Humane Work Podcast

Jim, Kevin, and Jesse talk practical work.

Continuous improvement is hard work and it isn’t just something you do .. and it is “done.” That’s part of what continuous means. It’s what Deming, Ohno, Goldratt, Shook .. everyone has warned us about. That we are engaged in continuous refinement, learning, and making things work better for the customer, the company, and the people doing the work.

This is always adjustment.

Kevin and Jesse deal with this every day in different ways. I always enjoy talking to them because they are truly thoughtful and always looking for ways to make work … work.

We walk about…

Visual Management as a Transformational Tool:How making work visible can fundamentally alter how teams operate and move from confusion and overload to transparency and shared understanding.

Navigating Transformation and Maintaining Progress:Progress is rarely permanent. Teams might reach new levels of collaboration or efficiency, only to risk backsliding over time. We talk strategies for sustaining these gains, emphasizing the importance of renewing focus and adapting as needs evolve.

Making Problems Tangible, Not Personal:You can’t understate the benefit of depersonalizing problems. Visual management allows teams to see issues objectively rather than associating them with individuals. This shift from personal blame to collective problem-solving reduces tension and fosters a sense of unity.

Fostering Participation and Shared Ownership:Involving everyone from leaders to frontline team members in shaping processes and solving problems is the only way to Create psychological safety and healthy feedback.

Behavioral and Cultural Barriers to Change:New tools and ideas can be difficult to adopt because people come to work every day with longstanding beliefs and behaviors. Addressing these behavioral barriers requires patience, empathy, and ongoing encouragement for new habits to take root.

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

Learned Helplessnesslearned help·less·ness | noun | /ˈlərnd ˈhelpləsnəs/

Learned helplessness is when people stop trying because they’ve been made to feel like nothing they do can change their situation.

At Modus Institute, we have a real problem with the term “learned helplessness.” Yes, learned helplessness is very real, but it is framed as “learned.” “Learned” suggests there’s an element of willingness involved, like people choose to give up. Like “quiet quitting” or “sitting this one out” or “checking out mentally.”

But when you’re trapped in toxic workplaces, command-and-control hierarchies, or environments where every attempt to act gets shut down, helplessness isn’t learned…it’s imposed.

And so what we’re really seeing is imposed isolation. People retreat because it’s their only rational response. For the individual, retreat is necessary for self-preservation. But the moment one person retreats, others follow. Soon the whole team grows distrustful and quiet. And momentum dies.

This isn’t learned helplessness. This is imposed isolation.

And isolation kills organizations from within.

The Fear Factory

Right now, we’re living through a painful and obvious period of manufactured isolation. Turn on the news, open social media, check your inbox, talk to a relative, stand in line at the store…and we hear division, fear, worry, concern.

All designed to make us feel small, threatened, and powerless. Fear rhetoric has become truth, or at least it’s become that which makes you doubt truth. To doubt your coworkers. To doubt the future.

Humane Work is reader-supported and we very much appreciate our paid subscribers, they help us keep going. Come to monthly calls, get additional content, get discounts on classes, by becoming a paid subscriber.

In this mire of doubt, groups we work with who are trying to build something meaningful, students learning to collaborate, clients attempting organizational change…all are having trouble with the most basic professional behaviors. Scheduling meetings becomes an ordeal. Building systems requires dozens of meetings (that are hard to schedule). The storming and forming stages of team development stretch on for months because the level of trust in society is at an all-time low. The communication breakdowns of the group, with people looking for accountability, become blame storms.

Storming becomes hurricane strength. Forming becomes a dreaded thanksgiving dinner. Norming becomes a bi-partisan bill. And performing simply slips away.

When everything feels like a threat, when every decision carries the weight of potentially catastrophic consequences, when leaders default to command-and-control because “somebody has to make the tough calls,” people do what makes sense: they stop taking initiative.

Doomscrolling Is Passive by Design

Doomscrolling isn’t an accident. It’s the natural result of systems designed to keep you consuming rather than creating. You scroll through endless feeds of problems you can’t solve, crises you can’t affect, disasters you can’t prevent. The algorithm rewards passivity. There are forces that win through lack of initiative. The longer you stay paralyzed by the feed, the more valuable you become.

This isn’t learned helplessness. This is strategic disempowerment.

The overwhelming narrative of command-and-control in popular media, political rhetoric, to the workplace… charlatans promise or even pronounce certainty in uncertain times, divide and conquer, and train people to wait for someone else to solve their problems.

Let’s Not Be Passive

Fear peddlers don’t want you to know that we already have the power. We don’t need to be incentivized. We don’t need empowerment. We need to take our work, our communications, and our world view back.

Hope is a weak sounding word, but it drives business. Hope is what we have at the base of every business plan. Hope that we are right, that our plans can come to fruition. Hope that we can build a better future. Hope is real truth. Focus and completion are real truths. Working together we can get things done, focus, and not fear our neighbors, our colleagues, or the world at large.

The Antidote to Isolation

When we do a right environment exercise or value stream mapping exercise, we are working together, as a team to build actionable clarity. When people understand their work flow, when they can see their work, understand how it connects to something larger, and have the information they need to act with confidence, they stop being passive consumers of other people’s crises and become active creators of solutions.

Visual management is actionable hope made visible. Whether it’s a simple Kanban board, an Obeya room, or just sticky notes on a wall, visual boards show us that we can have faith in our work and in each other. We can see what we’re doing, we can see what’s working, we can see what needs to change, and we can act together on what we see.

