And what we’re doing, when we’re doing it, is transforming information into product.

You have a plan. That’s information. You gather data. That’s information. You figure out what the client wants. That’s information. Then you make something out of all of it, it could be a sandwich, a Lamborghini, a skyscraper, a piece of software, a hospital. Work is literally the act of taking information and turning it into a thing somebody else wanted.

It is not the task list. It is not the plan. It is not the KPIs. Those are scaffolding. Work is the transformation.

And it always requires at least two people. There’s the person doing it and the person who needs it. Otherwise you’re just screwing around in your garage. Which is fine. But nobody’s paying you for it.

What a collaborative team actually needs

We want strong professionals inside collaborative teams delivering strong work. Easy to say. Here’s the part people skip:

Information doesn’t flow on its own.

Nobody wakes up thinking, you know what, today I’m going to withhold context from my teammates. They don’t share because we’ve built systems that make sharing hard. Status meetings instead of visible work. Dashboards instead of conversations. Slack threads that scroll into oblivion. Emails nobody reads.

Even Toni and I (who work together well) have had stretches this year where we got too busy and the information stopped moving between us. We felt its absence immediately. Then came the guilt, the frustration, the scramble to fix it. And by the time we looked up, we’d generated a pile of unnecessary work because we weren’t paying attention to what the team needed right now.

That’s the whole thing. Right now.

The four questions

If you want your team to actually function, you need to be answering four questions continuously and visibly:

1. What does the team need right now? What do you need to get your work done. What tools, information, contacts, time….Not what the plan says it needs. Not what last month’s retro said. Right now. This week. This hour.

2. Who are we? What are the people on this team actually capable of? What do they want to do? What does their job description say they’re supposed to do? What is the work currently demanding of them that sits completely outside that description? Those are four different answers and all of them matter.

3. Who are our stakeholders? Most teams I work with can’t answer this. Flat out. They don’t know who’s judging the work. They don’t know whose “yes” actually counts. So projects fail in this very specific, very predictable way: you do a ton of work to appease the one loud stakeholder who’s a pain in the butt, you ignore the three quiet ones, and at the end the quiet ones say this doesn’t give us any of what we needed and you feel like a schmuck.

Don’t feel like a schmuck. Find out who they are first.

4. What is happening right now? Not the Gantt chart. Not the roadmap. The actual state of the actual work. Where the blockers are. What’s moving. What’s stuck. Who’s waiting on whom.

Make it visual. Make it real-time. Make it shared.

It doesn’t matter where you put it. Miro. A kanban. An Obeya wall with sticky notes. A shared interface you built yourselves. What matters is that your team and your stakeholders agree that’s where the information lives and then you keep it current.

Because the moment that information stops being current is the moment everything starts falling apart.

If you’re underperforming, it’s usually because you’re under-informing.

And this one is a rule: if someone on your team says they don’t feel informed, they are right. Don’t argue with them. Don’t tell them you sent the email. Don’t explain that it was in the standup. If they feel under-informed, they are under-informed. That is independent of whether you feel you gave them enough. It’s not about you.

Quality of life, not work-life balance

I don’t particularly believe in work-life balance. I believe in quality of life. Work ebbs. Work flows. Satisfaction ebbs and flows with it. The job of a professional is to watch what you need and what the people around you need, and make sure the system is delivering it. That’s what a good team does. That’s what a good Obeya does. That’s what collaboration actually is when it’s working.

If you liked this, stick around. Like and subscribe is appreciated but what I really want is for you to go look at your team tomorrow morning and ask yourself: can everybody here see what’s happening right now?

I have spent a lifetime in rooms with people who are changing. Not in any dramatic, cinematic way. Like aliens busting out of their chests, but changing like people actually change. People change slowly, awkwardly, and usually at the worst possible time. You know, like why change is inconvenient and people say they don’t like it.

I’ve facilitated hundreds of value stream mapping exercises, A3s, retrospectives, design sessions. I’ve watched smart, capable, seasoned professionals navigate genuinely stressful revelations without flinching. Requirements that don’t match reality. Workflows that are held together with habit and denial. Processes that exist because someone built them in 2007 and then got promoted.

They handle all of it. They’re professionals. They rise to the occasion.

And then one of them falls apart over something that doesn’t seem important.

Someone laughs too hard. Someone goes quiet or bursts into tears. Someone gets angry about a sticky note and storms out. And the rest of us (facilitators included) have this instinctive response, which is: Wow. That was weird. Hope it doesn’t happen again.

What we should be saying is: Where did that come from?

So I wrote The Social Life of Small Enclosed Spaces, and it’s about a crew of people on a long-duration mission to Titan. They’re stuck together in a spacecraft for years, dealing with corporate surveillance, AIs that may or may not be trustworthy, and the slow-motion realization that the system they’re inside was designed to use them.

Standard Tuesday, really, for anyone who’s worked in a large organization.

The book is Lean and systems thinking wrapped in a space opera. It’s got value streams and kanban and organizational design, except they’re happening between people who are also dealing with murder, espionage, and an oligarch who thinks she owns them. It’s very much a book by me.

And that was great, and then ... the characters became people. And started doing things I didn’t plan for.

Now, you’d think the conductor of the orchestra wouldn’t be surprised by the music. I designed these people. I built their backstories, their motivations, their arcs. I knew where they were going.

Except I didn’t. Because characters are people, and people are predictably irrational, and characters are worse — because you think you have control over them.

*People are people, so why should it be, I should expect them to at predictably? * Jules Park is my security chief. He’s sarcastic, profane, and ready with a one-liner for any occasion. He’s the guy who walks into the crisis meeting with his coffee, arms crossed, chair tilted back, sarcasm buffer fully loaded. He handles everything.

Until he doesn’t.

And when he hit his breaking point (which I did not schedule) I found myself doing the exact same thing I tell facilitators not to do. I said: This person wouldn’t do that.

Which is exactly what we say in meetings when someone breaks pattern. We say it about Larry when the project goes sideways on his watch. We say it about the team lead who suddenly can’t take one more requirement change. We say it about the developer who was fine for five sprints and then just... wasn’t.

It’s a weird form of fundamental attribution error. We blame the person for the state of the thing, because they’re the last one holding it. But what actually happened is that they’re the part of the system where the complexity landed. They didn’t break the plan. They’re where the plan’s assumptions ran out.

No plan survives contact with Larry and Larry might not survive either.

There’s something else that happens in those rooms, and in the book, that I think we don’t talk about enough.

People have epiphanies on a different schedule than you do. Or than you wish they did. And that’s why we have other people (sometimes you are the slow one).

In any VSM exercise, you will watch people go from their current state to a future state. They know, roughly, what they expect that future state to be. But it never is. And the delta between their expectations and where they actually end up we think is just process improvement. But it’s not...it’s a personal change. It’s internal. It rewires something.

Someone says: “I guess this lean stuff isn’t so bad.” Someone else says: “I thought you were a jerk, but I realize the system was making me assume that.” These are epiphanies, and they arrive when they arrive...often at a point that’s wildly inconvenient for the facilitator or the project plan or the person sitting next to them.

In the book, this happens constantly. Rash (my military botanist), the quiet guy carrying a heavy load, doesn’t become a radically different person over the course of the mission. But he softens, he learns, he has experiences that change him.

In any enclosed space (a spacecraft, a conference room, a project team) you either soften toward each other (align) or you calcify (become brittle). Those are your options.

All systems want people and events to be predictable. That’s the entire architecture of control. Control the inputs, control the outputs. Decrease variation. Standardize. Garbage in-garbage out...an adage that is a joke at recycling plants that have garbage in, usable materials out.

Life gives us a lot of garbage. We...get to use it creatively.

In the book, Wei Lin, the HOMEGA director, has built an entire corporate infrastructure around the premise that if you coerce the right people and constrain their options sufficiently, they’ll perform as designed. (Any resemblance to any current oligarchs is purely coincidental.)

And right now, outside the book, we’re living in the real-world version of that assumption. We’re in variation soup. The amount of ambient uncertainty that people are carrying around...economic, political, personal, existential...is staggering. There is no predictability right now. And there are people who are trying very hard to make sure that remains the case.

So when someone in your next planning meeting has an emotional response that doesn’t fit your model of them — when someone on your team hits a trigger you didn’t see coming — please try to have the space to ask where did that come from? instead of that was weird.

The crew’s refusal to stay predictable isn’t them acting out, it’s just them growing and responding to the system they are in. And that’s been the most beautiful thing to see while writing this book.

It was an annoying form of self-humiliation, watching the characters in the book act like real people. Their plans didn’t survive contact with reality because the plan was bad, it was because people are alive. They learn. They change. In the face of complexity and variation, they change. And that is a very good thing. It’s what makes us all human. It’s what makes value stream mapping and Personal Kanban work.

So. Two very Modus things.

One. If you’re someone who works with teams (an agile coach, a project manager, an organizational designer, someone who stares at value streams and wonders why they never quite do what they’re supposed to) this book is for you. It’s a novel about systems thinking and human messiness and what happens when you lock a bunch of smart, broken, funny people in a tin can and send them to Saturn’s largest moon. It’s funny. It has a lot of coffee in it. And the AI has opinions.

Go to titanauts.com and help me launch it.

Two. When you’re working with people in any context, in any room, on any project, try to have the space to recognize that they are encountering what you’re encountering in a different way. Their responses, even when they’re inconvenient, can be incredibly helpful to making sure you do the right thing at the right time with the right people.

That’s the real value stream. The human one. It’s why we do what we do.

Jim Benson is the creator of Personal Kanban and the author of The Social Life of Small Enclosed Spaces. He’s been a process guy, a psychology guy, an urban planning guy, a design engineer guy, and now a fiction author guy. All of those things collide in this book.

Modus Institute × HOMEGA

That’s not a cute thing to say. That’s what happened.

I was attempting to sell my house. Running a company in a business-hostile environment. Writing a book on toxic waste. Onboarding new clients. Supporting existing ones. Working with students at Modus Institute. Tonianne was stressed. I was stressed. My wife was stress. My mom is stressed. All of this stuff going on that makes you compensate by going quiet and tight and efficient in all the wrong ways.

When we get like that, we do what we’re trained to do: we go to the board. We pull the next ticket. We execute. We survive. We go task focused, work-to-rule.

We don’t, generally, write novels. Mine is called The Social Life of Small Enclosed Spaces.

The Work That Keeps Us Human

But creativity doesn’t care about your backlog. Or your time management. Or even your level of nervous exhaustion.

So, for me, this character named Laura Marquez kept showing up. Urban planner. Systems designer. Living in a world of oligarchs and mega-corporations and people just trying to figure out how to be good to each other inside systems that weren’t designed for goodness. She’d tap me on the shoulder in the middle of a workshop prep. She’d hand me a line of dialogue during a client call debrief. I’d scribble fragments. I made songs out of some of them.

The Titanauts, as people, refused to wait for me to be ready.

And this is the reason for this post. This is true of a lot of important things. The conversation you need to have with a colleague. The decision your team has been avoiding. The pivot your org knows it needs to make. These things don’t wait until your calendar clears. They just keep accumulating pressure until something gives.

So I started writing. And the next thing I knew, I was in it. Laura’s voice was my flow.

And she was saying, “Write this, or lose every shred of humanity you have left to stress, fatigue, and the horrible narrative that is now.”

Systems Thinking in Narrative Form

I thought I was writing Office Space in space. Funny, light, a little irreverent.

The book had other ideas.

It wanted to talk about complicity. About how we end up inside systems that do harm, incrementally, quietly…not because we’re bad people, but because the system is designed to move us toward certain outcomes regardless of our intentions. We do little bits of harm. Then a little more. Until one day we hit the straw-breaks-the-camel’s-back moment, and we have to make a choice about our own agency.

Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it achieves.

That’s usually attributed to Deming. A lot of people have said it. What I know is that it’s true. And the corollary (the part we forget when we’re stressed and pulling tickets) is: if we don’t like the results, we can change the system.

We’ve done it before. We’ll do it again.

The Characters Who Turn Out to Be the Plot

We’re all people. We all show up when we can, do what we can. And sometimes those cans are musts. Sometimes they are wannas.

As I was writing the book, I had this same experience with the characters that I see in every value stream mapping exercise.

The characters I thought were supporting the plot turned out to be the plot.

The quiet ones. The people who don’t announce themselves. The ones who seem like they’re just... there. Bumping along. Doing their work without fanfare.

And then suddenly…they move everything forward.

You see this on teams constantly. You map the work, you identify the leaders, you talk to the loudest voices in the room. And then you find the person who’s been quietly holding the whole system together. The one who knows where everything is, who’s translated every decision into action, who everyone else depends on without realizing it.

We live staring at the beams of our teams and miss the rivets. And damn, it’s humbling to learn the same lesson over and over again. Writing The Social Life of Small Enclosed Spaces was a multi-year value stream mapping exercise I didn’t know I was doing.

A Different Kind of Review Cycle

I want to tell you something about how this book was actually made, because I think it matters for how we work in general. It’s about Lean and Agile and how we won the battle against AIDS and how we’re going to get our planet back from the banality of hate.

So, my normal process is to play with ideas in blogs and social media posts. But these ideas were so deep. So personal. And often alarming. I couldn’t just get into LinkedIn and say things like, “Wouldn’t it be wild if Jeff Bezos destroyed local commerce worldwide, then moved to a tax haven turning his back on the city that made him wealthy, bought major media, and then backed a banana dictatorship?” Because it wasn’t on brand. Oh, sorry, inside voice…

Anyway, normally, I’d write the whole book, give it to humans, wait months for feedback, incorporate, repeat. It’s waterfall or popular agile. It’s slow. And honestly, by the time the feedback comes back, you’ve already moved so far from the original thinking that the integration is painful.

I couldn’t just turn to my usual editor friends and say “Read this” every few minutes. Because they would very quickly (a) hate me and (b) get lost in endless version control.

So, I built a set of AI advisors. Deming. Buckminster Fuller. Elinor Ostrom. Kevin Lynch. David Lynch. Others. I’d write a section, describe my goals for it, and ask them to respond from their respective frameworks. The feedback was immediate. I could write, get a response, but it wasn’t rewriting my text… it was oblique perspectives from the amalgam of my history. It was an instable set of filters to challenge me to adjust, write more, get another response, adjust again…rapid cycles, tight loops, evolutionary design in real time. Discuss, Envision, Edit & Expand Repeat. Yes, it’s the DEEE model. Which I just invented while typing this. So… let’s make a graphic for it.

What that meant was that when I gave the manuscript to humans, to people like Kathy Gill, who became the patron saint of this project, I gave them something complete enough to be useful. I didn’t waste their time with roughness I could have resolved myself. I respected their attention by arriving prepared.

And even with that Kathy came back with over 100 edits and suggestions. A HUNDRED!

So, in Personal Kanban land…in humane work land. This is respect for people. This is making sure that other people aren’t on the hook to process your backlog refinement.

Writing in Defiance

I want to be honest about something.

This has been a very difficult time for me. I’m going to let that float without detail, because what the specifics aren’t as important to any of us as the fact that you probably know exactly what I mean. You’ve been there, are there, are helping people through there.

And when we’re there, we tend to think that creative work, expressive work, human work is a luxury we can’t afford. But what I found was the opposite. This crew kept insisting that hope was possible. Even when I wasn’t feeling it and certainly when they weren’t feeling it. I seriously take out a lot of frustrations on these poor people.

It was my keep hope alive message, an artistic momentum pulling me forward toward a place I couldn’t see yet from where I was standing. One night, while watching Australian Masterchef, I scared the hell out of my wife by yelling, “Why the hell did you do that?”

And she’d like, “WHO? WHAT HAPPENED?”

And I said, “Rash just did something he absolutely shouldn’t have. That I didn’t want him to do. And now the book is entirely different.”

And she stared at me…for more than a comfortable amount of time…and went back to watching Australians cook. (Imagine the Laura look below on a multi-racial Hong Kong born speech pathologist).

That’s what good work does, by the way. Not just art. Good systems work. Good team work. Good process. It holds the shape of what’s possible when you’re too tired to hold it yourself.

Come On This Ship With Us

We’re all on Spaceship Earth together.

While we’re here, we might as well have good people to work with. Good friends. Good collaborators. People who are thoughtful, who are building interesting things, who want the system to stop blocking them from doing the right thing.

That’s the community Tonianne and I have been building for 15 years and are not…going…to…stop. That’s what Modus is. That’s what this book is about…under all the oligarchs and spaceships and corporate absurdity and AIs and all of the goodies.

This is about the practical and the humane. Where do the tomatoes grow? How do we get the right thing to happen, at the right time, with the right people? How do we make up for our faults and build systems to make those faults less likely? When are we going to take other people seriously and not for granted?

Pre-orders are open at titanauts.com. There are also some games there…yes, I had fun building the site, and yes, you should go play. Yes, I say funny things. Yes, the book is funny.

Thank you for being part of this. Genuinely.

— Jim

The Nature of Your Overload Told Through Lack of Overload

My dad was a developer in Grand Island, Nebraska. He’d wake up in the morning, go out and check how the houses were being built, come home for lunch, check again in the afternoon — and then he was done. He’d watch baseball. He’d go fishing. There was genuinely nothing left to do that day.

That is a condition of work that no longer exists for most of us. The internet expanded the universe of things we could be doing beyond any natural stopping point. The internet gave us an infinite amount of things to do. AI has made it worse. We now live in a world of unprecedented options for how to spend the next hour, with no built-in signal for what matters most. AI has given us*** infinite things to do simultaneously***.

Personal Kanban helps me every day. I end up in these states where there’s so much I could be doing, I confuse it with what I should be doing right now. Part of this is priority, but a bigger part of it is that the world conspires against your (my) ability to focus.

So, there’s this specific feeling you get when you sit down to work and immediately feel like you’re already behind. Potential work isn’t a single thing. It’s a cluster. The list is too long. You don’t know what’s most important. Something is stuck and you don’t know why. You’re doing things but nothing feels finished. And somewhere under all of it is the quiet suspicion that you’re not doing the right things at all...that the most important thing, whatever that is, is being crowded out by everything else.

And someone, somewhere ... is yelling.

I know this feeling because I’ve had it for nearly sixty years of being alive. And while building Personal Kanban, teaching it, and watching teams everywhere struggle with the same problems I see it in others. And I see them react to it by blaming, by yelling, or by shutting down.

The feeling... of being behind .... is information. The feeling of frustration (which to be honest I’m feeling as I type this and multiple, equal priorities are pulling at me). The image here shows that at the end of last week I got stuck with these things to do and they are still there. So ... I pulled out the modus kanban/pomorodo and just focused on getting the ends of my book editing done. I focused on that and finished because the new post, modus store, and taxes were simply too much to do at once.

You just read 500 words about decision paralysis. Don’t let this become one more undecided tab.

Form follows function and function changes.

Personal Kanban has exactly two rules. Visualize your work. Limit your work in progress. Everything else — every column configuration, every sticky note color, every digital board or hand-drawn circle with work spiraling toward the center — is just an expression of those two rules. The form doesn’t matter. What matters is what happens when the brain can finally see what it’s carrying.

Ways of Not-Working

When we allow ourselves to give in to Reactivity, Overload, and Toxicity. Yes, you, guessed it ROT. You’ve heard of FUD? Well, meet ROT. ROT contributes to us being crazy ineffective while seeming to be productive. It is not a way of working, it is a way of not-working.

Below , I’m listing five Ways of Not-Working ... states in which we regularly find ourselves unable to truly progress while we fool ourselves into thinking we are productive. They aren’t the only five.

Way of Not-Working One: Decision Paralysis

Every Monday, heck every day, I’m Spongebob, jumping out of bed, yelling “I’m ready!” and then running face first into reality. There’s a full day in front of me. Nothing is missing — no information gap, no waiting on someone else, no real reason I can’t work. And I get to the desk and cannot for the life of me figure out what to start. (Well, not every Monday, but ... )

So I open email and check the calendar to make sure no one booked a surprise meeting overnight. I make another cup of coffee and look at the list again, as if it might have rearranged itself into an obvious order. (The email check and the calendar check aren’t necessarily avoidance...they’re grounding rituals, and reasonable ones. But they can’t substitute for a system, and when the ritual ends, the pile is still there.)

It hasn’t rearranged itself.

What makes this particularly hard is the scale of the pile. As I write this, my real list includes: a Modus Institute website relaunch, a rebuilt business model, new consulting clients to find, a book on toxic waste to finish, a novel in progress, and a Modus store to launch. That’s a lot for a company of two people. Any one of those things is genuinely important. The problem isn’t that any of them is wrong to work on. The problem is that a flat list of all of them gives the brain no signal about what to do now.

What’s happening here has nothing to do with laziness or poor character (I hope!). It’s a cognitive cost problem from ROT. When the number of options on a flat list exceeds the brain’s comfortable evaluation range, the brain doesn’t make a bad choice...it stalls and waits for a better signal. And if there’s no signal, it goes either where there’s no cost (Inbox, whoever is yelling the loudest, thing I like doing) or it goes everywhere (starting all the tasks at once).

The last one is a thing. Paralysis is a Paralysis of Decision...not a state of inaction. Doing everything at once is not a decision.

Decision paralysis is not solved by willpower. It’s solved by reducing the number of options the brain has to evaluate before it can act.

Only two rules, WIP limits aren’t a productivity trick. They are a cognitive mercy. When I have a few things in Doing and I’m not allowed to add a new one until something finishes. This helps me not seize up. There are no twenty options to weigh. There are three things in motion and the question is which one to finish next. That question has an answer. The board gives you the answer every time you look at it.

There are so many design patterns here. The easy one from the other week is the Priority Filter which is a backlog with three tiers (P1 for things you think are super important, P2 for important, P3 for everything else). Each tier is WIP limited to ensure you’re always reading the board rather than re-deliberating it. You can always pull from any tier, but you’ll always see the organization and decide, in real time, on execution.

Way of Not-Working Two: Productivity Guilt

This one is quieter and harder to talk about.

Productivity Guilt is where you’ve done a lot today during the day. You can point to real things that got done. But at the end of the day, the feeling is not satisfaction. It’s this low-level gnaw...a sense that the things you finished were not the things that you valued...that you committed to yourself you’d do in the morning. So, you did a lot of things (good things) but in the end they weren’t what you’d set out to do.

We first wrote about this in Personal Kanban...this has been part of the system from day one. Even after all these years, I’m still not sure people recognize it as a system problem rather than a personal one. They experience it as something about themselves. “I’m not productive enough, not focused enough, not disciplined enough.” It is so hard not to internalize what you see as failure.

But this feeling is almost always a feedback problem. We aren’t letting ourselves know what we want to do now... and then give ourselves permission not to do it.

There are two sides to this.

The first is the visibility problem, not seeing the work means we live in our heads (which is where our fears run amok). When you can see what you actually did, the guilt often eases. The second side is harder. Sometimes the day genuinely goes sideways — a piece of technology that worked fine every day for two years simply stops cooperating and there goes the afternoon. A conversation that was supposed to take fifteen minutes becomes two hours, something outside your control lands in your lap.

These disruptions are, in a real sense, predictably painful. They happen to everyone regularly. The question is whether you’re building a system that can account for them, or one that pretends every day will go as planned.

A Done column handles both sides. It is not a place for graveyard items. It is where evidence lives — the real, visible record that your effort produced results, including evidence of what actually happened on the days that went sideways. Review it on Friday morning for five minutes. Not to judge the week, but to see it clearly. People talk about compound interest in finance. The Done column is compound motivation — the accumulating proof that you’ve been working all along, even on the weeks that felt like nothing.

Tonianne and I built Personal Kanban partly because we noticed that the people around us were working themselves into the ground and feeling like they had nothing to show for it. The answer wasn’t to work harder. It was to make what they were actually accomplishing visible to themselves. Once they could see it, the guilt eased. Not because they worked more — because they could finally see that they’d been working all along.

Productivity guilt is not solved by doing more. It’s solved by making what you’ve done visible. The companion move is the Today column — a deliberate pull at the start of the day that makes your intentions as visible as your results.

Make room in your Today Column! You have everything you need to subscribe. So do it!

Way of Not-Working Three: The Overwhelm Spiral

The overwhelm spiral is Overload (the O in ROT) in its purest form. It’s not that you have too much work. It’s that you have too much in-progress work. Everything has been started. Nothing is finishing. Every day you begin with the accumulated weight of everything already in motion, and every day you add more to it without closing anything out.

You feel perpetually behind because you are. Not behind on starting things...you’ve started them all. Behind on finishing them.

I want to be honest about this one, because knowing the mechanism doesn’t make you immune to it. About an hour before I sat down to write this essay, I was bouncing randomly between four live projects...pure context-switching, getting nothing meaningful done on any of them, just accumulating the anxiety of all of them simultaneously. I write about this. I teach it. I still fell into it. What got me out was the Pomodoro: a timer on screen that says, for the next twenty-five minutes, you are working on this thing. Not because timers are clever. Because they’re physical. The screen shows you what you’re doing. You can’t pretend otherwise.

(I also ended up putting this on ice for three days to focus on something else then (now) coming back to it when I can focus.)

This is one of the most common conditions we see when working with clients, and it is almost entirely invisible to the people inside it. They think they’re managing their work. They are, in fact, managing their commitments to start work while systematically avoiding finishing it.

One design pattern that cuts through that invisibility: pattern matching — color-coding cards by project or task type so the board can actually show you what’s in flight. When every card looks the same, the overload is invisible. When they don’t, you see it immediately: seven things in Doing, four different projects, three cards that haven’t moved in two weeks. The board stops being a list. It becomes a diagnosis.

WIP limits break this pattern not because they’re clever but because they’re physical. When the Doing column has space for three cards and there are already three there, you cannot start something new without a deliberate violation. The board stops you not through discipline but through design. You see the full column. You know you can’t add. So you finish instead.

The overwhelm spiral doesn’t resolve through better time management. It resolves when finishing becomes structurally easier than starting.

Way of Not-Working Four: The Stuck Loop

The Stuck Loop is when you have a something in your Doing column for six days. Eleven days. Three weeks. It’s there forever.

It’s still there. It hasn’t moved. You move around it, doing other things, occasionally glancing at it with a feeling somewhere between guilt and dread. It occupies mental bandwidth even on the days you never touch it...which is most days.

It creates existential overhead. Which is where ROT’s Toxicity does its most insidious work. Here’s what makes stuck work different from just delayed work: the longer it sits, the harder it becomes to touch because you become more and more upset about not doing it.

This places a hurdle in your path that gets higher and higher each day. The cost of doing the ticket is now Actual Effort * Delay * Annoyance with yourself because of the delay. This is the Existential Overhead Penalty.

Not because the task itself has grown, but because the guilt compounds. Mine right now are a Shopify shopping cart and taxes. Neither is complicated. Both are boring and outside my natural wheelhouse. And every day I don’t do them, the barrier gets a little higher. You reach for it, and immediately the internal loop starts: I should have had this done a week ago. Why didn’t I have this done? What is wrong with me? And then you don’t touch it again.

That’s the meta-cost. The task itself has a concrete cost (unfinished). But the meta-cost is higher: the cognitive weight of a task that stays in Doing spreads. It becomes a persistent tax on your attention every time you look at the board and see it there. And it gets worse each time.

A gentle reminder for making stuck work visible as stuck rather than just as “in progress.” are aging cards, or cards that get flagged when they’ve been in Doing too long, stuck work announces itself. You can see it.

And seeing it is the beginning of resolving it.

Way of Not-Working Five: Invisible Workload

This one is the hardest to describe because its defining characteristic is that you can’t see it. It is ROT operating simultaneously on all three cylinders. The Reactivity of constant interruptions, the Overload nobody can measure, and the Toxicity of resentment that builds when no one acknowledges what you’re actually carrying.

You are doing more work than your commitments suggest. It’s what we call hidden WIP. Sometimes ambiguous WIP, sometimes guerilla WIP...the commitments you’re keeping that neither you nor anyone else has explicitly named as work. It’s the coordination overhead: the five-minute check-in that becomes thirty, the email that requires three back-and-forth exchanges, the context-switching cost of being the person everyone comes to with questions. It’s the work that keeps the other work moving but never shows up anywhere as work.

Something worth naming here: when you send someone a question, you are creating work for them. A simple question might seem like nothing on your end. On their end it might require an hour of context-gathering and careful reply. I’ve learned to front-load what kind of response I need — “I need a yes or no, don’t embellish” or “Don’t spend a lot of time on this.” This is not rudeness. It’s recognizing that you’re spending someone else’s bandwidth and giving them permission to spend less of it.

The reverse matters too. When someone promised you something and hasn’t delivered — they probably haven’t forgotten. They started, got distracted, couldn’t get back, and now feel guilty about it in exactly the way we’ve been describing. It’s okay to remind them. It’s a two-way street. Treating dropped commitments as character failures, in either direction, misses the actual mechanism: invisible work has displaced visible commitments, and nobody can see the displacement.

Why These Five Ways of Not-Working

After nearly twenty years of teaching this and watching people do it badly and then do it well, I’ve come to believe that most productivity problems reduce to one of these five Ways of Not-Working. And each one has the same underlying structure: something that should be visible is not, and the brain is working too hard to compensate for what it can’t see. Each one is ROT — Reactivity, Overload, or Toxicity — operating in a slightly different form.

These five are not a definitive list. There are dozens of Ways of Not-Working where a board helps — maybe hundreds. But these are the killers. The ones that show up in every kind of work, in every kind of team, year after year.

The board is not a productivity hack. It is an external cognitive system — a place where work can be visible, tracked, and ordered without requiring your brain to hold it all at once.

The brain is not a good task manager. It’s a bad one, actually — full of biases toward the recent, the urgent, and the familiar. Psychologists call one version of this the availability heuristic: whatever you encountered most recently feels like the most important thing, while the thing you’ve been avoiding feels like it somehow doesn’t count. The brain is optimistic by design and poor at accounting. We take on work and overpromise on what we can deliver because we genuinely believe we can get everything done. We almost never can. And the things we promised disappear from awareness while the new shiny thing takes their place.

What the board does is hold what the brain can’t. It makes permanent what the brain keeps misplacing. It records what the brain would rather not look at directly.

The five Ways of Not-Working in this essay — Decision Paralysis, Productivity Guilt, Overwhelm Spiral, Stuck Loop, and Invisible Workload — are the moments your brain is working hardest to manage what it was never designed to manage. They’re also the moments when glancing at a well-designed board provides the most immediate relief.

Not because the board magically solves the work. But because it makes the problem visible. And visible problems are solvable ones.

The Decision Paralysis set is live now:

* You Have Everything You Need to Start. So Why Can’t You? — board design for individuals on the Personal Kanban blog

* When Your Team Can’t Decide What to Work On Next — team applications at Modus Institute

* The Decision Tax Your Team Pays Every Day — leadership perspective at Modus Cooperandi

The remaining four Ways of Not-Working — Productivity Guilt, Overwhelm Spiral, Stuck Loop, and Invisible Workload — will publish over the next two weeks.

Personal Kanban: Mapping Work | Navigating Life is the book that started the movement. If you found this useful, that’s where to go next.

For courses, workshops, and live events, check the Modus calendar or visit Modus Institute.

After about twenty years of working with individuals, teams, and organizations of every shape and size it is clear that people are not lazy, selfish, or broken. We want to do good work. We want to be there for our colleagues, their families, their communities. We want to improve things. I know we’ve been taught to be skeptical about this, and it is easy to be given the ‘evidence’ of the way things go down every day. But this isn’t just aspirational chatter, it is what we have observed, consistently, across thousands of people trying to navigate their days.

But work piles up. Priorities blur. The most important thing keeps getting displaced by the loudest thing. People get overloaded, distracted, and overwhelmed. The environment they’re working in makes it genuinely hard to act on what they value. They end up exhausted and behind, doing less of the right work and more of the reactive work, caught in a loop they can’t seem to break.

And that gets frustrating.

Personal Kanban was built to break that loop. Two rules (visualize your work, limit your work in progress) turn out to be surprisingly powerful levers against the cognitive and social forces that keep people stuck. We’ve watched it work for individual contributors and executive teams, for nurses and software developers, for families trying to get the dishes done. For kids learning the alphabet. For teams building airplanes.

Last week, we had the five productivity lenses. This week it is five behavioral economists. People who spent careers mapping the gap between how humans intend to behave and how we actually do. If we get even a little of this, it gives us some reassurance we aren’t the problem, and a little push to building better Personal Kanbans to help us solve these puzzles.

Five behavioral economists with different perspectives, working separately, from different directions, with different methods, have each described mechanisms Personal Kanban makes practical. Their findings are not abstract. They are an explanation of the board you’re already using, or the board you’re about to build. And together, they point toward something hopeful: the problem was never you. It was the system. And the system can be fixed.

Here is what your Personal Kanban can do.

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Daniel Kahneman and Your Need to Plan and Adjust

Daniel Kahneman spent fifty years tirelessly documenting the myriad of ways human judgment goes off the rails. His central finding is based on two cognitive systems. System 1 is fast, automatic, and associative. This is your day-to-day judgements that run on heuristics and pattern-matching. System 2 is your slow, deliberate, and effortful mode, where you actually think something through.

System 1 is overconfident, lazy, and necessary. It generates answers that feel right without doing the work to check whether they are. Left to its own devices, System 1 will manage your workload using whatever information is most easily available...the most recent request, the task with the most social pressure, the work that feels familiar. System 1 is not prepared for change or complexity. Its job is to make snap judgements and move on. One is not better than the other, you’d over analyze everything if stuck in system 2 and be completely groundless if you were stuck in system 1.

