dave saw the prolific writing of 2 of his heros (Jack and Bukowski), and the stories generated by the third (Neal). Those guys drank heavily, why couldn’t Dave?

Simon was right, of course. Dave was already an alcoholic. While in Denver, I became more and more annoyed with Dave’s drinking. After Denver, each time I saw him, we connected less and less. His sharp mind would latch on to manic tangents and he would rant just on the border of nonsense.

Dave was dying slowly.

One day, in what I believe was 2003, Dave called me at 5 in the morning. This was not unusual and we had a policy not to answer the phone at that time. Something told me I should answer the phone. So I did.

Dave was in the process of drinking himself to death, with the strategic aid of sleeping pills, in a Presidential Suite of a hotel in Hartford, Connecticut. I managed to figure out where he was and get police and paramedics to him. He died in his hotel room, then again in the ambulance, then again in the ER.

His wife was the strange mix of sad, infuriated, and unsurprised that I am today.

Of course, Dave did not die in 2003. He managed to come back even after three charges at the pearly gates.

I hoped that this would be the ‘rock bottom’ that Dave needed to get better.

So, Dave and his wife really liked status-type things. So they checked Dave into a rehab clinic loaded with music and film stars. Net effect: they spent some money and met some stars.

Years pass and Dave ends up with an ultimatum from a judge in Nebraska, where Dave has moved to do … nothing at all but drink. “Get sober or get time,” the judge says. So Dave went to a rehab clinic in Colorado.

By this time, I had come to the conclusion that I was an enabler for Dave and had stopped taking his calls altogether. In a way, failing to come back from the three deaths and make something of himself offended me. It made me resent that Corey had left this earth long before his time and now Dave was just pissing away his talents and intellect.

But, one day, the phone rings and something tells me to pick it up.

Dave is at a Buddhist rehab clinic in Colorado. And, holy crap, the guy on the phone is my old friend Dave.

He’s lucid, creative, smart, optimistic.

And I got very excited.

It was like someone I cared about had died … and come back. ... because it was that exactly. You just don't get gifts like this. 

Over the next few weeks, Dave and I had great conversations. We talked almost every day. The monks had asked Dave to stay on and work at the facility. This was too good to be true. I made plans to go to Colorado and visit him.

“I just have to go back to Grand Island to clear up some stuff with the family,” Dave said.

“No!” I said, “Don’t under any circumstances go back to Nebraska.” I knew if he did, he’d slide right back to the bottle.

And that’s what happened. My next calls from Dave were rambling incoherence and him telling me he was sober. After several calls of me asking, suggesting, pleading, or cajoling him to go back to the facility, I Finally told him, “The only call I’ll take from you is when you’re back in Colorado.”

And I never spoke to him again. We "talked" on the phone a few times, but it was always me listening and nothing really being said.

During Dave’s last decade, he managed to get himself in all sorts of trouble that would have made good copy. Dave had more talent than necessary to quit drinking, tell those stories, and tell them with a purpose.

As it is, Dave, who ironically inherited a bunch of money that did not let him “have a real life” but did enable him to drink his life away, died a few weeks ago in a lonely hospital room in Grand Island, Nebraska. What he specifically died of is unknown to me and it doesn’t really matter. It was a long slow downhill slide.

Like both Jack and Neal, Dave died in his 40s.

Today, part of me feels guilty for not helping Dave more. Part of me wonders if it wouldn’t have been better for everyone if I didn’t answer the phone in 2003. Part of me will feel forever pissed off that Dave didn’t write his own Dharma Bums or Subterraneans. Dave leaves us a legacy of unrealized potential.

He could have written some awesome books.

Long Live the Community

There’s change in the wind and I like it.

The Lean Software and Systems Consortium (LSSC) has evolved to the Lean Systems Society (LSS).  I was never a member of LSSC, but I am a founding fellow of LSS. Why?

LSSC was a very necessary institution to begin talking about Lean in software development. With LSSC, we had several awesome conferences that rapidly increased the level of thought, range of adoption, and inclusion of new groups.

However, LSSC’s mission was very open-ended. Talks with LSSC ranged from setting up free communities to instituting scrum.org style certification for Capital K Kanban. I want to be clear here that I really love the LSSC people – it’s just that my voice was better used from the outside of the organization, always discussing new ideas and ways to expand the community beyond Software.