With visual management we are not isolated. We are a team.

Beyond Belligerence

Focus and completion are drowned out by belligerence, but they don’t have to be.

Every team that successfully moves from isolation to collaboration does it the same way:

* They learn about each other, they value their teammates.

* They understand what people bring to the table.

* They figure out what needs to be done.

* They make their work visible.

* They create space for real conversation (not just performative meetings),

* They build systems that underwrite professional action instead of political maneuvering.

These aren’t “soft skills”. Soft skills are creating a hero to solve your problems for you. This is literally taking responsibility for your life and work and getting things done.

This is hard economics. Watch the video for an insane number of stats about this. Workplace toxicity costs American employers $917 billion annually. That’s not the cost of people “being difficult.” This is not a “culture issue”. This is the cost of real behaviors modeled and promoted creating systems that make it impossible for people to act professionally.

We can complain about them or we can fix them.

When we worked with teams during COVID, something interesting happened. The crisis stripped away a lot of the unnecessary bureaucracy and forced people to focus on what actually mattered. Teams that had been paralyzed by procedure suddenly found ways to make decisions quickly. Not because the crisis made them better people, but because the crisis made the cost of inaction visible and immediate.

We’ve seen that people can and will work together and enjoy the experience.

This is the work we do at Modus Institute helping teams move from toxic isolation to collaborative professionalism. If your team is stuck in learned helplessness cycles, there are tools and practices that can help.

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

When teams go off the rails or get stuck in toxic patterns, there’s usually a breakdown in one of four fundamental areas (the C’s). Here’s how to diagnose what’s going wrong and fix it.

Whether you’re trying to build a healthy team from scratch or figure out why things have gone sideways, I keep coming back to the same four diagnostic questions / lenses / points. They’re at the heart of everything we do at Modus Institute…Personal Kanban, Obeya, visual management, reducing workplace toxicity…all come back to clarity (understanding), completion (are we actually able to work), calm (can we plan and execute with flow, and collaboration (do we really work together).

These are practical lenses for understanding why work feels hard and what you can do about it. Don’t tell me they are abstract…because I’ll get testy. :-)

CLARITY: Can You See the Work?

Do people have the information they need to make their own decisions?

Clarity means you can see what needs to be done, you understand the context that makes it important, and you have enough agency to move forward with confidence. When clarity breaks down, people spend more time figuring out what to do than actually doing it.

Most workplace dysfunction starts here. People can’t act professionally because they don’t know what “good” looks like, they don’t understand how their piece fits into the bigger picture, or they’re constantly waiting for someone else to tell them what comes next.

Personal Kanban, value stream mapping, Obeya all start with making work visible so people can see what’s actually happening instead of guessing. If you can’t see it, you can’t manage it or … complete it.

COMPLETION: Can You Focus and Finish?

Having clarity is worthless if you can’t act on it. The second C asks: Can you actually finish what you start?

“Finish” means a task is done and doesn’t come back. That’s it.

This is where most productivity advice falls apart. People think completion is about time management or motivation, but it’s really about flow. Can you focus on the work you’re doing right now without being constantly distracted by everything else demanding your attention? Can you pay attention enough to make sure it gets done the right way, for the right people, at the right time?

The completion question cuts through all the busy work and asks: Are you able to select something, work on it without interruption, and finish it before moving to the next thing? If not, you’ve got a system problem, not a people problem.

CALM: Can You Build Sustainable Rhythms?

Here’s where it gets interesting. Calm isn’t about being relaxed or quiet or even unbothered, it’s about creating a rhythm that creates predictable flow right now.

Think about your daily rhythm. Notice it. Be aware of it. Some days you have wall-to-wall meetings, so your rhythm is quick, focused bursts between calls. Other days are wide open, so you can tackle the deep work that requires sustained attention. The key is recognizing what kind of day you’re having and selecting work that fits the rhythm.

Calm is what happens when you have clarity about your work and the ability to complete it consistently. This means you can and must build sustainable patterns in how you work: When I face adversity, what do I do? When I select work, how do I choose? When I think about my quality for my work, what does that mean?

Without sustainable rhythms, you get floods, rapids, and droughts. Everything urgent followed by nothing to do. That’s is exhausting.

COLLABORATION: Are You Working Better Together?

The final C addresses why most of us go to work in the first place: to accomplish things with other people that we couldn’t do alone. We work in companies to be in the company of others.

Collaboration isn’t more meetings, it isn’t everyone sitting around and always working in a huge mob. Collaboration is not design by committee.

Collaboration is a shared understanding of how we, as a team, are going to achieve our goals IN DETAIL WITH REAL TIME UPDATES.

* Does the team know who’s working on what?

* Are people comfortable with how work is distributed?

* Do team members have the information they need to complete their work independently?

* Do they know how to give or receive help when needed?

When collaboration works you get natural coordination. People can see how their work connects to others’ work and act accordingly. When it breaks down, you get silos, bottlenecks, and the kind of meeting culture that makes everyone miserable.

How the Four C’s Work Together

The C’s are interdependent and self-reinforcing.

You need clarity to know what work to complete. You need the ability to complete work to build sustainable rhythms. You need sustainable rhythms to collaborate effectively. And you need collaboration to maintain clarity about what matters most.