That being said, the brain wants to stay in system 1 as much as possible because it is the least exhausting.

The planning fallacy is Kahneman’s term for our universal tendency to underestimate how long tasks will take. System 1 is action oriented and when you estimate a task, you want to get to work, so you construct an optimistic scenario of smooth completion (a happy path) and ignore or at least don’t look for evidence about how similar tasks have gone before or any complexity (weird) might be in this task. This is why you consistently think this week will be the week you get everything done and...it never is.

What the PK board does: It forces a reckoning with System 1’s errors before they compound, by giving you system 2 triggers. Letting you plan better and know when System 2 is necessary. WIP limits are correct for the planning fallacy...when you can only have three (or less) things in progress simultaneously, you are forced to watch how long those three things actually take before committing to a fourth. This makes you pay attention to the what, the why, and the weird for any task you take on. The board is triggering you to watch for the right work to pull at the right time.

Over time, you will also use the Done column to spot problems. You begin to see, concretely, how long your work actually takes versus how long you thought it would. You see where you will run into complexity and avoid the availability heurisitic, Kahnemann’s tendency to judge future tasks by the most memorable past tasks.

The design pattern: The Thinking Ticket is an elegant answer to the System 1 problem. It is a card, a literal, physical card, deliberate reflection (see last week’s discussion of deep work). This schedules regular System 2 engagement rather than demanding it constantly, helping us figure out how we figure things out...and get better at it. Most productivity systems burn out their users by requiring deliberate thought at every moment. The Thinking Ticket makes slow reasoning a designed event, not a perpetual grind.

The board does not make you smarter. It makes your cognitive errors visible before they become expensive.

Richard Thaler and Your Board as a Decision Engine

Richard Thaler tells us that people’s choices are profoundly shaped by the environment in which those choices are presented. This is how social media eats your brain. We make choices not by our values, intelligence, or intentions...we decide things in the architecture of the choice itself.

He calls this libertarian paternalism and it’s nasty. You retain complete freedom to choose whatever you want, but the design of the environment nudges you toward better choices without forcing anything. A cafeteria that puts fruit at eye level and cake at the back is not restricting your freedom, it is acknowledging that what you choose first is what you see most prominently and designing accordingly. (The same obviously works for the grocery store with candy surrounding the checkouts and chips now moved to the ends of nearly every aisle).

Every kanban board is choice architecture. You just may not have designed it intentionally. (And hopefully now you will.)

The left-to-right flow, (Backlog, Doing, Done) is a nudge that makes forward progress feel natural and backward movement immediately apparent. We use the WIP limit to nudge: it creates an artificial scarcity that forces you to think before you start something new. Color coding your stickies is a nudge that puts different tickets into different contexts. Even just having a Done column is a nudge, operationalizing what Thaler calls mental accounting...our tendency to track outcomes in like transactions. Completed work gets “banked.” The Done column is the ledger.

What the PK board does: The Priority Filter (see the last article again) has a P3/P2/P1 structure with decreasing WIP limits, providing nudges theory in a very physical way. The shrinking column capacity (10 → 6 → 3) means the default path through your backlog leads to your most important work. You are not forced to work on P1 items. But the architecture ensures that P1 is what you encounter first when you look for something to pull. (Again, the word is nudge, not enforce.)

Thaler’s research on status quo bias explains why backlogs become graveyards. People irrationally prefer whatever is already in place, so weirdly, once a task is in the backlog, the status quo is to leave it there. Respecting and regularly reviewing your backlog can nudge against at least this status quo bias by making inaction a conscious, visible choice rather than an invisible default. The card doesn’t just sit there anymore. It sits there deliberately, or it gets removed.

So when you build your board it will always nudge you. Now you just have to make sure you know how you need to be nudged and get the board to work for the best version of you.

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Elinor Ostrom and Your Team’s Workflow Commons

Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel Prize for proving something the economics establishment had previously declared impossible: communities can successfully manage shared resources without either privatization or top-down control. The “tragedy of the commons,” the notion that shared resources will always be depleted by individual self-interest, was not an iron law. It was a failure of institutional design.

From my background as an urban planner, collaboration, and business process, her research was the most welcome of revelations. She created 8 principles of governance that read like a manual/bible/greatest hits for team kanban.

So when you are working together, the shared resource in a team is not the board or even the tasks. It is your internal attention economy. How much energy you spend to get things done. Your team has a collective cognitive capacity, the finite pool of focus available at any given moment. When individuals on a team manage their work invisibly, without shared sight into the state of the whole, the commons gets depleted, because your work is fundamentally unmanaged and uncared for.

Yes, when you manage your tasks or your schedule, you are ignoring the actual work. Individuals in teams create value. So, when someone takes on too much and creates bottlenecks, someone else’s blocked work becomes everyone else’s problem, invisibly. Urgent work crowds out important work across the whole system, not just for one person. (again, see last week’s article.)

What the PK board does: A shared team board implements Ostrom’s principles and gives them visible structure. Clearly defined boundaries: the board defines what work belongs to this team and who is part of it. Congruence between rules and local conditions: WIP limits set by the team to reflect real capacity, not aspirational fiction. Collective choice arrangements: the team sets its own policies in retrospectives, not a manager imposing rules from above. Monitoring: the board is the monitoring mechanism, visible to all participants simultaneously, with no reporting lag.

The design pattern: Collaborative Aid shows team members having each other’s backs. They react professionally when blocked work becomes visible on the board. This is Ostrom’s graduated response principle in practice. When a card is stuck, the board signals it. The team can respond calmly and together, not as a crisis, but just reacting as a community. Ostrom found this immediate and shared response to a problem essential to sustainability. This replaces accountability (punitive) with responsibility (professional). The alternative is how we work now — each person managing their own work invisibly — and that’s a recipe for what she called free-riding and depletion.

And using a kanban board to democratize meetings with Lean Coffee, is an institutional design intervention. Collective time is a commons. It is chronically undervalued in most organizations. Too many meetings with too little results. Structuring meetings with visible cards, time-boxed contributions, and shared context is governance. It establishes rules, distributes agency, and makes the cost of the commons visible to all its participants.

Dan Ariely and Real Motivation

Dan Ariely has written a lot (a lot) of books documenting a single, inconvenient fact: humans are not rational economic agents. We are predictably irrational. Our irrationality follows systematic patterns, which means it can be studied, anticipated, and (crucially for us) designed for.

His research on motivation produced a finding that should embarrass every productivity system ever built. People are not primarily motivated by efficiency, or incentives, or logical arguments about what they should do. They are motivated by meaning, autonomy, and visible progress. The feeling that their effort matters. The evidence that something is getting done.

This information is exploited by every online shopping experience, political party, and entertainment company on earth. It’s time to take this and deploy it for something good. So, while most productivity systems optimize for throughput and ignore motivation entirely, we would like to treat humans as something other than execution engines. Personal Kanban wants more.

What the PK board does: Again, we look at the Done column which implements Ariely’s research with Teresa Amabile on the progress principle. It turns out the progress that you can see is the most powerful day-to-day motivator. More than recognition, more than incentives, more than management quality. Every card that moves to Done is a small psychological event...a completed loop, a mark of progress, concrete evidence of competence. The board generates these events continuously, structurally, without requiring anyone to remember to acknowledge them. If you look at the apps we’ve been building...all of the Modus systems show WIP ... and the results of successful work. See the system, see the success, and maintain it.

The design pattern: How Does Your Work Make You Feel? uses the Done column for specific personal reflection. This is just one example that annotates completed cards with emojis when it’s moved to done. Ariely’s research on experience utility shows a persistent gap between how we predict work will feel and how it actually does. We are bad at forecasting our own satisfaction. But if you track how completed work actually made you feel, you calibrate over time. Much of our dissatisfaction isn’t with the work, but it’s in buying into ways of working that make us turn in work we aren’t happy with.

Ariely calls this completion anxiety...the tendency to avoid finishing things because completion triggers judgment. People end up turning in work at the deadline that they know is incomplete or substandard because they never had the ability to do it right the first time. We want to see that work as it is, turned in but unloved, and then react.

Sendhil Mullainathan and the Scarcity of You.

Sendhil Mullainathan‘s research produced one of the most practically important findings in modern behavioral economics...that scarcity of your time measurably and directly taxes cognitive capacity. This is one of the first messages in the Personal Kanban book.

When we are under cognitive load (almost all the time), carrying too much in active memory, our executive function degrades. The capacity for planning, self-control, and complex decision-making is a shared resource, and scarcity depletes it whether you want it to or not. His studies showed that the cognitive impairment from carrying too much mental load is equivalent to losing a night’s sleep...or roughly thirteen IQ points.

The more that we let things stress us out, the less intelligent we become. No, we do not perform better under pressure any more than your computer works better running every program you have loaded simultaneously.

What the board does: WIP limits are a bandwidth intervention, and framing them this way is powerful. The conventional argument for WIP limits is about throughput: finish more by starting less. True, but incomplete. The deeper mechanism is cognitive (it’s you): when you have three things in progress instead of twelve, you are not just more focused...you are more physically, mentally, and emotionally capable. The mental overhead of tracking twelve open loops is gone. The decision about what to do next is already resolved by the board. The anxiety of incompleteness is reduced. All of that freed bandwidth is available for the actual work.

When we say focus and finish...you need to focus to finish.

To get there, Mullainathan coined the term tunneling for what happens under scarcity. In tunneling the mind fixates on the immediate constraint and ignores everything outside the tunnel. Overloaded workers tunnel on urgent tasks and systematically neglect important ones...not because they have poor values, but because they lack the bandwidth to see beyond immediate pressure. This is why How to Stay Focused in a World Full of Distractions describes cognitive residue that lingers between tasks...what Newport calls attention residue and what Mullainathan would call bandwidth leakage.

The design pattern: Combating Existential Overhead is a bandwidth intervention with a different name. What we call Existential Overhead is the literal cost in distraction and stress of uncompleted, unresolved commitments...is Mullainathan’s bandwidth tax. Every vague intention, every card that sits in the backlog without clarity, every commitment that hasn’t been explicitly deferred or acted on: these are bandwidth leaks. Closing them is not tidiness. It is restoring cognitive capacity.

Tonianne’s Clarity > Coffee makes the same point with satisfying directness. You don’t need more stimulants. You need fewer open loops. Clarity is the bandwidth intervention. The board is how you achieve it.

And for teams, Capacity: It’s a Matter of Content and Context extends this further: capacity is not just about how many tasks you have, but what kind of tasks...their cognitive weight, their emotional load, their context requirements. A team of five each carrying twelve open loops is not a team with sixty items in progress. It is a team whose collective bandwidth has been depleted to the point where even the important work will be done poorly.

What Five Economists Would Probably Agree On

Five researchers, working in different traditions, studying problems differently, converge on the same conclusion about Personal Kanban:

It works not by improving your willpower, but by changing your environment.

* Kahneman: it corrects System 1 errors before they compound.

* Thaler: it designs defaults that lead to better choices.

* Ostrom: it creates the conditions for healthy team culture.

* Ariely: it generates the visible progress that motivates.

* Mullainathan: it frees the cognitive bandwidth that scarcity steals.

Two rules. Five explanations. One board that is doing more than you realize every time you look at it.

Personal Kanban: Mapping Work | Navigating Life is the book that started the movement. If you’re new here, that’s the place to begin.

For weekly essays on work, flow, and being human while getting things done, join us at Humane Work. For courses, workshops, and live events, check the Modus calendar or visit Modus Institute.

Further reading from the Personal Kanban archive:

* Personal Kanban & Some Goodies About Your Brain

* On Working Intentionally: The Thinking Ticket

* Combating Existential Overhead

* The Priority Filter: A Tutorial

* Collaborative Aid: Element #10 of the Kanban

People are even more messed up than when we started the Personal Kanban movement 17 years ago. The need has not abated. People are overloaded, stressed, and looking for a way out. They keep finding models and falling in and out of love with them. So, as we relaunch the Personal Kanban site for a new era, it’s time to find the right way to work.

So there are a lot of productivity thinkers out there. Maybe you read David Allen and spent a weekend building a GTD setup with nested contexts and a Someday/Maybe list that runs three pages long. Maybe you read Cal Newport and time-blocked your calendar into a mosaic of deep work sessions. Maybe you tried Stephen Covey’s quadrants and felt virtuous for a while and then swallowed up by the urgent.

And maybe, somewhere in there, you discovered Personal Kanban with our two rules, a board, and the deceptively simple instruction to visualize your work and limit your work in progress.

From the beginning we wanted to make it clear that Personal Kanban was never competing with those systems, or anything else. Work changes over time, our focuses change over time. For us, PK is just a surface where their best ideas, and your best potential becomes visible, and where the contradictions between different ways of working become useful and no longer contradictions, but just serving different needs at different times.

We don’t want one framework for how we work, individuals or teams. We do, though, want to draw from the tensions between these ways of working: Allen’s “capture everything” against Newport’s “eliminate the shallow.” Covey’s top-down values against Ohno’s bottom-up waste elimination. Csikszentmihalyi’s need for total immersion against Allen’s need for constant system maintenance. We want the power of all five.

So I’m going to put Personal Kanban under these five lenses and see what each one reveals, where there are disagreements, and make something completely new.

Lens 1: David Allen’s Open Loops

David Allen’s GTD system is built on the notion that your brain is terrible at storage but excellent at processing. Every commitment without a defined next action, what Allen calls an “open loop,” occupies mental RAM, creating a low-grade anxiety that saps your capacity to focus on anything.

In the Allen world a Personal Kanban board is a powerful capture and clarification tool. The backlog column is essentially his “In” tray. The act of writing a sticky note forces the kind of processing GTD demands. We ask what is this thing, and what’s the next physical action?

Allen would want every card to answer his clarifying questions. Not just the task “Website redesign” sitting in your Doing column, but what specifically? “Draft homepage wireframe” with a context (@computer) and a time horizon. As the Personal Kanban blog explored in Paul Eastbrook’s GTD & Kanban: Similarities, Differences & Synergies series, “For GTD, it’s not about writing lists of goals: ‘buy milk’, ‘fill in tax return’, but rather, GTD is concerned with determining the next action required and given the right context or time, just performing that action without having to constantly figure out the next step each time.”

Even more power of the Allen lens is the organizing the PK backlog. Your PK backlog isn’t a guilt-inducing inventory of everything you haven’t done. Allen would insist on regular processing. Clarifying every new item and removing every non-actionable one, He would do a weekly review that keeps the board pruned.

The Focus of This Lens: Personal Kanban gives GTD the visual feedback loop it desperately needs. Allen’s system can become invisible, buried in lists and apps and folders. A board on your wall or digital keeps your commitments in your peripheral vision. But without some of Allen’s processing rigor, a kanban board becomes a graveyard of vague intentions.

Lens 2: Stephen Covey’s Ignored Quadrant

Stephen Covey would take one look at most personal kanban boards and ask a question that makes people uncomfortable: Is any of this important?

I use his (Eisenhower’s) Urgent/Important matrix as four quadrants with one life-changing insight…we spend most of our time distracted by the loudest tasks (the ones that yell and scream) and ignore the more important tasks (the ones that avoid yelling and screaming).

Covey says we spend most of our time in Quadrant I (urgent and important. The crises) and Quadrant III (urgent but not important. The interruptions). The work that actually changes our lives sits in Quadrant II: important but not urgent. This is where relationships, prevention, planning, and learning wait (im)patiently for the chaos to die down. And the longer it is forgotten, the more loud work becomes.

Covey would see kanban’s visualization as powerful but incomplete without a values layer. A board full of urgent tasks moving smoothly from Backlog to Doing to Done isn’t productivity — it might be efficient motion toward the wrong destination. “Begin with the end in mind” means every card should trace back to a role you’ve chosen and a mission you’ve defined.

This is where Covey’s lens gets practical. In Personal Kanban, the Priority Filter can essentially be Covey’s quadrants applied to a board. Or you can create an urgent and important matrix in your own board. Before pulling work into your Doing column, run it through a filter that makes you ask…is this urgent, important, both, or neither? The pattern doesn’t just organize tasks. It forces a conversation with yourself about what is the best use of your time right now and in the future.

Here we have some tension between Covey and Ohno (we’ll get to him). This could be one of the most productive in all of productivity thinking. Covey says: start with your values, then design your work. Ohno says: start with your work, then eliminate what doesn’t belong. Top-down or bottom-up? The answer might be both (and Personal Kanban’s mission-based approach shows what that looks like).

The Focus of This Lens: Visualization without prioritization is just a prettier (uglier) to-do list. Covey pushes kanban practitioners to add values or purpose, not just what you’re doing, but why it should even be done and whether it connects to the person you’re trying to become.

Lens 3: Cal Newport Blowing Up Your Productivity System

Cal Newport (who has written about PK in his books) might be the most provocative lens to apply to Personal Kanban, because his critique is deep: most productivity systems, he argues, are elaborate infrastructure for managing stuff to do (shallow work) while the cognitively demanding stuff (deep work) goes unscheduled and unprotected.

Newport would look at a kanban board covered in tasks…emails to send, forms to fill, meetings to schedule…and ask: where is the deep work? Even more likely is he’d say, why bother with all this? Where is the two-hour block for writing the proposal, designing the architecture, or thinking through the strategy? If it isn’t on the board (and the calendar) with a protected time slot, it isn’t happening.

His concern isn’t unfounded. It’s easy to feel productive moving cards across columns while avoiding the hard cognitive work that doesn’t break into neat tasks. The Personal Kanban blog tackled this directly in Tonianne’s piece How to Stay Focused In a World Full of Distractions, which explores the neurological cost of context-switching. Newport calls the goo of switching “attention residue” and it lingers when you jump between tasks.

But here’s where Newport and Personal Kanban find common ground: WIP limits. Newport’s deep work philosophy is essentially a WIP limit applied to your cognitive capacity. When the Personal Kanban blog examined Focus: Why Limit Your WIP, we came at the same principle from a different direction…you can’t do deep work if you’re carrying seven tasks in your head simultaneously. (You can also engage in Pomodoros to have protected focused time…we’ll detail that in a later post.)

PK and Deep Work: use your kanban board not just to track what you’re doing, but to protect what you need to think about. A card that says “Deep Work: Q3 Strategy (2 hrs)” sitting in your Doing column, with a WIP limit that prevents anything else from crowding in beside it, is Newport’s philosophy made visible.

The Focus of This Lens: A PK board can either enable or destroy deep work depending on how you use it. If every card is a 15-minute task, you’ve built a context-switching machine. If you use WIP limits to protect sustained cognitive effort, you’ve built a deep work fortress.

Lens 4: Taiichi Ohno Says You Are Wasting Your Time

Taiichi Ohno was the father of the Toyota Production System and the person who invented the kanban method in manufacturing. He didn’t deal much with individual work but he would have had a unique perspective on Personal Kanban. He’d hopefully see a direct descendant of his system. (But he might not be entirely pleased with how it’s been domesticated.)

Ohno’s kanban wasn’t a feel-good visualization tool. It is a ruthless waste-elimination system. In Toyota’s factories, kanban cards were signals that control the flow of production. You can only produce what the next station pulled, and only when it pulled. The entire point was to make waste visible so you could destroy it. And to make sure that every yen Toyota spent was creating value.

He identified many kinds of waste, but one he considered particularly destructive was overproduction…doing more than what’s needed. In personal work, you live overproduction every day: saying yes to every request, starting projects before finishing others, gold-plating work that needs to be good enough, and maintaining commitments that no longer serve any purpose.

Ohno would insist that WIP limits are structural constraints that reveal problems. Not nice to haves. If you have a PK without any WIP limits, your work-car has 2 tires. When your WIP limit forces you to stop starting new work, it makes bottlenecks visible. Maybe you discover that three of your five in-progress items are blocked waiting for someone else. That’s not a task management problem — that’s a process problem. And you’d never have seen it if you’d let yourself keep pulling new work to stay busy.

The pull system is Ohno’s deepest contribution to personal productivity. Most people push work: they look at the backlog and ask “what should I do next?” Ohno’s system pulls: you only start new work when you have capacity, as signaled by finishing something else. The difference sounds semantic. In practice, it’s the difference between a system that creates overload and one that prevents it.

The Focus of This Lens: Personal Kanban’s power comes from its manufacturing DNA, from its focused heritage. WIP limits, pull systems, and visual management aren’t productivity hacks, they’re proven engineering principles applied to knowledge work. Ohno would say: stop treating your board as a to-do list and start treating it as a production system. Then ask where the waste is.

Lens 5: Csikszentmihalyi and PK Flow

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi spent decades studying the moments when people are most alive… in states he called “flow.” Not productivity, not efficiency, not output. The state where you’re so absorbed in what you’re doing that time distorts, self-consciousness dissolves, and the work itself becomes the reward. Where productivity, effectiveness, and output become effortless.

Flow isn’t random. Csikszentmihalyi identified its prerequisites: clear goals (you know what you’re trying to do), immediate feedback (you can tell whether you’re doing it well), and a match between challenge and skill (hard enough to engage you, not so hard you shut down).

We designed PK so that a well-designed kanban board provides all three, because this is how you achieve the goals of the other five lenses. Everything rests in having the clarity to do the right work at the right time with the right people. To act with confidence.

* Clear goals? Every card states what needs doing.

* Immediate feedback? Moving a card to Done, or seeing it stuck in Doing, gives you instant information about your work.

* Challenge-skill balance? That’s what WIP limits create.

By constraining how much you take on, you prevent the overwhelm that pushes challenge past your skill threshold and kills flow.

His tension with David Allen is interesting and helps us select work and build out how we work. GTD requires regular system maintenance (weekly reviews, inbox processing, context switching between lists). Csikszentmihalyi would warn that all of this meta-work interrupts the very state that makes work meaningful. You can’t be in flow while reviewing your Someday/Maybe list. The system that enables good work can also prevent it.

Tonianne and I explored this territory in pieces about working intentionally and discovering your flow through design patterns. The “Thinking Ticket” in Toni’s post was a card one of our clients used on her board specifically for reflection and cognitive processing. It was a beautiful example of resolving this tension. It makes meta-work part of the flow rather than an interruption to it. So you can Cal Newport a bit here as well.

The Focus of This Lens: The ultimate purpose of any productivity system is creating the conditions where work feels clear and meaningful. Kanban’s visual feedback and WIP limits don’t just help you get more done. They help you get into the state where doing feels like being.

Where the Lenses Collide — and What the Collisions Teach Us

The five frameworks don’t converge neatly. They argue. And the arguments are awesome.

Allen wants you to capture everything. Newport wants you to eliminate the shallow. Both are right. The resolution: capture everything once (Allen), then ruthlessly filter before it reaches your board (Newport). Your backlog is a holding pen, not a commitment. The GTD-Kanban hybrid approach turns this from theory into practice.

Covey starts with values. Ohno starts with waste. Top-down meets bottom-up. The resolution: use Covey’s quadrants to decide what deserves to be on your board, then use Ohno’s pull system to control how it flows through. Values tell you what to work on. Lean tells you how to work on it without creating more problems than you solve.

Csikszentmihalyi needs immersion. Allen needs system maintenance. The resolution: schedule your review as its own flow activity, not as an interruption. The weekly review isn’t overhead … it cannot be. This is the practice that makes every other practice possible. Give it a card. Give it a time block. Make it part of the work, not work about the work.

Newport designs the environment. Csikszentmihalyi cultivates the internal state. Both matter. WIP limits are environmental design (Newport). The clarity and absorption they create is internal state (Csikszentmihalyi). The board is the bridge between the two…an external structure that produces an internal experience.

All models are wrong, some are useful…but none of them are an island. No model is sacred.

What a Five-Lens Board Looks Like

If you took one practical insight from each thinker and built them into your Personal Kanban practice:

* From Allen: Review and Focus: Process your backlog weekly. Every card gets a next action or gets removed. No vague intentions.

* From Covey: Select with Intention: Before pulling work, ask: is this Quadrant II? If your board has no important-but-not-urgent work on it, your board is lying to you about your priorities.

* From Newport: Don’t Swim in Shallow Water: Include at least one deep work card per day. Set a WIP limit that protects it from being crowded out by shallow tasks.

* From Ohno: Don’t Be Your Own Bottleneck: Respect your WIP limits absolutely. When you hit the limit, finish something before starting anything new. Investigate bottlenecks instead of working around them.

* From Csikszentmihalyi: Your Production Should Be Healthy: Notice when you’re in flow and study what made it possible. Redesign your board to create those conditions more often.

Two rules. Five lenses. A deeper system.

Personal Kanban was created by Jim Benson and Tonianne DeMaria Barry, authors of Personal Kanban: Mapping Work | Navigating Life. Explore 15+ years of design patterns, primers, and practitioner insights at personalkanban.com.

In an information landscape, there is helpful and toxic information. We don’t get to just ignore our landscape, though. In our Humane Work Subscribers Lean Coffee today, where we talk about how we get our work done, one of the tickets was about how to use LinkedIn.

There is a very predictable devolution of social media sites. Twitter went down first, then Facebook, and now LinkedIn…when the amount of toxic information outweighs the useful or supportive. On LinkedIn there are two rules: don’t post about politics and don’t post AI shlock. And…it’s 75% politics and AI shlock.

So, you open LinkedIn with a specific purpose in mind. Job hunting, community participation, announcing something and you say to yourself: “Just five minutes.”

Forty minutes later, you’re three layers deep into an argument about whether Agile is dead (again), you’ve scrolled past seventeen AI-generated listicles about leadership lessons with enough emojis that by the end you are certain you are going to the prom with this person, and are cognitively and emotionally overwhelmed from consuming information that looks professional but has zero soul.

You close the window. You think you are done, but you are contaminated.

For the next two hours, you’re more irritable, less focused, more cynical about your field. You are annoyed that you wasted forty minutes, but you’ve also really messed with your focus for the rest of the afternoon.

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LinkedIn in 2026. The radiation is real. But the value of the platform is still there. We can, like most toxicities, find a way to eliminate the negative and find some positive to accentuate.

The Fallout 4 Framework or Binging LinkedIn

“Accentuate the positive, e-limmmm-inate the negative.” ~ Bing Crosby

I spent a lot of time playing Fallout Four. As did Andrew Lenards, in the call, but in the game, you run around a post-apocalyptic wasteland filled with radiation. You can’t avoid it entirely…some areas are too valuable to skip, some resources are too important to leave behind, some bad guys are too bad to avoid. But you have a Geiger counter in your Pip boy. You track your exposure. You know your limits. And, you go out geared up, you wear a variety of hazmat suits to protect you in different ways at different times. But you have a key metric you are always watching: you leave before the contamination kills you.

You see where we were going with this…LinkedIn is the same.

For many professionals (looking for work, building networks, or establishing credibility) LinkedIn isn’t optional. It’s where opportunities live.

But it’s also contaminated, diluted, and dangerous.

Not by radiation, but by what we called in the Lean Coffee robot scrolling. The algorithmically-driven consumption of AI-generated or Process-doom content that makes you have to read it to find out if they are even serious. It’s all plausible enough to look like valuable content and then, when you are done, is either 100% confirmation bias or 100% anger inducing. In other words…toxic.

But we need to use LinkedIn so we need to figure out how much exposure can we tolerate before I lose more than we gain?

So, let’s grab some garb and build a hazmat suit.

LinkedIn’s Specific Toxicities

We need to understand the contamination and how it is spread so before we talk about mitigation, let’s diagnose the problem clearly.

Signal-to-Noise Inversion

LinkedIn used to have a decent signal-to-noise ratio. Real professionals sharing real insights, mixed with some self-promotion and the occasional praise for process. Maybe 90% signal and 10% noise.

That ratio has inverted.

We’re now swimming in 90% noise and desperately looking for the other 10%. The problem here, which was the same problem on Facebook is that this is intentional and algorithmically based. It’s actively engineered to look like signal. This means you used to go in and read, now you go in and spend serious energy trying to find the value. You went from berry picking in a fertile field to gold mining with an axe.

Dopamine Exploitation

In the call, Tonianne DeMaria used the phrase cheap dopamine. This is not the beautiful meal dopamine, it’s the McDonald’s burger dopamine. So, your brain on LinkedIn looks like:

* Anticipation spike: Your brain gives a small hit of dopamine. “Maybe there’s a good post today. Maybe someone engaged with my content. Maybe there’s an opportunity. Maybe…”

* The scroll begins: You encounter the first post. It’s AI slop—”Agile is really really dead: Thrive emdash smiley.” Mildly annoying, but you keep scrolling.

* Intermittent reinforcement: Every fifth post, there’s something marginally interesting by someone you actually know. You like it. and…keep you scrolling. This is the most addictive reward schedule known to neuroscience and it is now a business model.

* Emotional spikes: You encounter a post claiming “Agile is Dead” (for the 400th time this year). Even though you know it’s engagement bait, you feel a reaction—irritation, defensiveness, the urge to comment.

* Compulsion continues: “The next one might be good.” Your prefrontal cortex (the part of your brain responsible for executive function, decision-making, focus) is slowly being bypassed. You’re are now addicted to the dopamine-seeking loop.

* Finally you close LinkedIn: You are shocked how long you were there. And your nervous system doesn’t reset. Your focus is fractured. The cognitive residue lingers for hours.

You and your brain are responding to an engineered environment designed to maximize your time in their platform, not your professional growth.

Let’s Build a Social Media Hazmat Suit

We have to use LinkedIn, it’s literally a monopoly on business attention. So, lets build a system that protects us from contamination while still getting value.

Your Helmet of Intention

This is your radiation suit’s Helmet.

* Go In With a Goal:

* “I need to check messages from recruiters”

* “I need to post this article I wrote”

* “I need to DM three specific people about collaboration”

* Go In With a Time Budget

* Not “I’ll just check quickly.” Give yourself an actual number: 10 minutes. 15 minutes max.

* Go In Self-Aware

* “If I encounter three AI-slop posts in a row, I close the app”

* “If I start feeling irritated or cynical, session over”

This pre-load shifts you from reactive (algorithmic drift) to strategic (purposeful use).

Practical implementation: Before opening LinkedIn, take three deep breaths. Literally. It sounds trivial. It’s not. Those breaths ground you, reduce your baseline stress response, and prime your brain for intentional action instead of compulsive scrolling.

Your Time Suck Exposure Meter

In Fallout 4, you track exposure. You need the same for LinkedIn.

Create an actual budget, I’m thinking one 25 minute pomodoro a day:

Weekly exposure limit: Decide how much LinkedIn time you can afford before contamination outweighs value. 1-2 hours per week maximum.

Session length cap: No session should exceed 15-25 minutes. If you go longer, you lose control, the algorithm takes over. Set a timer. Your perception of time distorts on social media by design.

Quality threshold alarms: This is your Geiger counter clicking. Define your personal “radiation alarm”:

* Shlock Alarm: Three AI-generated posts in a row = session over

* Click Bait Alarm: Two “Agile is Dead” / “Leadership is about super listening” posts = close app

* Lost In Space Alarm: Any moment where you catch yourself scrolling without knowing why = immediate exit

The Respirator of Strategic Whimsy

This phrase came from our Lean Coffee, and I wrote it .

Strategic: You go in with a plan. You know why you’re there, what you need, and when you’re leaving.

Whimsy: You allow for serendipity. If you encounter something genuinely valuable, you engage with it. You’re not so rigid that you miss real connection. Find funny over fury. Look for ways to engage that aren’t doom, rage, or being duped.

You dictate the terms, not LinkedIn’s algorithm.

Decontamination Rituals

You should, after an pomodoro, take a 5 minute walking break. This is especially true for LinkedIn, you need a decontamination ritual.

The cognitive and emotional residue doesn’t disappear when you close the tab. If you go straight from LinkedIn into a meeting or deep work session, you’re bringing the contamination with you.

5-minute decontamination options:

* Get up and walk around (physiological reset) ← Best one …

* Write one paragraph about something you’re working on (forces your brain into creative mode)

* Read one page of a physical book (shifts neural pathways from reaction to comprehension)

* Solve a simple problem or puzzle (re-engages executive function)

We Work Better Together—Even Here

The reason we’re having this conversation isn’t because LinkedIn is uniquely toxic all the socials are challenged this way. But we still need community, and we need to figure out how to engage even when most internet traffic is artificial.

Job seekers need visibility. Professionals need networks. Thinkers need audiences. Those are real needs, and LinkedIn still serves some of them.

But we also need spaces where:

* Robot scrolling doesn’t replace human curiosity

* Performative expertise doesn’t crowd out genuine learning

* Algorithms don’t dictate what matters

That’s why we’re here on Substack. That’s why people come to our Lean Coffees. That’s why this conversation is the true final human frontier.

LinkedIn isn’t going away. The radiation will probably get worse before it gets better. But you don’t have to be a passive victim of content quality devolution.

Build your hazmat suit. Track your exposure. Find your decontamination zones.

And when you’re ready for actual human conversation instead of robot scrolling, you know where to find us.

The salesy bit:The challenges you’re facing…overload, unclear priorities, toxic work patterns…don’t have to be permanent. Modus Institute courses and events help respond practically, with human-centered actions that create clarity, reduce stress, and drive results.​

🎓 Explore Our Classes | Personal Kanban | 📅 View Calendar | 📖 Get the Personal Kanban Books | 💬 Book a Consultation

Learn to visualize work, limit WIP, and build humane systems that respect people while delivering exceptional value.

We’ve created a lot of models of different types of toxicity, but one that always surprises us is Self-Isolationism. It’s when we do things that actively work against our own best interests and, in turn, make the team work less effectively. This is what we call a constellation. A group of actions that, alone or combined, create dysfunction, even when we have the best of intentions.

