Evolving Web

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.

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!

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.

You Mean I Can’t Even Estimate? The Planning Fallacy in Action

Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.

We like to estimate things. “I’ll be there in 5 minutes!" “I will have that report to you in an hour!” “We can do the entire project in 24 days!”

Yet our estimates always make us nervous. They leave us ill-at-ease. We always know things won’t go exactly as we foresee, there will be things that should go right but don’t, there will be unexpected snafus. We know, the moment we create it, our estimate is wrong.

“Plans never survive contact with the enemy” – von Clausewitz

But we hold on to our estimation as necessary. We hold on to our plans as bibles. We hold on to contracts as … well … contracts. And we are surprised when things don’t go according to plan.

“Plans are useless, planning is indispensible.” – Eisenhower

We are running into two problems here. (1) There is variation is every activity and the world is sure to remind you of that. (2) The Planning Fallacy – which is a cognitive bias that shows that human beings tend to underestimate a given task even if they’ve done that task many times before.

The planning fallacy is one nasty little bugger. Already, we undervalue the role of variation in our work and believe we can ascribe one number to a particular task. Beyond that … we actually are predisposed to underestimate even that erroneous number.

Researchers have tested this many times and find a few things.

• People tend to underestimate their own completion times the most
• People tend to underestimate even more when others are present
• People can deliberately underestimate to garner favor or win contracts

These added together create some shaky ground when asking other people for an estimate of time. Some people glibly say, “Well, when they give me an estimate, I double it and that takes care of it.” But this doesn’t solve the core problem – people honestly did not know the variation in their work to begin with.

At a recent client, they compared their estimates to actual hours across a series of projects.  What they found was, if a task was estimated at one hour, there would be four times that estimate was correct, and three that it was not. The incorrect estimates would range between 2 and 6 hours.

For two hour tasks, it was similar. Three times they were correct, four times not – ranging between 3 and 9 hours.

Three hour tasks, a very similar spread.

When they visualized those tasks – they suddenly were able to see the variation in their work. And they were upset!

“We have to get rid of those major outliers,” they said.

But what they were really seeing was the variation in their work. The uncontrollable variation inherent in knowledge work that makes Hofstadter's Law a law and makes the Planning Fallacy a very common occurrence.

Understanding the variation statistically … that gives the team real power. With that they can choose any number of estimation strategies, based on real numbers with real spreads. There will never be one “right” number – because that is prediction and not estimation.

Combine this with Eisenhower’s advice, and we stop planning up front – when these errors and biases will be the most pronounced because of have the least information -and instead re-evaluate plans throughout a project. We make course corrections. We constantly re-adjust. So Hofstadter will still be right, but he’ll be less right than before.

Photo by Mr. Asthma Helper

Bigger Ears Make You Dumbo

Consider how the movement of a meme across the social media landscape spreads what looks good on the surface, but is fetid logic underneath.  A few months back I spoke at Social Media Breakfast, Seattle about Social Media, Lean and the CIA. A big part of that talk covered the danger of companies assuming that merely listening to people through Twitter was a standard of success.

Now let me tell you a little story about a recent experience I had with Delta Airlines, and how it relates to Chris Brogan's quote regarding assumptions on the Internet.

I was flying back to Seattle from Viet Nam. I had a ticket, but no seat assignment on the leg from Tokyo to Seattle. I was told that this wasn’t a problem, I could get one when I checked in at the desk in Tokyo.

My layover in Tokyo was nearly 10 hours long, before my 10 hour flight back to the States.

No problem, I thought. I would quickly check in, and then enjoy the day exploring the city.

I wend my way through the intricacies of Narita Airport, finally finding the transfer desk. It was unmanned. It was about 7 am at this point, so I went to the information counter and asked when the Delta people came to work. 

They told me 11:30.

Well, that’s pretty inconvenient. But I got myself some breakfast and proceeded to wait. 11:30 came and went, and yet there was still no one at the Delta transfer desk. A little after noon the desk finally opened. It took 15 minutes for them to process my request, after which they informed me I would get my boarding pass and seat assignment 15 minutes before departure.

I inquired why, and was told my ticket was so cheap I didn’t get a seat assignment. I said that this was leg four of a ticket that went from Paris to Beijing to Hanoi to Tokyo to Seattle and all the other legs had seat assignments. At that point I was told tersely that I simply didn’t have a seat assignment.

“Okay, how do I avoid having this happen in the future?” I asked.

I got my papers pushed back at me and never did receive an answer. I have no idea how to make sure this doesn’t happen next time.

So, I’m stuck in Narita for 10 hours now because I need to make sure that the moment they open the gate, I’m first in line for a seat assignment. I do what any red blooded netizen would do. I tweet that I’m annoyed with Delta.