When teams are struggling, there’s usually a breakdown in one of these four areas that cascades into the others. Fix the root cause, and the rest starts to improve naturally.

We can use this to demystify “process” or “frameworks” or other multisyllabic four-letter words. When we are working together, regardless of what you are trying to “implement”, just ask:

* Can we see the work? (Clarity)

* Can we focus and finish? (Completion)

* Can we adapt to the rhythm of the day? (Calm)

* Are we working well together? (Collaboration)

Most of the time, the answer points you toward exactly what needs attention.

What’s breaking down for your team right now? Which of the Four C’s needs the most attention? Let me know in the comments—I’d love to hear how this framework applies to your situation.

Want to dive deeper? Check out our Modus Institute calendar for upcoming workshops and community sessions where we explore these concepts in practice.

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

Modus Live Online Obeya Calendar | Modus Institute | Collaboration Equation Book

We work in companies to be in the company of others. Human others. We smile. We laugh. We get upset. We … do things. Sometimes fun things, sometimes frustrating things.

Often work is painful, with too many tasks, too many voices, and no clear place to start. When this happens, it’s tempting to just blame it on other people, want to put our heads down in isolation and “get real work done.”

But anyone that’s tried this knows they get part way into things and need to talk to someone. And then, because they have isolated themselves, that either means they interrupt someone else (in isolation) or they just don’t ask. Then… rework, misunderstandings, and worse result.

Isolationism sucks. We’d all rather show up to a team where everyone sees what matters, helps each other out, solves real problems, and gets things done. We want to create a go-to spot for the team to align, work, help, solve problems, seize opportunities, and always keep improving. This is called an Obeya or Mission Control or … so many names, I’ve lost track. One location where people know (know is a very strong word) that progress can be made, problems solved, and opportunities realized. It’s how people know the team has their back.

To Align

Beyond jargon, we are building a room where people can align. They process and agree to move forward. No more doubt, guessing, or passive aggression. When a team sees the same picture, they know what matters and what actions to take. Alignment does not mean everyone agrees on every detail. Alignment is when we agree on direction, and that frees us up to work smarter, not harder.

To Work

Work is more than a hundred tickets in your kanban or sixty cranky emails. Work is more than plans, more than dictates. Work is the best thing each of us could do right now to support our strategy, our plans, and our team. So, in an Obeya, we want to make that happen. Show people what’s in play today, what’s done, and what’s up next. Work stop being an invisible threat and becomes manageable. Overload will still exist, be we see it and can adjust to it. Meetings required to talk endlessly about what we are going to do and when go away. Status meetings shorten dramatically. The number of times you ask for clarification … and so on. This means less stress because you know what to do, and the team can trust the process.

To Help

If we don’t help each other, everyone’s issues are our shared bottlenecks. So we make this a space where we step up for each other. If a teammate’s stuck, we give them a push. You see where help is needed and offer it. When you need help, it arrives without you feeling lost or judged. Help stops being a rescue and becomes simply doing the work together. This is self-organization.

To Solve

Problems aren’t problems. Work is filled with surprises, it’s how we deal with them that is important. An Obeya lets us deal with surprises reliably, predictably, and collaboratively. When a challenge pops up, the team gathers, looks at the facts, and tackles it together. Solving things together means decisions come easier, faster, and with better results. People trust what they see and what they know. People trust predictability. The problems will change, the response should not. Solve immediately and together.

To Seize

Opportunities hardly ever announce themselves, but they sure are ignored. They are unplanned and inconvenient. When your team has a shared place to spot new directions, you also have a larger number of people looking for them. Profit and market share and customer value stem from these opportunities. Often they are lumped into “problems,” but opportunities are different. They are something that isn’t happening at all that, if successful, could have a lot of positive impact. The visual space, the Obeya, is where these ideas or options can be quickly looked at… and acted on.

To Improve

Improvement isn’t just about process. As professionals we are improving ourselves, our team’s way of working, our tools, our product, our relationships internally and externally… And if you aren’t improving at best you are stagnating, at worst you are moldering. With a shared space, you don’t just fight fires; you learn from every week, every project, every bump in the road. The team grows stronger, the product better, the market awareness more resilient…because you can see what’s working and what needs to change.

Humane Work is reader-supported and we thank you all who have subscribed. It means a lot to us! If you’d like to help keep this work going, become a paid subscriber.

What this Means to Me

I watch this all the time. Teams that take the time to work together, to see what’s important and make sure they are communication lose confusion and gain action. Some stick with it, some lose it, that’s part of how we humans work. We’re lousy at self-care, we’re worse at caring for others. We always think it’s someone else’s job. It is painful to see, I wish more people would invest just a little time to make the pain go away.

We have an ongoing series of Obeya classes at Modus Institute. You can grab one at your leisure or come to a few lean coffees and just get to know us. Or we can consult. Or you can grab a Collaboration Equation book. But please do something to help your team.

Also, if you are in the UK in Nov 2025, you can come to Jim and Karl’s Visual Leadership Class!

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

Strategy Course on Modus Institute | Karl and Jim Live Workshop in Bristol Nov 2025

Work sucks, work is wonderful.

We’ve been thinking about strategy lately. Not the retreat-in-Cancún kind where executives disappear for a weekend and return with glossy presentations nobody asked for way. The collaborative way. The effective way. Strategy created by the messy, collaborative, utterly human process of figuring out where we’re going and why that matters. The effective way.