This one you’ve seen a million times. The brilliant engineer who won’t ask for help. The dedicated manager who takes on everyone’s work rather than delegate. The talented professional who retreats into perfectionism instead of collaboration.

They’re not toxic people. They’re people trapped in self-isolationism. A toxic pattern where well-intentioned professionals inadvertently poison their organizations by walling themselves off.

We think this is about the person overloading themselves, but isolation doesn’t just hurt the isolated person. It spreads like a contagion through your entire organization.

The Five Toxic Wastes of Self-Isolationism

This constellation comprises five interconnected toxins:

* Learned helplessness – Feeling powerless to change your situation, leading to inaction that isolates you from support networks

* Self-hostility – Invalidating your own worth, competence, and contributions

* Self-doubt – Pervasive lack of confidence that breeds paralysis and hesitancy to seek help

* Imposter syndrome – The persistent belief that your accomplishments are inadequate, fostering anxiety that disrupts focus

* Toxic fatalism – Losing the ability to envision or pursue alternatives, internalizing toxicity as inevitable

Each feeds the others. Each compounds the damage.

The Toxicokinetics of Self-Isolationism

Really quickly… toxicokinetics is how a toxin flows through your body. So, if you think of office toxicity like a poison moving through a team or company, we can start to track it and work with it. Self-isolationism has a predictable progression:

Entry: Self-doubt and insecurity—that inner critic questioning your worth—create the entry point.

Metabolism: Those toxic thoughts breed learned helplessness. You compensate by taking on excessive work to prove your value. Confidence erodes under mounting responsibilities.

Distribution: Now isolated and overloaded, you lose vital context. You’re blindly assigned disconnected tasks without understanding broader goals. Communication breaks down because self-doubt prevents you from asking clarifying questions. Unproductive silos form.

Peak Toxicity: Lack of transparency becomes institutionalized. Professionals drift into dysfunctional silos, cut off from the shared leadership and knowledge flows needed for true teamwork.

The Antidote: Visual Management and the Obeya

Here’s what we’ve learned after decades of working with teams drowning in toxicity: You cannot fix what you cannot see.

Toxicity spreads quickly in darkness. It hides in:

* Invisible workloads that overwhelm people

* Information silos that starve teams of context

* Unstated expectations that breed misalignment

* Hidden information or decision-making bottlenecks that create panic and firefighting

Visual management, particularly through an Obeya, is how you expose and eliminate self-isolationism.

What Is An Obeya?

An Obeya (Japanese for “big room”) is a physical or virtual space where all the information a team needs to act with confidence lives. It’s not just a project room with sticky notes. It’s a beating heart that pumps clarity, context, and connection through your entire organization.

When self-isolationism takes root, the Obeya becomes your immune system:

It Makes Overload VisibleWhen someone’s Personal Kanban shows 8 items in their DOING column instead of 3, it’s not a personal failing…it’s a systemic signal. It’s a trigger for help can be offered before burnout happens.

It Eliminates Information StarvationInstead of people making decisions in the dark, the Obeya shows strategy, current work, blockers, and progress in real-time. Context isn’t hoarded…it’s radiating. It’s actively working for you.

It Destroys Silos Through CollaborationWhen work is visible to everyone, collaboration happens naturally. You see where colleagues are stuck. You offer help. You ask for help without shame.

It Celebrates Learning Over ExpertiseColumns that specifically show “Success,” “The Unexpected,” and “Lessons Learned” combat the imposter syndrome beliefs that drive people into isolated overwork.

Why This Matters Now

Workplace toxicity costs American employers $917 billion annually. Self-isolationism is one of the primary drivers:

* 26% of workers actively dread going to work

* Employees in toxic environments are 3x more likely to report mental health challenges

* Presenteeism costs $4,300-$7,200 per employee annually

You can’t fix this with HR mandates or two-day workshops. You fix it by building humane systems of work where:

* Information flows freely

* Overload is visible and addressed

* Collaboration is expected, not optional

* People act with confidence because they have clarity

Learn to Build These Systems

If you’re a team leader, project manager, agile coach, or operations professional struggling with scattered information, unclear priorities, or siloed teams—visual management through Obeya is your path forward.

Join us for the Guided Obeya Fundamentals Certification📅 February 16, 2026 | 10am-4pm ET🎓 Accredited by the Obeya Association👥 Taught by Obeya Senseis Jim Benson & Tonianne DeMaria

What You’ll Master:

* The 11 essential Obeya principles that separate high-performing teams from chaos

* How to design physical and virtual Obeya spaces that teams actually use

* Visual management techniques that make self-isolationism impossible to hide

* Creating psychological safety through transparent information-sharing

* Meeting rhythms that drive action instead of just talk

Official Certification Included:✅ Obeya Fundamentals Certificate from the global Obeya Association✅ Digital badge for LinkedIn✅ One-year free membership to the Obeya Association Community (€75 value)✅ Pathway to advanced certifications

Investment: $888 introductory price (regularly €1,500+ in Europe)Limited to 20 participants

This isn’t theory. This is decades of work with Fortune 500 companies, government agencies, and startups across six continents—helping teams transform toxicity into clarity.

👉 Register now at https://luma.com/1dscf3cv

Self-isolationism doesn’t have to define your team’s culture. You can see it. You can address it. You can build better.

Let’s get to work.

Jim Benson & Tonianne DeMariaModus Institute | Creators of Personal Kanban | Obeya Senseis

P.S. Don’t see a date that works for you? Reach out to us and we’ll do our best to accommodate your availability.

And while I was writing about these massive engagements, I was thinking … This isn’t where we started. And it’s not actually where most of our work happens.

The truth is, over a hundred of our clients have been small, short focused visits. They used to be all in person, but they are increasingly remote. A few hours or a few days where we come in, work intensively with a team to figure out what needs to happen, help them build a way to make it happen, and then we leave. They take it from there.

And I love that work.

Humane Work is reader-supported. Toni and I put a lot into the newsletter, the lean coffees, and other events. Please join, become a paid member, and we have a lot fun things coming to paid subscribers in the next few months.

The John Shook Moment

Years ago, I was working on a project with John Shook from the Lean Enterprise Institute. We were walking into a manufacturing plant, just talking, when suddenly his head swiveled.

He looked across the factory floor—materials moving this way and that, people working, the sounds of assembly and construction and shipment—and he just looked at me and said: “You know, I really love a factory. I love everything about what’s happening here. People working together to get stuff done.”

That’s how Tonianne and I feel when we work with a small group. We just love ways of working. Every team is different, personalities…challenges…what they need to see.

It doesn’t matter if you’re doing sales or marketing, building something, inventing something, researching something. What matters is that human beings are getting together, caring about something in real time, and making that thing happen.

This is because work isn’t just work. Work is your life. It’s what you spend so much of your time on. You don’t want to do it in a way that’s upsetting. Your bosses don’t want to give you work that upsets you.

What we all want is to figure out: What’s the right thing we should be doing right now? What’s the right way to get that done? And how do we move forward with that?

Five Quick Case Studies

I want to share five short engagements we had. They were so fun, so memorable, that even though a few of them happened several years ago, the people we worked with still reach out. You make friends quickly when you are dealing with people’s livelihood. I wanted these to just be stories, no a logo parade, so they are blind itemed.

Communicating Learning and Discovery

Where: Research Triangle, North CarolinaHow long: A few daysThe challenge: A group of scientists trying to discover things, but struggling to communicate their real-time, super-fast learning

We came in with some tools…Personal Kanban, value stream mapping, visual management…and asked: How are you going to deploy these in a way that allows you all to communicate this constant discovery?

Scientists are used to the scientific method. They know hypotheses change. Experiments fail. Discovery is nonlinear. They needed a system that matched that reality.

A few days. That’s all it took. They took the tools and the ideas, created their own versions. And they reported back just recently that what we built together continues to impact them and help them be more successful.

Every Request Sounds Like an Accusation

Where: Northeast United StatesHow long: One weekThe challenge: Fast food to fine dining, every restaurant has the same problem, communication that sounds like combat.

Our client’s restaurants were drowning in toxicity and the customers were noticing. In restaurants, things move fast. You’re barking at each other all the time: “I need three fish fired up!” “Why isn’t the bus station set up?” “Why isn’t there salt on the tables?”

The problem wasn’t that people were rude. The problem was the pace made every interaction hostile. Staff couldn’t see their work in the chaos, so nothing got done until someone yelled about it.

What we did: We set up visual management systems that created triggers for action. This is when supplies are running low. This is when the bus station needs attention. This is when that task needs to be done.

No one had to yell “Why isn’t this done yet?” anymore.

Staff could see their work and get their work done.

The barking stopped. The environment became more hospitable for staff, which made them more hospitable to customers.

Three Founders, Conflicting Assumptions

Where: Northeastern AustraliaHow long: One weekThe challenge: Three young entrepreneurs who’d just sold a company wanted to build townhomes…but each had different assumptions about how.

They had money. They had ambition. What they didn’t have was alignment.

They had to do everything: funding, permitting, design, clearing lots, construction, sales. Soup to nuts. An incredibly long value stream they had to create from scratch.

What we did: We took over a huge conference room. Went all the way around the walls with their assumptions…this happens, then this, then this…tons and tons of sticky notes.

Forming. Storming. Norming. Sometimes arguing. But always moving toward consensus about how they were actually going to operate.

One week. By the time we left, they didn’t have a business plan on paper. They had an operations plan for how they were actually going to achieve this thing.

Don’t Fix Defects, Prevent Them

Where: Scotland (global bank, one very large 80 person team)How long: A few daysThe challenge: Software quality issues…costly, recurring, exhausting

They came to us looking for ways to do better bug fixing. But here’s what we said: “You already know how to fix defects. You’re good at that. Let’s find out when they’re about to happen and stop them from happening at all.”

What we did: We used Personal Kanban to create triggers that allowed them to see problems before they became problems. When dependencies were forming. When miscommunications were brewing.

We helped them design a system they’re still using after a decade.

A few days. Over ten years of impact.

Montessori-ing Montessori

Where: Southern EnglandHow long: Ongoing (they buy hours as needed)The challenge: Everything from internal communication to planning to stakeholder management

This school has two locations and a lot of stakeholders: students, parents, the community, other instructors. Lots of people deeply invested in the school’s success.

What we did: They bought a chunk of hours. We get together for an hour at a time. We have conversations about where they’re going. We visualize things. We solve specific problems.

It’s been amazing. No long-term contract. No massive engagement. Just expertise when they need it, on their terms, at their pace.

Small Engagements Work (And We Love Them)

Here’s what all these have in common:

Quick, surgical, expert interventions. We bring the right expertise, the right conversations to your right moment. We get creative together.

We don’t need months to understand your work. We don’t need enterprise budgets to make an impact.

What we need is:

* A real problem you’re trying to solve

* People who care about solving it

* A few focused days (or even hours) to work together

And here’s why this matters right now: Everybody is really worried about AI, about tariffs, about market uncertainty. So we aren’t acting.

That worry, that inaction, is costing us…not just time and energy, but stress. Real, grinding, exhausting stress.

We want to help with that. We want you to get to work during the day and to sleep at night.

Not by selling you AI solutions. Not by promising magic. But by doing what we’ve always done: helping you see your work, understand your work, and control your work.

We want to do this like a pit-stop. We pause, we get you better tires and clean the windshield, and then you are off. You walk away with something that works for you, your team, and your reality.

The Real Point

Work is your life. It’s where you spend your days, your energy, your creativity.

You deserve to do it in a way that doesn’t make you miserable.

Your team deserves systems that actually match how they work, not generic “best practices” that ignore your reality.

And you don’t need to be Turner Construction or the World Bank to get that help.

You just need to reach out.

Let’s Talk

If you’ve been thinking “Modus sounds great, but they probably don’t work with companies like ours,” I’m here to tell you: You’re exactly who we work with.

Small teams. Startups. Nonprofits. Schools. A single department inside a big company. Three people with a vision.

The vertical doesn’t matter. Biotech, restaurants, real estate, banking, education—we’ve done it all.

What matters is you’re people doing work with other people, and you want to do it better.

No obligation. No sales pitch. Just a conversation about what’s not working and whether we might help.

→ Let’s have that conversation

Because the beauty of a small engagement is this: Big impact doesn’t require big budgets or big timelines.

Sometimes it just requires the right help at the right moment.

And that moment might be right now.

P.S. — One of my favorite clients is a small nonprofit in Australia. Another was a small biotech in North Carolina. Another is a school in England that books us an hour at a time.

If you’re waiting until you’re “big enough” for expert help, you’re waiting too long. Start now. Start small. Start with what actually works.

At work we have things to do. Tasks, deadlines, things to focus on. Then things go wrong and then we are blamed for things or we blame other people for things.

Lots of … things.

In the Collaboration Equation, I say that individuals work in teams to create value. People have taken that to heart, but value ends up being the focus. People get so focused on the value that they forget about the individuals. They get so focused on completing tasks that they miss who those tasks actually exist for.

We work with and for people. Value is always a relationship.

Most of the stress in your work doesn’t come from the work itself. It comes from people asking, “Where is the thing I asked for?” or “Why did you do it that way?” And almost always, that stress exists because you’re managing the work and not the relationships.

The Quick Story Involving my Mom and Snails

My mom and I went to have dinner at a nice Italian place in Omaha. We sat at the chef’s counter where the people cooking studiously ignored us. We ordered and watched them expertly create our meals which looked very delicious. We sat there and watched them…less than a foot away from us … prepare our meals. They then went over to a serving station where they sat for FIFTEEN MINUTES. We just sat there and stared at our sauces breaking, our expertly created food cooling, pasta hardening.

The people who cooking for us were breathing the same air. Sharing the same space. But they were so focused on their part of productivity, they completely destroyed the value of the meal and us as future customers. And…they could have touched us they were so close. We were saying things like, “That sure looks like our food.” and “Excuse me, but I think our food is just sitting there.”

So, we were stakeholders. They, in their minds, had provided value. Our first visit to the restaurant was nice. This was our second, and our last. As Gordon Ramsey would say, “Such a shame, I expected more from you.”

So, your stakeholders and you, when you are a stakeholder, have expectations and when those expectations are not met…you have a dependency. The cooking team was not delivering food to the eating team when the eating team needed it.

So, to make this clear, dependencies are not a natural outgrowth of work, they are a failure state borne of crappy relationship management.

The Invisible Stakeholder Map

When Tonianne and I work with teams, we ask them a simple question: Who are all your stakeholders?

And every single time, in the first hours and days of working together, we find stakeholders they didn’t even know they had. People wearing different hats. Playing different roles in their lives.

But we all lose track of people and promises. Even me. (especially me)

We have one truth about work we need to hold onto. Your work is fundamentally about meeting stakeholder needs. And if you don’t know who your stakeholders are or, if you know but don’t take them seriously, your relationships break down. Dependencies form. Bottlenecks appear. Conversations don’t happen at the right time with the right people.

And no, you don’t get to say things like, “They’re doing it too.”

So Map Your Relationships

In practice, I have business partners, development partners, customers, team members, family members. Each plays a different role in my life. Each needs different things from me. Each needs those things on a different cadence.

My primary client? I talk to them every day.

My wife? We talk every day too, but we set aside specific time weekly to talk about finances.

My colleague Karl? He’s a stakeholder, a team member, and a development partner. So we talk daily about some things, weekly about others, monthly about others still.

And don’t you boil this down to schedule. The point here is you have to be intentional about knowing:

* Who needs what from you

* When they need it

* What role they play in your life

* What role you play in theirs

(Okay, you see how I started bolding things here because I wanted the main points to stand out… well… imagine they are all bold. Because we get this so consistently and catastrophically wrong.)

The Reciprocal Nature of Relationships

When you have a relationship with someone, it is reciprocal.

They need things from you. You need things from them. If it’s one-sided, then you’re only taking and it’s not a relationship. It’s exploitation.

Even in a client relationship where they pay you money, it’s still reciprocal. They give you money. You give them value. There’s a give-and-take.

And the reason this matters is simple: You build relationships through giving and receiving, not through demanding.

When you understand that, you’re no longer just some Transactional Task-based Tommy. You’re collaborative, you are professional, you are focused on what keeps the goal moving forward and not just the tasks checked off.

Need vs. The Asked-For Task

You should really watch the video for this part.

When you map or manage a relationship, you need to four areas of clarity:

* What do they need? Not what they asked for. What do they actually need?

* What did I promise? Be honest. What exact thing did you commit to?

* What are they worried about? This is critical. Context changes everything. If your boss is worried about whether the company will survive a market downturn, asking them about continuous improvement ROI in dollars misses the point entirely.

* What’s the context? What artifacts, links, and background information help you understand the full picture?

Why you might ask? (Though I’d hope by now you would know)… Look, when your boss asks you, “What’s the ROI on your continuous improvement project?” they’re not actually asking for a spreadsheet. They’re asking for reassurance that you’re making decisions that protect the company’s future. Even if they only know how to ask for a spreadsheet (because they aren’t managing their relationships either).

If you answer with the task you did yesterday, you will answer the question, and fail the test. Your answer will be correct, but the person you are talking to didn’t get their unstated value need yet. Then they will criticize what you did or your capabilities, because they .. again… suck at relationships as much as anybody else.

But if you answer with what you did and a quick story about how what you did helps them be less worried about whatever is keeping them awake at night, everyone wins. They now know they can count on you. They know, even just slightly, that you are paying attention to their needs. You know you’re having a meaningful conversation. You’ve completed a full value loop.

Your touch with them has been meaningful for both parties. That’s a healthy relationship.

So… think about your work. Think about your relationships. Think about what you are waiting for and what you are annoyed about and ask, “Who should I be talking to today?”

For years, I’ve been looking for the right Pomodoro app. And by right I mean one that actually did something other than give you a timer. I found ones that were close—close enough to make me think, “Maybe this one...” So I reached out to the builders. I wrote to them. I said, “Here’s what you need to add. Here’s what’s missing. Here’s what would actually make this useful.”

And nothing happened. This is because most people who build an app don’t actually know what it could do. (Cough, Trello, cough).

So we gave up waiting for other people to build the things we know people need. This year, we decided: stop waiting. Build the things ourselves. Build the tools that match what we actually teach, what we actually know works.

Today, I’m showing you the Pomodoro app we created. Not because we think we invented timers…but because we built something that does what we’ve been telling people to do for years. Focus. So this creates the flows between focused work, self-awareness, and the ability to actually improve how you work.

The Problem With Pomodoros (And Most Productivity Tools)

Here’s what drives me crazy about Pomodoro apps: they track time. That’s it. You set a timer. You work. It dings. You’re done. Excellent you’ve reached 1695 and built the stopwatch. How about we move forward in time a bit?

I mean, what does that timer actually tell you?

Nothing. It runs, it dings. And it tells you “dinger-all” about your work. Nothing about your capacity. Nothing about what’s getting in your way. It’s just a timer that makes you feel productive. … not effective.

We’re going for effective.

I use Personal Kanban every day, you all know this. But it’s part of my system. It’s the part where I visualize my work because invisible work kills everything. It drains you. It makes you second-guess yourself. You finish an eight-hour day and think, “What the hell did I actually do?”

When we focus and finish, we need to focus.

What if a Pomodoro app actually helped you see what you’re doing? What if it connected focus time to insight? What if deep work had a repeatable pattern? What if flow could be scheduled?

So, that’s what we built.

How Modus Pomodoro Works

Let me walk you through the my workflow, mostly because I’m still shocked that this worked as well as it did.

First: your Kanban board. You’ve got your pending work. You’ve got your active work. You’ve got your “well of commitment” … your annoying backlog that keeps growing no matter how much you complete.

So you go to your Personal Kanban and you want to focus. You don’t just grab whatever’s on top. You think about it. You sort it. And not by arbitrary priority lists. By what the work actually is.

So we built this in a way that lets you take those things you are going to focus on and drop them into different contexts.

You want to understand what is actually happening with your work. Is this work a heavy lift but a quick win? Then you know you can knock it out in a focused sessions with a colleague.

Is this flow state? The kind of work where you lose yourself for 25 minutes and forget to check Slack? Mark it and protect that time, use it as a reward.

Is this supported delegation? Work that needs someone else’s input or feedback? That tells you something important about your capacity.

Is this thankless work? Important but stuff nobody celebrates? At least now you can see it. You can see it in context.

This is what changes everything. Context.

Now here in this view you see your tasks and their contexts. You’re not just marking down “contact new students” or “taxes and licensing.” You’re noting: Why is this here? What does it actually mean for how I work? What kind of energy will it take?

Once you’ve sorted your work with that clarity, you pull one thing into your focus zone. Just one thing and you do a Pomodoro all Francesco Cirillo style.

The Pomodoro Itself

You start the timer. 25 minutes. The app doesn’t do anything fancy here. It just gets out of your way. You work.

When I’d do this in the other apps, I’d just work, but I couldn’t track anything. So with ours, you can take notes. But here’s the part that matters: as you work, you can take notes. You need to remember what you’re learning or discovering or what’s changed between when you started and where you are now.

With this we are building memory. You’re creating the story of your work.

Twenty-five minutes later, the timer ends. You enter your energy level (you’d like to spend a day not burning out) and anything that interrupted you. Then the Modus Pomodoro tells you to:

“Get up and walk around.”

The thing about Pomodoro is that your brain needs to process and we never give ourselves time for processing. When you work for 25 minutes straight, your short-term memory gets maxed out. You need those five minutes, not necessarily to rest, but more to to consolidate what you just learned. To move it from your working memory into something more permanent. You need to actually remember your life.

Every Pomodoro app glosses over this. Just like Trello glosses over WIP limits. But this is real neuroscience. When you skip this, you get to the end of your day (or your week) and you can’t remember what you did. The work disappears into fog. You may as well not be even trying to improve.

So, with this … I tell you (and I tell myself) to get off your butt and walk around.

What Happens Next: The Insight

After your break, you come back. Then you move on to the next thing.

Other Pomodoro apps just were like Yeah! Productivity! and you just moved on to the next task. But I wanted to build a picture of how I work.

You’ve completed some Pomodoros. Your energy averaged 7.5 out of 10. You had some friction. Maybe some context switching, maybe missing information. The app gives you stats over your day. So by the time you complete you have an idea of:

* Your actual capacity (how many Pomodoros you can sustainably do)

* Your energy patterns (when you’re strongest, when you fade)

* Your drag profile (what gets in your way most)

* Your completion rate (did you finish what you said you would?)

You have tons of context.

So, Why and Stuff

We teach people that invisible work kills you.

We teach Personal Kanban because visualization is power. You can’t improve what you can’t see.

We teach Personal Kanban because the moment you see your capacity and work within it, you start making real choices about what you can promise and what you cannot.

We teach Pomodoro because focus is a skill you acquire through practice. We don’t naturally avoid email and doomscrolling.

How to Use the Alpha

We’ve built this as an alpha…a New Year’s gift, honestly, for people who are tired of tools that don’t let them focus.

Go to pomodoro.modusinstitute.com.

Start a session. Work on something that matters. Actually focus on it. Take notes. Log your energy. Let the app see your patterns.

Then come back and tell us what you think. Tell us what breaks. Tell us what actually helps. Tell us what we’re missing.

P.S. We’re building more of these tools this year. Tools for focus. Tools for clarity. Tools to help us get things done in a constant shark tornado of distraction. If there’s something you’ve been waiting for someone to build—something that would make your work visible and meaningful—tell us. Maybe we’ll build that next.

Try the Pomodoro App: pomodoro.modusinstitute.com

Want to go deeper? Check out Personal Kanban and our courses on visual management.

It’s 2010. Carbon credit programs are exploding globally, but no one has figured out how to distribute money equitably. The stakes are enormous. They needed a system that could channel hundreds of millions toward the right individual landowners. A poorly built system could perpetuate inequality at a massive scale.

So someone decides: let’s build it in one week.

And not with a team that’s been working together for years. With twelve relative strangers who have never met.

Each one is an expert in their domain… we had economists, geologists, geographers, agriculturists, policy specialists. Each one brilliant in isolation. And that was the problem.

The experts had done their work in isolation and there was an assumption that they could get together and just fold them into one system in a week.

The reality was: brilliant experts + isolation + deadline = twelve incompatible documents heading toward catastrophic misalignment.

Speed might hide the chaos, but it certainly didn’t eliminate it.

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Individual Expertise Alone Fails Fast (all) Projects

Since there were 12 chapters, each belonging to one subject matter expert, the obvious move is let them own their subject. Let them do their deep work.

People don’t quite get that these things have parts. Each chapter isn’t a project on it’s own, it is a part of a machine. That means that for every chapter on economic distribution, there are elements about geography, supply chains, and more. No chapter can possibly stand alone.

So deep work does not mean solo work.

Isolated expertise produces isolated results. Person A writes a brilliant chapter (to themselves) on economics. Person B writes a brilliant chapter (to themselves) on agriculture. Person C writes something on geopolitics (to themselves) that’s technically sound but incompatible with A’s assumptions.

Then, when you go to bring all that work together, it’s instant crisis mode. It’s totally Muppets. You waste days on rework, trying unsuccessfully to find all the little bits of wrong in the document.

Isolation is always a precursor to failure.

Collaboration Isn’t About Being Nice

On day one of the REDD+ project, we made two leadership decisions that looked like a huge mistake.

1: “No one is writing their own chapter anymore. You’re all grouping on chapters.”

The expertise didn’t change. The time constraint didn’t change. What changed was the visibility system, the speed of feedback, the relationships of the authors.

Instead of twelve isolated experts, we had cross-functional teams…economists paired with agriculturists, policy specialists working alongside geologists. Each chapter had multiple perspectives embedded from the start.

2: “Every 20 minutes, we review.”

Literally every 20 minutes, we’d stop and ask how far people were on their outlines and writing. And we would expect people to have questions for others in the group. So, every 20, the work paused, the teams talked. Questions were asked. Conflicts surfaced immediately. Adjustments were made in real-time.

Every 20 minutes = constant steering of the ship.

Over a week of intense work, that’s dozens and dozens of micro-corrections. A potential misalignment caught on day 2 averted a crisis that would have easily killed the report later. The second night, a team stayed late making major revisions to the model.

This is group deep work. We created a system that compounded clarity in real time.

Why This Matters Right Now

My Christmas wish: 2026 needs collaboration. We need to work together.

We think collaboration means: more meetings, more communication, more tools, more accessibility.

What the REDD+ experience shows us the opposite: fewer meetings, more visibility, structured interruptions, and seemless, constant improvement.

The detail of my holiday wish:

1. Visibility eliminates blame.

When twelve people can see what everyone else is producing, like seeing it literally, on a board, there’s no mystery about who’s ahead or behind, what’s working or what’s stuck. You can see the problem, not the person. This removes the fear that kills collaboration. (yes, this happens on digital on-line boards too).

2. Structured interruptions prevent invisible chaos.

A 20-minute interrupt wasn’t a distraction. It was a feedback loop. We created a quick, painless way of saying, “Are we still together on this?” Most fast projects (or projects at all) don’t have that. Work compounds for days in isolation, then you discover misalignment when it’s too late to fix.

3. Cross-functional grouping allows constant project steering.

It could have been something like, “Let’s have economists talk to agriculturists in a meeting.” But we opted for the more effective, “You’re writing this chapter together. You can’t move forward until you’re aligned.” The system makes collaboration mandatory.

4. We do the right amount of work when we feel a bit of pressure.

When you are writing or creating something for yourself, you are answering your personal need for the perfect product. You will write more or less than is needed. You will do more or less than is needed. When someone else is there working with you, you will both see when things are becoming overkill or under expressed.

4. Coherence emerges from repeated correction, not perfect planning.

We didn’t spend three days planning the perfect chapter structure. We started working, interrupted constantly, corrected frequently, and let coherence emerge through iteration. This is faster than planning, we made small adjustments instead of big pivots.

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What This Means for Your Team

If You’re an Individual Contributor:

Stop assuming silence means alignment. In your next fast project, ask: “How will we see the work? How often will we check in? How do we know when we are done?”

If the answer is “updates on Friday,” you’re in a chaos-hiding project. If the answer is “we’ll check the board daily (or better) and interrupt every morning (or better),” you’re in a system designed for real-time coherence.

If You’re a Project Manager:

Your job is to manage the visibility of the work and how the team coordinates.

Build the system first:

* Physical visibility: Board, stickies, or shared space where work is constantly visible

* Cross-functional grouping: Stop isolating expertise. Pair or mob people across functions early and often

* Clarity Compounding: What are you doing to make sure that people know are doing the best thing they could be doing right now?

Then start the work. The system does the managing.

If You’re Leading:

Stop measuring output, throughput, or velocity: they lead to rework and failure demand. Start measuring alignment and rapid problem solving, they lead to products that go out strong and at the right time.

How fast can your teams detect misalignment? How quickly can they correct it? How early can they surface integration problems?

The teams that win in 2026 won’t be the ones that move fastest in isolation. They’ll be the ones that move coherently. Teams that are constantly checking, constantly correcting, constantly steering.

The 2026 Challenge

2026 will be chaotic. There’s strife in the world. There’s uncertainty. There are constraints you can’t control.

You can’t control the chaos. But you can structure how you respond to it.

The teams that thrive won’t be the ones that move fastest. They’ll be the ones that see the fastest, correct the fastest, and integrate the fastest.

Build the board, the room, whatever visualization is needed. Group the experts. Interrupt the work. Let coherence emerge.

We work better together. We fail alone.

Have a good 2026. And when you start a fast project, start with visibility.

What You Can Do Next:

* Join us for the Personal Kanban workshop. We’ll go deep on your actual limits, help build visuals that work for you personally, and create boundaries that work. Spend some time with us:Deep Dive See Your Work-shop

* Read the full Personal Kanban book to understand the humanity behind the practice.

* Read the Collaboration Equation to learn more about this type of leadership.

* Take the Personal Kanban class on Modus Institute

* Work with Jim and Toni for personalized guidance implementing visibility in your specific situation.

Like and subscribe and all that stuff. But … really, everyone is running way above capacity and it’s hurting us all. So, please … opt out of that pain.

Your Backlog Is Not A Museum For Your Good Intentions

Your brain lies to you. It tells you that every idea you have is a precious diamond that must be acted upon immediately. But they aren’t diamonds.

Most of your ideas are just shiny rocks. And if you put every shiny rock on your desk (i.e., your Kanban board), pretty soon you can’t find your computer.

When you come up with something to do, it’s often a real need that you haven’t thought through yet.

We have a term for this: Solutioning. It’s when you decide how to fix something before you even know what is broken. It’s like buying a cast for your leg because you might fall down the stairs next week.

Pawel Brodzinski (see above) pointed out that most of the stuff in our backlogs is just noise. It’s clutter. We stare at 50 items, paralyzed, wondering which one is the “priority,” when in reality, 40 of them are just vague wishes written months ago.

The problem is that we confuse “The Need” with “The Solution.”

And we make our tasks solutions and not need. Ideas are not action, but we need to turn ideas into action.

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What To Do With Ideas

If I put a card on my board right now that says “Make Pizza,” that’s a solution. But the actual need is “Make Dinner.” By the time 6 PM rolls around, nobody might want pizza. If I’ve committed to “Pizza” as a task, I’m stuck. But if I have a pantry full of ingredients, I can look at the hungry people (the market) and say, “What do y’all want?” And they say, “We can Carne Asada Tacos.” I go to the pantry and I make some tacos.

Or worse yet, and to torture the analogy even more, it’s like your ticket is make buttered scampi and then you find out your guests have shellfish allergies.

But anyway you need a pantry. You need something to make sure that when the market wants something from you, you have the ingredients and the recipes.

The Idea Factory

So, let’s get some ideas and then hold them until they are ready with three quick visualizations:

* The Idea Supermarket: This is a nice way of saying “Purgatory for Good Intentions.” Put your ideas here. Let them sit. If they are actually good, they will wait until you and the market are ready. If they are bad, they will quietly decompose without cluttering up your actual workday.

* The 3 AM Notebook: I write things down in the middle of the night. It usually looks like a 6 month old got a sharpie and went nuts. That’s fine. The point here is to leave a trail to that 3 am idea that I’ll forget otherwise. If the evidence is compelling in the morning, I’ll do something with it. If not, it leaves something for the Jim Benson historians to decipher.

* The Quality Filter: This one is deceptive. Only put stuff in your board’s backlog that you are ready to actually do. First, don’t be vague. If a sticky note says “Do Strategy,” that is not a task. That is a cry for help. A task is “Email Dave.” A task is “Write paragraph one.” If you don’t know the physics of the verb, it’s not a task. It’s a solution you haven’t earned yet. Kick it back to the pantry until you learn what you need to cook.

* Second, if it’s something that you could do a million of (for me it’s posts like this one) putting everyone one you could do, into your options column means an insane number of options. Your real option that day is “write something that makes sense for the audience right now”…it’s the dinner. The subjects all go in the super market, they are ingredients.

Closing on Maybe

My friend Jeffrey White asked me recently about the “Maybe” column you see in some Kanban systems. A space for things that might happen. It sounds nice. It sounds like a gentle way to hold space for the unknown.

And this can work for some people, giving them sort of an idea buffer. But, for me, “Maybe” is ambivalent. And ambivalence is justification for clutter that hasn’t found the courage to leave yet. It’s that roommate we all had in college.

The image below shows a pantry, with shelves specifically market for different ingredient types. Don’t make a “parking lot” with stuff just thrown in it. Don’t maybe these things. Make them actionable future yeses.

Today’s metaphor mixer: If you don’t know if an idea is dinner or just a shiny rock, don’t let it sit on your board staring at you like a bad roommate. Put it in the Supermarket. Put it in the Notebook. Get it out of your face.

