Humane Work Podcast

Modus Institute

We explore humane work, visual systems, and people acting with confidence. humanework.substack.com

  1. We Are All in Transformation

    APR 13

    We Are All in Transformation

    Individuals work in teams to create value. Individuals communicate in teams to create value. Individuals interact in teams to create value. Slice up the collaboration equation however you want…it always reduces to the same thing. We get together. We work together. We get things done. 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? This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit humanework.substack.com/subscribe

    7 min
  2. This Person Wouldn’t Do That

    MAR 24

    This Person Wouldn’t Do That

    Go to Titanauts.com to see more about the book and help launch the mission. 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 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit humanework.substack.com/subscribe

    10 min

  3. MAR 19

    The Book That Wouldn’t Wait

    I didn’t decide to write this novel. It decided to be written. 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 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit humanework.substack.com/subscribe

    12 min

  4. MAR 11

    Five Ways of Not Working

    This post launches a series. Each Way of Not Working gets three companion pieces — a practitioner how-to on the Personal Kanban blog, a team application at Modus Institute, and a leadership essay at Modus Cooperandi. The first set is live now. (For workshops and to see us in person see our calendar of events). 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

    20 min
  5. The Science of Finishing Things

    FEB 24

    The Science of Finishing Things

    Modus calendar | Modus Institute | Personal Kanban: Mapping Work | Navigating Life 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. Most people read about better work. Paid subscribers build it. Get the full essay archive, member discussions, and early access to everything Modus makes. 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. Weekly essays on work, flow, and staying human while getting things done. Paid subscribers get deeper dives, tools, and access to the conversation. 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, invisib

    11 min

  6. FEB 16

    What GTD, Deep Work, Lean, Flow, and the 7 Habits Reveal About How We Really Work

    The joke might be Okay, so, five productivity frameworks walk into a kanban board…They don’t agree on much, but their arguments might be more useful than their advice. 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

    10 min

  7. FEB 2

    How To Survive LinkedIn

    Modus Institute | Personal Kanban | Upcoming Events 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. Humane Work is reader-supported publication. To receive more from us, come to our subscriber-only calls, and just help us keep doing this, please become a paid subscriber (it’s like a cup of coffee…or so). 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 yo

    9 min

  8. JAN 28

    We Can Be Accidentally Toxic...and We Can Not

    For a few years, we’ve had the toxic waste class at Modus Institute. It’s been an amazing experience, every month we have a call where people from around the world talk about the way work is impacting them and their teams and we, together, work on ways to remove those bottlenecks. 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. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit humanework.substack.com/subscribe

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About

We explore humane work, visual systems, and people acting with confidence. humanework.substack.com

Information

  • Creator
    Modus Institute
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    51
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Modus Cooperandi, Inc
  • Show Website
    Humane Work Podcast