While creating the second course in the Strategy and X-Matrix course, we (Karl Scotland and Jim Benson) had a conversation about three deceptively simple, profound approaches to strategy. Strategy historically has been a dictate, something you can put on a card and carry around with you. But if we treat it like an action … I am acting strategically … this means we have to be aware of our future desires, our past behaviors, and our current reality. And we have the acts of forecasting, backcasting, and sidecasting.

We have three different ways of understanding how we relate to uncertainty, how we learn from the past, and how we stay grounded in present reality while still moving toward something better. This post introduces these three concepts.

We’ll be diving deeper into each approach in future posts and exploring them in more detail in an upcoming workshop. For now, let’s just introduce them.

Forecasting is Seductive Wishing

Forecasting feels safe. Organizations and managers love forecasting because it creates an illusion of control. “We know what our operating model should look like,” they say. “We’ll just create our goals, follow our playbook, and get there.”

Forecasting actually feels pretty good in the moment. It’s the strategic equivalent of drawing a straight line from here to there and calling it a plan. Over the years, we’ve seen this play out repeatedly: organizations become attached to a given and brittle solution, believing it can be achieved without adaptation.

Forecasting assumes a level of predictability that simply doesn’t exist in complex systems. A forecast is a plan, and plans do not survive contact with reality unscathed; there are always changes, learning, and new directions. Organizations that over-attach to forecasting miss something crucial: to adequately forecast, you have to understand the work you need to do, the team you have to do it with, and the rate of variation in the market of whatever you’re creating. These elements are dynamic, contextual, and deeply human. Successful forecasting only happens when the forecast comes with the ability to change, be updated, and continuously re-forecast based on the best available data.

Backcasting is Scientific Fantasy

Backcasting sounds more sophisticated. Instead of just projecting forward, you start with your desired future state and work backward to figure out what needs to happen. It feels more thoughtful, more strategic.

Backcasting has its own challenges, though. When you’re working backward from that perfect future state (an overly specific goal), you’re often working backward from a fantasy. You’re assuming that your desired endpoint is actually achievable with your current culture, skills, and organizational reality.

Too many organizations create beautiful backcasting exercises that ignore their starting point and undervalue changes along the way. They design the perfect process, work backward to create the perfect implementation plan, and then wonder why it feels like they’re trying to implement someone else’s solution in their own context. The missing piece? Understanding where you actually are right now.

Sidecasting Just Might Have Some Strategic Presence

This is where sidecasting makes things interesting.

Sidecasting, a term coined by Dave Snowden, focuses on now. Now, to the best of our understanding, is real. Real is good.

In sidecasting, you look at the data you have, the visual information available to you, and use that to figure out just what to do next. It is strategy as situational awareness. It is strategy always updated to match what is both desirable and achievable.

Karl described his most enjoyable change efforts as the ones where teams just started trying stuff. “What new practice might we try?” became the driving question. No grand implementation plan, no perfect future state—just careful experimentation in context.

This reminds us of Kevin Chase at Turner Construction, whom Jim wrote about in The Collaboration Equation. Kevin told him, “I work in construction. Nothing is going to impact my work/life balance. But the Kanban here in this room helps me communicate with my bosses, their bosses, and my team. They know what’s going on, and that helps me act with confidence.”

That’s sidecasting in action. Kevin wasn’t implementing a methodology or working toward some idealized future state. He was solving a real problem, a lack of confidence that came from communication difficulties, with the tools and context available to him. His right now, made visual, allowed him to act both tactically and strategically.

You Can’t Have One Without the Other

The most effective strategic approaches we’ve seen don’t choose between forecasting, backcasting, and sidecasting. They dance between all three.

Memento Vivere: They forecast enough to understand direction and intent. This provides shared understanding of where we think we’re heading and why that matters. What might a good end-state look like? They set direction.

Memento Mori: They backcast enough to create initial hypotheses based on experience. What has happened to us previously? How does that inform how we’ll approach this next group of work? This honors the wisdom embedded in our collective experience and uses our experience and experiments to update and adjust our forecasts.

Carpe Diem: And they sidecast constantly to stay grounded in current reality. What are we doing right now? What’s actually happening on the ground? What does the data tell us about how things are flowing? How should we adjust and adapt our approach? What opportunities are presenting themselves?

When you visualize all three of these perspectives in real time, something magical happens. People can see their work clearly enough to make good decisions about what to focus on, what to delegate, and what to decline.

Making Strategy Visible and Human

Think about the construction site where teams track corporate performance metrics daily, not because some consultant told them to, but because they can see how their daily work connects to larger outcomes.

This is what happens when forecasting, backcasting, and sidecasting work together. Strategy becomes something people participate in rather than something they receive. The forecast informs direction, the backcast utilises learning, and the sidecast provides agency. And this is all best done visually.

The real breakthrough comes from creating systems that help humans navigate uncertainty together.

After twenty years of watching people try to get work done, we know this: we’re all making it up as we go along. The question isn’t whether you have the perfect strategy. The question is whether your approach to strategy helps people act with confidence in the face of uncertainty.

And that requires all three: enough vision to move forward, enough reflection to learn from experience, and enough presence to respond to what’s actually happening right now.

The best strategies aren’t perfect plans—they’re learning systems that adapt as quickly as the humans who use them.