Your Personal Kanban isn’t a museum of things you thought about once. It’s a kitchen. And you need to cook.

Also H/T to Janis Ozolins for the nifty graphic in the video.

What You Can Do Next:

* Join us for the Personal Kanban workshop. We’ll go deep on your actual limits, help build visuals that work for you personally, and create boundaries that work. Spend some time with us:Deep Dive See Your Work-shop

* Read the full Personal Kanban book to understand the humanity behind the practice.

* Read the Collaboration Equation to learn more about this type of leadership.

* Take the Personal Kanban class on Modus Institute

* Work with Jim and Toni for personalized guidance implementing visibility in your specific situation.

* The board above is on Kanban Zone. Subscribers to this substack can get a bunch of templates from us there.

Like and subscribe and all that stuff. But … really, everyone is running way above capacity and it’s hurting us all. So, please … opt out of that pain.

“Line cooking done well is a beautiful thing to watch. It’s a high-speed collaboration resembling, at its best, ballet or modern dance.”~ Anthony Bourdain

We love the word “Flow.” It sounds magical. It sounds like a river. It sounds like a state of pure bliss where you are a productivity god and work is effortless.

Flow isn’t magic; it’s just what happens when the friction disappears. It’s that quiet, humming moment when the tools get out of the way, the noise stops, and you realize, ‘Oh wait, I’m actually really good at this.’ It’s the feeling of the machine working exactly as designed, and realizing the machine is you.

You ever see a jazz drummer? Or a line cook during a rush? They aren’t thinking. They aren’t planning. They’re just doing what comes next, what feels right, what’s not necessarily easy, but it effortless. They are creating value.

That’s flow. Not cycle time, not throughput, but intentionality and correct action that improves what you do.

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You know what else flows (downhill)? Sewage.

And for most of us, that’s exactly what our workday feels like. Because we don’t know what to do next, we don’t know the why, we don’t even know our own stakeholders.

For most companies, work is a backed-up wastepipe of interruptions, bad policies, and meetings that could have been emails. You wanna be “in the zone.” You’re in a hostage negotiation with your own calendar. You want to be a drummer, but instead you are playing whack-a-mole in a rigged carnival.

FLOW OR FAIL

We can fix this. But if we just talk about our work (which no one understands) our conversations will just be shouting matches. If you treat work like a transportation problem, you realize there are actually Three Flows you need to worry about. And right now, all three of them are permanent red lines in your google map to the future.

There is one key driving idea here. If things are in your way, go around them or get them out of the way. That’s it.

Flows for better flow

1. The Road (Operational Flow)

* Appreciate: This is the way you work. The road is the physics of your company. The highway. The rules of the road.

* Accept: Everyone thinks the road is an Autobahn. In reality, the road is filled with potholes, road blocks, and toll booths.

* Acknowledge: Every time you hit a pothole (a missing tool), a roadblock (an approval queue), or a toll booth (a “quick sync”), you stop moving. You can’t drive 100mph on a road that is actively trying to kill you.

* Attention: Stop blaming the other drivers for swerving into your lane. Fix the pavement. A process that doesn’t help the car move forward is debris. Clear it.

2. The Car (Workflow)

* Appreciate: This is the actual value. The project, report, code, sold house, plate of food…the thing you are trying to deliver.

* Accept: You aren’t driving one car. You are trying to drive a fleet. You have the “Project A” sedan, the “Q3 Report” truck, and the “Favor for Dave” scooter. You are trying to drive five vehicles at the same time.

* Acknowledge: A parked car delivers zero value. When you switch cars every 15 minutes, all of them are parked 90% of the time. And you have to run from car to car. You feel busy, but you aren’t moving. You’re just wasting energy.

* Attention: Focus! Pick a car. Drive it to the destination. Get out. Go back. Drive the next one.

3. The Driver (Psychological Flow)

* Appreciate: This is you. The creative engine. The poor soul behind the wheel.

* Accept: You want to be a Formula 1 driver, but you’re stuck in a clown car, in a hockey rink, surrounded by … you get the idea. You can’t find “creative bliss” when you have to slam on the brakes every 45 seconds to answer a Slack message.

* Acknowledge: You burn out. You get road rage. You start looking at Facebook marketplace for bobbleheads.

* Attention: You cannot “will” yourself into flow if the road is broken. You have to protect the driver.

“Practicing your craft in expert fashion is noble, honorable, and satisfying. And I’ll generally take a stand-up mercenary who takes pride in his professionalism over an artist any day.”~Also, Anthony Bourdain

The Done Column

Why does this matter? Why fix the road? Why stop driving five cars at once?

We have a choice. When we finally unjam the sewage from the pipes, work stops being a traffic jam and starts being a jam session. How’s that for a mixed metaphor?

As Anthony Bourdain said, ‘Practicing your craft in expert fashion is noble, honorable, and satisfying.’ That’s the feeling we’re chasing. Not magic. Just the noble satisfaction of a machine running exactly the way it’s supposed to.

That’s humane work and it is the only way any company can be reliably profitable and innovate.

What You Can Do Next:

* Join us for the Personal Kanban workshop. We’ll go deep on your actual limits, help build visuals that work for you personally, and create boundaries that work. Spend some time with us:Deep Dive See Your Work-shop

* Read the full Personal Kanban book to understand the humanity behind the practice.

* Read the Collaboration Equation to learn more about this type of leadership.

* Take the Personal Kanban class on Modus Institute

* Work with Jim and Toni for personalized guidance implementing visibility in your specific situation.

Like and subscribe and all that stuff. But … really, everyone is running way above capacity and it’s hurting us all. So, please … opt out of that pain.

Your to-do list is long. It’s staring at you like a judgmental cat that hasn’t been fed in three hours. Meow…meow…meow…

You think that list is a contract. You think that because you wrote “Clean the Garage” on a sticky note, you are legally obligated to clean the garage before the heat death of the universe. You think that because someone thought they could write a user story about it, it became a must-complete.

Personal Kanban the first column of any board “Options,” which is a nice, financially sound way of saying “Things I Might Do If and When They Make Sense.” Because they are Options. Say it with me, Op-shunz.

Humane Work is reader-supported. You are a reader. Become a free or paid subscriber.

You Are Working in a Bear Market

Think of the investment of your life like the stock market, but instead of losing money, you’re losing your will to live. Make the most of what you have.

* Expiration Dates: Work is like yogurt. Eventually, it goes bad and when it does, it’s very very ugly. If you have a task that’s been sitting there since the Obama administration, it’s not a task anymore. It’s a historical artifact. Throw it out.

* Market Value: Your effort might not yield returns. Just because you want to write a 400-page report on the history of paperclips doesn’t mean anyone wants to read it. If you want to do things for your own benefit that’s fine, just don’t get caught in the trap of completing work no one wants.

* The Strike Price: Your work is an investment of your time. If you have used up all your time on other stuff, you won’t have the brain juice to do anything else. You’ll have spent so much time eating moldy yogurt with your paperclips that when a real opportunity comes along you’ll say it has to wait. (No, I can’t find a picture of a Muppet eating moldy yogurt with a paper clip…)

You Gotta Have Options

So, when we build a kanban or Personal Kanban, we need to make sure that our “backlog” doesn’t stay a set of tickets we are duty bound to carry out, but become a pool of options that we can apply our professional judgement to. If we don’t we will routinely do the wrong work at the wrong time, leading to wasted energy, re-work, extra meetings, and poor quality product.

CTAs FTW!

* Join us for the Personal Kanban workshop. We’ll go deep on your actual limits, help build visuals that work for you personally, and create boundaries that work. Spend some time with us:Deep Dive See Your Work-shop

* Read the full Personal Kanban book to understand the humanity behind the practice.

* Read the Collaboration Equation to learn more about this type of leadership.

* Take the Personal Kanban class on Modus Institute

* Work with Jim and Toni for personalized guidance implementing visibility in your specific situation.

Like and subscribe and all that stuff. But … really, everyone is running way above capacity and it’s hurting us all. So, please … opt out of that pain.

We often confuse delegation with abdication.

Be a leader, not an absentee landlord.

Too many leaders treat delegation as a way to empty their inbox: a request comes in, they don’t want to do it, so they quickly pass it to someone else with vague instructions. When the team inevitably fails, the leader blames them (or “holds them accountable”).

But predictable failure is a leadership failure. If you hand off work without accounting for its complexity or the unknowns involved, you are setting your people up to fail.

Effective delegation isn’t binary (I do it vs. you do it). It is a spectrum based on uncertainty. The more unknowns a task has, the more involved you need to be. This is literally what leadership is, helping people find their way to success in the face of uncertainty.

I’m intentionally writing this as an executive summary, so leaders will read it. If you want more, leave comments.

In the video, I create a board for this. But every leader needs to understand and implement at least these four buckets of potential work.

Humane Work is reader-supported. Toni and I bring decades of helping companies collaborate better and lead others to better places. If this is useful to you become a paid subscriber.

The Delegation Filter

All tasks that you delegate need to go through a simple filter. Do we understand this enough to reliably ignore it? Do I as a leader feel comfortable I understand it enough to delegate it?

As a leader, it’s important to understand the impacts of your direction on any given resource.

In this model, there are four buckets of potential delegations:

1. Collaborative Delegation (High Unknowns / High Involvement)

* Use when: The path forward is unclear, standard work doesn’t exist, or the problem is novel. (Novel problems, when solved, are new IP).

* The approach: You aren’t handing this off; you are bringing someone in. You create the plan together, learn together, and build the standard work as you go.

* Your role: Co-pilot. Do not leave them alone with the ambiguity. Let yourself learn with them. (This is often a strategic benefit.)

2. Supported Delegation (Medium Unknowns / Guardrails)

* Use when: The team has the capability, but the task has “gotchas” or high stakes.

* The approach: “I trust you to run with this, but here are the guardrails.” Check in with the team often. Become a light collaborator.

* Your role: Safety net. Define specific triggers for when they must come back to you (e.g., “If the budget exceeds $10k” or “If we need to build a new facility”). Give them agency within those bounds.

3. Full Agency Delegation (High Trust / High Autonomy)

* Use when: You trust the person or team’s judgment to navigate unknowns without you.

* The approach: You are explicitly granting them the authority to make decisions and, crucially, the permission to fail. Check in regularly.

* Your role: Shield. You agree upfront: “Unless there is gross negligence, if you make a call and it doesn’t work, that is learning, not failure.” You cannot punish them for outcomes if you gave them agency over the process.

4. Standard Delegation (Low Unknowns / High Clarity)

* Use when: The task is routine, instructions are clear, and “standard work” exists (e.g., “Extend the discount to Client X”).

* The approach: This is what most people think all delegation is. It only works when the recipient knows exactly what “done” looks like.

* Your role: The issuer. Verify it gets done, but get out of the way.

The Golden Rule: Reasons vs. Excuses

When a delegated task fails, leaders often hear “excuses.” But there is a critical distinction:

* A Reason is information given to you in time to act on it.

* An Excuse is a reason given too late.

If you don’t create the safety and the cadence for your team to bring you “reasons” early, the excuse is on you. You cannot hold people accountable for silence if you gave them under-described work, an unreasonable demand, and walked away more interested in “results” rather than understanding and professionalism.

CTAs FTW!

* Get a Very Long and Generous free trial for Kanban Zone

* Join us for the Personal Kanban workshop or the webinar. We’ll go deep on your actual limits, help build visuals that work for you personally, and create boundaries that work. Spend some time with us: Free Webinar | Deep Dive See Your Work-shop

* Read the full Personal Kanban book to understand the humanity behind the practice.

* Read the Collaboration Equation to learn more about this type of leadership.

* Take the Personal Kanban class on Modus Institute

* Work with Jim and Toni for personalized guidance implementing visibility in your specific situation.

Like and subscribe and all that stuff. But … really, everyone is running way above capacity and it’s hurting us all. So, please … opt out of that pain.

This is a plea for the holidays if anything.

A conversation is a connection. I am a person, writing to you with intent. You are a person receiving my intent. That is a relationship. The more thought, the more respect.

A task, on the other hand, is a burden. When you do a task, your goal is to finish the task and move on with your life. It is usually done as quickly and, frankly, thoughtlessly, as possible. The more thought, the more burden.

When you use AI to write your emails, you give the AI the agency to make that connection, and you remove it from yourself. You ask the AI to respond. It looks pretty good, you say good enough and hit send. That’s a task. You will forget it.

If I’m like “Oh, I’ve got to respond to Tonianne. I’ll just pop it into the bot. It will write something…yeah, that looks good enough. Send.” It feels like I wrote an email, but I didn’t. It’s not me. It’s not the relationship.

Humane Work is reader-supported. Toni and I are always looking for ways to help people lose work stress, collaborate better, and lead others to better places. Please become a paid subscriber.

Tasks vs. Conversations

There is a reason why we forget tasks. Most tasks are designed to be forgotten. We do them in a specific place and time, and once they are done, we flush them from our working memory so we can move on to the next thing. If we didn’t we’d have brains filled with “I turned off the lights on Jan 7th and 8 pm”.

Toni and talk a lot about the Zeigarnik Effect. Our brains hold onto unfinished business (open loops) to ensure we complete them. Once we check that box, the brain essentially deletes the file to free up cognitive space.

Again, AI turns conversations into tasks.

A conversation isn’t a task; it is a connection where you say something, I process it, and we build a direction together. But when you use AI to not have to bother talking to me, you are artificially closing that loop too quickly. You treat your friend like a kanban ticket. Your brain registers “Task Complete” and immediately flushes the interaction.

You are very efficiently deleting your relationships from your mind. If they aren’t there, you won’t value them. If you don’t value them…you won’t have them for long.

The Science of “Good Enough”

In the video, I say that when you accept an AI draft because it looks “good enough,” you are skipping the struggle of creation. That struggle is not a bug; it is a feature of human memory. Writing things down might not be fun, but we’ve had thousands of years linking writing and memory.

This is known as the Generation Effect. Decades of research show that information is better remembered if it is generated from your own mind rather than simply read. When you type out a messy draft, delete a sentence, and retype it, you are physically encoding that thought into your long-term memory.

Maybe more important is that you are asking yourself, did I mean this? I’ve written enough books to know that editing is more important than writing. (Which is likely why a lot of you are saying Yeah, that’s why I hate writing.

When you simply “approve” an AI output, you are robbing yourself of that encoding process. Recent research backs this up:

* A 2025 study from MIT, mentioned in this Study International article, found students who used AI to write essays had significantly lower neural connectivity and “had a harder time recalling vital points” of their own work.

* In Psychology Today, Dr. Cornelia Walther, calls this “Agency Decay.” We think we are hyper-connected, but by offloading the process of communication, we are engaging in a pseudo-intimacy where we are present in output only, not in mind. I strongly suggest you read her terrifying article.

The Integrity Gap

I’ve folded these ideas into what I call the Locked Loop of Forgetfulness.

* Overload: You have too many messages.

* Offload: You let the bot write the replies to survive.

* Amnesia: Because you didn’t generate the thought, you don’t remember the promise you just made.

* Indifference: You didn’t respond, you don’t remember, you stop caring. You are more likely to do it again, which overloads others, forcing them into the same cycle.

This is dangerous. If you make a decision, a promise, or a statement of fact to another human being, you probably want to remember what that is. This means that you could very easily end up committing to things you have no initial intention to and then, later, won’t even remember that. A paper recently published by Cambridge University Press, titled Homo Promptus, warns that this leads to a state of “grey memory,” where we can no longer distinguish between what we experienced and what the machine fabricated for us.

This means other people will believe you wrote something (because the received it from you) and you will believe it too.

This Is Avoidable

When autoresponses first started, I got a text from Tonianne that was alarming. She had a situation I need to delicately respond to. Google felt the best response was “HaHa”. I accidentally hit it.

After much explanation and apology, we started using HaHa as a response meaning everything. “What would you like for lunch?” “HaHa.”

AI has barely made it past that hurdle. You can avoid this simply by avoiding the urge to cut corners. If you use AI for anything, you need to edit it like you gave it to your worst enemy to write. But, it’s easier in the end to just write the email yourself.

CTAs FTW!

* Join us for the workshop or the webinar. We’ll go deep on your actual limits, help build visuals that work for you personally, and create boundaries that work. Spend some time with us: Free Webinar | Deep Dive See Your Work-shop

* Read the full Personal Kanban book to understand the humanity behind the practice.

* Take the Personal Kanban class on Modus Institute

* Work with Jim and Toni for personalized guidance implementing visibility in your specific situation.

Like and subscribe and all that stuff. But … really, everyone is running way above capacity and it’s hurting us all. So, please … opt out of that pain.

The thumbnail up there has a pic of me, my brother, my dad, and our dog Cookie. Likely taken in 1977.

Cookie was an expert food catcher and could catch nearly anything short of a whole turkey if you tossed it to her. She was extremely productive, effective, and efficient. But she had a capacity. She had a system you could work with, or break.

Throw her one cocoa puff? Caught it. Perfect.

Throw two? Caught both. Still winning.

Throw three? She’d get two, one would drop. Starting to struggle, but mostly okay.

Throw four? She’d catch one. Miss three. Now she’s frustrated.

Throw five? She might catch one, but might.

Throw a huge handful at her? Complete meltdown. She’d catch nothing, just wave her head like a Muppet, jaw wide open, overwhelmed while cocoa puffs bounced off her nose, forehead, or fly by. Then she’d make an annoyed snarf-sound and eat them off the floor.

This is you. This is all of us. We’re Cookie with too many cocoa puffs.

Jim and Toni (we) are really enjoying the engagement with Humane Work. It is reader-supported and we are grateful. If you are enjoying this, please becoming a paid subscriber.

Cookie Had No Boundaries

Cookie was suffering from too much work being forced on her by bosses that didn’t care about her overload. Or, in the case of my brother and I, actively amused. We’d actively test her. 1 … 1.. 1. … HANDFULL. When you are 12 and 8 this is endlessly funny. Well, the end was running out of cocoa puffs.

Later, my mother would be like, “Why do I keep finding cocoa puffs in the family room? Are you guys just throwing them around?!” Yes, yes we were.

So cookie didn’t have a system for managing incoming cocoa puffs. Neither do you.

Every day, commitments come at you:

* “Can you do this?”

* “We need you on this project”

* “Quick favor?”

* “One more thing?”

* Emails, messages, requests, emergencies

And what do we do? We say yes. Because:

* We don’t want to disappoint people

* We believe we “should” be able to handle it

* There’s no system evaluating whether we actually can

* Saying no feels like weakness

* We have no visibility into what we’re already juggling

So we say yes to everything. And then we become Cookie with a handful of cocoa puffs—catching nothing, finishing nothing, disappointing everyone.

Yes Beats No

If you want to annoy people, set up a Personal Kanban because you want to “say no” more effectively. We hear this often but that’s not actually what we want. We don’t wake up thinking “I wish I could disappoint more people.”

When you are overloaded, you’ll take all the work on, but like Cookie, you’ll be eating it off the floor and Jennifer will be annoyed with a Hoover full of cereal she bought and no one will eat.

If you want to make work better for everyone, say yes effectively.

To say: “Yes, I can do this. And here’s when I can realistically do it.”

Cookie Capacity Calculator

Your capacity is finite. Let’s say Cookie can catch 2-3 cocoa puffs reliably.

When she has 2-3 cocoa puffs in the air? She catches them all. High success rate. Repeat performance. Build reputation.

When she has 5+ cocoa puffs in the air? She catches maybe 1. Misses most. Looks incompetent. Loses trust.

Let’s torture this analogy like we’re still pre-teens: Cookie limiting herself to 2-3 cocoa puffs gets MORE cocoa puffs overall because she finishes what she catches. People trust her, they throw more, she keeps succeeding. We are figuring out the capacity.

Cookie trying to catch a handful gets ZERO cocoa puffs overall but people can’t process that. Surely you’d always catch a few? They will overload her for hours on end trying to figure out why Cookie “isn’t catching any anymore”.

This is your career. Your reputation. Your sanity.

Limited WIP (work-in-progress) = higher delivery = more opportunity = more success.

Unlimited WIP = catching nothing = disappointing everyone = burnout.

You Lie to You

When you are overloaded, you internalize that load and then compensate by doing more. People invariably respond to overload with overload. When you’re running way above capacity, it doesn’t feel like “catching nothing.” It feels like:

* Constantly working (checking email at 10pm)

* Always stressed (something’s always falling through cracks)

* Lower quality (you’re too fragmented to do good work)

* More mistakes (brain is juggling too many things)

* Inability to focus (constant context-switching)

* Guilt (you’re letting people down despite working constantly)

This feels like your personal failure. Like you’re not working hard enough. Like you should be able to handle this.

But this is systemic … it is the system (the 12 and 8 year olds) throwing work at you and you’re like “why can’t I catch this…food I shouldn’t be eating in the first place because I’m a dog and dogs aren’t supposed to eat Cocoa Puffs.”

You don’t have a gate. You have no way to evaluate incoming work against actual capacity. So everything gets added. And everything suffers.

What Changes When You Build Triggers

Triggers are things that cause you to act : It’s how you decide what comes in and when. Believe it or not, Personal Kanban is not about tracking your work. We designed it to tell you what to do about your work. It’s a triggering system. “What is the right thing for me to be doing right now? And What is Not?”

Step 1: See the load you’re already carrying

Write down everything you’re currently doing. Put it on a board or list:

* OPTIONS (things you’ve committed to but haven’t started)

* DOING (things you’re actively working on)

* DONE (things you’ve finished)

Now count what’s in DOING. That’s your current WIP.

Step 2: Set your realistic limit

Look at that DOING pile. What’s honest? Can you really juggle 5 things? Or are you Cookie with too many cocoa puffs?

Most people discover they’re actually at 10 to 18 things when they think they’re doing 2 or 3.

Set a real limit. Maybe it’s 2. Maybe it’s 4. Pick something honest.

Step 3: Manage the incoming

New request comes in: “Can you do this?”

No triggers to help us control our work means we say, “Yeah, yeah, sure” (adds it to the pile in DOING immediately)

With triggers that show what you are doing and what is coming up… “I’d love to. I’m currently working on X, Y, and Z. You’d be #4 in my queue. I can start on this [realistic date] and finish by [realistic date]. Does that work?”

Now people have real expectations. You have capacity. Everyone wins.

Step 4: Watch what actually happens

* You finish things (dopamine hit, momentum)

* Quality improves (you’re not fragmented)

* People trust you (you deliver what you promise)

* Stress decreases (you’re not drowning)

* You get more respect (limited delivery > chaotic chaos)

* Ironically, you get MORE opportunities (people trust you)

You’re not doing less. You’re accomplishing more because what you do is actually complete.

The Permission You’re Looking For

Humans can only do so much. You are human. You’re allowed to have limits. You’re allowed to have realistic capacity. You’re allowed to say yes in a way you can actually deliver.

Cookie knew this. She caught cocoa puff and was excited or she’d make the snarf-sound and cleaned them up. You can do the same with your commitments.

The only catch here is you have to build the system yourself. Your cocoa puffs won’t self-regulate.

Want to go deeper? Read Personal Kanban to learn the full system. Take the Personal Kanban class to build your gate system with support. Join the webinar or the workshop to understand WIP limits at scale.

Because unlimited cocoa puffs are a choice. And a bad one.

Choose better.

The Conversation That Never Happens

It’s Monday morning. Your colleague seems off. Quieter than usual. Not their normal engaged self. But you don’t ask. They don’t tell.

Three months later, they’re gone. Stress leave or resignation. And everyone’s shocked.

“They seemed fine,” people say.

They weren’t fine. But the workplace created a culture where saying “I’m not fine” feels like weakness. Like admitting you can’t handle your job. Like confessing failure.

So they kept silent. And the stress compounded. And the team broke.

This is what happens when organizations ignore existential overhead.

What Is Existential Overhead, Actually

Existential overhead is cognitive load from life circumstances that has nothing to do with your work tasks. Tonianne DeMaria and I first wrote about it way back in 2009, when we were preparing to write Personal Kanban. Every year, it gets worse. Since 2016, it has become debilitating.

Existential Overhead isn’t on your to-do list. It’s not a project you’re managing. But it’s consuming your mental capacity 24/7. It is the stuff that keeps you awake at night. It’s the moments you find yourself looking at the screen, fingers not moving, arguing with relatives that aren’t even there.

It can look like so many things:

* Your parent’s health declining (constant background worry about whether to move them to care facilities, whether you’re abandoning them, whether the diagnosis is real)

* Financial instability (rent going up, unexpected medical bill, job market feeling fragile, wondering if you’ll have to move back with family)

* Your own health crisis (managing symptoms, attending appointments, processing the diagnosis, wondering if you’re really okay)

* Grief or loss (someone’s died, your brain keeps forgetting they’re gone, you reach for your phone to text them)

* Caregiving (your kid is struggling at school, your partner is going through something, you’re the emotional support for someone in crisis)

* Relationship breakdown (the marriage is failing, you’re figuring out how to tell people, you’re processing the end of a partnership)

* Trauma being triggered (something in the news, something in the workplace, something small that brings the whole thing back)

None of this shows up on a kanban board. None of this is listed in project management tools. This isn’t going to be part of your huddle. But all of it is consuming cognitive capacity. It’s consuming you.

People are Idiots about This Stuff

We all think existential overhead is a personal problem that needs a personal solution. Books are written about it. HR has a counselor so you don’t bother the team. But more often than not, we hide it, bury it, avoid it…and then pay for it when performance suffers or we’re “just not fun to be around anymore.”

So our fixes are all focused on avoidance:

* Better time management (doesn’t help when your parent is declining)

* Meditation apps (won’t fix financial terror)

* Mental health days (one day off won’t heal grief…and if you own your own company, mental health days are their own terror)

* Therapy (valuable, but doesn’t solve the underlying crisis)

* Productivity hacks (don’t work when your brain is partially offline)

These aren’t bad things, in fact most of them are recommended, but in this case they’re treating the symptom while ignoring the real need.

Which is…when people are under stress, they are processing that stress. That means less time to process work. Piling on work, piles on stress, and everyone suffers.

The Data Is Sorta Clearish

Toni and I don’t have perfect research on existential overhead specifically. But we have plenty of research on related problems:

On stress and capacity: Chronic stress impairs decision-making, increases errors, and reduces working memory function. When someone is managing serious life stress, their cognitive capacity genuinely is reduced. This isn’t opinion or laziness—it’s neurobiology.

On burnout: Over 80% of workers reported risk of burnout in 2024. Most of those people are dealing with compounding stress: life stress + work stress + pretending they’re fine = breakdown.

On turnover: The number one reason people leave jobs isn’t salary or title. It’s feeling unsupported during crisis. When someone is managing existential overhead and their organization responds with more pressure instead of flexibility, they leave.

«GOOD THING HERE» On performance: We’ve repeatedly seen that when teams acknowledge capacity changes (people are on fire some days, not so much others) and build flexibility (they see that variation and plan for it), they perform better over time. Not because people work less, but because the teams operates in reality instead of fantasy. The team pulls the right work at the right time with people that can actually complete it.

Why Ignoring Existential Overhead Destroys Team Performance

When teams operate as if everyone has unlimited capacity all the time, something has to give.

A Quick Blueprint for Building Slack for Human Reality

HUMANE DISCLAIMER: I really don’t want to call this a blueprint, but, frankly, it’s also been a hard few days here and I can’t come up with a better word right now. But what this is .. is a list of things to think about. You have the ability to care about yourself and others and, when you do that, make work, people’s lives, and the product better. These lists are some pointers, but, seriously, you will have to think about this. I mean, “WHAT IS YOUR CAPACITY” every day is not going to help anyone. Knowing how people are doing…that is helpful. So, having said that….

1. Normalize the Conversation About Capacity

* Make it standard practice to talk about available capacity.

* In planning meetings: “What’s realistic for everyone this month?”

* In stand-ups: “Anything affecting capacity I should know about?”

* In retrospectives: “When were we working outside our actual capacity?”

* This treats capacity as subject to variation like anything. It doesn’t shame people into or out of acting. It is just being professional.

2. Create Multiple Ways to Signal Reduced Capacity

Not everyone wants to talk to their manager. Not everyone trusts HR. People have different comfort levels with disclosure.

Give people options:

* Anonymous capacity flags

* Peer-to-peer conversations

* Flexible work arrangements that don’t require explanation

* Team agreements that normalize asking for support

* One-on-ones focused on “what do you need right now”

3. Plan With Actual Capacity, Not Optimistic Capacity

Most project planning assumes everyone has full capacity all the time.

Realistic planning assumes:

* Some people will be managing life circumstances

* Some sprints will hit unexpected crises (they always do)

* Sustainable work requires buffer capacity

* That your cycle time, throughput, or other metrics have variation for a reason.

Why This Matters Now

In 2024, over 80% of workers reported risk of burnout. That’s not because people got lazy. That’s because life stress is compounding with work stress in systems that refuse to acknowledge either.

We know how to build organizations that work with human reality. We’re just choosing not to.

The teams that will thrive in the next decade aren’t the ones pushing hardest. They’re the ones that acknowledge human complexity and build systems flexible enough to work with it.

That’s not soft. That’s strategic.

Because when you ignore existential overhead, you don’t make people more productive. You make them fragile. And fragile teams break.

The question isn’t whether your team is dealing with existential overhead. Someone is. The question is whether they feel safe enough to tell you.

If the answer is no, you’re running on borrowed time.

CTAs FTW!

* Join us for the workshop or the webinar. We’ll go deep on your actual limits, help build visuals that work for you personally, and create boundaries that work. Spend some time with us: Free Webinar | Deep Dive See Your Work-shop

* Read the full Personal Kanban book to understand the humanity behind the practice.

* Take the Personal Kanban class on Modus Institute

* Work with Jim and Toni for personalized guidance implementing visibility in your specific situation.

Like and subscribe and all that stuff. But … really, everyone is running way above capacity and it’s hurting us all. So, please … opt out of that pain.

Most leaders, most people, believe that transparency creates accountability. The truth is the other way around, hiding work creates the need for accountability.

When you can’t see your work, your brain stops processing it. Your team stops self-organizing. Your leaders stop leading.

When this happens, everyone starts interrogating. And worst of all, you start blaming yourself and others for failures.

The exhaustion you feel, confusion you are enduring, and constant interruptions you are experiencing aren’t personal failures. They aren’t accountability. They’re signals of invisible work.

As leaders, team members, and just us…we need to understand that we’re creating these problems simply by not understanding what is really going on.

Your Brain Wasn’t Built For This

Your brain is not a filing cabinet. It’s a processor.

Your working memory can hold about 7-9 active items. Most of us are trying to actively hold 30, 50, or 100 invisible commitments in our heads simultaneously. Your brain literally cannot do this. So, it does what it can: it keeps checking in with itself. “Did I forget that? What about this? Is that deadline today? Who is most upset with me right now?“

All day. Every day.

That’s your brain. In your head. The one you use for everything. And right now a lot of your mental capacity is gone before you even start working. Your brain is just trying to remember, to keep up with, what you’re supposed to be doing.

This isn’t your fault, and it’s not “their” fault. It’s that you haven’t set up a way to easily find out what is going on.

Jim and Tonianne create Humane Work which is reader-supported. If you are getting value from this, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.

You Cannot Improve What You Cannot See

Toni and I have said many times that you cannot improve what you cannot see. We are all too busy to let others know what we are doing, we rely on late-to-the-game status meetings or huddles to make up for this. But most of our work is hidden, and we are doing so much of it that we forget. End up under-reporting and everything things (1) not much is actually happen and (2) that things take less effort to complete than they really do.

Regardless of if you are management or subjected to it, there is a universal painful passion play I see everywhere I go. Management cannot know what they cannot see. So they ask constantly. “Where are we on this?” “What’s the status?” Now the “worker” is doing the work PLUS constantly reporting on the work. Neither gets full attention. Now, think of how many people are stakeholders in any task or project. They are also asking. Over and Over again. Tons of overhead, just answering the question, “What are ya doin’...?”

Deming will tell you this is 85% system problem and 15% individual problem. Toni and I will tell you… when the system is invisible, you blame people 100% of the time. (You have no alternative.)

Deming’s insight essentially is “Show me a burned-out worker, and I will show you a worker operating in an invisible system.“

Making work visible isn’t soft. It’s the fundamental act of management competence.

Invisibility Destroys What You Value

If you value deep work, you should be terrified of invisibility.

Deep work requires focus. It requires the ability to work together or alone without interruption (yes, you can deeply work with other people). Invisible work requires constant additional and unnecessary communication: “What are you working on?” “Can you give me an update?”

When your work is invisible, someone must interrupt you to “see” where you are at. That’s 2-3 hours a day in communication that only exists because no one can see the work.

When we’ve set up kanban and obeyas for teams, they report significantly fewer interruptions. Depending on the work, they’ve gained back over half the work day. Context switching, fewer meetings, and knowing where information is (and actually finding it there) really does pay off. People’s focus and output increase dramatically. Less surprisingly, they also report feeling LESS watched and less stressed.

Why? Because visibility removes the need for constant checking.

A Permission Slip to be Professional

Making work visible is an act of professional vulnerability.

You’re saying: “This is what I’m doing. This is what I have capacity for. This is what’s blocking me.”

Shame loves invisibility. When work is hidden, even from yourself, shame has a perfect place to grow.

Shame, guilt, imposter syndrome, learned helplessness, self-doubt… the list gets really long.

High performers don’t carry everything in their heads. They externalize. They get it out so their brain can do what it was designed to do: think clearly.

You are not weak for needing to see your work. You’re human. You are professional.

The Board Makes It Possible

This isn’t complicated.