The next day, Delta’s big ears hear my pain and tweet to me:

So they heard me.

And so I DMed them. Now…look up.

My story wasn’t short. But I had to mash it into several 140 character statements because Delta didn’t actually give me a higher bandwidth way to have the conversation.

I told them the fastest possible version of that story. Without any further communication, Delta gave me 2,500 frequent flier points. I don’t even fly Delta! This was pretty much the equivalent of Charlie Brown winning 5 free haircuts. “My dad’s a barber and besides, I don’t have that much hair to cut!” he lamented.

 Delta’s ears might have been big, but their execution sucked. No, their listening is not what I will remember them for, but rather, it is their consolation prize I will forever associate them with. I still have no idea how to not get stuck somewhere waiting for a seat assignment. That was all I really wanted: simple information.

What should Delta have done? Let me now share a story from an earlier part of that trip.

Due to a communication snafu, Orbitz messed up part of my flight. At one point, I was in real danger of being stuck in Paris with no way to fly onto to Hanoi or, to return home.

I tweeted my frustration and Orbitz responded within minutes.

They immediately gave me a direct email address and a phone number to Kristi, a real person, who could help (and who could take the time to get the whole story). Orbitz then fixed the problem I had and one other I didn’t know I had. Then they told me how I could avoid having that ever happen to me again.

Orbitz had big ears, but more importantly, they also had helping hands.

Delta’s system is built on productivity. They feel they did a good job by moving me through their process and giving me something. Orbitz is build on effectiveness. (I cover the difference in this post). They found the real problem, solved it, and made sure I was taken care of. Rest assured, both experiences will have a lasting impact.

(Oh, and Kristi later wrote to say she was glad I made it safely to Hanoi, and to thank me for the tweet.) 

Social Media, Lean and the CIA

At the end of March, I spoke at Social Media Breakfast, Seattle (See their recap) at the Waggener Edstrom offices in Bellevue. They were live streaming the talk, but had some technical problems – so the video is in two parts. If you want to see what the audience saw on the screen, there’s also the Prezi I spoke from here.

This talk is covering the challenges that organizations have with collaboration, both internal and external. Social Media and Lean need to be applied together to provide both a set of principles and a collaborative foundation. I also talk about being a punk rocker.  So, if you want to know how punk rock, twitter and the CIA all mean the same thing … take a look!

Part 1 Part 2

Scotch, Apples and Time to Think

What does your company do?

Every company does something different, no matter how slight. Even Burger King and McDonalds have their differentiators.

These differentiators, and ones you've planned to release later, are vital to your survival. They make your products unique. If you pick the right differentiators and can communicate their value, you win! If you pick the wrong ones or can't communicate the value of the right ones, you may well lose.

Companies are filled with people. By and large, these people care about the company. Not only because they like having a job, but also because they are interested in their profession.

At Modus Cooperandi, we try to schedule specific times just to think together. Frankly, it's my favorite part of owning a company. When we were in the Lake Union offices, we had 3pm Scotch. We'd break out the single malt, some nice glasses, and just talk. No agenda was set, but these conversations were deep and engaging opportunities. We developed a lot of new knowledge from our 3pm Scotch.

When I was in DC, we instead took "apple breaks," or went for a walk. Whenever we'd hit a wall in our work, someone broke out the cutting board and knife we knew it was time to talk it out.

Modus' main product is intellectual - we manufacture ideas and knowledge. Whether we are writing a white paper or coaching individuals or teams, we are leveraging tools to help them better manufacture their own ideas and knowledge.

3pm Scotch

3pm Scotch was a time of invention. We'd gather, find a topic, and off we went. Many times there'd be a running theme that carried over from the previous day, but that theme evolved. The ritualized nature of these gatherings became part of the culture. Corey and I would start talking about something in the morning and one of us would suggest writing it on the white board "for Scotch."  We'd record it, and then get back to daily business.

This prevented that conversation from becoming a distraction at at 10am, and instead honored it as a legitimate business act at 3. It also gave us a specific time where we - as a company - took our manufacturing resources (our people) and focused them on new product development or product improvement. We didn't do this by forcing a particular topic, but instead by providing the time in the first place.

On separate occasions, both Thu An and Jeanine expressed how they'd been waiting for these moments all day. This had nothing to do with the Scotch (they often drank tea), and everything to do with something they were itching to talk about.

Software development and other knowledge work teams rarely do this. We get so buried in the day-to-day "work" that we forget what it is that we are building. We miss opportunities to make them better or sell them faster.

Apple Breaks

Apple Breaks often occurred like Andon events on an assembly line. When someone pulls an Andon cord in manufacturing, it is an instant alert that there is a problem, and a team quickly forms to solve it. In some cases, the pull of the Andon cord may actually stop all production.