Events with Karl and Jim:

This conversation emerged from ongoing work on making strategy deployment more collaborative and humane. We’ll be exploring these concepts in more detail in future posts, as well as these events:

Our Visual Leadership workshop LIVE in Bristol in Nov 2025,

Our online Strategic Aspirations Workshop

Our online Creating Strategy Workshop

Our online Strategy and Tactics Workshop

Our online Strategic Evidence (Metrics and ROI for Strategy) Workshop

and in an upcoming workshop focused specifically on the art of casting.

If you’re interested in exploring these ideas with your team, we’d love to hear from you just leave a comment or talk to us on linkedin Jim LinkedIn … Karl LinkedIn.

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

Modus Institute Online Classes | How We Can Help You

Ghosts in the Machine

Teams don’t argue because they’re “bad” People argue because their systems are bad. Everyone has surprise dependencies, last-minute requests, and the endless slog of “bad exciting” work (the stuff that blows up your day). I’ve created another design to solve this. Let’s set you up to actually collaborate effectively.

What you see above is a KanbanZone board I built to solve for clarity. Every team member—Andy, Stuart, and Gordon—is working together but also pursuing their own tasks. There is a structure for this. Easy to use and easy to maintain. It’s detailed in the video.

The Structure

The individual work of team members are in their own swim lanes.

The columns:

Ready to Start starts the relationship with a promise of action, not a surprise.

Concept defines the work. It’s you figuring out what you are going to do. That is your own personal work.

One World is the three team members coming back together and saying “Yes, that concept is sound, run with it.”

In Progress is work that you do alone.

Synchronicity is work you do with others. Andy / Stuart pairing for example.

Invisible Sun is the column, like One World, where the team reviews the work.

Done is the completion of work that everyone agrees was both formulated and implemented well.

Humane Work is reader-supported. We are loving this work and want to keep doing it. If you are getting value, become a paid subscriber. (It’s like a coffee a month).

Why This Solves Dependencies

Using this board, each member knows exactly what their role is and how ideas move from concept, through shared vetting, to done. This is a very real mechanism for eliminating dependency disasters, redirection, and comments being lost. When a ticket lands in a shared column, everyone knows it’s time to act. Nothing sneaks up on anyone. Work is shared. Planning is shared. The end result is shared.

This simplicity is intentional. The simplicity is professional. The fewer steps, the fewer bottlenecks. Building this board lets the team designing their heaven together.

Hell and Heaven are Both Collaborative Acts

Without a working system, if your system doesn’t let you know when and how to act, then teamwork feels like hell. When it’s clear, you move with purpose and even excitement. The right kind.

Call To Action Things

Personal Kanban teaches this kind of agency. At Modus Institute, our class delivers everything you need to quit guessing, start collaborating, and actually enjoy your work. KanbanZone is a platform for making it real (we enjoy it). visualizing teamwork so everyone knows what’s next and no ticket gets lost in the shuffle.

Ready to join a community that works smarter? Subscribe to HumaneWork and check out our Personal Kanban course. Heaven is a board away.

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

“Hell is other people.” And, because work is nothing if not ironic, heaven is too. The difference between the two isn’t people, it’s the system they are in. At work and on earth this is a system we create, inhabit, and serve.

People like to work together. People like to focus. People like certainty, even when things are fluid. Certainty is a funny word. We focus on it being an infallible plan, reassuring us that everything is going to be fine. Well, it’s not going to be fine. False certainty is not good, but it’s what we get most often. (Wishful thinking is not a plan.)

So, we want certainty that, no matter what happens, our team has our backs and that we’ll respond immediately and together.

We are building new barriers to our existing lousy relationships. Remote work, asynchronous comms, and post-pandemic uncertainty can be ingredients for a communication apocalypse. Toss some AI in there and suddenly managers are like, “Well, you all couldn’t get your work done anyway, so is AI going to be any worse?”

Conway’s Law and the System We Deserve

Conway’s Law tells us that the way our teams communicate (or don’t) becomes our culture and our products embody our culture. If our communication is scattered, guarded, and bureaucratic, our products will be too. If we want to be professional, we must design ways of working that allow us to act professionally. If we value agency, transparency, and humane collaboration, we need to design how we work to underwrite that. Good relationships is heaven. Bad relationships, division, isolation, and fear are simply formalizing hell.

Bob Dylan said, “Ya gotta serve somebody.” When we work, we build our system…then we become its servants. We create the environment together and that shapes our experience. If we neglect it or assume someone will solve our problems for us, that is negligence and we will pay a price for it.

Humane Work is reader-supported and getting pretty popular (yay!). To receive new posts and support our work become a paid subscriber.

Collaboration Is Always a System

In The Collaboration Equation, I talk about how teams don’t magically collaborate and how our negligence of our culture builds barriers to Professionalism. Professionalism isn’t doing going to work and shelving your emotions. Professionalism is being an active player in your system of work and actively designing how we operate, share information, and improve together.

My editor, Tom Ehrenfeld, made me spend a lot of time on Five Principles of Collaboration. He did this because he was part of the team and knew they were important. He was being a professional. I’m glad he did because they are relevant here. We need, more than ever, to build our businesses on a professional, collaborative foundation:

* Pay Attention (Situational Awareness): Professionals know what’s going on. They don’t operate blind.

* Give a Damn (Relationships): Value is created when people care about the outcome, the product, the customer, and each other.