You don’t need software (but you might want to try out KanbanZone anyway, it’s what I use in the video). You don’t need certification. You don’t need budget approval. You need to appreciate what is actually weighing you down.

Write down what you’re working on. Organize it into three columns: OPTIONS | DOING | DONE.

That immediate organization, even just that simple, breaks out your work so you can appreciate your overload. And then…

What Happens when you DO see it?

You see capacity. That pile in DOING is likely exceeding your real capacity, but the discomfort when you see 10 things there? That’s your brain saying, “I’d like to adjust this, please.”

You see potential. That pile in OPTIONS is what you’re promising to do when capacity opens up. Here your brain might be saying, “Oh, I have promised too much, to too many people, in too short a time.” Your brain might also say, “I’d much rather do these promises than those promises.”

You see patterns. The same types of issues keep blocking you. When patterns are visible, you can start improving them. Your increasingly chatty brain asks, “What can I do to make my work be smoother?”

You see progress. Every time you move something to DONE, your brain gets a hit of completion. The more visible the completion, the stronger the reward. Your brain is back again, “When do I need to work with other people to avoid interruptions and make decisions faster so I have more time to focus?”

You see what’s actually blocking progress, completion, and revenue. For solopreneurs (for all of us, really), this is shocking: 60% of time in busywork, 40% in revenue work (if you are lucky). And here, your brain is, not surprisingly asking the MONEY question, “What is the most important thing for me to be doing right now?”

Our Professional Identity

Personally, I prefer to be happy with myself.

I will become overloaded and lose track of work from time to time. When this happens, I do what I said above, I get out post its and write down everything that’s going on. Then, I work with that reality. Reality is scary when you can’t see it. It’s generally manageable, even if it is annoying, when you can see it.

So, identity…we might start by making work visible to be more productive. That’s fine. But there’s a thing here where when we change our actions, we change our self-perception. That leads to behavior changes.

Every sticky note you move from DOING to DONE becomes evidence. Evidence of what? Evidence of who you ARE.

“I am the kind of person who finishes things.”“I am the kind of person who knows their limits.”“I am the kind of person who makes clear commitments.”

You don’t become productive by making work visible. You become a producer.

Productivity is a behavior. “I am told to do lots of whatever.”

A producer is an identity. “I make things.”

Behaviors are an outcome, derived and fragile. Identity is more durable. Once you see evidence that you’re the kind of person who finishes, who leads, who creates clarity…that becomes who you are.

Value Props for People, Teams, Leaders (leaders are also people… and team members)

Once work is visible:

You can finally answer: “What’s my actual capacity?”

You can finally lead without micromanaging, because the work speaks for itself.

You can finally focus deeply, because the mental noise stops.

You can finally say no, because you can see your yes pile.

You can finally stop blaming yourself, because you can see the system.

SOMETHING TO DO! A 15-Minute Experiment

I’m saying this again down here, in case I didn’t lean on it harder above or in case you are using an AI to summarize this and it didn’t catch it the first time….

Do this today:

* Pick ONE area of work

* Write each task on a sticky note

* Put them on a wall: OPTIONS | DOING | DONE

* Stop. Just look at it. Find the right thing to do right now.

What do you see that you didn’t see before?

Do this once, then look at it whenever you finish something. You’ll see things, know things, be able to communicate things about your capacity, patterns, and possibilities that you couldn’t before.

CTAs FTW!

* Join us for the workshop or the webinar. We’ll go deep on your actual limits, help build visuals that work for you personally, and create boundaries that work. Spend some time with us: Free Webinar | Deep Dive See Your Work-shop

* Read the full Personal Kanban book to understand the humanity behind the practice.

* Take the Personal Kanban class on Modus Institute

* Work with Jim and Toni for personalized guidance implementing visibility in your specific situation.

Like and subscribe and all that stuff. But … really, everyone is running way above capacity and it’s hurting us all. So, please … opt out of that pain.

The image above is better explained in the video, it’s long so very hard to read here. But, I always want these videos to come with a letter. A write up.

The flow chart shows a breakdown in relationships due to normal reactions to cranky behavior. We have three actors, Red, Green, Blue. Three people who work together and, because they do, need to pay attention to each other even when people aren’t really up for being social.

Sometimes you have a bad day. I’ve been “Red” many times. A morning when everything broke. Coffee spills. Bad news. My mood shattered. I showed up to Green’s desk with frustration wrapped around a request, demanding (not asking) what I needed because everything sucked.

Or I’ve been Green, absorbing someone else’s stress like a sponge. Then complaining to others. And somehow, venting didn’t help me “get over it”, it convinced me that Red was a problem. Not a person needing help, but a problem.

Or I’ve been blue… getting that third-party stress from someone complaining about someone else, making me think less of both of them.

So this is also learned helplessness. But it’s not imposed on us from outside or a boss or power. We create it for each other, one interaction at a time.

Jim Benson and Tonianne DeMaria write Humane Work with reader-support. Help keep us going for the cup of coffee price of becoming a paid subscriber.

What Do You Need?

Watch the video. Red’s fractured mood arrives at Green’s desk (or slack or zoom or whatever). At this point, we have a choice. We as the person receiving the frustrated person, have a choice. We choose to absorb the stress and pass it along, and the cycle plays out. Infecting Blue with second hand toxicity. Blue never sees Red. Blue only sees Green’s complaint.

But what if Green pauses?

What if, instead of reflecting frustration back, Green asks: How can I help? Not transactionally. Actually. Green doesn’t absorb the stress. Green breaks the cycle. Red gets what they need. Green stays human. Blue never hears the warning. The cascade stops.

It won’t solve everything. But it stops the compounding.

What Do You Need?

People are more stressed now than ten years ago. That’s observable. The uncertainty feels relentless because it is systemic, embedded in popular culture, how we work, how we communicate. We can’t control the stress arriving at Red’s door.

But we can control what we do when stressed Red shows up at our desk.

This is where humane work begins. Not in frameworks or org charts, but in the moment when someone approaches you fractured, and you choose presence over transaction. When you ask, “What do you need?” and actually listen.

What Do You Need?

I know you see yourself in this. The roles are interchangeable. But our reactions, are changeable.

The next time this happens, regardless of where you are in the cycle, pause. Ask the question. Actually listen.

Because that’s how we break it. Not through grand declarations, but through the small, repeated choice to turn toward someone else with genuine care.

The rest will follow.

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Leadership books love to talk about people being our greatest asset. We all do.

Unfortunately, workplace stress costs nearly a trillion dollars a year in the US. $917 billion annually. Toxicity costs money.

Not a wellness issue.

A strategic failure.

Right now, rather than dealing with the issue, we are laying people off. Removing institutional knowledge, because we’ve simply given up.

Here’s what $917 billion looks like in a body:

It’s 3pm. You’ve context-switched all afternoon. Your brain is fog. Your shoulders are up around your ears. You can’t remember what you were doing at 2pm or why it mattered.

You pour another coffee and check your calendar: five more meetings before 5pm.

Your stomach hurts. You haven’t eaten lunch. You think about lunch the way you think about retirement…theoretical, not happening today.

By 5pm, you’re supposed to “transition to personal time.” Instead, you’re answering Slack while making dinner. Your partner asks about your day. You realize you have no memory of it. Just blur. But they want details.

This is what drag feels like in a body.

Not theoretical. Not economic.

Physical.

And your company is paying $16 billion annually in healthcare costs related to this feeling.

I know, because I live it too.

Why Drag Persists

Drag is anything that slows you or interrupts you from getting your work done.

It doesn’t happen randomly. It’s created by systems that incentivize the wrong things.

If your performance metric is “number of tickets moved,” managers start more projects than can finish. WIP explodes. Context-switching becomes default. Drag multiplies.

When budget is allocated upfront (use it or lose it), teams keep and multiple work “in progress” to justify expenses. Nothing finishes. Nothing delivers value. Drag becomes the system’s survival mechanism.

When career advancement rewards “looking busy,” people manage impressions instead of managing work. Status becomes performance.

These aren’t individual failings.

These are system designs your company has built that create, reward, and underwrite drag.

The fix isn’t motivational.

It’s architectural. You (leadership, middle management, team member) have to change what gets measured, what gets rewarded, what gets visible.

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Three Sources of Drag and How to Reverse Them

Drag Source 1: Context Demolition

Your desk. 2:47pm. You’re in deep focus, really in it, that place where thought flows and ideas connect.

Slack pings. Email notification. A question in chat.

You surface. Check messages. Fix something. Try to get back.

But your brain won’t go back. That thread is broken. Fifteen minutes rebuilding context, and another interruption lands.

Context-switching costs 40% of productive capacity or more because your brain can’t rebuild focus as fast as interruptions arrive. I’m saying or more because while studies show between 30 and 50%, I see people literally taken off line for hours by interruptions that result in little completion, but a lot of undocumented, uncoordinated conversation that very often results in nothing more than being asked the same questions again the next day.

When this happens, participation breaks down. Engineers stop suggesting improvements. Designer who stops seeing new opportunities. Team culture settles into “just get through it.”

A fix: Build and See Your Focus

A simple Kanban board that shows your workflow and has limits to force focusing and finishing. A “Focus” column signals deep-work time which includes concentration bubbles where interruptions are off-limits.

Limits in what you are doing now. Stop screwing around with 8 things at once. Take something, focus on it and finish it. Make it visible. Force choices.

Visual. Measurable. Immediate.

Drag Source 2: The Illusion of Progress

We were working with a major bank that was overloaded with bugs, customer complaints, and rework.

Every request was poorly defined. Every deadline arbitrary. Every developer overloaded. Nothing finished. Status meetings multiplied. Reports got longer. Throughput flatlined.

Everything that was “in progress” now, had been done a few weeks before. Poor quality meant more rework meant more work in progress with meant more bugs which meant even more rework.

The overload was self perpetuating, stressed workers made stressed product.

The business side had no idea. They just knew they needed things done. They just kept submitting requests. IT kept accepting them, because they had no choice. Both sides blamed each other.

A fix: What is your work to you?

So we did something simple: made the impact of overload visible.

Not just the work, we had the people in IT, their developers, mark every completed task with how they felt about their product. Great, good, okay, not so good, terrible… The better they felt, the higher the quality. And we started to see how overload made not-so-good or terrible work product and how, when we took time to focus and finish, finish meant good or great.

Collaboration replaced blame.

Drag dissolved.

People started truly finishing things. The act of completion stopped being just moving a card from “In Progress” to “Done”, but became an actual moment of realized success.

Drag Source 3: Perverse Incentives

A mid-size tech company when a senior leader I’d been mapping systems with opening his calendar. It was triple booked all day every day.

I laughed.

She said slowly. “Every day is like this. There’s just too much that needs my attention.”

Pause.

I asked, “What if you didn’t? What if you trusted people to do the work with out you?”

He was shocked to find that, as he put it, “every time I stop doing something, I actually get more power.”

What he was saying was that everytime he trusted others, they trusted him more. They weren’t afraid of his Monday morning quarterbacking.

Before that, they wouldn’t make decisions without him. If they were in the 2 meetings during his triple booking that he couldn’t attend, they would simply wait their turn.

$777.9B is the dollar figure businesses spend on employee disengagement. I can’t help but think that this company, with him missing 2/3 of all meetings where he was required to be part of the decision, was losing a lot … a lot … of money.

But the real cost is watching talented people slowly stop caring while you’re paying their salary. When they are sitting there, unable to act, they learn to not act.

You’re paying full salary for diminished output.

The ROI Is Immediate and Concrete

At a major construction company with projects worth billions. Their profit margins? Under 2%.

They can’t afford drag.

When they implemented visual management: Kanban boards, collaborative planning, WIP limits, no yelling in the trailer….

The result? Faster delivery. Fewer surprises. Calmer teams. Better retention.

Not because they got soft.

Because they eliminated drag and built flow.

At a major bank, IT was drowning. We visualized their work. Suddenly, non-IT colleagues could see that IT was the constraint. Collaboration became obvious. Drag dissolved. Flow returned. Throughput increased. Stress dropped.

The pattern repeats: visibility → accountability → behavior change → flow → performance.

Not a motivational speaker’s promise.

A systems design outcome.

Why This Matters Right Now

Companies that reduce stress through visual management don’t just have happier employees.

They have:

* Faster delivery cycles

* Lower turnover

* Higher profit margins

* Better decision-making (stress impairs judgment)

* More innovation (people have mental capacity for improvement)

* Sustainable competitive advantage

The business case isn’t “let’s be nice because it’s right.”

The business case is “let’s be nice because everything else is leaving money on the table.”

Visual management doesn’t create overhead—it eliminates drag.

Every bottleneck you spot early saves rework.

Every WIP limit you enforce prevents cascading failure.

Every retrospective you run turns drag into flow.

The Choice Is Simple

You can keep glorifying burnout. Keep measuring productivity by hours worked. Keep pretending stress is an individual problem instead of a system design failure.

Or you can build systems that:

* Make work visible

* Limit work-in-progress

* Enable real collaboration

* Create space for recovery

* Connect daily work to meaningful purpose

The choice isn’t between productivity and humanity.

The choice is between sustainable flow and expensive, exhausting drag.

Humane work isn’t the compassionate alternative to business success.

It’s the only path to it.

Build systems that let people act with confidence.

Make work visible.

Limit WIP.

Retrospect relentlessly.

Remove drag.

Build flow.

And watch stress—and its staggering costs—evaporate.

For more of what we do, check out our calendar of events, classes at Modus Institute, or call us to work with us directly.

Nobody shows up to work and says, “I’m a Scrum Master” or “I’m a Product Owner.” with anything other than fear and imposter syndrome. Strict roles just aren’t how work actually works. They are a convenient fiction. False certainty. Self-defeating.

Sure, you can give people those titles. You can write job descriptions. You can put org chart boxes around names. But on any given day, hell, in any given hour, you’re playing five or six different roles simultaneously, not because someone told you to, but because the work demands it.

Or because you’re inspired. Or because you notice something nobody else sees. Or because that’s just how you showed up today.

It’s easier for organization to call these roles. They’re archetypes. They’re patterns. They’re mindsets that create the ability for teams to operate together. When you make one person a role and only that role can provide a function, that person is an instant bottleneck.

And when you start seeing patterns of professional action instead of enforcing rigid job descriptions, you get fluidity. People step up when they’re needed, step back when they’re not, and the team moves like water instead of grinding like gears.

Flow requires fluidity…go figure.

So, 8 Archetypes then…Fêter le Vague

Here are 8 archetypes. They are rough, they are useful, they are incomplete. They are … necessary to get us out of the ruts in which we find ourselves, waiting … waiting … for permission, for information, for action. These are 8 archetypes for obeya, for kanban, for waterfall, for doing anything that people do. These are traits people have, no person is one archetype, all people are mixtures at different times.

1. The Host: Reading the Room

The Obeya Association calls this the “Obeya Host”. his is the person who tends to facilitate meetings, maintain psychological safety, and handle group dynamics.

Mindset: “How is everyone actually doing right now?”Interaction: Notices who’s speaking and who’s silent, addresses tension before it festersFocus: Social dynamics and psychological safetyBehaviors: Adjusts meeting formats when they get stale, checks in with quiet voices, names uncomfortable truths

The Builder: Curating the Space

Also from the Obeya Association. This is the person curating content and curating space.

Mindset: “What information do we need visible right now?”Interaction: Designs spaces so the right visualizations reach the right people at the right timeFocus: Information architecture and visual systemsBehaviors: Updates boards, creates new visual controls, rearranges physical/digital spaces to improve flow

The Sensemaker: Navigating Complexity

This is the person who notices when things get complex, and then helps guide the team through that complexity.

Mindset: “This is actually complex. We need to experiment.”Interaction: Helps teams recognize when they’re facing genuine complexity versus merely complicated problemsFocus: Structured thinking about messy situationsBehaviors: Proposes experiments, designs small tests, helps teams learn from ambiguity without premature conclusions

The Weaver: Connecting the Threads

We talk all the time about how teams need to understand corporate strategy, project direction, and interrelationships with other teams. The Weaver naturally does this.

Mindset: “How does this connect to everything else?”Interaction: Links daily decisions back to strategic direction and other teams’ workFocus: Context and alignment across boundariesBehaviors: References the X Matrix or strategic goals, talks to other teams, connects dots others miss

The Processor: Doing the Deep Work

The Processor is about deep thinking and having direct impact on how we visualize our work.

Mindset: “Let me think this through completely.”Interaction: Takes complex information and transforms it into clear, actionable visualsFocus: Cognitive heavy lifting that makes collaboration possibleBehaviors: Builds detailed visual systems, works independently on complex analysis, creates clarity from chaos

The Witness: The Long Payoff

This one’s subtle, and we get it wrong constantly. The Witness is quiet, reflective, but sees patterns nobody else notices.

Mindset: “I’m watching everything, processing deeply.”Interaction: Mostly observes, but speaks up at critical moments with pattern observationsFocus: Long-term pattern recognition across timeBehaviors: Sits quietly in meetings, does work alongside others, occasionally delivers devastating insights that shift everything

We tend to undervalue these people because they don’t participate “enough.” We have a bias toward action, so we focus on the people talking all the time and discount the people who are helpful yet quiet.

But the Witness is the long payoff, high return investment.

The Guardian: Noticing the Invisible

The Guardian notices when people are running out of energy. When someone’s getting uncomfortable. When something in the environment needs adjustment.

Mindset: “Is everyone really okay?”Interaction: Watches for burnout, discomfort, and environmental issues that affect team healthFocus: The human side of work between the meetingsBehaviors: Checks in privately with struggling team members, suggests breaks, notices subtle morale shifts, adjusts environment before problems escalate

The Navigator: Holding Course

The Navigator is always connecting plans to actions and actions to consequences.

Mindset: “Where are we, and where did we say we were going?”Interaction: Keeps team honest about commitments while clear-eyed about when circumstances demand course correctionFocus: Operational awareness and stakeholder communicationBehaviors: Tracks what was planned versus what’s happening, notices when things change, communicates shifts to stakeholders

Fluidity Over Rigidity

When you have all eight of these archetypes present, they aren’t assigned roles they’re just how people naturally respond to information, work, and change. When people get that their diversity is a strength for the team you get fluidity….you get them acting in needed and appropriate ways at appropriate times.

Nobody has to be locked into a single role. Everyone can step up and embody what the team needs in that moment.

The work demands a host? Someone hosts. The work demands sensemaking? Someone makes sense. The work demands someone to notice patterns? The Witness speaks up.

You can be a Guardian and a Host and a Witness and a Processor all at the same time, depending on what the moment demands.

After watching teams for decades now, I’ve seen a million project managers and maybe 100,000 of them had that title. People just did what was needed, or, if they couldn’t the team suffered. This is how successful teams actually operate. Through dynamic pattern recognition and fluid response (This is a fancy way of saying the see things that need to be done and they do them without fear or hesitation).

These eight archetypes give teams the ability to act with confidence because everyone knows: these patterns exist, these needs emerge, and collectively we can meet them.

Not because someone’s job description says so.

Because the work demands it, and we’re paying attention.

Want to dive deeper into Obeya and visual management? Check out our Modus Institute calendar for upcoming workshops on building teams that adapt instead of fracture.

Why Stress Exists—And What It’s Telling You

Stress is a signal. It’s your brain telling you that how you are working is broken. When you don’t know what to do next, when work arrives undefined, when people aren’t available, when tasks are un-completable, when you’re forced to do work that obviously doesn’t need doing, when you are in more meetings than production, when you face toxicity and aggression…all of these create stress. They are drag, they are bottlenecks, they are a pain. ​

Humane Work is reader-supported. Jim and Toni are really pouring their hearts into this. Keep it going and join the conversation by becoming a paid subscriber.

Work should arrive defined and completable. If it doesn’t, you should have a system to explore, define and complete it. If there’s complexity, you should have a way to handle that complexity. That’s what flow is: not smooth, but predictable. Your river might have rapids and whirlpools, but you know the lay of the land. You understand how work moves through the system. When things are unexpected (truly unexpected, not just unplanned) that creates drag. That’s when you lose the ability to focus and finish.​

So how do you visualize stress? How do you define flow, identify drag, and actually do something about it? You build a board that makes the invisible visible.

Stress Is a Breakdown in How You Work

Here’s what research tells us: Stress isn’t about working hard, working hard can be pretty fun actually, but stress is more about working blind. When you can’t predict what’s coming, when you can’t control your inputs, when feedback is absent or delayed, your brain enters a state of chronic vigilance. You’re always on alert, never at rest.​

When you make work visible, categorize it by difficulty, and establish clear time horizons, you restore predictability. You create “perceived control”, the feeling (in this case actually built into the board) that you have agency over your work. Perceived control is one of the strongest predictors of reduced stress and increased performance.​

Flow requires three things: clear goals, immediate feedback, and a balance between challenge and skill. Today’s Kanban board gives you all three. It shows you what’s next (clear goals), where things are stuck (immediate feedback), and which work is easy versus difficult (challenge/skill balance).

Seeing, Finding, and Maintaining Flow

The “Finding Flow” board is a commitment device. It makes promises visible, converts vague intent into structured action, and turns surprises into manageable challenges.

Today’s board has three planning horizons: This Week, Next Week, After Next Week. Before that, work sits in “Ready for Planning,” where teams categorize tasks as Easy (fully defined, no surprises) or Difficult (complex, politically sensitive, requires unavailable people). From there, work flows through What (re-defining the work), Doing (solo), Collaborating (paired/team focus), Review, and finally the Afterburner (continuous improvement). See the video for a lot more detail.

Three Core Themes

Theme 1: Plan Before You Pull

You can’t just grab work and start. That’s how you get blindsided by your own blindness. Before pulling anything into Doing, teams gather and plan collaboratively. They look at upcoming work and ask:

* Is this fully defined? (Easy)

* Or will there be surprises? (Difficult)

Knowing up front that a task is Difficult means you pay more attention to it. You schedule extra time, involve the right people early, and don’t assume it’ll “just work out.” This categorization is about understanding what you’re getting into.​

Then, you set time horizons: This Week, Next Week, After Next Week. Why three buckets? Because people need to know when you’ll deliver. “Sometime in the next few weeks” creates anxiety and constant unnecessary check-ins. Unnecessary check-ins are more work. But when you say, “This is happening next week,” people relax and leave you alone to work.​ Setting expectations is important. Keeping them means people will trust you in the future.

WIP limits apply here too: maybe you only do two Difficult things per week, filling the rest with Easy work. That’s sustainable. That’s realistic. That’s how you avoid overload before it starts.

Theme 2: Define in the Flow, Not Just at the Start

Here’s where most teams screw up: they plan once, then assume the plan is perfect. But the moment you stop planning, you start drifting and drift becomes the plan.

So the board has a What column, a space to define work mid-flow. You pull a task, realize it’s not as clear as you thought, and move it to What to figure it out. Maybe it’s an “Easy” task that turned out to be complex. Maybe it’s a Difficult task that needs decomposition. Either way, you pause to plan again before continuing.​

This isn’t failure, it’s adaptive intelligence. Real work is messy. The goal isn’t to eliminate surprises; it’s to have a system for handling them when they appear.​

Theme 3: Collaboration Creates Concentration Bubbles

Solo work is interruptible. Collaborative work is not. When you work alone, anyone can Slack you, tap your shoulder, pull you into a meeting. But when you’re collaborating, truly focused with another person or team, you’re in a concentration bubble. Interruptions drop. Focus intensifies. Work accelerates.​

That’s why the board has separate columns for Doing (solo) and Collaborating. It signals to others: “These people are unavailable right now becuse they’re deep in shared focus.” It also reminds you to protect that time. Collaboration isn’t just “working together” it’s structured, uninterrupted co-creation.​

And when work moves to Review, it’s clear: someone else has the ball. You’re waiting, not stuck. That visibility prevents the anxiety of “Did I forget something?” and the endless “Where’s my thing?” requests.

Individual Value: Reduce Your Stress by Making Promises Visible

* Categorize before you commit: Is this Easy or Difficult? Knowing up front protects you from surprise stress.

* Use time horizons to set boundaries: “I’ll get to this next week” is a promise—and it stops the daily “Is it done yet?” interruptions.

* Move to What when needed: Don’t power through confusion. Pause, define, then proceed. Clarity reduces stress more than speed.

* Build Trust: Make promises you can keep and people will know you can keep your promises.​

Project Manager: Build Predictability Into the System

* Facilitate collaborative planning: Don’t let individuals plan alone. Bring the team together to identify Easy vs. Difficult work and set realistic time horizons.​

* Enforce WIP limits on Difficult work: Cap how many complex tasks the team takes on per week. Overloading Difficult work is a recipe for burnout.​

* Use the Afterburner religiously: Every completed task gets a 60-second retro: What went well? What slowed us down? What will we do differently? Patterns emerge. Systems improve.​

Leadership: Flow Is Money, Flow Is Retention, Flow Is Strategy

* Measure predictability, not just velocity: Can teams forecast when work will finish? That’s the real metric of health.​

* Protect collaboration time: If your best work happens in Collaborating, then interruptions during collaboration are theft. Design systems that respect focus.​

* Celebrate continuous improvement: Every Afterburner insight that becomes a process change is ROI. Flow improvements compound.​

Conclusion

Stress is a signal that the system is broken. Visualization is how you fix it. When you plan work collaboratively, categorize by difficulty, set time horizons, and continuously improve through retrospectives, you design stress out of the system.

Next Episode: We’ll make the business case for humane work—why companies that invest in flow and reduce stress outperform those that glorify burnout.

Why We Treat Ourselves Like Nobodies

We manage work like it’s just generic toil. Work becomes anti-human, a pile of tasks handed down by nobody and received as nobody. No context. No ownership. Just something to do.

No wonder people don’t identify with their work, don’t want to engage in continuous improvement, and don’t feel motivated to make things better. Then we’re shocked when morale tanks and quality slides.

The world is full of enough demoralizing nonsense. We don’t need to add more by building systems that ignore the human at the center of the work. We not only need to do this, it needs to be how we design our kanban or any other way we take on our work.

So ask! Wonder! PONDER!!! When you define (and see) who you are and what you want, how does it change how you act? How does it change how you take on tasks, how you say yes with conditions, or how you explain what you can’t do right now?

I keep saying things about using these tools to say no to work. Any can say no, and regardless of how many tools you have people will get tired of hearing it. So, forget saying no for the moment and figure out how to say yes intelligently…with a reason, with a timeline, with clarity. And if that timeline or those reasons are too difficult, then you have a conversation.​

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You Don’t Value Yourself as a Stakeholder

We humans don’t prioritize things that help us grow because we don’t value ourselves as stakeholders in our own lives. We put everyone else’s urgencies ahead of our own development. Growth gets shoved aside for “just one more task,” and then we wonder why we’re burned out, stuck, and resentful.​

Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s research on flow looks at why we get good work done in ways that don’t stress or hurt us. This doesn’t mean there’s no emergencies or unexpected, it means that we just handle them well. Flow is a state of optimal focus where we’re fully immersed, energized, and performing at our best. This requires a balance between challenge and skill, clear goals, and immediate feedback.

When we treat our own growth as optional, we never develop the skills needed to handle increasing challenges. We stay stuck in anxiety (challenge exceeds ability) or boredom (ability exceeds challenge). We never reach that place where work feels both effortless and meaningful. By refusing to invest in ourselves as stakeholders, we sabotage our own capacity for flow and with it, our ability to do work that matters and feels good while we are doing it

That’s not humane. And it’s completely fixable.​

Board done in KanbanZone (our Kanban Partner), Get 3 Months Free.

Today’s Kanban

Your Work, Your Life, Your Vision

The “My Work, My Life” board isn’t just another task tracker or vision board. We are solving a problem here of a gap between overload making you do many unrewarding things quickly, and you knowing exactly how you can get work done well in an appropriate amount of time.

The board starts with your personal vision, which frankly worries me because so many people say stupid things about personal visions. What we want here is your work to be in context of who you want to be. If it is not, your work will always be at odds with who you can be. That’s self-defeating and I am not a fan.

Personal Vision Panel (Left Side of Board)

Before you touch a single task, you declare your ground rules:

The bullet points here are examples. Not the answers….

What do I want to be?

What state to you want to be in at any point in time?

* Calm

* Informed

* Ready to help

Where do I want to be?

What is the environment you want to be in?

* Surrounded by thoughtful people

* In meaningful conversations

* Present in the work

How do I want to be?

How are you wanting to present yourself?

* Open-minded

* Patient

* Consistent

Why do I want to be this way?

Well…why?

* To build lasting relationships

* To actually improve things

* To grow, not just perform

When you write these down and put them on your board, something shifts. Suddenly, taking on a task that makes you not calm becomes visible self-sabotage. Working with a client who isn’t thoughtful becomes a values-conflict you can address. You’re not just reacting, you are structuring your work so you can be the most effective.

And yes, I know you won’t always have a choice. I know you will have crap pushed on you. Everyone has to do their taxes. ​

Work Context Lanes (Middle Section)

Work doesn’t arrive in neat categories. But you can contextualize it so you understand what you’re actually carrying:

Planned Work (Projects)

* The main work: strategic, committed, expected

* Example: “Design rebrand for key client”

Unexpected / Growth Work

* Half of these are surprises; half are things you need for your own development

* Critical insight: Growth work is urgent and important—not because someone’s waiting, but because you matter as a stakeholder

* Example: “Learn new AI tool” or “Respond to New Customer Request Quickly”

Administration

* Necessary but low-energy work

* Example: “Submit timesheet,” “Organize files”

The Doing Columns (Right Section)

Once work is contextualized, it flows through:

This board has three workflows centered around planned, unplanned, and crisis. Crises can come from any of the three context columns. We do want to see how much of our work flows through the planned and unplanned work and….

The Crisis section is its own set of triggers. Crises always trigger immediate action and retrospectives. If something was an emergency, you need to ask why and figure out how to prevent it next time. This turns reactive firefighting into proactive system improvement.​

Even non-crisis work can move to the Retro/Kaizen column if it didn’t go smoothly. The board becomes a learning system, not just a tracking system.​

Value for the Individual: Claim Stakeholder Status

* Anchor work to your vision: Before saying yes, check: Does this align with calm, informed, ready to help? If not, negotiate or decline.

* Prioritize your own growth: Move learning and development into “urgent/important”—because you are waiting for it, and you matter.​

* Use crises as data: Every emergency is a chance to learn and improve the system so it doesn’t happen again.​

Value for the Project Manager: Design for Agency

* Make vision visible for the team: Encourage everyone to define their personal ground rules and share them. Suddenly, task assignments become conversations about fit and alignment.​

* Track work by context, not just status: Planned vs. Unexpected vs. Crisis reveals patterns—and helps teams advocate for sustainable loads.​

* Turn crises into action: Build a culture where emergencies are quickly resolved, examined, and prevented.​

Value for Leadership: Build Systems That Value all Stakeholders

* Stop treating people like task robots: When individuals can articulate their values and align work accordingly, engagement skyrockets.​

* Measure team growth as a metric: Track how much time teams spend on development vs. firefighting. Growth is ROI, not a luxury.​

* Model the behavior: Share your own vision. Show that grounding work is a strategy.​

Conclusion

You’re not nobody. Your work isn’t random. And when you anchor every task to a clear vision of who you want to be, work stops feeling like an assault and starts feeling like progress. The “My Work, My Life” restores agency, builds meaning, and turns every crisis into a chance to get better.

Stop being nobody. Be somebody who chooses their work, their growth, and their future.

Next Episode: We’ll explore how visual management transforms abstract chaos into tangible, shared understanding—and why that changes everything.

Humans are driven by productivity, wanting to fill every minute with action. We’re wired to want to be useful, stay in motion, and prove our worth. We prove to ourselves, our colleagues, and our managers that we are useful. Multitasking promises that we can do more, faster, and please the managers and upper managers who are all demanding it. Job descriptions ask for multitasking, even though it’s been shown time and again the only thing multitasking does is multiply your tasks.

As Tonianne DeMaria and I wrote years ago in Personal Kanban, no matter how hard we try, we’re not designed to juggle flaming torches, let alone eight projects. Yet much of the praise in the modern workplace goes to the “master jugglers,” burning out in the pursuit of false efficiency.

Efficiency is not how many things you can show someone you did, it’s removing obstacles to doing the right thing at the right time.

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Science is stubborn. It just keeps looking at things, even when it finds things we don’t expect or are uncomfortable with.

In a Stanford study on multitasking, frequent multitaskers performed worse than their focused peers on every metric. They scored lower on the ability to pay attention, to remember what they did, and to filter distractions. They lost control of their time, working on multiple tasks at once, without taking time to plan or improve. When they multitasked, they increased their cognitive load, allowed distractions, and made errors more likely and completion less likely. Quality wasn’t even part of the conversation.​

It doesn’t matter if you’re a programmer, a project manager, or a CEO, if you do more work than you can handle, your performance drops. I’ve spoken with many CxOs who are frustrated that “no one want to work any more.” But when we’ve gone deep on just their workload, they see how much they leave unfinished or delegate with vague directives that they could have sworn (and do repeatedly swear are “quite clear”). It takes them a while to realize that their directives are deliverables and those deliverables were low quality. They were multitasking, feeling productive, creating mayhem.

The majority of “multitasking” is just frantic task-switching. This gives the illusion of productivity, which provides a false sense of security (I’m productive everything is fine). But in the end, we all fall prey to the Zeigarnik Effect, a psychological bear trap, which keeps unfinished business looping in our brains, adding more anxiety to the pile. Every task we start, we keep thinking about until its finished. Our brains only have so much space, and we break down our ability to process. We forget things, we rush things, we become testy, we start to avoid things.