LSS is an entirely different animal. It is only focused on discussing new ideas and ways to expand the community beyond software. So … it seems to fit me better!

Along with this transition comes two things that I want to talk about:

Thing 1: LSSC 2012

This year’s conference felt different. I think we did a few things that gave this year’s LSSC a bit of slack.

Calmer Content

This is the part where I get to talk about how wrong I was. So, I’m  all big into setting up unconferences and putting the people in charge of the content. This year, at LSSC we had a few track chairs (mercifully few!) who were responsible for populating the content in their tracks. The speakers this year were awesome, the quality of the presentations was stellar, and the smaller number of tracks meant that people could focus.

I was initially unhappy with the decision to go this way – but in the end it made for a fantastic conference.

Start Loud

This year we started with a one-day unconference, a community meeting, a special event (Lean Action Kitchen), and a reception. This year just started fun and thoughtful. We built up a great momentum on the first day.

In addition, each day started with a Lean Coffee that went from last year’s one table to three to five tables a day.

Centralized Vendors in a Fun Location

Rather than having the vendors off in some removed part of the building, this year they were right at the center of everything. The vendors helped this by becoming “snack central” as well – it seemed like everyone had food. The space was also light and airy – which is something I noticed about the entire conference – the whole thing seemed less cramped and dark.

Thing 2: The LSS Mission Statement

Here’s the LSS Credo:

The Lean Systems Society believes that excellence in managing complexity requires accepting that complexity and uncertainty are natural to social systems and knowledge work. Effective systems must produce both better economic and sociological outcomes. Their development requires a holistic approach that incorporates the human condition. The Society is committed to exploring valuable ideas from all disciplines, and fostering a community that derives solutions from a common set of values and principles, while embracing specific context and avoiding dogma.

There’s nothing I can’t get behind here. This is an outward facing, humanistic, respectful approach to business, learning, and people.

This year I was lucky enough to win a Brickell Key award, which is given every year to two people in recognition of their work in this community. This meant a lot to me, because my focus has been often beyond software and my style of presentation is sometimes, shall we say, nonchalant.

This award was especially rewarding for me, given that this year I really feel like the community has really come into its own. This has been an exciting movement to be a part of and I look forward to what comes next.

The Tiger Woods Effect

“What metric are you using to incentivize your people to perform?”

“Every day we compile who processed the most orders, the winners are broadcast every day – as are the losers.”

“Hmm, and how is that working.”

“People love it, they are all working as hard as they can to process orders.”

It didn’t take long to verify that, rather than creating an environment to process orders, it instead had fostered an environment where everyone was angry. High performers thought low performers were lazy. Low performers knew that high performers were cherry picking. People in the middle just felt lost in the shuffle.

This can be attributed to something called “The Tiger Woods Effect”.

As we are put into competitive systems with clear winners, the actual performance of other players actually decreases. When we set up competitive games in our organizations, we unleash all sorts of cognitive biases – this being one. The goal becomes winning (or losing) the game (satisfying the metric) and not providing value for the company or the customer.

The team processed less orders because they were playing the game to individually process the most orders. Golfers shoot worse when under direct pressure to perform better.

Note: The Modus Press ebook Why Plans Fail, examines how cognitive bias impacts our decision making at the office.

(And Bloomberg needs to have better video embedding.) For the video click here.

Innovation for Erratic Meatbags

Okay..  Herbert Hoover and Ayn Rand tell us of the rugged individualist. More or less, its a western ideal. We question convention - even conventions WE helped create. We have free will. We make decisions and act accordingly. In our rational hearts, we make only appropriate, moral, and ethical decisions.

We want to control our environment and, in order to do that we must control ourselves - and perhaps even those “less intelligent than us”.

But we've learned a lot recently about the human brain and the psycho soup we call a mind.  We now have significant data that leads us to scientifically understand that humans are more like highly suggestive, moody, erratic meatbags. And I understand that I, Jim Benson, fit that bill as much as anyone.

We also understand that we fall into some definable types. Some of us are introverts, some of us are gregarious, some of us are creative, some of us are INTJ, some of us are ADHD, some of us get depressed in the Winter. etc. etc.

And maybe all these deterministic blanket statements describe no one in particular - but rather describe common human states we all find ourselves in from time to time. We do know one thing, that whatever evidence we may find that our will isn’t as free as we’d like it to be - the opposite is also untrue - we are not some B.F. Skinner robots of behavioralism. We are neither John Galt nor walking computers.