* Improvement Is Your Job: (PDSA) Agency isn’t bestowed, it’s earned by fixing and maintaining a collaborative system, not just working harder.

* Information Drives Action: (Act with Confidence) Every team member needs the whole picture, in real-time, to see direction, engage in strategy, get their work done, and help the most when help is needed.

* Trust but Visualize: (Visual Leadership) Respect and trust are built when we make our work visible. Everyone can see plans, change, and needs…and then contribute.

Collaboration is the only tool humans have to avoid chaos. We replace silent participation and long meetings with the right communication and interaction when and where it’s needed. But we choose. No Exit (1944), Conway’s Law (1967), Gotta Serve Somebody (1979), Collaboration Equation(2019) nearly 80 years of the same message. By now, it is a choice we make. We choose how to communicate. We almost always hand that decision to someone else.

We need to stop that.

A Pact of Professionalism

Every meeting we have (on Zoom, in Slack, or face-to-face) is a re-negotiation our professional culture. We don’t show up to be each other’s hell or heaven. We choose. We show up to design which we’ll create, and often unintentionally add to the problems that upset us every day.

We can’t wait for managers to enforce out-of-the-box “collaboration.” We, as professionals, need to architect systems that support agency, improvement, information, and respect.

If Sartre, Dylan, or Conway show up in your dreams tonight they’ll be saying the same thing. Build your heaven together, or get ready to serve the hell your system creates.

The real collaboration equation is simple: Individuals in teams create value. Systems either amplify or crush that value.

… and for some reason the Substack UI wouldn’t let me say this was inspired by a chat with Pawel Brodzinski under the image at the top. But it was.

CALL TO ACTION: If this is interesting to you, you can hire us to help (just message me on substack or linkedin), or take a class at Modus Institute, or simply get a paid subscription to Humane Work here on substack (see above).

This is what we do and have done for decades, and what we work with others on. Simple, visual, humane strategies to fix the real problems of work.

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

Work Begins Strong

People join teams to create. People like building things. Small groups ignite fast. Teams start strong. New teammates gather, share an idea for what’s possible, and launch real work built from back-and-forth exploration, shared vision, and a real sense of moving forward together. For a while, each member holds tightly to the same direction, fueling progress with every conversation.

Alignment and Realignment are Part of Learning

As work unfolds, everyone starts turning ideas over in their heads. Excitement drives action, and action launches new directions. Some directions are explicit, others are more sneaky. Individuals drift and, through conversation and constraint, teams pull back into alignment. This iterative realigning is the heartbeat of creative work. But as teams get bigger, recalibration gets harder. New voices, new perspectives, and new interpretations create more opportunity. Existing voices fall more and more into a set direction. Falling out of sync is inevitable. The challenge in scaling is that the mechanism for caring and aligning grows complex and unwieldy. It becomes harder and harder to keep people in the loop when there are many loops.

Scaling as an Opportunity

Team misalignment or drift at scale becomes failure when we don’t have a system to keep us sharing information and direction in a healthy way. In the Toxic Waste class and in the upcoming book, we talk about this as an inevitable tax of having passionate, smart people eager to build, create, and contribute. Weirdly many alignment issues are proof of enthusiasm, not error. Most organizations never anticipate or design for the comms burden that comes with growth. No one ever budgets for the fact that, beyond a certain size, realignment is a system that must be intentionally architected, not left to chance. It’s a cornerstone of strategy and culture.

Communication Breakdown are Unseen Silos

In the beginning, conversation is effortless and low cost. The daily chatter that aligns small teams becomes expected, taken for granted. With growth this same chatter becomes invisible, then expensive, then impossible. Bottlenecks and silos are created by us simply getting poor information or direction and then needing to say “What?” over and over again. Everything needs to be analyzed. This makes every one of us a silo, every one of us a bottleneck.

In the call we discussed communications with the “lorry rule” where in the past, the truck (information) arrived to deliver a sofa (soft and easy to use), now it has become a runaway truck (or fleet) of urgent information headed toward you at great speed (dangerous and bewildering). When this happens, people retain their will to succeed…they still want to get the work done). With the overload, they lose their ability to work together effectively. This leads people in management to assume the people aren’t working effectively. The reality here is that the communications system has not grown with the complexity of the company.

We Can Fix This

At the risk of becoming overly geeky...this is straight up Conways Law.

Conway’s Law says systems are designed to mirror the communication structures of the organizations that create them, meaning a product’s architecture will reflect team boundaries and ways of working.

Conway’s Law is that if your company’s internal communications are confused, combative, or otherwise crappy it will drive your culture, work, and products much more than your frameworks or product plans.

We’d like to avoid crappy product, frankly. So let’s try to fix this very repeated pattern (I’ve seen it a lot). These breakdowns aren’t terminal. They are fixable. We just need to acknowledge that this happens and that people want to do good work. They don’t want to interrupted, redirected, or confused.

Companies (people working in the company of others) need to build systems that allow conversation, recalibration, and distributed decision-making to happen smoothly. Information needs to be provided predictably. Work alignment is not a one-time event but a continual, shared commitment. And the unexpected is met with a known, implementable, and reassuring process.

The best groups treat each misalignment as a signal, not an annoyance, to evolve how they communicate as they grow. In doing this, they maintain the culture they love and create products the customer does too.

Practical Steps for Scaling Collaboration

* Recognize that scaling is building and maintaining communication architecture. (If you don’t you aren’t scaling, you are bloating).