We convince ourselves we’re busy, but the real outcome is overload and our teams, our companies pay the price in missed deadlines, quality slips, and employee churn. We individuals pay the price in stress, sick days, and less tolerance for literally everything around us.​

The Fix: Building a Board to Fix Overload

This series uses Personal Kanban as a tool to see work, align with team members and stakeholders, and calm our workloads. If you are unfamiliar with it, here is the book.

We’re going to start with the assumption that people don’t want crappy work done late with surprising changes. We further assume that we all, at every level, want people to do the right thing at the right time and to quickly note when our plans aren’t going to work.

So, in this board today we are going to focus not on priorities, not on limiting work in process, and not even on quality. We are simply going to make sure people know why we are doing what we are doing and when something important happens.

For You: Dismantling Multitasking Stress

* You see what people want from you. Both tasks and strategies. You see which goals each task supports, and you’re empowered to say, “if this is client relationship work, let’s include them now.” Suddenly, quality and partnership take precedence over frantic solo delivery.

* WIP limits and visible board congestion are conversation starters, not personal failures; they create context for realistic planning, self-advocacy, and ideas of how to make the strategies work.

* Agency is built in. Instead of being crushed by work you didn’t consent to, you can point to the board and have transparent conversations about what’s possible.

For the Project Manager: Delivery through Effectiveness

* Boards tie every backlog item to strategic focus, ensuring that it’s not just “next on the list,” but valuable to upper management, clients, and team.

* When too many tasks are in “Doing,” this form urges the team to collaborate, prioritize, or escalate before the flood causes quality to drop and shows people throughout the company what is happening and why. (You don’t have to come up with a slide deck apology.)

* Instead of defaulting to more status meetings, project managers (and everyone else) use the board as a lens for spotting where help is needed, and where throughput is about to stall.

Leadership: ROI and Strategy were Murdered by Multitasking … not any more

* Metrics show not just dumb-speed, but how smart-strategy is moving / evolving / succeeding. You see how real work (not just work units) is flowing.

* You can now participate as part of the company. Your own overload is lessened as projects stop having bad surprises, territory wars diminish, and in general, people start working with you and not waiting for corrective action.

* The whole company owns the relationships, the planning, and the strategy.

A Shared Mission Beyond Just the Board

In the video, Julie’s team learned that working in this way is about more than “throughput.” It is possible to build and maintain a culture of context, collaboration, and conversation. Instead of optimizing for doing more (productivity), the board and the people optimize for “doing more that matters” (effectiveness). When every ticket on the board tracks back to a real goal, and everyone can finish right.

Next Episode: We’ll unpack how overload forms feedback loops that sabotage us and what to do about it.

Continuous improvement is hard work and it isn’t just something you do .. and it is “done.” That’s part of what continuous means. It’s what Deming, Ohno, Goldratt, Shook .. everyone has warned us about. That we are engaged in continuous refinement, learning, and making things work better for the customer, the company, and the people doing the work.

This is always adjustment.

Kevin and Jesse deal with this every day in different ways. I always enjoy talking to them because they are truly thoughtful and always looking for ways to make work … work.

We walk about…

Visual Management as a Transformational Tool:How making work visible can fundamentally alter how teams operate and move from confusion and overload to transparency and shared understanding.

Navigating Transformation and Maintaining Progress:Progress is rarely permanent. Teams might reach new levels of collaboration or efficiency, only to risk backsliding over time. We talk strategies for sustaining these gains, emphasizing the importance of renewing focus and adapting as needs evolve.

Making Problems Tangible, Not Personal:You can’t understate the benefit of depersonalizing problems. Visual management allows teams to see issues objectively rather than associating them with individuals. This shift from personal blame to collective problem-solving reduces tension and fosters a sense of unity.

Fostering Participation and Shared Ownership:Involving everyone from leaders to frontline team members in shaping processes and solving problems is the only way to Create psychological safety and healthy feedback.

Behavioral and Cultural Barriers to Change:New tools and ideas can be difficult to adopt because people come to work every day with longstanding beliefs and behaviors. Addressing these behavioral barriers requires patience, empathy, and ongoing encouragement for new habits to take root.

Learned Helplessnesslearned help·less·ness | noun | /ˈlərnd ˈhelpləsnəs/

Learned helplessness is when people stop trying because they’ve been made to feel like nothing they do can change their situation.

At Modus Institute, we have a real problem with the term “learned helplessness.” Yes, learned helplessness is very real, but it is framed as “learned.” “Learned” suggests there’s an element of willingness involved, like people choose to give up. Like “quiet quitting” or “sitting this one out” or “checking out mentally.”

But when you’re trapped in toxic workplaces, command-and-control hierarchies, or environments where every attempt to act gets shut down, helplessness isn’t learned…it’s imposed.

And so what we’re really seeing is imposed isolation. People retreat because it’s their only rational response. For the individual, retreat is necessary for self-preservation. But the moment one person retreats, others follow. Soon the whole team grows distrustful and quiet. And momentum dies.

This isn’t learned helplessness. This is imposed isolation.

And isolation kills organizations from within.

The Fear Factory

Right now, we’re living through a painful and obvious period of manufactured isolation. Turn on the news, open social media, check your inbox, talk to a relative, stand in line at the store…and we hear division, fear, worry, concern.

All designed to make us feel small, threatened, and powerless. Fear rhetoric has become truth, or at least it’s become that which makes you doubt truth. To doubt your coworkers. To doubt the future.

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In this mire of doubt, groups we work with who are trying to build something meaningful, students learning to collaborate, clients attempting organizational change…all are having trouble with the most basic professional behaviors. Scheduling meetings becomes an ordeal. Building systems requires dozens of meetings (that are hard to schedule). The storming and forming stages of team development stretch on for months because the level of trust in society is at an all-time low. The communication breakdowns of the group, with people looking for accountability, become blame storms.

Storming becomes hurricane strength. Forming becomes a dreaded thanksgiving dinner. Norming becomes a bi-partisan bill. And performing simply slips away.

When everything feels like a threat, when every decision carries the weight of potentially catastrophic consequences, when leaders default to command-and-control because “somebody has to make the tough calls,” people do what makes sense: they stop taking initiative.

Doomscrolling Is Passive by Design

Doomscrolling isn’t an accident. It’s the natural result of systems designed to keep you consuming rather than creating. You scroll through endless feeds of problems you can’t solve, crises you can’t affect, disasters you can’t prevent. The algorithm rewards passivity. There are forces that win through lack of initiative. The longer you stay paralyzed by the feed, the more valuable you become.

This isn’t learned helplessness. This is strategic disempowerment.

The overwhelming narrative of command-and-control in popular media, political rhetoric, to the workplace… charlatans promise or even pronounce certainty in uncertain times, divide and conquer, and train people to wait for someone else to solve their problems.

Let’s Not Be Passive

Fear peddlers don’t want you to know that we already have the power. We don’t need to be incentivized. We don’t need empowerment. We need to take our work, our communications, and our world view back.

Hope is a weak sounding word, but it drives business. Hope is what we have at the base of every business plan. Hope that we are right, that our plans can come to fruition. Hope that we can build a better future. Hope is real truth. Focus and completion are real truths. Working together we can get things done, focus, and not fear our neighbors, our colleagues, or the world at large.

The Antidote to Isolation

When we do a right environment exercise or value stream mapping exercise, we are working together, as a team to build actionable clarity. When people understand their work flow, when they can see their work, understand how it connects to something larger, and have the information they need to act with confidence, they stop being passive consumers of other people’s crises and become active creators of solutions.

Visual management is actionable hope made visible. Whether it’s a simple Kanban board, an Obeya room, or just sticky notes on a wall, visual boards show us that we can have faith in our work and in each other. We can see what we’re doing, we can see what’s working, we can see what needs to change, and we can act together on what we see.

With visual management we are not isolated. We are a team.

Beyond Belligerence

Focus and completion are drowned out by belligerence, but they don’t have to be.

Every team that successfully moves from isolation to collaboration does it the same way:

* They learn about each other, they value their teammates.

* They understand what people bring to the table.

* They figure out what needs to be done.

* They make their work visible.

* They create space for real conversation (not just performative meetings),

* They build systems that underwrite professional action instead of political maneuvering.

These aren’t “soft skills”. Soft skills are creating a hero to solve your problems for you. This is literally taking responsibility for your life and work and getting things done.

This is hard economics. Watch the video for an insane number of stats about this. Workplace toxicity costs American employers $917 billion annually. That’s not the cost of people “being difficult.” This is not a “culture issue”. This is the cost of real behaviors modeled and promoted creating systems that make it impossible for people to act professionally.

We can complain about them or we can fix them.

When we worked with teams during COVID, something interesting happened. The crisis stripped away a lot of the unnecessary bureaucracy and forced people to focus on what actually mattered. Teams that had been paralyzed by procedure suddenly found ways to make decisions quickly. Not because the crisis made them better people, but because the crisis made the cost of inaction visible and immediate.

We’ve seen that people can and will work together and enjoy the experience.

This is the work we do at Modus Institute helping teams move from toxic isolation to collaborative professionalism. If your team is stuck in learned helplessness cycles, there are tools and practices that can help.

Whether you’re trying to build a healthy team from scratch or figure out why things have gone sideways, I keep coming back to the same four diagnostic questions / lenses / points. They’re at the heart of everything we do at Modus Institute…Personal Kanban, Obeya, visual management, reducing workplace toxicity…all come back to clarity (understanding), completion (are we actually able to work), calm (can we plan and execute with flow, and collaboration (do we really work together).

These are practical lenses for understanding why work feels hard and what you can do about it. Don’t tell me they are abstract…because I’ll get testy. :-)

CLARITY: Can You See the Work?

Do people have the information they need to make their own decisions?

Clarity means you can see what needs to be done, you understand the context that makes it important, and you have enough agency to move forward with confidence. When clarity breaks down, people spend more time figuring out what to do than actually doing it.

Most workplace dysfunction starts here. People can’t act professionally because they don’t know what “good” looks like, they don’t understand how their piece fits into the bigger picture, or they’re constantly waiting for someone else to tell them what comes next.

Personal Kanban, value stream mapping, Obeya all start with making work visible so people can see what’s actually happening instead of guessing. If you can’t see it, you can’t manage it or … complete it.

COMPLETION: Can You Focus and Finish?

Having clarity is worthless if you can’t act on it. The second C asks: Can you actually finish what you start?

“Finish” means a task is done and doesn’t come back. That’s it.

This is where most productivity advice falls apart. People think completion is about time management or motivation, but it’s really about flow. Can you focus on the work you’re doing right now without being constantly distracted by everything else demanding your attention? Can you pay attention enough to make sure it gets done the right way, for the right people, at the right time?

The completion question cuts through all the busy work and asks: Are you able to select something, work on it without interruption, and finish it before moving to the next thing? If not, you’ve got a system problem, not a people problem.

CALM: Can You Build Sustainable Rhythms?

Here’s where it gets interesting. Calm isn’t about being relaxed or quiet or even unbothered, it’s about creating a rhythm that creates predictable flow right now.

Think about your daily rhythm. Notice it. Be aware of it. Some days you have wall-to-wall meetings, so your rhythm is quick, focused bursts between calls. Other days are wide open, so you can tackle the deep work that requires sustained attention. The key is recognizing what kind of day you’re having and selecting work that fits the rhythm.

Calm is what happens when you have clarity about your work and the ability to complete it consistently. This means you can and must build sustainable patterns in how you work: When I face adversity, what do I do? When I select work, how do I choose? When I think about my quality for my work, what does that mean?

Without sustainable rhythms, you get floods, rapids, and droughts. Everything urgent followed by nothing to do. That’s is exhausting.

COLLABORATION: Are You Working Better Together?

The final C addresses why most of us go to work in the first place: to accomplish things with other people that we couldn’t do alone. We work in companies to be in the company of others.

Collaboration isn’t more meetings, it isn’t everyone sitting around and always working in a huge mob. Collaboration is not design by committee.

Collaboration is a shared understanding of how we, as a team, are going to achieve our goals IN DETAIL WITH REAL TIME UPDATES.

* Does the team know who’s working on what?

* Are people comfortable with how work is distributed?

* Do team members have the information they need to complete their work independently?

* Do they know how to give or receive help when needed?

When collaboration works you get natural coordination. People can see how their work connects to others’ work and act accordingly. When it breaks down, you get silos, bottlenecks, and the kind of meeting culture that makes everyone miserable.

How the Four C’s Work Together

The C’s are interdependent and self-reinforcing.

You need clarity to know what work to complete. You need the ability to complete work to build sustainable rhythms. You need sustainable rhythms to collaborate effectively. And you need collaboration to maintain clarity about what matters most.

When teams are struggling, there’s usually a breakdown in one of these four areas that cascades into the others. Fix the root cause, and the rest starts to improve naturally.

We can use this to demystify “process” or “frameworks” or other multisyllabic four-letter words. When we are working together, regardless of what you are trying to “implement”, just ask:

* Can we see the work? (Clarity)

* Can we focus and finish? (Completion)

* Can we adapt to the rhythm of the day? (Calm)

* Are we working well together? (Collaboration)

Most of the time, the answer points you toward exactly what needs attention.

What’s breaking down for your team right now? Which of the Four C’s needs the most attention? Let me know in the comments—I’d love to hear how this framework applies to your situation.

Want to dive deeper? Check out our Modus Institute calendar for upcoming workshops and community sessions where we explore these concepts in practice.

We work in companies to be in the company of others. Human others. We smile. We laugh. We get upset. We … do things. Sometimes fun things, sometimes frustrating things.

Often work is painful, with too many tasks, too many voices, and no clear place to start. When this happens, it’s tempting to just blame it on other people, want to put our heads down in isolation and “get real work done.”

But anyone that’s tried this knows they get part way into things and need to talk to someone. And then, because they have isolated themselves, that either means they interrupt someone else (in isolation) or they just don’t ask. Then… rework, misunderstandings, and worse result.

Isolationism sucks. We’d all rather show up to a team where everyone sees what matters, helps each other out, solves real problems, and gets things done. We want to create a go-to spot for the team to align, work, help, solve problems, seize opportunities, and always keep improving. This is called an Obeya or Mission Control or … so many names, I’ve lost track. One location where people know (know is a very strong word) that progress can be made, problems solved, and opportunities realized. It’s how people know the team has their back.

To Align

Beyond jargon, we are building a room where people can align. They process and agree to move forward. No more doubt, guessing, or passive aggression. When a team sees the same picture, they know what matters and what actions to take. Alignment does not mean everyone agrees on every detail. Alignment is when we agree on direction, and that frees us up to work smarter, not harder.

To Work

Work is more than a hundred tickets in your kanban or sixty cranky emails. Work is more than plans, more than dictates. Work is the best thing each of us could do right now to support our strategy, our plans, and our team. So, in an Obeya, we want to make that happen. Show people what’s in play today, what’s done, and what’s up next. Work stop being an invisible threat and becomes manageable. Overload will still exist, be we see it and can adjust to it. Meetings required to talk endlessly about what we are going to do and when go away. Status meetings shorten dramatically. The number of times you ask for clarification … and so on. This means less stress because you know what to do, and the team can trust the process.

To Help

If we don’t help each other, everyone’s issues are our shared bottlenecks. So we make this a space where we step up for each other. If a teammate’s stuck, we give them a push. You see where help is needed and offer it. When you need help, it arrives without you feeling lost or judged. Help stops being a rescue and becomes simply doing the work together. This is self-organization.

To Solve

Problems aren’t problems. Work is filled with surprises, it’s how we deal with them that is important. An Obeya lets us deal with surprises reliably, predictably, and collaboratively. When a challenge pops up, the team gathers, looks at the facts, and tackles it together. Solving things together means decisions come easier, faster, and with better results. People trust what they see and what they know. People trust predictability. The problems will change, the response should not. Solve immediately and together.

To Seize

Opportunities hardly ever announce themselves, but they sure are ignored. They are unplanned and inconvenient. When your team has a shared place to spot new directions, you also have a larger number of people looking for them. Profit and market share and customer value stem from these opportunities. Often they are lumped into “problems,” but opportunities are different. They are something that isn’t happening at all that, if successful, could have a lot of positive impact. The visual space, the Obeya, is where these ideas or options can be quickly looked at… and acted on.

To Improve

Improvement isn’t just about process. As professionals we are improving ourselves, our team’s way of working, our tools, our product, our relationships internally and externally… And if you aren’t improving at best you are stagnating, at worst you are moldering. With a shared space, you don’t just fight fires; you learn from every week, every project, every bump in the road. The team grows stronger, the product better, the market awareness more resilient…because you can see what’s working and what needs to change.

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What this Means to Me

I watch this all the time. Teams that take the time to work together, to see what’s important and make sure they are communication lose confusion and gain action. Some stick with it, some lose it, that’s part of how we humans work. We’re lousy at self-care, we’re worse at caring for others. We always think it’s someone else’s job. It is painful to see, I wish more people would invest just a little time to make the pain go away.

We have an ongoing series of Obeya classes at Modus Institute. You can grab one at your leisure or come to a few lean coffees and just get to know us. Or we can consult. Or you can grab a Collaboration Equation book. But please do something to help your team.

Also, if you are in the UK in Nov 2025, you can come to Jim and Karl’s Visual Leadership Class!

Work sucks, work is wonderful.

We’ve been thinking about strategy lately. Not the retreat-in-Cancún kind where executives disappear for a weekend and return with glossy presentations nobody asked for way. The collaborative way. The effective way. Strategy created by the messy, collaborative, utterly human process of figuring out where we’re going and why that matters. The effective way.

While creating the second course in the Strategy and X-Matrix course, we (Karl Scotland and Jim Benson) had a conversation about three deceptively simple, profound approaches to strategy. Strategy historically has been a dictate, something you can put on a card and carry around with you. But if we treat it like an action … I am acting strategically … this means we have to be aware of our future desires, our past behaviors, and our current reality. And we have the acts of forecasting, backcasting, and sidecasting.

We have three different ways of understanding how we relate to uncertainty, how we learn from the past, and how we stay grounded in present reality while still moving toward something better. This post introduces these three concepts.

We’ll be diving deeper into each approach in future posts and exploring them in more detail in an upcoming workshop. For now, let’s just introduce them.

Forecasting is Seductive Wishing

Forecasting feels safe. Organizations and managers love forecasting because it creates an illusion of control. “We know what our operating model should look like,” they say. “We’ll just create our goals, follow our playbook, and get there.”

Forecasting actually feels pretty good in the moment. It’s the strategic equivalent of drawing a straight line from here to there and calling it a plan. Over the years, we’ve seen this play out repeatedly: organizations become attached to a given and brittle solution, believing it can be achieved without adaptation.

Forecasting assumes a level of predictability that simply doesn’t exist in complex systems. A forecast is a plan, and plans do not survive contact with reality unscathed; there are always changes, learning, and new directions. Organizations that over-attach to forecasting miss something crucial: to adequately forecast, you have to understand the work you need to do, the team you have to do it with, and the rate of variation in the market of whatever you’re creating. These elements are dynamic, contextual, and deeply human. Successful forecasting only happens when the forecast comes with the ability to change, be updated, and continuously re-forecast based on the best available data.

Backcasting is Scientific Fantasy

Backcasting sounds more sophisticated. Instead of just projecting forward, you start with your desired future state and work backward to figure out what needs to happen. It feels more thoughtful, more strategic.

Backcasting has its own challenges, though. When you’re working backward from that perfect future state (an overly specific goal), you’re often working backward from a fantasy. You’re assuming that your desired endpoint is actually achievable with your current culture, skills, and organizational reality.

Too many organizations create beautiful backcasting exercises that ignore their starting point and undervalue changes along the way. They design the perfect process, work backward to create the perfect implementation plan, and then wonder why it feels like they’re trying to implement someone else’s solution in their own context. The missing piece? Understanding where you actually are right now.

Sidecasting Just Might Have Some Strategic Presence

This is where sidecasting makes things interesting.

Sidecasting, a term coined by Dave Snowden, focuses on now. Now, to the best of our understanding, is real. Real is good.

In sidecasting, you look at the data you have, the visual information available to you, and use that to figure out just what to do next. It is strategy as situational awareness. It is strategy always updated to match what is both desirable and achievable.

Karl described his most enjoyable change efforts as the ones where teams just started trying stuff. “What new practice might we try?” became the driving question. No grand implementation plan, no perfect future state—just careful experimentation in context.

This reminds us of Kevin Chase at Turner Construction, whom Jim wrote about in The Collaboration Equation. Kevin told him, “I work in construction. Nothing is going to impact my work/life balance. But the Kanban here in this room helps me communicate with my bosses, their bosses, and my team. They know what’s going on, and that helps me act with confidence.”

That’s sidecasting in action. Kevin wasn’t implementing a methodology or working toward some idealized future state. He was solving a real problem, a lack of confidence that came from communication difficulties, with the tools and context available to him. His right now, made visual, allowed him to act both tactically and strategically.

You Can’t Have One Without the Other

The most effective strategic approaches we’ve seen don’t choose between forecasting, backcasting, and sidecasting. They dance between all three.

Memento Vivere: They forecast enough to understand direction and intent. This provides shared understanding of where we think we’re heading and why that matters. What might a good end-state look like? They set direction.

Memento Mori: They backcast enough to create initial hypotheses based on experience. What has happened to us previously? How does that inform how we’ll approach this next group of work? This honors the wisdom embedded in our collective experience and uses our experience and experiments to update and adjust our forecasts.

Carpe Diem: And they sidecast constantly to stay grounded in current reality. What are we doing right now? What’s actually happening on the ground? What does the data tell us about how things are flowing? How should we adjust and adapt our approach? What opportunities are presenting themselves?

When you visualize all three of these perspectives in real time, something magical happens. People can see their work clearly enough to make good decisions about what to focus on, what to delegate, and what to decline.

Making Strategy Visible and Human

Think about the construction site where teams track corporate performance metrics daily, not because some consultant told them to, but because they can see how their daily work connects to larger outcomes.

This is what happens when forecasting, backcasting, and sidecasting work together. Strategy becomes something people participate in rather than something they receive. The forecast informs direction, the backcast utilises learning, and the sidecast provides agency. And this is all best done visually.

The real breakthrough comes from creating systems that help humans navigate uncertainty together.

After twenty years of watching people try to get work done, we know this: we’re all making it up as we go along. The question isn’t whether you have the perfect strategy. The question is whether your approach to strategy helps people act with confidence in the face of uncertainty.

And that requires all three: enough vision to move forward, enough reflection to learn from experience, and enough presence to respond to what’s actually happening right now.

The best strategies aren’t perfect plans—they’re learning systems that adapt as quickly as the humans who use them.

Events with Karl and Jim:

This conversation emerged from ongoing work on making strategy deployment more collaborative and humane. We’ll be exploring these concepts in more detail in future posts, as well as these events:

Our Visual Leadership workshop LIVE in Bristol in Nov 2025,

Our online Strategic Aspirations Workshop

Our online Creating Strategy Workshop

Our online Strategy and Tactics Workshop

Our online Strategic Evidence (Metrics and ROI for Strategy) Workshop

and in an upcoming workshop focused specifically on the art of casting.

If you’re interested in exploring these ideas with your team, we’d love to hear from you just leave a comment or talk to us on linkedin Jim LinkedIn … Karl LinkedIn.

Ghosts in the Machine

Teams don’t argue because they’re “bad” People argue because their systems are bad. Everyone has surprise dependencies, last-minute requests, and the endless slog of “bad exciting” work (the stuff that blows up your day). I’ve created another design to solve this. Let’s set you up to actually collaborate effectively.

What you see above is a KanbanZone board I built to solve for clarity. Every team member—Andy, Stuart, and Gordon—is working together but also pursuing their own tasks. There is a structure for this. Easy to use and easy to maintain. It’s detailed in the video.

The Structure

The individual work of team members are in their own swim lanes.

The columns:

Ready to Start starts the relationship with a promise of action, not a surprise.

Concept defines the work. It’s you figuring out what you are going to do. That is your own personal work.

One World is the three team members coming back together and saying “Yes, that concept is sound, run with it.”

In Progress is work that you do alone.

Synchronicity is work you do with others. Andy / Stuart pairing for example.

Invisible Sun is the column, like One World, where the team reviews the work.

Done is the completion of work that everyone agrees was both formulated and implemented well.

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Why This Solves Dependencies

Using this board, each member knows exactly what their role is and how ideas move from concept, through shared vetting, to done. This is a very real mechanism for eliminating dependency disasters, redirection, and comments being lost. When a ticket lands in a shared column, everyone knows it’s time to act. Nothing sneaks up on anyone. Work is shared. Planning is shared. The end result is shared.

This simplicity is intentional. The simplicity is professional. The fewer steps, the fewer bottlenecks. Building this board lets the team designing their heaven together.

Hell and Heaven are Both Collaborative Acts

Without a working system, if your system doesn’t let you know when and how to act, then teamwork feels like hell. When it’s clear, you move with purpose and even excitement. The right kind.

Call To Action Things

Personal Kanban teaches this kind of agency. At Modus Institute, our class delivers everything you need to quit guessing, start collaborating, and actually enjoy your work. KanbanZone is a platform for making it real (we enjoy it). visualizing teamwork so everyone knows what’s next and no ticket gets lost in the shuffle.

Ready to join a community that works smarter? Subscribe to HumaneWork and check out our Personal Kanban course. Heaven is a board away.

“Hell is other people.” And, because work is nothing if not ironic, heaven is too. The difference between the two isn’t people, it’s the system they are in. At work and on earth this is a system we create, inhabit, and serve.

People like to work together. People like to focus. People like certainty, even when things are fluid. Certainty is a funny word. We focus on it being an infallible plan, reassuring us that everything is going to be fine. Well, it’s not going to be fine. False certainty is not good, but it’s what we get most often. (Wishful thinking is not a plan.)

So, we want certainty that, no matter what happens, our team has our backs and that we’ll respond immediately and together.

We are building new barriers to our existing lousy relationships. Remote work, asynchronous comms, and post-pandemic uncertainty can be ingredients for a communication apocalypse. Toss some AI in there and suddenly managers are like, “Well, you all couldn’t get your work done anyway, so is AI going to be any worse?”

Conway’s Law and the System We Deserve

Conway’s Law tells us that the way our teams communicate (or don’t) becomes our culture and our products embody our culture. If our communication is scattered, guarded, and bureaucratic, our products will be too. If we want to be professional, we must design ways of working that allow us to act professionally. If we value agency, transparency, and humane collaboration, we need to design how we work to underwrite that. Good relationships is heaven. Bad relationships, division, isolation, and fear are simply formalizing hell.

Bob Dylan said, “Ya gotta serve somebody.” When we work, we build our system…then we become its servants. We create the environment together and that shapes our experience. If we neglect it or assume someone will solve our problems for us, that is negligence and we will pay a price for it.

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Collaboration Is Always a System

In The Collaboration Equation, I talk about how teams don’t magically collaborate and how our negligence of our culture builds barriers to Professionalism. Professionalism isn’t doing going to work and shelving your emotions. Professionalism is being an active player in your system of work and actively designing how we operate, share information, and improve together.

My editor, Tom Ehrenfeld, made me spend a lot of time on Five Principles of Collaboration. He did this because he was part of the team and knew they were important. He was being a professional. I’m glad he did because they are relevant here. We need, more than ever, to build our businesses on a professional, collaborative foundation:

* Pay Attention (Situational Awareness): Professionals know what’s going on. They don’t operate blind.

* Give a Damn (Relationships): Value is created when people care about the outcome, the product, the customer, and each other.

* Improvement Is Your Job: (PDSA) Agency isn’t bestowed, it’s earned by fixing and maintaining a collaborative system, not just working harder.

* Information Drives Action: (Act with Confidence) Every team member needs the whole picture, in real-time, to see direction, engage in strategy, get their work done, and help the most when help is needed.

* Trust but Visualize: (Visual Leadership) Respect and trust are built when we make our work visible. Everyone can see plans, change, and needs…and then contribute.

Collaboration is the only tool humans have to avoid chaos. We replace silent participation and long meetings with the right communication and interaction when and where it’s needed. But we choose. No Exit (1944), Conway’s Law (1967), Gotta Serve Somebody (1979), Collaboration Equation(2019) nearly 80 years of the same message. By now, it is a choice we make. We choose how to communicate. We almost always hand that decision to someone else.

We need to stop that.

A Pact of Professionalism

Every meeting we have (on Zoom, in Slack, or face-to-face) is a re-negotiation our professional culture. We don’t show up to be each other’s hell or heaven. We choose. We show up to design which we’ll create, and often unintentionally add to the problems that upset us every day.

We can’t wait for managers to enforce out-of-the-box “collaboration.” We, as professionals, need to architect systems that support agency, improvement, information, and respect.

If Sartre, Dylan, or Conway show up in your dreams tonight they’ll be saying the same thing. Build your heaven together, or get ready to serve the hell your system creates.

The real collaboration equation is simple: Individuals in teams create value. Systems either amplify or crush that value.

… and for some reason the Substack UI wouldn’t let me say this was inspired by a chat with Pawel Brodzinski under the image at the top. But it was.

CALL TO ACTION: If this is interesting to you, you can hire us to help (just message me on substack or linkedin), or take a class at Modus Institute, or simply get a paid subscription to Humane Work here on substack (see above).

This is what we do and have done for decades, and what we work with others on. Simple, visual, humane strategies to fix the real problems of work.

People join teams to create. People like building things. Small groups ignite fast. Teams start strong. New teammates gather, share an idea for what’s possible, and launch real work built from back-and-forth exploration, shared vision, and a real sense of moving forward together. For a while, each member holds tightly to the same direction, fueling progress with every conversation.

Alignment and Realignment are Part of Learning

As work unfolds, everyone starts turning ideas over in their heads. Excitement drives action, and action launches new directions. Some directions are explicit, others are more sneaky. Individuals drift and, through conversation and constraint, teams pull back into alignment. This iterative realigning is the heartbeat of creative work. But as teams get bigger, recalibration gets harder. New voices, new perspectives, and new interpretations create more opportunity. Existing voices fall more and more into a set direction. Falling out of sync is inevitable. The challenge in scaling is that the mechanism for caring and aligning grows complex and unwieldy. It becomes harder and harder to keep people in the loop when there are many loops.

Scaling as an Opportunity

Team misalignment or drift at scale becomes failure when we don’t have a system to keep us sharing information and direction in a healthy way. In the Toxic Waste class and in the upcoming book, we talk about this as an inevitable tax of having passionate, smart people eager to build, create, and contribute. Weirdly many alignment issues are proof of enthusiasm, not error. Most organizations never anticipate or design for the comms burden that comes with growth. No one ever budgets for the fact that, beyond a certain size, realignment is a system that must be intentionally architected, not left to chance. It’s a cornerstone of strategy and culture.

Communication Breakdown are Unseen Silos

In the beginning, conversation is effortless and low cost. The daily chatter that aligns small teams becomes expected, taken for granted. With growth this same chatter becomes invisible, then expensive, then impossible. Bottlenecks and silos are created by us simply getting poor information or direction and then needing to say “What?” over and over again. Everything needs to be analyzed. This makes every one of us a silo, every one of us a bottleneck.

In the call we discussed communications with the “lorry rule” where in the past, the truck (information) arrived to deliver a sofa (soft and easy to use), now it has become a runaway truck (or fleet) of urgent information headed toward you at great speed (dangerous and bewildering). When this happens, people retain their will to succeed…they still want to get the work done). With the overload, they lose their ability to work together effectively. This leads people in management to assume the people aren’t working effectively. The reality here is that the communications system has not grown with the complexity of the company.

We Can Fix This

At the risk of becoming overly geeky...this is straight up Conways Law.

Conway’s Law says systems are designed to mirror the communication structures of the organizations that create them, meaning a product’s architecture will reflect team boundaries and ways of working.

Conway’s Law is that if your company’s internal communications are confused, combative, or otherwise crappy it will drive your culture, work, and products much more than your frameworks or product plans.

We’d like to avoid crappy product, frankly. So let’s try to fix this very repeated pattern (I’ve seen it a lot). These breakdowns aren’t terminal. They are fixable. We just need to acknowledge that this happens and that people want to do good work. They don’t want to interrupted, redirected, or confused.

Companies (people working in the company of others) need to build systems that allow conversation, recalibration, and distributed decision-making to happen smoothly. Information needs to be provided predictably. Work alignment is not a one-time event but a continual, shared commitment. And the unexpected is met with a known, implementable, and reassuring process.

The best groups treat each misalignment as a signal, not an annoyance, to evolve how they communicate as they grow. In doing this, they maintain the culture they love and create products the customer does too.

Practical Steps for Scaling Collaboration

* Recognize that scaling is building and maintaining communication architecture. (If you don’t you aren’t scaling, you are bloating).

* Underwrite and expect moments of realignment.

* Make communication agreements explicit, revisable, and visible. Make them daily work.

* Acknowledge growth as a force multiplier for creativity and complexity. (Balance them)

* Bottlenecks arise often, look for excitement and direction beneath the surface. Deal with bottlenecks quickly to avoid bureaucracy.

Final Reflection:I love these conversations each month. This week we discussed how people want to create, build, and make a difference in the context of how we stop people from doing exactly those things. Growing pains sneak up on you and feel like defeat. In the group, we felt the defeat and the challenges behind that defeat. We commiserated and then said, “What do we do to fix this.”

If you recognize yourself, past or present, in this situation, leave a comment.

Why Focus Feels Impossible

It’s natural to crave relief, if you didn’t you’d simply be a glutton for punishment. But if we’d like to escape the mental rat race and create a space where the pressure lets up, we need to create that space. It doesn’t happen on its own, we have to architect it, to build it. We need to build a “bubble” where attention is protected, priorities are visible, and interruption becomes manageable rather than overwhelming.

