Modus Institute

Modus Institute is proud to announce the release of Jim Benson's latest book, The Collaboration Equation! While we are all trying to collaborate every day, individuals and teams rarely work with confidence and humanity. In The Collaboration Equation, Jim share a coherent framework for collaboration: How to see collaboration, foster it, share it, and make use of it. This is a book about finding your way in a collaborative world. How you participate, how you lead, how you benefit. Every chapter is about how to work better, but ultimately every chapter is about how to live better. Be less stressed, more accepting, and more in control of your decisions and actions. Jim taps into decades of working with others to offer several key promises enabling readers to:? *build visual systems where people can see their work and?? *create cultures with a “Right Environment” so that they can mind their system.? ? By doing so they will create organizations where individuals truly work in teams to create value; and where professionals, companies, and individuals will act with confidence.? ? The organizations we work for today destroy confidence. They run on systems and processes that starve professionals of information, direction, psychological safety, and purpose, causing even the most talented individuals to question themselves and their decisions. Whether virtually or in real life, we isolate workers in cubicles, teams into silos, and decisions into oblivion. ? Teams collaborate when they see and understand their shared work of actions, plans, and priorities. They interact professionally and humanely when operating in a Right Environment that is purposefully designed. ? This book takes lessons from around the world and very different contexts where real professionals created their own resilient, collaborative teams to create value. Each chapter provides at least one flexible tool for your toolkit. Each chapter has at least one story showing these ideas at work in the real world. Each chapter gives you something to think about and something to act on.? For the past two decades Jim has worked at uncovering ways for individuals and groups to communicate, collaborate, and find clarity in unpredictable and amorphous environments.? With Tonianne DeMaria, he wrote Personal Kanban, which shares a system to quickly visualize and organize work for individuals or teams. Used around the world for daily work and projects large or small, PK allows you to visualize your work, fight overload by limiting work in progress, and complete with quality. The book has sold more than 100,000 copies, been translated into multiple languages, and is a recipient of the distinguished Shingo Publication Award.? The Collaboration Equation extends the core principles of Personal Kanban by showing how visualizing work, recognizing priorities, and focusing on the right work at the right time can help teams navigate humane work–and life–with purpose. #collaboration #lean #agile

Why aren't you able to get work done? Why are things always late? Why are people always cranky? We created kanban for knowledge work because teams were always overloaded. We set a WIP limit and tried to manage it operationally. But you have seen the result. People tell me "I was doing Personal Kanban and it worked great but the <event> happened and I fell off the wagon." People naturally blame themselves for not continuing with something helpful, but the reason they "fell off" was because we haven't done a good job of actually understanding our work and the relationships behind the work. So, I will say this.... when you understand the relationships behind the work, you can visualize and better control the work. In this order. Look at this slide from the WIP Whisperer class... It's a thing. We know it's a thing. No one does anything about it. If you are using Kanban or Scrum and actually want to get control of the work. If you are doing Lean and actually want to engage "respect for people". This is a very affordable way to greatly improve your chops. Come and join the group. The conversations in this one will be epic. It will be the best conference you never had to fly to. Sign up here. https://lnkd.in/gyp86WGd

This program is a transformative experience. It helped me understand visualization, collaboration, and the work I do on levels I did not even know existed. This is an investment that will pay you back many times over. I cannot say enough good things about it.

Standard work's history is allegedly from manufacturing, where people do one thing in one way over and over again. But for time immemorial there has been standard work in the creation of the unique. Here we have the standard work for lacquerwork. Boxes, art, hats, shelves, furniture, plates, etc. The standard work is quite standard, the results are not. So many people think their work is "unique" and "defies standardization" but that's never been the case. Having no set way of doing the basics of your work means you cannot improve on it. When Deming said "If you can't explain your work as a process, you don't know what you are doing," he wasn't trying to make people into automatons, he was trying to free their creativity by encouraging us to know the basics and create from there.

I know that's a lot of text for a social media post, but we just graduated another cohort from the LAVM (Lean Agile Visual Management) Program. We spent over a year together. Everyone had family issues, the world was falling into confusion, people had family members who fell ill, the economy was challenging, and all of this fed into the connection not just to each other, but to what we are working toward: creating better ways of working and better work-lives for people. We cannot innovate or even do quality work when we are distracted, frustrated, or held back. We need to remove the bottlenecks. We need to solve. We need to create. And, right now, with everything negative going on in the world, I'm proud that's what we do at Modus Institute. https://lnkd.in/gi5uA8c7=&utm_term=&utm_content=&utm_campaign=

Ready Fire Aim isn't just a management joke, it repeatedly destroys careers. People put their energy into creating something, solving problems, making it all work, then find out the people assigning the work hadn't thought it through and it needs to be round-filed and replaced with something else. Meanwhile, those same people are later judged on their "productivity" that doesn't include that shelved work. Yes, you guessed it, this is also part of the WIP Whisperer class https://lnkd.in/gyp86WGd

We've found four categories of WIP. It would be nice to assume that WIP is just what you are doing, but we know that it is much deeper than that. Leadership's often over-zealous or misguided or simply underinformed notion of how much we can do or what types of change we can take on are their own category. There are over 20 types of WIP in this one. If you'd like to respond elegantly to this type of WIP and not suffer from it, join us in May https://lnkd.in/gyp86WGd

So many kinds of Work in Progress that overload us. Often it's just the simple fact that we should be collaborating, but we're off "doing our own work". No one else learns, we become isolated, and then no one knows how to do anything. This is number 22 of quite a list. Want to learn more? Come join me and others in May for the WIP Whisperer event at Modus Institute. ,,, here ... https://lnkd.in/g23az29p

Over the last year, I've been downsizing. We've been downsizing. Downsizing has happened. This means I've given away a lot of things. Big things, little things. The matter and materiel of existence. So many more items than those attached. The detritus of continuous improvement. When complete, I'll leave this house I've been in for so long and move to another place far away. It's interesting to see the small improvements (giving away some notebooks) quickly add up to dozens of actions, all building to one huge step. When we improve, we create the opportunity to improve again and in more substantial ways.

We are at a continuous improvement crossroads where we need to improve continuous improvement. When we look at what is next, we see building ways of working from the various frameworks we've experienced over the years. This is what's behind the Clarity Kit at Modus Institute. We need to work together, learn together, and build new ways of working that understand constant change and emergent learning. ... Check it out at https://lnkd.in/gbX7n7Ax