* Underwrite and expect moments of realignment.

* Make communication agreements explicit, revisable, and visible. Make them daily work.

* Acknowledge growth as a force multiplier for creativity and complexity. (Balance them)

* Bottlenecks arise often, look for excitement and direction beneath the surface. Deal with bottlenecks quickly to avoid bureaucracy.

Final Reflection:I love these conversations each month. This week we discussed how people want to create, build, and make a difference in the context of how we stop people from doing exactly those things. Growing pains sneak up on you and feel like defeat. In the group, we felt the defeat and the challenges behind that defeat. We commiserated and then said, “What do we do to fix this.”

If you recognize yourself, past or present, in this situation, leave a comment.

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

Social media, politics, relationships, constant updates, and the plain noise of daily life can be pretty unfriendly. Destroying our calm, as they said in Firefly. While we might think many of these are totally unnecessary; they eat up our focus and fuel our anxiety. Without intent, our best energy is totally drained before we reach the work that matters.

Why Focus Feels Impossible

It’s natural to crave relief, if you didn’t you’d simply be a glutton for punishment. But if we’d like to escape the mental rat race and create a space where the pressure lets up, we need to create that space. It doesn’t happen on its own, we have to architect it, to build it. We need to build a “bubble” where attention is protected, priorities are visible, and interruption becomes manageable rather than overwhelming.

A Cinemascope Board

Every Personal Kanban is dealing with a need beyond the work. Planning a party, managing a project, communicating with family. He we are building that bubble. We are create a space to keep you sane and still honor and get work done for others (the needs and interruptions around you).

This board starts in the backlog. Dividing visually the ways work might come to us:

* My Work: (Planned work) What genuinely engages or replenishes energy? What enables flow or clarity?

* Work for Others: (Planned Work) What’s defined well enough that real focus is possible—even if coordination is required?

* Interruptions: (Unplanned Work) These are the extra requests and interruptions that come at you unexpectedly. Here we want to track the difference between “urgent” and “not urgent” requests from others.

When you prepare for the day, you can plan for what you want to do and your boundaries. The “purple” tickets are the incoming unexpected demands, underplanned and over-emotioned. The “green” tickets are work you choose, that is planned up front, and done with less stress. If you don’t balance these, you will be constantly responding to unplanned work, while planned work languishes until it becomes late and now a new emergency.

Humane Work is reader-supported. Help keep this running. If you got value from this, consider becoming a paid subscriber.

Balance, Boundaries, and Ownership

The value for this post: Interruptions from others, left unchecked, will always win by default. It’s easy to become everyone else’s help desk making it impossible to do meaningful work in the process. We want to break this cycle intentionally:

· For each working period (“today,” “this week”), place a visible limit on the number of “for others” tickets you’ll accept.

By visualizing both categories, imbalance becomes impossible to ignore. If your board is all “purple” interruption tickets and no “green” restorative work, something needs to change. If anything, you need to change what planned work looks like.

Doing vs. Dealing: Naming the Pain

Most digital and physical Personal Kanban boards sink into murky “doing” columns where work stalls indefinitely or we lie about what is actually in process. This board does it differently, with powerful honesty:

* I’m Doing This: This is active work you’re currently moving forward.

* I’m Dealing With This: Items waiting on others, or held up by external blockers, sure. But think also of stuff moving slowly, work that requires extra effort to move the ticket to done than necessary.

Distinguishing these states shows you (and others) where energy is going, and where it’s stuck. Many “doing” tickets are really “dealing” tickets in disguise.

Reflection: A Good Wrap or Rotten Tomatoes

When work finishes, move it into one of two columns:

Critical Acclaim:

* Well Acted: Flow-state work that’s effortless, engaging, energizing even.

* Well Directed: Work that succeeded, but required wrangling others or solving tough dependencies.

Panned by the Academy

* That was bad: Work that was not good but could be improved

* That was very very bad: Work that was catastrophic.

Plan the Unplanned

The “aha” of the board is this: The purple “unplanned” work (interruptions and sudden asks) consume more time and energy than any planned work. Unplanned work must be addressed in crisis mode, robbing focus from everything else. By visualizing and categorizing these interruptions, you finally have evidence for a conversation about capacity and fairness.

Over weeks and months, patterns emerge. Do unplanned “for others” tickets always outnumber “sane” work? That’s a conversation worth having with your team, your customers, or yourself. It’s the data needed for humane work design and negotiation.

Make Your Focus Visible

With any kanban, we want to surface patterns. This board is trying to see:

* Protected focus time becomes a non-negotiable right, not a privilege.

* Interruption costs become visible, actionable, and adjustable rather than denied or resented.

* Work that helps you and work that helps others are brought into honest, creative balance.

* You build and defend a bubble of attention (Don’t let anyone pop it).

Stuff Jim Says

Overload has been around forever. It’s getting worse. When we started creating ways to tune out social media, there were all sorts of new existential threats. It’s literally killing people. We need to do what we can to focus, finish and find energy to deal with the day-to-day weird. I’m committed to helping find ways to do that. I’m hoping you join me.

CALL TO ACTION:

Ready to transform your workplace? Jim and Tonianne have spent decades refining simple, visual approaches that solve fundamental work challenges. Connect with us to talk about consulting from Jim and Toni.

