A year-end retrospective.
Imagine Yo-Yo Ma performing a solo.
Now imagine him performing a duet with Hai-Ye Ni.
Now imagine him performing the duet on his own. First he’ll play his part, then he’ll play hers. Sure it’ll take twice as long … but he’ll get there.
Eventually.
I've never been more productive than I've been over the past year. This was not due to a tool. It was not due to Personal Kanban. It was not due to energy drinks or hot yoga.
It was due to the powerful combination of collaboration and clarity. Everything that was successful about 2009 I attribute to the potency of these two forces.
Anything that fell short, can be easily traced to a lack of it.
Tonianne first came on board with Modus to help me write my book. During the first six months of the year, we pounded out about 80% of a fairly decent manuscript. We felt really good about this, but we were just getting our sea legs.
It wasn’t until June when we raised the sails and the effortless race began.
In the latter half of the year, Tonianne and I:
- Wrote three white papers, two for a major company and one for a groundbreaking new organization
- Conceived of and launched Personal Kanban with hundreds of articles on personal and team productivity
- Created three InfoPaks that described in detailed and illustrated richness what Personal Kanban is
- Worked with the World Bank and the CGIAR to create and implement a system to teach local government officials in forested countries how to calculate and distribute carbon credits to landowners
- Worked with (and continue to work with) the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization to create an eLearning module on collaboration and knowledge sharing
- Managed the process to create an iPhone app (almost done)
- Helped a client refine the concepts for - and launch a development effort to build - a system that employs social media and real estate information to better define where we actually think we live
- Helped a client who owns and operates a drug rehab agency for street kids use Personal Kanban to focus his clients and his staff
and I know I’m forgetting things.
The UN Work and the World Bank project have shown me that David Anderson and I shouldn’t have been surprised when he used Kanban at Corbis and achieved 400%+ gains in productivity.
We should have expected it.
Collaboration and clarity through the kanban dictated it.
There were only two projects that Tonianne and I worked on this year that we were less than pleased with, and that is due to a lack of collaboration and clarity. Engagements where people lacked clear understanding of their role in the project or the purpose of the project or the direction of the project led to collaboration breakdown and failure.
The World Bank/CGIAR project was a wake up call. The group we worked with was comprised of people from around the world, all dedicated professionals, all very intelligent. Previously, the project was all but paralyzed. We got them in a room and working and together they took off. Vertical take off. They went from almost nothing to a clear concept of purpose and a tremendous amount of documentation in five days.
Why? Because in that conference room they had clarity and they were able to collaborate. And they did it gleefully. Why didn’t they do this before? No clarity and no feeling of collaborative momentum. They had jobs in their isolated offices and this project (no matter how important or interesting) was just another thing begging for attention during the course of their day.
The UN Project showed me that collaboration and clarity can be effortless in a distributed team as well. One of the lessons we are writing is in a module where other lessons are being written by Nancy White and John Smith. Instantly and elegantly, everyone began collaborating organically, which has made our work much easier. Our individual creativity and expertise is providing immediate quality improvements to our respective sections and the document as a whole.
So, if Tonianne and I can do all that in six months, and if David can get a 400%+ rise in team productivity, what does this mean?
That with a team that has clarity, the number of team members does not necessarily provide linear gains in productivity. I’m not saying it’s exponential. I’m just saying that 1+1 > 2.
Imagine Yo-Yo Ma performing a solo.
Now imagine him performing a duet with Hai-Ye Ni.
Now imagine him performing the duet on his own. First he’ll play his part, then he’ll play hers. It’ll take twice as long … but he’ll get there.
Eventually.
Life cannot be a solo. Ma and Ni are two of the most accomplished cellists in history, but they can’t perform a duet on their own. Their art, their accomplishment, comes from knowing when they are soloing and when they are part of something larger than themselves.
This does not mean they lose themselves in the process. They don’t become cello-bots simply because it’s not their solo. When Yo-Yo falls back and Hai-Ye’s part is in the forefront, he’s playing his piece with the same grace and attentiveness as if he were on stage alone. Grace and attentiveness that comes from clarity is the bedrock of successful collaboration. You know your part, you know your place, you feel the whole being created because - and only because - you are playing your part perfectly.
As for 2008, I just wanted it to end. It was a year plagued by muddy thinking, half-completed projects, and soloists trying to collaborate. 2008 physically hurt.
2009’s successes have existed not only because Tonianne’s and my duet was able to operate on its own, but also because that same duet could easily shift and become part of an even larger entity, like our UN quartet and CGIAR’s 14 piece orchestra.
Beautiful music.
I want to thank Tonianne and those who truly understood Modus’ mission, helped make Personal Kanban what it has become, and prepared us for what looks to be a stunning 2010.
Thank you all for this year.
Photo of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra by Jordan Fischer.
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