Apple Breaks caused us to get away from our laptops, regroup in the kitchen, and discuss the problem we were facing. Tonianne and I would get away from our screens and instead focus on the issue, rather than on the words we'd typed. Tonianne likes to say "our nose is too close to the canvas." 
Apple Breaks not only forced us to focus on and solve the issue at hand, they also got our noses away from the proverbial canvas. They gave perspective. They gave us time to work it out.

Most importantly, Apple Breaks gave us permission to stop "working" in order to get work done. Permission is important here. When you are building something for a living, walking away from the production center feels like you are abdicating your responsibility. But this isn't the case.

Watch any construction project. The construction workers take regular breaks, and not just because their work is physically exhausting. It's because they know the more tired they are, the more likely they are to injure themselves. Sometimes walking away from the computer is the best way to use the computer.

Apple Breaks recognize that the source of many issues is often being stuck in the current form of the solution we are working on. The more we stare at that form, the more invested we are in it.  Walking away from it frees us of its tyranny. On more than one occasion, Tonianne and I solved a problem during a 20 minute Apple Break that we fought with for days on the screen.

Why Scotch? Why Apples?

You can eat or drink whatever you want - that's irrelevant. The point here is: Take time out to think expansively. Take time out to solve problems as they happen. Your people need permission to think. Give it to them.

Remember: Knowledge is your company's #1 asset and its #1 product. Knowledge comes from thinking. Did you really hire people to not think?

Time Value of Money and The Psychological Value of Money

In a recent coffee with Jon Bach (Blog, Company), I blurted out something that I want to explore here.  In my last post I talked about the Modus Cooperandi 2010 Business Plan which is:

We want to work with people we like and respect on projects that are fulfilling.

Idealistic? Pedantic? Maybe.

Yesterday's post provides a few equations as to why this might make sense.  But in reality, it's all risk mitigation. Regardless of how much a difficult project might pay, it's usually so painful to complete as to be self-negating.

I had a project with a large client a few years back that was so painful that my wife refuses to acknowledge that I ever got paid for it at all.

Why? 

Because there's a time value of money which is well defined by economists. It looks something like this:

According to Investopedia:

What Does Time Value of Money (TVM) Mean?

The idea that money available at the present time is worth more than the same amount in the future due to its potential earning capacity. This core principle of finance holds that, provided money can earn interest, any amount of money is worth more the sooner it is received.

So,  it took soooooooooo long for me to get paid by my client that a combination of interest I was paying for a business line-of-credit and the fact that I wasn't able to invest that money when I made it, greatly reduced the actual value of what I was paid for the project.

Okay, that's all well and good, but I was still paid. Why does my wife not even recognize this as an event?

I think this is due to a psychological value of money or (PsVM).

You see, when you do a thing, your brain gets really happy when you are immediately rewarded for that thing. Beyond simply instant gratification, serotonin levels rise making you feel happier, more social, you digest your food better, just a load of good stuff. Why? Because immediate rewards, have a funny two-pronged effect. They make us calmer (not nervous) but simultaneously more excited (ready to invent, ready to take on new challenges).

So NOT getting a reward when it is expected for a job well done drastically decreases the value of the reward when it does come. The longer it takes, the more our brains disassociate it as a reward and make it an entitlement. And if someone HAS to give you something and they don't do it on time, you quickly become resentful because they are keeping you from something you are entitled to.

Getting something you are entitled to has zero psychological value because you were supposed to get it regardless.  This is why pre-calculated cash bonuses have been shown to be lousy incentives to effect change in companies. The disassociation of the reward from the individual (through having to wait and having it be a systematic equation) makes the incentive a disincentive.

It's like telling someone what to get you for Christmas, having them order it, and then having it be backordered to March. It was never really a gift to begin with because you requested it, someone else merely paid for what you wanted. But then, you don't get it in time and by the time it arrives you say "finally."

Money Money Money Money

In the end, Money is an abstraction. A really important abstraction, but one nonetheless. We need to figure out, as people, as companies, as a society, what we really value and where money fits into that equation. It's clear that, as an abstraction, the value of money is different to every individual. To some people it's a toy to play with on the stock market or in Macau. To others it's security to hold and look at and smile. To others it is power to buy and sell whatever or whomever they wish. But the psychological component is clear.

So when weighing future projects or opportunities ask yourself where that psychological value of money fits for you.

Photo by emrank

Collaboration and Clarity Make Us Greater than the Sum of Our Parts

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.

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

Personal Kanban at the World Bank - Small Team Rapid Development

View more documents from ourfounder.

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.