We’re something very different. We are neither pre-programmed nor truly rational, we are influenced. We are complex emotional beings striving for clarity. And we go to work in the morning.

Why this matters to people and business...

Recently, I had the unique opportunity to see some beauty worked. Simon Marcus and Jabe Bloom at The Library Corporation decided that their staff needed a dose of entrepeneurialism. Why they felt this is not really important right now. What is important was that a large group of computer programmers who had worked their entire careers on legacy systems suddenly found themselves in a situation where they had to invent new products and then discuss those products with potential users.

And by potential users I mean strangers walking the streets of Washington DC.

TLC’s staff is as varied as anyone’s, and they have their share of introverts. These introverts had to talk to strangers on the street about products they just made up.

Jabe Bloom, TLC's CTO, knew that the coders would literally freak out if asked to do this - so he had to ease them into it. For a week leading up to the DC day, he gave his teams exercises that slowly helped them understand who their clients were, the sensibilities and needs of other people, what problems these people might be having, and then license to invent products that might solve those problems. From this, product ideas would be generated, refined, and then vetted (validated) with these on-the-street interviews.

What was important was that these programmers were ... programmers. They just wanted to code. This was a huge and frustrating distraction from their regular work - which really needed to get done. So they started the first exercises annoyed and angry. Jabe gathered comments along the way - after the first few days of this process he received some extremely negative feedback.

As the exercises progressed, they began to generate products for the participants. They created personas of their system users, affinity maps of attributes, and most important - real individual and team learning.  Feedback became more positive.

By the time the group started generating real, tangible ideas - they had unprecedented clarity, not only into the exercise, but into their own clients and products. Perhaps for the first time ever, they had a deeper understanding of who would use their products and that those people were real. That clarity felt good, it was empowering. I don't mean “empowering” in the harmonically convergent woo-woo babble sense - I mean that in the actual "I now know how to really do my job" sense. They had more real power to write good code.

By the time these people did their exercise in DC, they were so into the game and their ideas, that the previously terrifying prospect of going out on the streets of Washington and talking to strangers was now merely .... terrifying.

Yes, it was still terrifying.

But they did it.  Introverts and non-people-persons stormed the nation’s capital and got some real work done.

Because they had clarity and because there was a system that made those actions logical. That made those terrifying actions easier.

Punch line

Our individual programming obviously runs deep, and circumventing it is not trivial. But we are not hopeless. No one is a trapped.

We can step outside our comfort zones, we can grow. And we can enjoy the experience.

Our brains have tendencies, some stronger than others, and many extremely rewritable. When we encounter stimuli, our brains record it and we are changed by it. The more that stimuli is repeated, the more our brains physically and operationally adapt to the new patterns.

We, as individuals, team members, and managers, all would do well to appreciate that thoughtfully created collaborative systems like TLC's can have radical impacts on the system participants. (Habits take longer to develop, of course).

After all was said and done, at about 10 pm on a Wednesday night we were gathered in TLC’s offices back in Inwood, West Virginia. I ran a retrospective with everyone in attendance. These people were exhausted and euphoric. The most successful applications will be further refined and likely built. People stepped way outside their normal comfort zones to make that happen. It was draining and beautiful to watch.

Simon Marcus, the COO at TLC, who started this whole process rolling, listened to everyone talk about what they enjoyed about the process and what they did not. He made it clear that innovation was everyone's job. And, by and large, everyone knew he was serious. The next morning they were at work, building a new process to harness this new power.

Simon and Jabe could have written off their programmers as stereotypical introvert meatbags and left the innovation to product development experts - but that's the normal way of doing things. Silo'ing innovation where it’s appropriate and turning everything else into a factory.

In the middle of all this, Jabe said to me, "you know, I thought I would get a ton of stupid ideas and maybe two good ones, but I've been overwhelmed by the number of really good - not just good but really good - ideas these guys came up with."

If Jabe and Simon  would have silo'ed their innovation, they would have destroyed not only value, but people as well.

Photo of Jim Benson by Jim Benson

Photos of TLC staff by Jabe Bloom

Depth in Progress: of Wine Snobs, Audiophiles, and Agilistas

“Wine is to enjoy, not to judge.”
~ Hwi Woong Jeong (웅가) Wine Enthusiast

 

The gentleman next to me took out his laptop and began typing, he had a large pile of wine labels and a notebook filled with wine notes. He began systematically copying them into his laptop. I figured he was a wine critic.

