Humane Work Podcast

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 [https://humanework.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

This Person Wouldn’t Do That

Go to Titanauts.com [http://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 [https://titanauts.com/], 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 [https://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 [https://humanework.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

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 [http://titanauts.com]. 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 [http://titanauts.com], 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 [http://titanauts.com] 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, [https://www.linkedin.com/in/kegill/] 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 [https://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. 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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 [https://personalkanban.com/], a team application at Modus Institute [https://modusinstitute.com/blog/], and a leadership essay at Modus Cooperandi [https://moduscooperandi.com/modus-cooperandi/]. The first set is live now. (For workshops and to see us in person see our calendar of events [http://lu.ma/modus]). 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 [https://pomodoro.modusinstitute.com/] 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 [https://personalkanban.com/pk/designpatterns-the-priority-filter-a-prioritization-tutorial/] 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 [https://amzn.to/4arpi3m]...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 [https://personalkanban.com/pk/designpatterns-pulling-in-batches-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 [https://personalkanban.com/pk/designpatterns-pattern-matching-use-your-personal-kanban-to-see-what-is-really-happening/] — 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 [https://personalkanban.com/pk/expert-combating-existential-overhead-2/]. 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 [https://personalkanban.com/pk/designpatterns-ready-column-ticket-aging/], 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 [https://personalkanban.com/pk/expert-finding-hidden-wip-2/]. Sometimes ambiguous WIP [https://personalkanban.com/pk/expert-ambiguous-wip/], sometimes guerilla WIP [https://personalkanban.com/pk/expert-guerrilla-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? [https://personalkanban.com/pk/decision-paralysis-personal-kanban/] — board design for individuals on the Personal Kanban blog * When Your Team Can’t Decide What to Work On Next [https://modusinstitute.com/blog/team-decision-paralysis-kanban] — team applications at Modus Institute * The Decision Tax Your Team Pays Every Day [https://moduscooperandi.com/modus-cooperandi/2026/3/3/decision-fatigue-leadership-kanban] — 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 [https://amzn.to/4arpi3m] 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 [https://lu.ma/modus] or visit Modus Institute [https://modusinstitute.com/]. 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 [https://humanework.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

The Science of Finishing Things

Modus calendar [https://lu.ma/modus] | Modus Institute [https://modusinstitute.com/] | Personal Kanban: Mapping Work | Navigating Life [https://amzn.to/4arpi3m] 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 [https://amzn.to/4s5hxr1] 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 [https://personalkanban.com/pk/primers-the-estimate-refineryelement-5-of-the-kanban/] 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 [https://personalkanban.com/pk/expert-focus-why-limit-your-wip-vii/] 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 [https://personalkanban.com/pk/designpatterns-done-column-daily-weekly-review/] 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 [https://personalkanban.com/pk/designpatterns-on-working-intentionally-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 [https://amzn.to/4kQW56w] 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 [https://personalkanban.com/pk/designpatterns-the-priority-filter-a-prioritization-tutorial/] (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 [https://personalkanban.com/pk/expert-respect-your-backlog-and-manage-it/] 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 [https://amzn.to/46malOQ] 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 [https://personalkanban.com/pk/expert-why-retrospectives-2/], 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 [https://personalkanban.com/pk/expert-collaborative-aid-element-10-of-the-kanban/] 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 [https://personalkanban.com/pk/expert-democratize-meetings-with-personal-kanban/] 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 [https://amzn.to/4ay6ReB] 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? [https://personalkanban.com/pk/designpatterns-done-column-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 [https://amzn.to/4b6Jysw]‘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 [https://amzn.to/4s011se] 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 [https://personalkanban.com/pk/uncategorized-what-was-i-just-doing-zeigarnik-forgetfulness/], 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 [https://personalkanban.com/pk/featured-on-focus-conquering-the-shiny-squirrel/] 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 [https://personalkanban.com/pk/expert-combating-existential-overhead-2/] 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 [https://personalkanban.com/pk/featured-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 [https://personalkanban.com/pk/expert-capacity-its-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 [https://amzn.to/4arpi3m] 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 [https://humanework.substack.com/]. For courses, workshops, and live events, check the Modus calendar [https://lu.ma/modus] or visit Modus Institute [https://modusinstitute.com/]. Further reading from the Personal Kanban archive: * Personal Kanban & Some Goodies About Your Brain [https://personalkanban.com/pk/featured-personal-kanban-and-some-goodies-about-your-brain/] * On Working Intentionally: The Thinking Ticket [https://personalkanban.com/pk/designpatterns-on-working-intentionally-the-thinking-ticket/] * Combating Existential Overhead [https://personalkanban.com/pk/expert-combating-existential-overhead-2/] * The Priority Filter: A Tutorial [https://personalkanban.com/pk/designpatterns-the-priority-filter-a-prioritization-tutorial/] * Collaborative Aid: Element #10 of the Kanban [https://personalkanban.com/pk/expert-collaborative-aid-element-10-of-the-kanban/] 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 [https://humanework.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]