A Cinemascope Board

Every Personal Kanban is dealing with a need beyond the work. Planning a party, managing a project, communicating with family. He we are building that bubble. We are create a space to keep you sane and still honor and get work done for others (the needs and interruptions around you).

This board starts in the backlog. Dividing visually the ways work might come to us:

* My Work: (Planned work) What genuinely engages or replenishes energy? What enables flow or clarity?

* Work for Others: (Planned Work) What’s defined well enough that real focus is possible—even if coordination is required?

* Interruptions: (Unplanned Work) These are the extra requests and interruptions that come at you unexpectedly. Here we want to track the difference between “urgent” and “not urgent” requests from others.

When you prepare for the day, you can plan for what you want to do and your boundaries. The “purple” tickets are the incoming unexpected demands, underplanned and over-emotioned. The “green” tickets are work you choose, that is planned up front, and done with less stress. If you don’t balance these, you will be constantly responding to unplanned work, while planned work languishes until it becomes late and now a new emergency.

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Balance, Boundaries, and Ownership

The value for this post: Interruptions from others, left unchecked, will always win by default. It’s easy to become everyone else’s help desk making it impossible to do meaningful work in the process. We want to break this cycle intentionally:

· For each working period (“today,” “this week”), place a visible limit on the number of “for others” tickets you’ll accept.

By visualizing both categories, imbalance becomes impossible to ignore. If your board is all “purple” interruption tickets and no “green” restorative work, something needs to change. If anything, you need to change what planned work looks like.

Doing vs. Dealing: Naming the Pain

Most digital and physical Personal Kanban boards sink into murky “doing” columns where work stalls indefinitely or we lie about what is actually in process. This board does it differently, with powerful honesty:

* I’m Doing This: This is active work you’re currently moving forward.

* I’m Dealing With This: Items waiting on others, or held up by external blockers, sure. But think also of stuff moving slowly, work that requires extra effort to move the ticket to done than necessary.

Distinguishing these states shows you (and others) where energy is going, and where it’s stuck. Many “doing” tickets are really “dealing” tickets in disguise.

Reflection: A Good Wrap or Rotten Tomatoes

When work finishes, move it into one of two columns:

Critical Acclaim:

* Well Acted: Flow-state work that’s effortless, engaging, energizing even.

* Well Directed: Work that succeeded, but required wrangling others or solving tough dependencies.

Panned by the Academy

* That was bad: Work that was not good but could be improved

* That was very very bad: Work that was catastrophic.

Plan the Unplanned

The “aha” of the board is this: The purple “unplanned” work (interruptions and sudden asks) consume more time and energy than any planned work. Unplanned work must be addressed in crisis mode, robbing focus from everything else. By visualizing and categorizing these interruptions, you finally have evidence for a conversation about capacity and fairness.

Over weeks and months, patterns emerge. Do unplanned “for others” tickets always outnumber “sane” work? That’s a conversation worth having with your team, your customers, or yourself. It’s the data needed for humane work design and negotiation.

Make Your Focus Visible

With any kanban, we want to surface patterns. This board is trying to see:

* Protected focus time becomes a non-negotiable right, not a privilege.

* Interruption costs become visible, actionable, and adjustable rather than denied or resented.

* Work that helps you and work that helps others are brought into honest, creative balance.

* You build and defend a bubble of attention (Don’t let anyone pop it).

Stuff Jim Says

Overload has been around forever. It’s getting worse. When we started creating ways to tune out social media, there were all sorts of new existential threats. It’s literally killing people. We need to do what we can to focus, finish and find energy to deal with the day-to-day weird. I’m committed to helping find ways to do that. I’m hoping you join me.

CALL TO ACTION:

Ready to transform your workplace? Jim and Tonianne have spent decades refining simple, visual approaches that solve fundamental work challenges. Connect with us to talk about consulting from Jim and Toni.

If this is interesting to you, you can hire me and Toni to help (just message me on substack or linkedin), or take a class at Modus Institute, or simply get a paid subscription to Humane Work here on substack (see above).

This is what we do and have done for decades, and what we work with others on. Simple, visual, humane strategies to fix the real problems of work.

That's what I talked about with John von Seggern, who runs Future Proof Music School. We talking about using AI successfully, but using it as a tool, not something that will replace humans.

Turning Sticky Notes Into Action Plans

I called John for this impromptu chat. At Modus Institute, we run workshops where teams map out their work, their problems, their actions, their collaborations, etc. Everyone puts ideas on sticky notes and puts them on the wall. While these exercises always lead to immediate improvements and have led to faster product development, the actual creation of plans, designs, and schedules takes time.

But we tried something new. We grabbed an image and fed it to our AI. The AI read all the sticky notes and wrote up a flawed but useful initial set of requirements. As John says, “It was about 70% right, and that’s great.

Rather than using AI to solve our problems for us, we asked it to help us get something done that had a very aggressive deadline. To get there, we had our agent organize the human solutions that were already there. The people in the room did the thinking. AI just helped us initially sort and analyze it faster.

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What AI Does Best (And What It Doesn't)

John pointed out something smart: AI is great at "finding patterns in vast amounts of information". Humans can't look at 100 sticky notes and instantly see all the themes. AI can get much closer to this.

AI can't replace the human thinking that created those sticky notes in the first place. It can't understand your business like you do. It can't feel frustrated about a broken process or get excited about a new idea.

This is because business logic has always been a function of business intelligence and actual intelligence runs on emotion, motivation, and multiple perspectives. While AI claims to have these because its “intelligence” is based on the sum total of what’s on the internet, it’s truly only pattern matching and making sense of a lot of words.

Real Examples from a Music School

John's Futureproof Music School shows how this works in practice. He created an AI music coach called Cadence that teaches basic skills like scales, rhythm, and music theory. But it can’t be creative, it doesn’t have expertise or continuous learning. These are the domain of the human teachers who focus on advanced techniques and helping students with their careers.

This makes sense. AI never gets tired of explaining the same concept 15 times. It can (mostly) give consistent feedback on basic exercises. But humans are better at creativity, emotion, and the kind of knowledge that comes from years of experience.

They're not competing for the same job. They're working together to do a job neither could do as well alone.

An AI Assistant That Actually Helps

John as a CEO also built an AI assistant he calls Nova for his business tasks. Nova is integrated with his calendar, chats, and more. Nova looks at all that data helps John run the company. It doesn’t run the company, it keeps track of things and make recommendations. Sometimes they are useful.

But the bots only works because John was smart about their limits. He told Cadence to focus only on music and creativity. He made it double-check facts by searching the web. He treats Nova's ideas as starting points, not final answers.

This is the pattern we see with successful AI use beyond hype or fear: AI handles the processing, humans handle the judgment. It is a word calculator.

The Back-and-Forth Approach

Both John and I learned that working with AI is like having a conversation. You don't just ask it once and get a perfect answer. You go back and forth, refining your questions and improving the results.

As John said, "AI isn't always right, but its suggestions provide a starting point for humans to iterate and refine".

This is different from other tools. When you use a hammer, it works the same way every time. AI is more like a thinking partner who might offer useful ideas, obvious points, or occasionally brilliant insights you hadn't considered. It might also be utterly stoned out of its gourd and tell you completely idiotic things.

The danger is that often AI will tell you things that look right. They are a plausible story it makes up or takes from sources that were wrong or misinterpreted. AI use does not come with vigilance.

How to Use AI Well

From our conversation, here's what works:

Start with human expertise: The best AI applications help people who already know their stuff. The workshop leaders understood team problems. The music teachers understood how to teach. AI just made them faster and more effective.

Expect to go back and forth: Don't expect perfect results right away. Plan to refine your questions and improve the AI's responses over time.

Set clear limits: Tell AI what it should and shouldn't do. Make it verify facts. Treat its suggestions as starting points, not final decisions.

Focus on helping humans, not replacing them: Use AI to handle routine tasks so humans can focus on creative and strategic work.

You are also still a stupid human: You can and will use AI to be a confirmation bias engine. You will work your prompts in a way to get what you want, not what you need. Check yourself while you are at it. Sometimes, the AI may be right, it’s not what you want so you think it’s wrong, and correct to your original error.

What This Means for Your Work

John did not build a music tutor to kill music tutors. He built a search engine, specialized for music. We haven’t replaced our ability to think about how work flows and feature sets are created, we just removed long, confused, and often frustrating processing time between ideation and action. The word calculators are helping move our work forward and get value to people faster, while at the same time allowing us to handle the deeper thinking, human relations, and creative bits.

CALL TO ACTION: If this is interesting to you, you can hire me and Toni to help (just message me on substack or linkedin), or take a class at Modus Institute, or simply get a paid subscription to Humane Work here on substack (see above).

This is what we do and have done for decades, and what we work with others on. Simple, visual, humane strategies to fix the real problems of work.

It can be in person or on-line, but there's something intoxicating about watching professionals dig deep into what they actually do every day. Hearing them wrestle with how their work really happens. How they realize the sanitized version they believe in is a more messy, complicated, and human reality.

Like John likes to see the flow of goods, the creation of value, and the ways he can help streamline. I watch the flow of conversation, relationships, ideas, and the creation of value. I watch the people on the team discover who they really work with, how they work together, and where the work flows or gets stuck. It's can be (often is) raw and uncomfortable when we start. These aren’t systems people are used to seeing.

Most teams run not on process, but on assumptions and hope. While we go through the exercise, people realize they don't work the way they thought they did. They see where they're unwittingly creating problems for each other. They confront the gaps between what they say they value and what their actual process rewards. They are seeing their relationships and the customer journey and the workflow at the same time. In context.

And they care. So they start negotiating. Not the adversarial kind where someone wins and someone loses, but the collaborative kind where everyone's trying to figure out what's important to each other. They build a "shared professionalism", they create a mutual understanding of what good work looks like and what each person needs to do that good work. Then they start to create expectations to do those things.

Individuals Work In Teams to Create Value

This creates a game where the goal is to stop being collections of individuals with competing priorities and start becoming genuine collaborators. To become an actual team. Seeing the work lets them vent frustrations they've been nursing, see them in how work is done, and realize these issues aren’t some blamable personal failings but systemic issues the team can fix together. The energy in the room shifts from defensive to creative.

And at this point, the team starts to optimize. They organize. They focus.

The energy and flow John loves about factories comes from people understanding their place in a larger system that creates real value. The work in a factory is very visual, things are moving from collections of parts to shippable wholes. In knowledge work, we don't have the luxury of seeing our "factory floor." Most of our value creation happens in our heads and in our handoffs to each other.

For the factory, you can go-see locations of issues to improve or optimize. For the rest of us, we need a way to see the work. The value stream map becomes that place to go see. In Lean parlance, the VSM becomes the beginning of a visual Gemba.

Building a Team Together

The exercise starts with an end-state (what value are you delivering?). When professionals map their work backwards from the end state, they're forced to slow down and examine each step. They need to be thoughtful about what happens. They can't rely on the convenient narratives they've constructed. They have to confront what actually happens.

The teams always surprise me and themselves. Always. The person who thought they were being helpful realizes they're creating a bottleneck. The team that prided itself on quality discovers they create defects through their handoff process. The process everyone assumed was working fine turns out to be held together by hidden heroic individual efforts that aren't sustainable.

Rather than focusing on failure or assigning blame (holding people accountable), we are creating the conditions where professionals can act with confidence because they finally understand the system they're part of (being responsible). When people can see how their work connects to others' work, when they understand what success looks like from their teammates' perspectives, they can make better decisions in real time.

That shared professionalism emerges from honestly examining how value gets created and figuring out together how to make it better. It's professionals respecting each other enough to tell the truth about what's working and what isn't.

John's right about factories. There is something beautiful about watching people create value together with clarity, purpose, and mutual respect. We just have to see our own version of that factory. We need to see how we work together to get things done.

In this episode of the podcast we are speaking with Brad Brown, Fire Chief of Grand Rapids, Michigan, and Alex Baszler, their performance and management reporting specialist. What gets me about Brad and Alex’s system isn’t just that they have boards to manage the department, it’s the more-than-decade of sustainability. Most workplace improvement initiatives flame out with the transition of personnel or leadership, but they've maintained and evolved their approach for over ten years.

This happens when visual management becomes so embedded how people relate to each other that decisions, problems, and even the mundane are expected to be visualized. This means that by default problems and solutions emerge collaboratively.

Humane Work is reader-supported. To keep us creating interesting interviews like this one consider becoming a paid subscriber.

Expecting Lasting Change

I can’t make this point enough. Your system needs to expect actions by team members that support the system. Your daily work needs to support the team, the work, the product, and the culture. If it doesn’t support it, then it isn’t helping.

For Alex and Brad, the sustainability of their system rests on two pillars.

First, unwavering support from leadership: Brad didn't just implement visual management, he participates in it. Every week, he answers the same four questions as everyone else: major accomplishments, key learnings, weekly focus, and what help he needs. The initial adoption of the system, years ago, rested on Brad personally showing he would help others when asked. You can delegate or you can participate.

Second, the boards were relevant to the people using them. The boards were so valuable that the team started improving them. Alex described how their boards evolved organically as new team members brought fresh perspectives or the needs of the team changed. People enhance useful systems.

Save Crisis Management for Real Crises

Managing your workflow shouldn't be a crisis, ~ Alex Baszler

"Managing your workflow shouldn't be a crisis," Alex said near the end of our conversation. This insight cuts to the heart of what makes the Grand Rapids Fire Department remarkable. The boards keep everyone informed about routine work. Project timelines, resource allocation, operational challenges, improvement, are visual, tracked and calmed. No one has to waste time figuring out where they are, everyone knows. This preserves everyone’s cognitive and emotional capacity for actual emergencies.

The logic is elegant. A fire department exists to handle genuine crises where lives hang in the balance. Why would they allow preventable workflow chaos to drain the energy and clarity needed for those moments? By visualizing the predictable work, they ensure they can respond with full focus when unpredictable emergencies arise.

Why are you any different?

Repeating Again…An Expectation of Visualization

We have this stuff all over the place!~ Brad Brown

In the video you’ll hear Brad say, "we have this stuff all over the place." He was celebrating the fact that visual management and Obeya have become so ingrained in their daily work that when decisions need to be made, there's an organizational expectation that they'll be visualized first.

They aren’t worried about frameworks or rules or “am I doing it right.” They are worried about saving lives and getting work done at the same time.

This represents a fundamental cultural shift from information hoarding to information radiating. Instead of knowledge trapped in email threads, management software, or individual minds, their systems make the invisible visible. Problems surface before they become crises. Routine work avoids becoming a problem. Opportunities for collaboration become apparent. People can offer help because they can see where it's needed.

Lessons for Every Organization

The Grand Rapids Fire Department's journey offers three crucial insights for any organization seeking sustainable improvement:

Start with leadership participation, not just support. Brad models visual management by simply using it. His personal board sits prominently in the hallway where everyone can see his commitments, challenges, and progress.

Design for evolution, not perfection. Their boards have changed dramatically over ten years because the team was empowered to improve what they encountered. The goal was never to create the perfect system, but to create a system that could become more perfect over time.

Focus on the real work, not the meta-work. Their visual management directly supports their mission: protecting the community. Every board, every sticky note, every huddle serves the ultimate purpose of being ready when someone needs help.

I’ve been talking to Brad for a long time now, watching how he runs a real enterprise with a lot more calm than anyone would expect. The Grand Rapids Fire Department have create a visual management approach that is humane, elegant, evolving, and sustainable work. When people can see what needs to be done, understand how their work connects to others', and know they have the support to act with confidence, extraordinary things become routine.

CALL TO ACTION: If this is interesting to you, you can hire me and Toni to help (just message me on substack or linkedin), or take a class at Modus Institute, or simply get a paid subscription to Humane Work here on substack (see above).

This is what we do and have done for decades, and what we work with others on. Simple, visual, humane strategies to fix the real problems of work.

This is a way of working made of ten principles that build upon each other. It is a way. A system. A whole. You can add to it, you can change it, but you must know why you are doing so. The quotes are all from the book The Collaboration Equation.

Humane Work reader-supported. Keep the words flowing and come to our monthly calls by becoming a paid subscriber.

The Way of Working: These principles create a virtuous cycle where meaningful work enhances professional development, cognitive health, and organizational profitability. We want to create conditions where people do their best work with dignity, purpose, and genuine satisfaction.

The Modus Way of Working (v.1.0)

1. Be visible.

Action: Make Work Visible Before You Try to Fix / Do / Assign / Accept It

"We cannot manage what we cannot see."

Transform invisible fear-based overload into visible actionable reality through visual management systems. When work becomes visible, teams see where help is needed and how to support each other effectively

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2. Be In Control.

Limit Your Work-in-Progress to Restore Your Humanity

"The most toxic behavior is taking on more than we can reasonably complete."

When you see overload (Be Visible), you can saying "not right now" to preserve cognitive capacity. Address self-inflicted overload (martyr syndrome), leadership chaos (conflicting priorities), and broken systems that create unnecessary work.

3. Be Honest.

Create Psychological Safety Through Shared Visual Systems "Every real collaboration has psychological safety."

Visual and controlled work provides the foundation for psychological safety by reduces politics that make honesty dangerous. When everyone sees what's happening and where problems exist, speaking up becomes safe and productive.

4. Be You

Build Your Personal True North to Navigate Overload"Your True North is essential navigation equipment when life gets harder."

Define your core values, behavioral boundaries, and quality standards. Create decision filters for opportunities and competing demands when everything feels urgent. Be you.

5. Be a Team

Design Right Environments Where Teams Define Their Own Culture"Culture is how your team knows they're providing value."

Co-create environments where professionals have what they need to act with confidence. Culture emerges from explicit conversations about planning, communication, and working relationships. Be a team.

6. Be Professional

Practice Humane Management Through the Seven Elements

"We need functioning human beings, and those people are usually mistreated."

When you visualize work, remember The Seven elements of any visualization: direction (planning), state (what's happening), triggers (actions to take), narrative (learning), culture (relationships), identity (purpose), and PDSA (improvement). Complete systems that respect people and create value. Be professional.

7. Be Effective

Embrace Collaboration Over Competition and Rigid Dogma

"Transparent communication and collaboration over rigid dogma."

Seeing work as it happens always shows us where we should be communicating better and evolving. Foster Creative tension with professional respect. Build systems where diverse perspectives enhance performance through structured conversations and shared problem-solving. Be effective.

8. Be Aware

Create Constancy of Purpose That Connects Daily Work to Mission

"People want their work to matter."

Ensure every professional understands how their work contributes to something larger and how they relate to their team members. Use visual systems and regular conversations to connect daily tasks to organizational mission and impact. Be aware.

9. Be Healthy

Build Antitoxic Systems That Prevent Rather Than React

"Toxicity is expression of individual and collective weakness."

Solve problems immediately and together. Address root causes: information starvation, decision bottlenecks, unclear roles. Build systems that contain and redirect toxic patterns through visual management, clear protocols, and continuous improvement. Be healthy.

10. Be a Leader

Act with Confidence Through Real Time Shared Professional Development

"Leadership is a verb that any team member can express."

Enable professionals to have the information, authority, and support needed for good decisions. Good decisions are everyone’s job. Visual systems give people the information they need to act with confidence. Invest in collaborative capabilities and systems thinking at every level. Be a leader.

CALL TO ACTION: If this is interesting to you, you can hire me and Toni to help (just message me on substack or linkedin), or take a class at Modus Institute, or simply get a paid subscription to Humane Work here on substack (see above).

This is what we do and have done for decades, and what we work with others on. Simple, visual, humane strategies to fix the real problems of work.

I watched a project manager have what I can only describe as a quiet breakdown in her beautiful 18th floor office. She was surrounded by three laptops, two phones, and a set of kanban boards so full of different colors and shapes you needed a 2 hour conversation just to figure out what was going on.

"I’m seeing my work, but I can't remember what I'm supposed to be doing," she said. "I mean, I know I'm busy. I'm always busy. We are always getting things done, but there’s too much conversation once we start. There’s too many questions. I can’t focus."

This is the reality of work and leadership today. We've become incredibly sophisticated at starting things. We’ve been amazing at inventing new things we could be doing. There are literally limitless things we could be doing. We've mastered the art of being busy. But somewhere between "let's do this" and "we did this" something fundamental breaks down.

We've lost the ability to see our work as it actually exists: not as neat project plans or color-coded calendars, but as the messy, human, learning-filled journey it really is.

If you're nodding along, you're sharing my world where work is always an endless cycle of starting without finishing, reacting without reflecting, and moving without meaning. But there are ways to deal with this … and no, it’s not another productivity app or mindless rule about "crushing it."

Yes, it involves visualizing your work and yes, it involves Kanban or Personal Kanban…

Real Work is More Than You Planned For

People talk about productivity hacks and project management tools, and we love setting up our task boards with neat columns. But we're missing something fundamental: we're optimizing for busy instead of optimizing for human.

Here's what I mean. When was the last time you finished something at work and felt genuinely satisfied? Not just relieved that it was over, but actually proud of what you created and how you created it? When you could look back and say, "That was worth doing, we did it well, and I understand why it mattered"?

You're not alone in having more bad examples than good. As humans, we've built work systems that are incredibly good at keeping us moving but terrible at helping us feel we’ve done something worthwhile.

For leaders reading this: When someone on your team feels genuinely satisfied with their work, it means they know what they did, why it mattered, and that it was delivered with care. This isn't a nice-to-have, this is your most reliable indicator of quality work…of effectiveness. When people feel good about what they've created, they've done good work. Pushing productivity or efficiency will always leave you with shoddy output. Pushing for effectiveness and measuring satisfaction will always result in a self-optimizing team (which increases the productivity and efficiency you wanted without the quality penalties).

For everyone else: You feeling like your work was worthwhile and well-executed isn't being precious or perfectionist. It's the most honest measure of effectiveness we have. When something doesn't feel right to you, it's usually because something important was missing: clarity about the goal, support during execution, or time to reflect on what you learned. This is what being a professional is all about.

How We Actually Experience Work

When our work is invisible to us and others, it exists in one state: overwhelm. Everything feels and is equally urgent, nothing feels truly important, and we lose track of what we've actually accomplished.

But when we make our work visible (really visible, not just "task management visible") something interesting happens. We see our work in its natural rhythm: the figuring-out phase, the doing phase, and the learning phase.

Most people (even people doing Kanban) focus only on the doing. They ask "What are you working on?" But that's like asking a chef what's on their cutting board while ignoring the menu planning, the moment when they taste the dish to see if it's ready to serve, and the wait to see if the dish is sent back.

The truth is, meaningful work has three essential phases, and we need to honor all of them if we want to feel good about what we create together. To understand this and make it useful, we need to name things. I’ve chosen WIN, WIP, and WIR.

WIN, WIP, and WIR

WIN - Work in Navigation (or Initiation, or Intake)

You cannot win without a plan.This is where work begins its journey. Not just the obvious stuff like "new project approved" but all the messy, human work of figuring out what we're actually doing. The conversations, the clarifications, the slow dawn of understanding what this thing really needs. The prioritization and re-prioritization. Stop starting – start finishing starts here. This is more than a To Do column, these are columns that help you build a structure for doing the right work at the right time. This is where we ensure that when WIN becomes WIP, it is ready for the people doing it to focus and finish.

WIP - Work in Process (or Progress)

You cannot finish well without focus.I should hope we all know this one. Personal Kanban only had two rules at limiting WIP was one of them. It was called out because it’s the hardest (and we can do it without a good WIN before the WIP). Over the years we’ve found that limiting WIP isn't just a number "currently doing." It's the active wrestling with reality. It's where our plans meet the world and things get complicated. It's where we discover what we didn't know we didn't know. WIP is where the real work happens, and it's messier than any project plan ever imagined. Our WIP Whisperer class and our Toxic Waste class both deal with this head-on. When we don’t plan or review well, we create increasing amounts of unnecessary WIP with additional meetings, re-work, tossed-out work, coordination costs, discussed and re-discussed decisions, proving that tasks can’t be completed as assigned, and so much more. For almost all teams, most WIP is not visualized, but is a reaction to failure to create completable work in the first place.

WIR - Work in Review

Your work either improves, or it decays.I see painfully few teams or people respect WIR. They have a DONE column and think they are DONE. They will create definitions of DONE that are laughable in that they focus on when the work stops, not when the responsibility for the work ends or value for the customer is realized. Then people are surprised when the “bad work” listed in the WIP section above shows up. WIR is the entire reason to have a kanban…not DOING, but what happens next. Planning and Review are professionalism, In-Process is just execution. WIR isn't just checking boxes or getting sign-offs. It’s not putting in tickets for a retrospective that happens later. It’s not a Done column. It's the space where we learn from what has been released to the customer. Where we ask not just "is it done?" but "how is it doing?" It's where individual effort becomes team wisdom. It is where continuous improvement becomes continuous. It’s where we remember we are responsible for our work after the DONE column.

Why This Matters

Yeah yeah, I hear you, "Great, another three-letter acronym (or two) for my collection." But this has been a thing ever since we created kanban, and we’ve never stated it well. WIN, WIP, WIR point out what’s there, hidden beneath the chaos. We can’t calm the chaos without focusing harder on planning and reviewing. (For geeks I could go into PDSA here, but we can do that elsewhere).

For the rest of us…think about the last time your team felt truly synchronized. I'm know for a fact it wasn't because you all followed the same process or framework perfectly. It was because you were all clear about where things stood and why. You knew what was just beginning (WIN), what was actively in motion (WIP), and what was ready to teach you something (WIR). <- Not Done…

Hidden Information = Stress…When work is invisible, information is hidden and stress takes over.

Shared Information = Focus…When we can see the full landscape of our work (not just what's "in progress" but what's finding its footing and what's teaching us lessons) everything changes.

The Necessary Art of Making Work Visible

I want all teams to do the right work at the right time in a way that works for them.

WIN, WIP, WIR doesn’t need permission for you to start using it. You don't need to convince anyone or change any systems. Just don’t ignore it. You can begin with three columns on a whiteboard, three sections in a notebook, or three areas on a shared digital board.

Start with WIN (Honesty in what’s coming)Notice when something new enters your world. Not just the formal requests, but the questions that need exploring, the conversations that reveal hidden needs, the problems that are just beginning to surface. Give these things space to breathe before they become urgent.

Be honest about WIP (Honesty in what you are doing)Stop pretending you're only working on three things when you're really buried in fifteen. The “official work” on the board is not your real work in progress. Make all the work visible, even the stuff you're doing “because you have to”. Especially that stuff. The emails, the quick questions, the "this will just take a minute" requests…all of that belongs somewhere you and everyone else can see it.

Create space for WIR (Honesty in what you’ve released)This is the one most teams miss and it's the most important. When something moves out of active work, don't just celebrate and move on. Watch the work get used and ask: How is it doing? How is the customer better off? Is anyone using it? Did it hurt to do this? Do we have to do it again? What did we learn? What surprised us? What worked better than expected? Let the work teach you before it disappears into memory. And no, it is not the product manager or the product owner’s job to care about your work, it’s yours.

Use This Now

Right now, wherever you are, take a moment to think about your work and what stage it is in. Think about what you have been overlooking for the actual work involved in a task. Think about the after-release maintenance you are doing or ignoring and the impact those have on your day. Then, make that all visible, make it part of your Personal Kanban.

And that's when WIN, WIP, WIR becomes not just a way of organizing tasks, but a way of creating work that's both effective and humane.

Ethical: Doing what is right and good according to rules about how people should behave.

Ethics and AI should be a very constant topic right now. AI can now write your LinkedIn posts, draft your emails, write your heartfelt apology to your spouse. For overloaded people, the temptation to hit "generate" and take the result and spread it around is nearly unavoidable. I’m watching people let AI do their thinking for them, and relish in losing both their individual voices and their humanity.

I've been watching this unfold across every platform, every industry. Less on substack, but it is creeping in. People cutting and pasting wisdom of the AI.

When I look at these posts, they aren’t “plagiarism” they are something even lazier. I'm calling this "AIgarism." (that Ai-garism, not an L) not outright copying someone else's work, but passing off AI-generated content as their own original thinking. These content-pollution-generators create a quick 2 minute prompt, get a confirmation-bias-laden result, and then bask in the glory.

Humane Work is an increasingly rare voice in the world. Help us stem the surge of uncollaborative behaviors and keep us all working together by becoming a paid subscriber.

AI is an Idiot, but it isn’t the Problem

The real problem isn't that AI exists. It's that we're predisposed to abuse it. We want so badly to not be overloaded, we look at AI like the savior that will deliver us from overwork. It’s a fairly nice word calculator, but it is by no means an employee or replacement for actual thinking.

When I’m writing or creating with others, I use AI tools as part of the process. Just like I use a word processor or a spreadsheet. But just like I’d always check the math of a spreadsheet (human), I am amply involved in what I produce otherwise. This paragraph was originally organized by my AI agents, but I’ve rewritten nearly every word.

To do my work, I work by what we’re calling a "Balanced Work" approach to AI collaboration. It's built on a simple premise: humans stay in the driver's seat, AI handles the minutia, and we are always second guessing the results we are given.

In every post, I am trying to provide a mini-system. A way to look at work. This is an idea, a model…

Jim Benson’s Ethical Balanced AI Work Flow

Step 1: Ideate as and with People (Creative)

I muse, I mull. I converse. Real ideas come from human conversation, from wrestling with problems alongside other people who see the world differently than you do. From taking time to combine what you are thinking with what’s happened over your life. So I start here. Individual and collaborative. Come up with ideas.

Step 2: AI Organizes and Compares Information

Once messy, beautiful human ideas are ready, I expose them to AI. The AI then sorts, categorizes, and structures information. The AI then is subjected to a series of questions like, “What else has been written about this?” “What criticisms are there about ideas like this?” My AI is my mediocre research assistant, giving me a mediocre product that I then need to interpret and edit. The AI never gives me the “right” answers. It gives me acceptable organization.

Step 3: Human Selection and Filtering

I am very interested in making my points clear, fully understanding my own words, and owning the product. Experience, expertise, and worldview are inputs for the actual product. We review the AI's recommendations and choose what fits our goals, our values, our vision. There is serious second-guessing of the AI recommendations here. (You wouldn’t believe how many times AI agents will quote me to me with things I never said).

Step 4: Human Refinement and Direction

I then take the selected ideas and shape them with human expertise. I look at the original thesis, I see how working with the AI has provided me with additional detail, and I write an article based on this new information.

Step 5: AI Processing

The AI processes the refined direction, with prompts specifically designed to critique the product, build the ideas deeper, and give me other helpful sources.

Recursive: Steps 2 to 5 repeat while creating the product.

Step 6: Human Voice and Authenticity

In this last step I rewrite the piece entirely in my own voice. I am writing a Jim Benson / Modus article or course or whatever. The final words need to be human to have human impact that last longer than clicking “like.”

Don’t Cut and Paste People

This has been a process that allowed me to question my assumptions and use AI in an ethical way. When used with a group, I find this:

Eliminates ego-driven perfectionism. Writing as a group often takes forever. With the AI, there’s this “processing” element that I find helps no single person getting attached to "their" idea. The work becomes about the best outcome. Weirdly, the impersonal nature of AI can help depersonalize work in a healthy way.

Maintains human ownership. Even though we are using AI in the mix, humans are making every significant decision. People are simply using a tool to amplify capabilities and provide additional information that may be unknown to them.

Preserves authenticity. It’s still your hypothesis, your learning, your voice. Step 6, where we rewrite one last time, creates (because you are actually creating it) real information from your real head and heart and typed with your real hands.

Come join the conversation

If you are a leader or a team member that wants to confront the toxicity in the room, please check these courses out and join the conversation.

* Cleaning Toxic Waste Is a toolkit and a community for restoring health at work.

* WIP Whisperer helps you visualize your overload, manage it more humanely, and rediscover pride in what you do.

Modern work is overwhelming, not because we’re lazy, but because digital tools and platforms constantly compete for our attention and give us so many options…so many things we could be doing with our time. We always feel the FOMO of these options and then get stuck in productivity hellscapes.

In our latest Kanban Evolved session, we will tackle this overload head-on, workshopping the impacts of this on us and why simply tracking tasks on your Kanban isn’t enough.

The real enemy isn’t just a long to-do list, but the attention economy organized crime syndicate employing ample tricks to steal our time. Notifications, apps, and endless online temptations are meticulously designed to hijack our focus. That’s why our course, covering everything from Personal Kanban to Kanban Method and everything in between, goes beyond basic task tracking or throughput… we are dealing with you … your team … your work.

Here’s how we help Kanban practitioners at every level fight digital chaos:

* Not all tasks are equal: We teach you to filter your backlog before putting items on your Kanban.

* Well-defined solo work: Easy-to-complete tasks that you can handle without much distraction.

* Collaborative work: Tasks best accomplished in pairs or groups. Working together reduces distractions and increases focus—your energy stays with the person, not on random notifications.

* Danger zone tasks: Anything requiring internet deep-dives, social media, or heavy use of AI. These can pull you off track and into rabbit holes before you realize it.

* Today’s Work = Balanced Portfolio: Move tasks into the “Today” column that play to your strengths: some for solo focus, some for collaboration, some best tackled with time blocks (like Pomodoro sessions).

* Focus Time = WIP Limit of One: Dedicate a column for deep work—strictly one thing at a time—to ensure true progress and avoid spreading yourself thin.

The Kanban Evolved series isn’t just about moving stickies; it’s about rethinking how you work so you avoid the traps of modern digital chaos. Every session is hands-on, fast-paced, and designed to help real people tackle real work challenges. Helping you get more done, with less stress, and more focus where it counts.