Other work he went on to do involved software development and airplanes so my curiosity overtook me and we began to talk. It turned out that he was a software developer that worked with airplanes. But … he was also a noted wine critic enthusiast. He had been to the Pacific Northwest of the US on a wine excursion as a guest of the major wineries. He had been all over Washington and Oregon tasting.

When I was in my 20s, I decided I wanted to be a wine snob. So I went and took courses on wines, read books, and started a collection. I became rather good at it. So good, in fact, that I found I wasn’t actually enjoying wine any more. I was always critiquing it. I could always find something not quite right.

I told him this and he smiled and said, “wine is to enjoy, not to judge.”

We will always suffer from snobbery – to this day, I cannot listen to music from laptop speakers. And I know more than my share of agile adherents who actively hate every team they come into contact with because of their flaws.

We tend to fall in love with our ideas and nothing kills romance like familiarity. Richard Dawkins once said, “There is an anaesthetic of familiarity, a sedative of ordinariness which dulls the senses and hides the wonder of existence.”

We do this all the time with our work. We get excited about a task or an idea and we go deep. Too deep. Beneath the layer of effort that separates excitement from boredom. From energizing to draining. From inspiration to drudgery.

We might call this “depth in progress”. Just like we can have too much work in progress, we can also have too much depth. It’s simply doing too much of something. We go beyond what would be an acceptable level of completion and strive for “perfection.”

“The fact of storytelling hints at a fundamental human unease, hints at human imperfection. Where there is perfection there is no story to tell.” ~Ben Okri

At some point on the path to perfection, we pass the point of diminishing returns. After that point, our efforts do not return profit, only waste. In our pursuit of perfection, we identify all the things that cannot be perfect and then strive to perfect them. Yet, the imperfect is always with us. It is where growth resides.

Yet the need for growth, and the imperfection, will always be there. We end up in a doom loop of reductio-ab-absurdum – we manage our products as if the end product were a fine diamond that would last centuries. Well, it took the planet millions of years to make that diamond, and we don’t have that kind of time.

Therefore we need to approach our work by asking, “What is the least amount I can do to make this task successful?” In doing this, we want to move our ticket to DONE and have it stay there. No re-work, no additional tasks created because it was incomplete.

Can that task be improved in the future? Absolutely. But for now, it is complete. We launch it, watch it work, and come back to improve upon it later if necessary.

We want to know what the minimal completed task looks like and then do that. Anything beyond is too much work. Our previous goal of “perfect” is still valid, but now it has an upper boundary. Overly polishing the task does no one any good. Because of this, perfection is no longer gilding the lily - we now recognize the lily is perfect. We want to enjoy our wine, not judge it.

"To gild refined gold, to paint the lily ... is wasteful and ridiculous excess." ~ Shakespeare

One Day’s Idea is Another Day’s Waste

On my travels through startups and the corporate world I see small to gross acts of negligence. They usually come in the wrapper of something like, “because that’s our process.” Metrics are gathered for the sake of reports no one acts on. Information is collected to feed otherwise ignored databases. People fill out forms to protect the company from a long-forgotten infraction.

Policies and processes we adopt over time are corporate inventory. We have to maintain them, administer them, and be annoyed by them. All these actions are waste.

The tricky thing here is that all policies can be defended by “what if” arguments. “We can’t get rid of that policy … what if someone does something bad?”

Well, what if someone does something bad? How likely is that to occur?

We know for certain that the waste is making the group less effective when subjected to the policy. What is the likelihood of your What If?

A gross example of this is airport delay post 9-11. The 9-11 hijackings had nothing to do with airport screening points. They were a systemic breakdown (and a highly improbable one) of the global intelligence network. Yet, the 631,939,829 people who flew in 2010 all were delayed at least one hour by needing to get to the airport early, stand in line, and subject themselves to security policies. At about 40,000 as an average income, this quickly pencils out to about 12.5 billion dollars worth of delay every year. That delay can be easily compounded by the lost time of collaboration that people have endure by leaving the office early.

The What Ifs here are obvious. But so are the costs. Are there better ways of dealing with terrorist threats than incurring billions of dollars in passenger delay?