If this is interesting to you, you can hire me and Toni to help (just message me on substack or linkedin), or take a class at Modus Institute, or simply get a paid subscription to Humane Work here on substack (see above).

This is what we do and have done for decades, and what we work with others on. Simple, visual, humane strategies to fix the real problems of work.

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

I am currently involved in three projects that need to happen quickly, have a lot of unknowns, and require some serious human collaboration. All three projects are using AI as a processing tool for all the information we need to process. It isn’t replacing anyone, it’s doing some specific functions that would take us weeks to get done otherwise. It’s always flawed, but it’s always useful.

That's what I talked about with John von Seggern, who runs Future Proof Music School. We talking about using AI successfully, but using it as a tool, not something that will replace humans.

Turning Sticky Notes Into Action Plans

I called John for this impromptu chat. At Modus Institute, we run workshops where teams map out their work, their problems, their actions, their collaborations, etc. Everyone puts ideas on sticky notes and puts them on the wall. While these exercises always lead to immediate improvements and have led to faster product development, the actual creation of plans, designs, and schedules takes time.

But we tried something new. We grabbed an image and fed it to our AI. The AI read all the sticky notes and wrote up a flawed but useful initial set of requirements. As John says, “It was about 70% right, and that’s great.

Rather than using AI to solve our problems for us, we asked it to help us get something done that had a very aggressive deadline. To get there, we had our agent organize the human solutions that were already there. The people in the room did the thinking. AI just helped us initially sort and analyze it faster.

Humane Work is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

What AI Does Best (And What It Doesn't)

John pointed out something smart: AI is great at "finding patterns in vast amounts of information". Humans can't look at 100 sticky notes and instantly see all the themes. AI can get much closer to this.

AI can't replace the human thinking that created those sticky notes in the first place. It can't understand your business like you do. It can't feel frustrated about a broken process or get excited about a new idea.

This is because business logic has always been a function of business intelligence and actual intelligence runs on emotion, motivation, and multiple perspectives. While AI claims to have these because its “intelligence” is based on the sum total of what’s on the internet, it’s truly only pattern matching and making sense of a lot of words.

Real Examples from a Music School

John's Futureproof Music School shows how this works in practice. He created an AI music coach called Cadence that teaches basic skills like scales, rhythm, and music theory. But it can’t be creative, it doesn’t have expertise or continuous learning. These are the domain of the human teachers who focus on advanced techniques and helping students with their careers.

This makes sense. AI never gets tired of explaining the same concept 15 times. It can (mostly) give consistent feedback on basic exercises. But humans are better at creativity, emotion, and the kind of knowledge that comes from years of experience.

They're not competing for the same job. They're working together to do a job neither could do as well alone.

An AI Assistant That Actually Helps

John as a CEO also built an AI assistant he calls Nova for his business tasks. Nova is integrated with his calendar, chats, and more. Nova looks at all that data helps John run the company. It doesn’t run the company, it keeps track of things and make recommendations. Sometimes they are useful.

But the bots only works because John was smart about their limits. He told Cadence to focus only on music and creativity. He made it double-check facts by searching the web. He treats Nova's ideas as starting points, not final answers.

This is the pattern we see with successful AI use beyond hype or fear: AI handles the processing, humans handle the judgment. It is a word calculator.

The Back-and-Forth Approach

Both John and I learned that working with AI is like having a conversation. You don't just ask it once and get a perfect answer. You go back and forth, refining your questions and improving the results.

As John said, "AI isn't always right, but its suggestions provide a starting point for humans to iterate and refine".

This is different from other tools. When you use a hammer, it works the same way every time. AI is more like a thinking partner who might offer useful ideas, obvious points, or occasionally brilliant insights you hadn't considered. It might also be utterly stoned out of its gourd and tell you completely idiotic things.

The danger is that often AI will tell you things that look right. They are a plausible story it makes up or takes from sources that were wrong or misinterpreted. AI use does not come with vigilance.

How to Use AI Well

From our conversation, here's what works:

Start with human expertise: The best AI applications help people who already know their stuff. The workshop leaders understood team problems. The music teachers understood how to teach. AI just made them faster and more effective.

Expect to go back and forth: Don't expect perfect results right away. Plan to refine your questions and improve the AI's responses over time.

Set clear limits: Tell AI what it should and shouldn't do. Make it verify facts. Treat its suggestions as starting points, not final decisions.

Focus on helping humans, not replacing them: Use AI to handle routine tasks so humans can focus on creative and strategic work.

You are also still a stupid human: You can and will use AI to be a confirmation bias engine. You will work your prompts in a way to get what you want, not what you need. Check yourself while you are at it. Sometimes, the AI may be right, it’s not what you want so you think it’s wrong, and correct to your original error.

What This Means for Your Work

John did not build a music tutor to kill music tutors. He built a search engine, specialized for music. We haven’t replaced our ability to think about how work flows and feature sets are created, we just removed long, confused, and often frustrating processing time between ideation and action. The word calculators are helping move our work forward and get value to people faster, while at the same time allowing us to handle the deeper thinking, human relations, and creative bits.

CALL TO ACTION: If this is interesting to you, you can hire me and Toni to help (just message me on substack or linkedin), or take a class at Modus Institute, or simply get a paid subscription to Humane Work here on substack (see above).

This is what we do and have done for decades, and what we work with others on. Simple, visual, humane strategies to fix the real problems of work.

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