Our workshops run regularly so check the Modus Institute calendar and join us whenever you need practical tools and actionable insights to take back control of your workday.

Work keeps surprising you by taking too long.

You can write it off to interruptions, to things "not being explained right"… but it's time to embrace the complexity and build systems that help you see it coming.

Hofstadter's Law Hurts

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

Douglas Hofstadter said this haunting quote way back in 1979. And it's been steadfastly ignored by anyone who has tried to estimate work ever since. It looks like this is about estimation and time, because when we estimate we ask ourselves, "How much time should this take?"

The cruel fact is, this isn't about time at all. It's about complexity…the kind of work where the solution emerges as you do it, where each step reveals new steps you didn't know existed. Complexity makes you yell "why doesn't this work?" "Why isn't this done yet?" As unexpected issues arise, as things don't work as we expect, we fall victim to complexity.

We don’t need to be victims.

Weird Work in the Now

Humane Work is reader-supported and community driven. To be part of the Modus calls and events, become a paid subscriber.

For solopreneurs, remote workers, and anyone attached to distributed teams, we don't have someone to tap on the shoulder when you discover that "simple" client request actually requires learning three new tools, navigating two different bickering teams, and somehow making them all play nicely with the meeting invites you are sending out. It can feel like you are on your own with the "surprise" complexity, and your client is wondering why the two-hour task is now on day three.

But the problem here isn't the extra time…it's that you don't even know it's complexity. You might blame yourself for the estimate. You might blame an app or someone else for "slowing you down." But the fact is complexity exists, sometimes we can see it, sometimes we can't. But it always happens.

When we and our colleagues/clients don't respect this, we deal with broken trust. With yourself, with your client, with your team. When you consistently underestimate, you start to feel incompetent, even when you're doing brilliant work solving problems you couldn't have planned for.

Or is that true?

How You Can Plan for Complexity

You can plan for them. You know they are coming. So what can we do to make sure they are part of the work and not a crisis?

The answer is not better estimation. The answer is making complexity visible so you can manage it rather than be blindsided by it.

AI as Complexity Detector (Not Eliminator, and not Immune from it Either)

AI promises to help and sometimes it delivers. AI can break down complex tasks, research solutions faster, and generate starting points when you're stuck in that "how do I even approach this?" moment. I will create plans, make them detailed, but also tell the stories of why the work is necessary, who is asking for it and what I think might get in my way.

Give that to an AI agent (of any complexity) and prompt it something like. “What am I missing?” “Where might this fail?” “Where is there hidden complexity in this work?” And then have a conversation with it.

This has proven very helpful, not in that the AI gives me solutions or may even be “right”, but it does what LLMs do best, scour the world for patterns that match the one I’ve set up and compares that diffuse data to my situation. This points out areas to take another look at, question the design, or have appropriate conversations.

It's not all roses here and AI is not your buddy. AI can also make Hofstadter's Law worse in sneaky ways. AI gets less reliable as complexity increases. It starts making subtle errors when your project involves multiple interconnected systems. More dangerously for people, we over rely on the tool. AI can then make you overconfident in your estimates. When AI spits out what looks like a complete solution in seconds, it's tempting to think the work is nearly done. It’s tempting to think we have a product and not an input.

The key insight: Use AI as a complexity detector, not a complexity eliminator. When AI initially identifies something as complex and then struggles to give you clean, consistent answers about it, that's your early warning that you're dealing with complex work that should trigger a second look on your part.

The Hofstadter's Law-Resistant Kanban

Your Kanban is the only place to find ways to trigger the right ways of working for different types of work. Here's how you can structure your work to catch complexity before it catches you:

Add Complexity Columns in Your Planning Columns:

* I am Comfortable With this Task: Clear path, known solution, minimal dependencies

* This is going to be some work: Multiple steps but predictable, expertise required

* I am worried about this task: Something feels weird. The definition doesn’t seem right. Solution emerges through doing, learning required

Build Triggers into Your Doing Columns:

The earlier you can detect complexity, the sooner you can talk to other people about it. Complexity always requires conversations and collaboration. Flag Kanban tickets that encountered complexity so you can study them later and detect them earlier.

* Slow moving vehicles: Task has been in progress longer than estimated

* Learning required: You've had to research or learn something new

* Scope creep: The task now involves work you didn't originally plan

* Lots of chatter: This task was repeatedly planned, talked about, and refined. Unplanned conversations, unplanned meetings, or rework.

Track "Discovery Work" Separately:

Create a lane or a column for discovery work. These are tasks where you realize you need to learn something before you can estimate the "real" work. Simply creating the column or swim lane for this makes your brain say, “discovery might be a thing.” Then you watch for it, your barrier of what requires discovery becomes lower. Then you are honest about it. This makes the invisible visible and helps you communicate that some work is inherently unpredictable or that some work simply requires another look by a group of people.

Make Discovery Part of the Plan, Not the Crisis

We once had a client who wanted a detailed specification for a project that was inherently complex. We knew the outcomes we wanted, but the path required significant learning and experimentation. Instead of creating a false specification that would inevitably be wrong, we invited the client into our daily work. They attended every huddle, had access to all our work as we were doing it, and made every decision with us.

When the client could see and share in our discoveries in real-time, those discoveries became collaborative problem-solving rather than scope creep. When we hit unexpected technical challenges, they became shared challenges rather than our failures to estimate properly. Hofstadter's Law was still operating in full force, but it became a shared experience rather than a source of broken trust.

Your Next Steps

* Acknowledge complexity exists in your current work

* Add complexity indicators to your planning process

* Make discovery work visible to yourself and your clients/team

* Use AI as a complexity detector / sounding board to quickly get rid of complexity that is already solved or to alert you to areas that might cause you to stumble

Hofstadter's Law isn't a bug in complex work, it's a feature. People often try to avoid the complex work by trying to plan it out of existence, but the most valuable work often involves solving problems we couldn't have anticipated. When we solve problems our competition doesn’t, we win. Instead of fighting it, build systems that acknowledge complexity, make discovery work explicit, and turn surprises into shared problem-solving.

Your work will still take longer than you expect. But now you'll see it coming, plan for it, and turn those "surprises" into the collaborative discovery work they really are.

You can visualize your work all day long, set up the prettiest Kanban board in the world, and limit your work-in-progress religiously. But if you haven't identified and tackled the hidden forces that slow, complicate, and muddy your work, you'll never achieve the flow you're chasing.

Where Drag Lives on Your Kanban

Drag isn't inefficiency. Drag isn’t just a bottleneck. Drag isn’t simply having too many task. Drag is the visible manifestation of deeper political, behavioral, and emotional forces. Drag shows up in every column of your board (which means we can deal with it).

In Your Backlog Drag is the Work People Won't Touch

Look at those tickets that have been sitting there forever. People aren't pulling them because they're uncomfortable with:

* The complexity ("This looks like a career-ending task")

* The political implications ("When I finish this, it goes to that leader I don't trust")

* The vague definition ("I don't know what this actually means")

* The perceived ownership ("I think this might be someone else's job")

The emotions behind it: Fear, confusion, avoidance, and the quiet hope that "maybe it'll just go away."

In Progress Drag is the Stuck and Struggling

In the active state, that point between starting and “finishing” (it gets even worse at finishing), we have tasks stalled for days or weeks. This isn’t because they are hard it’s because of:

* Complex work given to one person (they're drowning alone, trying to fix something that needs collaboration)

* Constant interruptions (they can't maintain focus or are being intentionally derailed)

* Hidden overload (clean Kanban, messy calendar full of meetings)

* Political hot potatoes (they're dragging their feet hoping priorities change)

The emotions behind it: Overwhelm, frustration, the internal dialogue of "I've been beating my head against this for five days and now I'm the jerk holding everyone up."

In Done Drag is the Lies We Tell Ourselves

We are so good at completing incomplete work. The Done Column is where teams don't expect to find drag, but it's often the biggest source. These are tasks moved to "Done" before they're actually complete because of:

* Sprint or deadline pressure (we need to show progress)

* Bureaucratic demands (compliance says it's done, reality disagrees)

* FUD—fear, uncertainty, and doubt (better to call it done than admit we're stuck)

* Lack of care or training (we don't know what "good" looks like)

The emotions behind it: Resignation ("I hate this task, I hate my job, I'm just moving this so people leave me alone"), desperation, and the dangerous comfort of "acceptable completion of unacceptable work."

From Drag to Flow and Finding a Path Forward

Flow is drag's positive opposite. Where drag creates stress, confusion, and stagnation, flow creates clarity, energy, and steady progress. You can see it on your Kanban when:

* Tasks move steadily left to right

* The board stays balanced—no columns pile up

* Team members collaborate visibly across different steps

* People celebrate progress as cards hit "Done" (and actually stay there)

The Transformation Process

To move from drag to flow, you need to:

* Be Honest: Make all work visible, including the emotional and political dynamics around it

* Plan Like a Professional: Set realistic limits, create psychological safety, and address the root causes of avoidance and fear

* Create Real Team Focus: Align team priorities, establish clear definitions of "done," and build systems that prevent the behaviors that create drag

The Human Element

Remember: drag isn't just about process. It's about people living with bad process. Those stalled tickets and half-finished tasks represent real human experiences of fear, confusion, overwhelm, and resignation. The path to flow requires not just better visualization or stricter WIP limits, but creating an environment where people are (not feel, they actually need to be) safe to:

* Ask for collaboration when the work requires it (not ask for help, but acknowledge the work requires a team-lift)

* Find ways to learn together (not ask for help when they don’t understand)

* See realistic and exciting work and act on it (Not push back on unrealistic expectations)

* Finish work properly and professionally(Not move it to done because of fear or sick mechanics).

Your Next Steps

If you're struggling to create flow despite having a good Kanban system, look deeper. What behaviors and emotions are creating drag in each column? What conversations aren't happening? What fears are driving people to avoid certain work or push things through before they're ready?

Flow isn't just smooth work movement. Flow is the visible result of clear systems, team trust, and a focus on doing the right work at the right time for the right reasons.

This post accompanies a deeper exploration of flow, drag, and the psychology of Kanban. If you're ready to move beyond surface-level process improvements and address the human dynamics that make or break your workflow, consider joining us for Personal Kanban Evolved where we workshop these exact problems with real teams doing real work.

Because if you're interested in flow, if you want a good working environment, you need to understand not just how work moves, but why it gets stuck and what to do about it.

Work feels heavier than it should. How we relate. How we communicate. And how we don’t.

Deadlines slip, tempers flare, and once-motivated people withdraw. It feels like it’s “just work”, but it doesn’t have to be.

Workplace toxicity seldom arrives with fanfare and announcements, it hides in invisible bottlenecks, muddled handoffs, and unspoken tensions. Toxicity oozes slowly. We don’t notice it and after a while it becomes normalized. People can’t remember any other way work could be.

Then, because we can’t see the toxicity, we blame each other, we blame our bosses, we blame our employees. We blame the customer. We blame the government. We blame policy. We blame blame and more toxically blame.

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Stop That

Until your team can see where the pain originates, it can’t begin to heal.

Toxicity lurks and grows in shadows. When how we work becomes visible, both toxicity and cure are immediately seen.

Why Toxicity Persists Unseen

Most teams don’t set out to be dysfunctional. They inherit broken systems, ambiguous roles, and overloaded communication channels. Gifts! A from these gifts, stress mounts, psychological safety evaporates, and turnover stealthily erodes momentum. These forces operate beneath the surface and our traditional metrics (focused on measuring what we know) miss them entirely.

Bring Toxic Patterns into the Light

When things are hidden, the obvious answer is to make them … not hidden. Make the complexities of work clear and how you work collaborative. Mapping the real flow of value renders silent friction visible. Once everyone sees the same picture, they share language, ownership, and the agency to fix what hurts.

Five Steps to a Healthier Workplace

* Map your Current WorkWhen you map your work, you map your culture. You map how you help or hinder each other.Gather the team and build a living map of every step, decision, and handoff. physical sticky notes, a digital Kanban board, or an online whiteboard. Color-code stalled items, repeated rework, and unclear ownership so trouble spots leap off the wall. (Pro tip: work backward from the final outcome to surface hidden dependencies.)

* Spot the Toxic BullseyesOn your map, highlight areas that feel hostile, powerless, or perpetually stuck. Don’t blame, just find where your current system creates tension. These “bullseyes” often cluster around overloaded experts, murky priorities, or silent approval loops. Seeing them in your process transforms blame into problem-solving.

* Expose the Agency GapsAsk, “Where do people feel they can’t act with confidence?” Mark these zones in a bold color. They’re direct indicators of psychological safety breaches. Empowerment starts by recognizing where it’s missing.

* Visualize Your Reality and Your Path, Not Your Wishes and FailuresYou now have something extremely powerful. You know how you want to work together and how you are currently working together. Now, for the first time, you know what you want your kanban and other visualizations to show you. Everyone on the team wants to complete their work with quality and on time. Before your planned work, slow throughput, and defects were all you visualized, so all people could see is how they failed. That failure came from not knowing how you could work well together. Now you do, so you can visualize your two products: culture and completion. (Pro tip 2: You can’t complete without culture.)

* Co-Create Rapid RemediesConvene short, blame-free sessions in front of the boards. Brainstorm “today-sized” experiments: clarify a policy, smooth a handoff, or redistribute decision rights. Small, visible wins build momentum and restore trust. Work together to work better together.

Your Next Move

Reserve time this week to visualize your team’s workflow, if you do it right it will take some time. Identify a single toxic workplace sign and tackle it together. You’ll find many and they are much less threatening than they sound. Most of the time, it’s something like setting a policy for where certain information goes or when someone needs to focus.

Want more? Come see us at Modus Institute and sign up for the VSM class…or if you’d like to do something more involved drop me a line on LinkedIn and we’ll talk about doing a value stream mapping exercise or looking a how you are working together.

In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.—Albert Einstein

Some of you might be thinking, “yeah, this had better be a really great opportunity….”

Every morning now, my day starts with a walk through my mother’s Omaha neighborhood (which is a huge and weird neighborhood. Not quiet suburb, not quite city, very 1960s). It’s a simple daily routine, walking with some friendly faces, changing routes, a few conversations with neighbors and their dogs. But this walk has become more than just exercise. It’s part of my routine, my base, my bit of certainty when everything else is full of change.

I can think, process, plan, invent. And today, make this video (which might become a regular thing).

Why Routines Matter

A daily walk is standard work: something you do in a regular, repeatable (but not monotonous) way. Standard work is not rote, but it helps you write. It isn’t standardization, but it is a standard. You might choose a new path today, but you know you’re walking. You know the feeling of putting one foot in front of the other. That’s the reassurance and the power.

When life is turbulent our routines give us a steady platform. It might seem unimportant, even silly. Anything that brings predictability is the foundation you need to respond elegantly.

Elegance

Humans need a balance: stability and change working together. Too much unpredictability, and our brains go on high alert. We lose focus. We get stuck in fight-or-flight mode. If we let instability win, we can’t be fully present or effective. This is a battle. I’m sorry, but it is.

We will lose focus. We will become frustrated. But we must find that elegance of response…for ourselves, our work, or our loved ones, and perhaps generations to come. Right now isn’t a stressful time because of something small or immaterial.

“Don’t sweat the small stuff” … right now is not small stuff.

We need to respond swiftly, decisively, elegantly. So we start at a starting point.

We create our simple routine (walking, making breakfast, journaling, video games, music, anything that grounds you). We create the foundation. Then we build and build hard. Turn building into that routine.

This is the only way I know to focus and deal with the chaos, the surprises, and the unexpected.

Try It Yourself

* Pick one daily ritual, however small.

* Do it intentionally every day this week.

* Notice how having that bit of certainty affects your energy and mood.

* Add more, intentionally building a structure of reflection (learning) and action (doing).

This Video

The Rick Mercer walking around videos have been so overdone in the last 3 or 4 years that I was hesitant to do one. But on the walk, it felt right. And the weirdness of it likely will keep them short, plus maybe I can highlight things while walking. So expect more of them from time to time. Maybe I’ll make it part of my routine.

Want more? Come see us at Modus Institute and sign up for the VSM class…or drop me a line on LinkedIn and we’ll talk about doing a value stream mapping exercise for AI enhanced teams together.

We are at a Flex Point: Now things are more inventive, the rate of change is faster, the types of change more pronounced. This is not a death sentence, it is a point of change. AI certainly isn’t ready for prime time, despite the hype, but it will get there and we will adjust.

Work will become more distributed. We will be individuals, in teams, creating value, but the teams will become more spread out. People at home, in other cities or countries, and we’ll need to communicate much better than we have in the past (The “good news”: we were always pretty bad at communicating, so we have only upwards to go).

“There is no point trying to impose certainty on a situation which contains high uncertainty.” ~ Goldratt

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Replace Problems with Opportunities. As we work now solo business and creative work, we will need to improve how we improve. In the past , we spent a lot of time talking about problems. We examined how to fix them, how to avoid them, how to survive them. But the real story of the future of work, and of meaningful, humane work, is about opportunity: how do we set ourselves up to spot, seize, and shape the opportunities that matter most to us? How do we take a problem or found complexity and turn it into something we can (personally and as our team) and make it not an interruption (problem) but part of daily work done better than yesterday (opportunity).

This video explores how to keep your direction clear, your routines resilient, and your learning visible. Especially when the world around you is full of surprises which it is every day. The post here summarizes the video and extends it.

What’s in the Video: True North, Goals, and Standard Work in a World of Surprises

Hell is other people. ~ J.P. SartreSo is heaven. ~ Jim Benson

The more distributed we are, the more overhead we have. You can’t call IT and tell them to replace your printer, that’s on you. You can’t have finance handle taxes, it’s also on you. If you need some training, again…you.

Believe it or not, there was a reason we worked together in the same building and there are some pretty compelling reasons to continue to do so. That’s for a different post. Here, we are talking about how to get clarity, drive completion, and enjoy the daily work when you are distributed, a solopreneur, or otherwise “on your own.”

* Your True North is Who You Want to Be

* Before you chase opportunities, ask: Who do I want to be?

* True North isn’t a task list or a job title or a platitude. Your True North defines who and what you want you and your product to be. This guides every decision, big or small.

* In practice, most people think they know their True North, but when pressed, struggle to articulate it. It takes real reflection and conversation.

* Put your True North where you can see it. Make it a visual reminder when overload tries to make you focus on short term gains that will hurt your real aspirations.

2. Define Your Goals

* Your goals are the outcomes that flow from your True North.

* Whether you’re working solo or with a team, it’s easy to assume you know what you want. Until you try to write your goals down and really look at them, you will not “have goals”.

* Goals can be for today, this week, this month. They are a reason to invest your time in one activity over another. They must be intentional.

* Real clarity about goals comes from dialogue, not just internal monologue.

3. Build Your Standard Work

* Standard work is your best-known way to move toward your goals through the work you do every day. It’s a current, temporary, improvable routine that makes the unpredictable manageable.

* For example, my standard work for creating videos (currently) is:

* Generating ideas

* Sketching visuals

* Talking through the concept

* Shooting and editing

* Publishing and promoting

* Engaging with the community

* Within this standard work there are editing techniques that are standard, tools that are standard, ways I generate and store ideas, etc. I change them daily.

* This routine evolves over time, adapting to new tools, lessons learned, and the inevitable weirdness of daily life.

* If you don’t regularly improve your standard work, you have an increasingly ineffective rut.

4. Embrace Variation

* No matter how well you plan, variation is unavoidable. This doesn’t mean it should not be controlled, but it means that, now, we live in a world where change is more pronounced, more likely, and requires more reaction on our parts.

* Variation might be mundane (Tech fails, clients panic, family needs arise, and inspiration striking at odd hours). Our success lies in our ability to deal with these things elegantly.

* The trick isn’t to eliminate variation, but to build routines and systems that absorb it, so you can keep moving toward your True North through achieving goals and learning and improving even when the unexpected happens.

Extending the Practice

Making True North Tangible

* Keep it visible: Write your True North statement at the top of your board or workspace. Review it weekly. Make it the background on your monitor. Tape it to the dog.

* Make it collaborative: Don’t just define it alone. Discuss it with customers, friends, peers, mentors, or your community. Shared language builds shared direction. Hear yourself talking about it with others.

Setting and Reviewing Goals

* Limit your focus: Choose 2-3 weekly goals that align with your True North. Don’t overload your plate. But track them, see how you are making progress. Opportunities that you convert into completed goals are the very definition of success.

* Check in often: With each ticket ask: Are my actions moving me closer to these goals? If not, adjust the goals, adjust your tactics, look for options. Don’t just push harder.

Evolving Standard Work

* Document your routine: Write out your standard process for key actions. (Mine are content creation, sales, and working with students / clients). Update them as you learn.

* Build in learning: After each ticket, reflect: What worked? What didn’t? What will I change next time? (Check out the video on the afterburner for how to make learning continuous).

* Capture solutions: When you solve a recurring problem (like a tech glitch), record the fix—build your own FAQ.

Dealing with Variation and Interruptions

* Expect the unexpected: Design your day with buffer space for surprises. Don’t schedule yourself to the brim.

* Visualize interruptions: Track major disruptions on your Personal Kanban. Over time, you’ll spot patterns and can build better defenses.

* Practice self-compassion: When things go sideways, remember: variation is normal. The goal isn’t perfection, but steady progress.

Building a Resilient Workflow

* Choose tools that serve you: Use platforms and apps that fit your workflow, not the other way around. If a tool causes more pain than progress, it’s time to switch. Also remember, every tool is flawed, some are useful. Be neither beholden to your tools or switch so often that you build no standard work.

* Connect with community: Share your struggles and solutions. Someone else has faced your challenge before and sharing builds collective wisdom. If you work with tools often, find their user groups on Facebook or LinkedIn and leverage them.

Opportunity Overload and Humane Work

The real challenge here is opportunity overload. When you have no standard work then everything is changing or a surprise. You are reinventing the obvious. This means your attention is split by surprises you could have avoided and you risk missing the benefits of real surprises and opportunities.

By making your direction, your goals, and your routines visible, you create the space to notice, seize, and shape opportunities, even when they come in frustrating or stressful packages.

If you want to go deeper, explore Modus Institute’s courses on Personal Kanban, Cleaning Toxic Waste, and the x-matrix (on setting your strategy). Upcoming workshops in summer 2025 are: Personal Kanban Evolved and the True North Workshop

And as always, keep making your work visible. When you can see it, you can shape it.

This article builds on the video above, providing the structure and power of a Kanban board designed for solo business owners. I create not only a flow of work from yesterday’s video, but include an “Afterburner” column to make sure that our overwhelm isn’t in such control that we can improve our way out of it.

Each section below summarizes a major theme from the video and extends it with practical insights from the Modus Institute and Humane Work knowledge base.

Visualizing the 5Ps: Making our Real Work Visible

From the Video:Our work isn’t just tasks, it should have some direction, it should have some structure. But for those working alone, it all feels like a deluge. Tasks, taxes, attacked by interruptions.

To bring calm to this, the video provides a Personal Kanban with five swim lanes: Process, Provision, Platform, People, and Personal. This structure makes visible the true landscape of solo work:

* Process: The core flow of your business (content creation, service delivery, etc.).

* Provision: The administrative overhead (taxes, compliance, and all the “must-dos” that are easy to procrastinate).

* Platform: The tech and tools that support your work, including their (endless) maintenance and troubleshooting.

* People: Clients, collaborators, and anyone you interact with, highlighting the importance of relationship management.

* Personal: Your own well-being, energy, and growth.

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Extension:Overwhelm lives in the invisible. By mapping not just tasks but categories of expectation, you can instantly spot imbalances. You can see admin overload or neglected client follow-ups. You need to track these or you’ll lose them, using visual cues (colors, icons) to highlight urgent or neglected areas, and reviewing your board daily to rebalance your focus. Build your system, lose less, and feel progress.

Standard Work and Creative Flow

From the Video:Standard work is repeatable routines for admin, tech setup, and daily tasks. It’s how you do the things you do. Having it frees up bandwidth for creative, high-value work. By making these routines explicit and easy to follow, we can reduce friction and decision fatigue. More importantly, we can better understand how much effort something is going to take and are better prepared for the eventuality that sometimes it does not.

Extension:Standard work is not about rigidity or making you do the same thing every day. It is how you ensure that when you do things you know how you do them, what results you want, and how to improve them. When we create predictable space for work, we are also creating emotional space for the unpredictable. You know things are going to happen to knock you off your game, make sure your game is strong enough to resist those efforts. And when the weird does happen, you are able to respond elegantly.

In Personal Kanban and making work visual we want to see the routine parts of our day so we can respond flexibly to creative opportunities and unexpected challenges. Regularly review your routines in the “Process” lane to refine them for efficiency and ease. Then, use the afterburner, to fine tune.

Which brings us to the afterburner.

The Afterburner: Turning Completion Into Learning

Stuff from the Video:The Afterburner is a place, a set of columns, were we can analyze completed work for quality, completeness, and satisfaction. Instead of simply moving tasks to “Done” and forgetting about them, we learn, we reflect:

* Was this work up to your standards?

* Did it energize or drain you?

* What would you do differently next time?

* (You can ask more questions than these three…what’s important to you?)

The afterburner in the video uses visual cues (smiley faces for wins, snakes for pain points) to make it easy to spot patterns, celebrate wins, and see our impact.

Extension:The Afterburner reminds you that completed work isn’t “your past to be forgotten”. We want to constantly make our small business more successful and we can only doing that by doing more of the right things and less of the not-right things. We can only doing that by adjusting how we work, what we choose to spend our energy on, and how we respond to demands on our time.

This ensures your Personal Kanban is a work tool and a learning engine. Improvement is impossible without reflection. Setting aside time to reflect is good, but in the end it means you only reflect when it is time. Scheduled reflection is at best musing, but more likely it is time you cannibalize to do something other than reflect.

With the Afterburner and the emojis, reflection is happening constantly. You see and are reminded what you’ve done, how that relates to what you are doing, and allows you to routinely ask “What went well with that last time? What needed fixing?” and making those insights immediately actionable, you build a system of continuous, humane improvement. You review your Afterburner every time you touch your work. Learning will always be fresh.

Actionable Improvement: From Insight to Change

So, to be clear and really drive this point home, the Afterburner isn’t for idle reflection, it is for immediate action. When you spot a recurring pain point (like a tech tool that always fails), you can decide to research alternatives, seek advice, or automate the task. When you notice a satisfying project, you can plan to do more of that kind of work or with those nice people.

At Modus Institute, we think this real-time action is the heart of “visualized improvement.” Don’t let lessons learned fade into memory, wait weeks or months to discuss what went right, Do..It…Now. Turn these insights and inspirations into new cards, experiments, or changes to your standard work.

Share persistent challenges with your network; often, someone has already solved the problem you’re facing.

Close this up… Sustainable Solo Business

The video closes by urging solopreneurs to leave their business a little better each day, using the Afterburner to avoid repeating mistakes and to reinforce what works. Humane Work is about more than getting things done—it’s about making your work visible, manageable, and meaningful. By visualizing the full scope of your commitments, reflecting honestly on outcomes, and acting on what you learn, you create a resilient, adaptive solo business. This isn’t just hooey hustle culture; it’s sustainable progress, grounded in clarity and self-compassion. You started your business for a reason, remember it, respect it, and re-invigorate it.

Next Steps

* Visualize your own 5Ps: Adapt the swim lanes to fit your unique business landscape.

* Build your Afterburner: Make reflection and improvement a visible, regular practice.

* Go deeper: Explore Modus Institute’s Cleaning Toxic Waste and Personal Kanban Evolved courses for hands-on tools and a supportive community.

Every day, make your learning visible. Every day, invest in making your business more humane. You seriously owe it to yourself and everyone you serve.

Join Jim Benson, Mike Burrows, and Karl Scotland as they dive into the evolving world of visual management, strategy, and organizational alignment. This episode explores why defining a clear True North is so challenging, how non-prescriptive and outcome-oriented approaches foster better engagement, and why granularity—breaking down strategy and planning into actionable, context-specific elements—matters for real progress.

Key topics include:

* True North is required to have a confident, directed, team

* The power of non-prescriptive, context-rich language for shared vision

* How granularity in planning and strategy leads to more robust, adaptable outcomes

* The importance of collaborative conversations over top-down prescriptions

* Balancing freedom and constraint to enable both confidence and flexibility in teams

* Visual tools like the X-Matrix and Obeya for organizing and socializing strategy

Listeners will hear practical insights on making strategy more humane, actionable, and resilient—moving beyond rigid plans to a more granular, conversational, and emergent approach to change.

Why We Voluntarily Drown in Work (And How to Stop)

Too many commitments, scrambling to keep up, secretly prideful of our “busyness.” “Oh, I am soooo important!”

At the same time, we complain about too many meetings, unreasonable demands, and never any time to “just work.”

Overload is pushed (bosses give it to us) sure, but it turns out that the root of overload isn’t just external demands—it’s our own instincts.

Some Definitions: WIP and Martyrdom?

WIP (Work-in-Progress)noun

* The total amount of work (tasks, projects, or commitments) that has been started but not yet finished, actively consuming attention, time, or resources.

Work-in-Progress (WIP) are the things we’ve started but not finished. Like a highway, our brains have limited bandwidth for active work. Exceed that capacity, and everything slows down.

In the video we talk about a specific type: Martyr WIP where we voluntarily take on more than we can handle. It’s not just about saying “yes” to others or even fear of punishment for “no,” it’s about craving validation, fearing irrelevance, or equating productivity with worth.

In the video I say, “We sign up for it, we basically just say ‘abuse us.’”

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The Overload Tug of War: We Pull Just as Much as We’re Pushed

Overload isn’t just about others dumping work on us. We actively pull it in through:

* The “High Score” Trap: Chasing metrics like tasks completed, speed of delivery, or hours worked, even when they don’t align with real priorities.

* Illusion of Progress: Starting a bunch of tasks to avoid disappointing anyone, (Have you started my task yet?) then spending more time managing them (having meetings, updating on status) than actually doing the work.

* Identity Attachment: Becoming “the person who handles X,” which locks us into servitude.

“I’ve got all this professional desire, personal desire, and so I’m voluntarily drowning.”

Why Overload Backfires

Overload crushes us because our brains just can’t handle it. It creates cycles where we hate it, crave more of it, and in the end build systems that keep piling it on.

The Zeigarnik Effect: Unfinished tasks haunt our brains, increasing anxiety and reducing focus.

Collaboration Erosion: Do you hate silos? Martyrdom breeds silos. When we hoard work, we deny others growth opportunities and create single points of failure in ourselves. We make ourselves little silos of one.

The Stanford Multitasking Myth: Research shows chronic multitaskers perform worse on all tasks due to cognitive overload.

Breaking the Cycle: A 4-Step Framework

Step One: Visualize Your Real WorkWe want to build a Personal Kanban that shows the types of work that we have and gives us triggers to deal with it in less self-harmful ways. Start by create a simple Personal Kanban board that uses columns to call out they types of work: Backlog → Teaching | Deciding | Complex | Me → Doing → Done.

* Teaching: Tasks that upskill others (e.g., “Document this process with Julie”).

* Deciding: Tasks requiring input from stakeholders (e.g., “Finalize budget with Finance”).

* Complex: Tasks needing collaborative problem-solving (e.g., “Redesign onboarding workflow”).

* Me: Tasks only you can do (keep this list ruthlessly small).

Step Two: Focus Your WIP on Working With Every Category:Pull work that gets you to share work, to train people, to work with others, and to work alone. Balance your workload and get your ‘martyr fix’ by helping other people be better.

Step Three. Never Stop CollaboratingFor every task, ask: “Who else needs to understand this?” Redefine your value from tasks done to people helped. (If that seems the same as Number 2, sit with it a while.)

And Step 4. Conduct a Weekly “Overload Autopsy”Review tasks that spilled into the next week. Were they truly urgent—or self-inflicted?

The Path Forward

Martyrdom isn’t a badge of honor; it’s a recipe for burnout. By designing systems that prevent overload (like the Kanban framework above), we shift from reactive chaos to intentional flow.

Watch the companion video for a deeper dive into how Martyr WIP creeps into our routines—and how to spot it before it’s too late.

Want more? See the Personal Kanban book. Or Explore Modus Institute’s Personal Kanban Class. Or, if you are feeling like you are ready for the next level, check out our Visual Management Certification to master visual management and humane productivity.

The short form:

* Define the task you want to focus on

* Create a space where you can focus on that task for 25 minutes

* Work for the 25 minutes focused only on that task

* At the end of the 25 minutes take a 5 minute break, let your brain catch up, and relax a bit.

When we work this way, alone or together, we get a tremendous amount done because we are momentarily limiting our work in progress to one single task, we are closing out external interruptions, and we are achieving both flow and deep work.

It’s all sorts of goodness. In the little TikTok video above, I show how to create space in your Personal Kanban for your Pomodoro. Why? Because when you make physical space for something you create a system and are more likely to do it. When you look at your board you will always ask yourself if something should go into that column.

The Pomodoro column helps us not just focus, but it is a commitment device, something that we set up to specifically visualize and promote a way we would rather live. A way we would rather work. A way we would rather be.

It is so easy to think “I should do more Pomodoros”. Pomodori?

But it is another thing to actually do it. When we build our Personal Kanban, it’s not enough to just think “I’ll just focus on that one ticket in my In-Progress column.” We need to focus on the behaviors we want to promote. The behaviors we want to achieve.

For more: Personal Kanban Book | Personal Kanban Class | or just chat here.