Other examples are regular reports that show the progress of various business metrics. One company we visited generated a weekly report of dozens of pages and nearly 100 metrics every week. Not only did report generation take more than a combined 40 hours to produce (an obvious cost), it delayed the very projects it was trying to measure. In the end, the overwhelming number of charts, graphs, and numbers created a culture of managing by the numbers while totally ignoring what was really happening. Managers would comb through the document until they found the metric or two that went in the wrong direction, then they’d come to find out why.

More often than not, the why was a normal fluctuation in the number. The conversation was waste, the “analysis” was waste, and the generation was waste. But those receiving the report had become so fixated on it that they couldn’t see beyond it. “What if we didn’t have this report? We’d never know what was going on!”

Examine your policies regularly. Make sure that you don’t have policies to create waste.

 

Photo by Anders V

Territory Destroys Thought–An Open Letter to Jabe Bloom

Dear Jabe

It strikes me that we humans often like to think.

Yet we are still territorial creatures.

Therefore when we invent anything, we wish to guard that thing. We are protectors of our territory.

Even when there clearly is neither threat nor territory.

• My friends Chris Matts and Olav Massen had the idea that we can apply the economic theory of real options to your daily life.
• My friend Dave Snowden is posits that there is a rather fluid landscape of existential states that all things (people, policies, relationships, goals, etc) live in that has varying degrees of simplicity, complication, complexity, and chaos and that understanding that state greatly informs responsible action.
• My third friend, Jurgen Appelo has constructed a management aesthetic that transforms the roles of the worker and management to create a simultaneously profitable and humane working environment.
• My friend David Anderson has spent a great deal of time creating a new way of managing software development and IT teams with greater clarity and significantly less process overhead.
• And my friends Bob Marshall and the regrettably late Grant Rule have a concept that companies are in a state of evolution or devolution from zero-sum game authoritarian weak states to more resilient collaborative states.

I, for one, count myself lucky to have such friends. No, doubt they will all disagree with my summaries. :-)

For my part, I had the idea that if individuals better understood the work they were doing, they would make better decisions, feel better about those decisions, and could better deal with difficult challenges when they arose.

What I appreciate most about this nascent group is that there is no appreciable territorial overlap.  A team using David's Kanban can be employing Jurgen's Management 3.0 techniques to solve a wicked problem elucidated in Dave's Cynefin framework and act at the right time with Chris and Olav's Real Options by individuals who are informed and ready to act using my Personal Kanban - as they do all this, they are consciously engaged in Bob and Grant's Rightshifting.

I, for one, get a hell of a kick out of that.  Individually, we have managed to create an incredibly deep potential system.

So... territory.

Lucky for us all, we are not the only ones interested in our ideas. Globally, each of us has audiences for our ideas. Because all eight of us are quite excited by our ideas, we like to talk about them. So, we gather with those who can discuss and extend our thinking.

That is also awesome.

Over the last year, David hosted a Kanban gathering in Iceland, Jurgen had his Stoos meeting in Switzerland, and Dave et al hosted an event called CALM in England. All three meetings were simply gatherings of people to talk about the ideas. Yet all three were strangely attacked in blogs, Twitter, and through social media for no reason I can surmise other than territoriality.

If any of these three were attacked solely for the ideas being discussed, that would be one thing - but these attacks were most often from fear.  What are they doing in there? Why aren't they tweeting? They must have some hidden agenda! As if Stoos were the Illuminati or CALM were some kind of Skull and Bones society.

While all of us have egos, we're all too busy and too invested in social media to build secret process cabals.

We and our supporters apparently see some finite landscape that needs to be conquered and protected. This is regrettable, because without my seven counterparts I know I would have learned a lot less over the last several years. It is also regrettable because when we as standard bearers of ideas shut out the ideas of others, we make intellectual intolerance that much more permissible. This ultimately drives dismissal for our own good ideas.

And, for whatever trappings we may put around them, we are in the idea business.

So, Jabe, go fix that. Thanks.

All the best,

Jim Benson

Failure is an Option-Collaberwocky Episode 4

The Lean Startup movement has focused considerable energy in the message that we learn from failures. Small, easily recoverable, failures can be invaluable in the success of a company. However, many ignore failure and focus on success.

Since success is a rarity and failure much more common, we limit our learning opportunities by that success focus.

However, many also do not understand how the scientific process actually works. We therefore tend to build experiments that are invalid.

In Episode 4 of Collaberwocky, Corey Ladas, Jabe Bloom, and I discuss thoughtful failure.