Humane Work Podcast

John Shook and I were standing in a factory. He breathed in deeply and smiled and sighed, “You know, I just love factories.” He looked so at home, at peace. He was in his element in the factory we were in. The feel of it. The sound. The energy. The flow. The mistakes. Dude just loves factories. When Toni and I are doing our Modus-style value stream mapping workshops, this is kind of how I feel.

It can be in person or on-line, but there's something intoxicating about watching professionals dig deep into what they actually do every day. Hearing them wrestle with how their work really happens. How they realize the sanitized version they believe in is a more messy, complicated, and human reality.

Like John likes to see the flow of goods, the creation of value, and the ways he can help streamline. I watch the flow of conversation, relationships, ideas, and the creation of value. I watch the people on the team discover who they really work with, how they work together, and where the work flows or gets stuck. It's can be (often is) raw and uncomfortable when we start. These aren’t systems people are used to seeing.

Most teams run not on process, but on assumptions and hope. While we go through the exercise, people realize they don't work the way they thought they did. They see where they're unwittingly creating problems for each other. They confront the gaps between what they say they value and what their actual process rewards. They are seeing their relationships and the customer journey and the workflow at the same time. In context.

And they care. So they start negotiating. Not the adversarial kind where someone wins and someone loses, but the collaborative kind where everyone's trying to figure out what's important to each other. They build a "shared professionalism", they create a mutual understanding of what good work looks like and what each person needs to do that good work. Then they start to create expectations to do those things.

Individuals Work In Teams to Create Value

This creates a game where the goal is to stop being collections of individuals with competing priorities and start becoming genuine collaborators. To become an actual team. Seeing the work lets them vent frustrations they've been nursing, see them in how work is done, and realize these issues aren’t some blamable personal failings but systemic issues the team can fix together. The energy in the room shifts from defensive to creative.

And at this point, the team starts to optimize. They organize. They focus.

The energy and flow John loves about factories comes from people understanding their place in a larger system that creates real value. The work in a factory is very visual, things are moving from collections of parts to shippable wholes. In knowledge work, we don't have the luxury of seeing our "factory floor." Most of our value creation happens in our heads and in our handoffs to each other.

For the factory, you can go-see locations of issues to improve or optimize. For the rest of us, we need a way to see the work. The value stream map becomes that place to go see. In Lean parlance, the VSM becomes the beginning of a visual Gemba.

Building a Team Together

The exercise starts with an end-state (what value are you delivering?). When professionals map their work backwards from the end state, they're forced to slow down and examine each step. They need to be thoughtful about what happens. They can't rely on the convenient narratives they've constructed. They have to confront what actually happens.

The teams always surprise me and themselves. Always. The person who thought they were being helpful realizes they're creating a bottleneck. The team that prided itself on quality discovers they create defects through their handoff process. The process everyone assumed was working fine turns out to be held together by hidden heroic individual efforts that aren't sustainable.

Rather than focusing on failure or assigning blame (holding people accountable), we are creating the conditions where professionals can act with confidence because they finally understand the system they're part of (being responsible). When people can see how their work connects to others' work, when they understand what success looks like from their teammates' perspectives, they can make better decisions in real time.

That shared professionalism emerges from honestly examining how value gets created and figuring out together how to make it better. It's professionals respecting each other enough to tell the truth about what's working and what isn't.

John's right about factories. There is something beautiful about watching people create value together with clarity, purpose, and mutual respect. We just have to see our own version of that factory. We need to see how we work together to get things done.

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 | Upcoming Events

In this episode of the podcast we are speaking with Brad Brown, Fire Chief of Grand Rapids, Michigan, and Alex Baszler, their performance and management reporting specialist. What gets me about Brad and Alex’s system isn’t just that they have boards to manage the department, it’s the more-than-decade of sustainability. Most workplace improvement initiatives flame out with the transition of personnel or leadership, but they've maintained and evolved their approach for over ten years.

This happens when visual management becomes so embedded how people relate to each other that decisions, problems, and even the mundane are expected to be visualized. This means that by default problems and solutions emerge collaboratively.

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Expecting Lasting Change

I can’t make this point enough. Your system needs to expect actions by team members that support the system. Your daily work needs to support the team, the work, the product, and the culture. If it doesn’t support it, then it isn’t helping.

For Alex and Brad, the sustainability of their system rests on two pillars.

First, unwavering support from leadership: Brad didn't just implement visual management, he participates in it. Every week, he answers the same four questions as everyone else: major accomplishments, key learnings, weekly focus, and what help he needs. The initial adoption of the system, years ago, rested on Brad personally showing he would help others when asked. You can delegate or you can participate.

Second, the boards were relevant to the people using them. The boards were so valuable that the team started improving them. Alex described how their boards evolved organically as new team members brought fresh perspectives or the needs of the team changed. People enhance useful systems.

Save Crisis Management for Real Crises

Managing your workflow shouldn't be a crisis, ~ Alex Baszler

"Managing your workflow shouldn't be a crisis," Alex said near the end of our conversation. This insight cuts to the heart of what makes the Grand Rapids Fire Department remarkable. The boards keep everyone informed about routine work. Project timelines, resource allocation, operational challenges, improvement, are visual, tracked and calmed. No one has to waste time figuring out where they are, everyone knows. This preserves everyone’s cognitive and emotional capacity for actual emergencies.

The logic is elegant. A fire department exists to handle genuine crises where lives hang in the balance. Why would they allow preventable workflow chaos to drain the energy and clarity needed for those moments? By visualizing the predictable work, they ensure they can respond with full focus when unpredictable emergencies arise.

Why are you any different?

Repeating Again…An Expectation of Visualization

We have this stuff all over the place!~ Brad Brown

In the video you’ll hear Brad say, "we have this stuff all over the place." He was celebrating the fact that visual management and Obeya have become so ingrained in their daily work that when decisions need to be made, there's an organizational expectation that they'll be visualized first.

They aren’t worried about frameworks or rules or “am I doing it right.” They are worried about saving lives and getting work done at the same time.

This represents a fundamental cultural shift from information hoarding to information radiating. Instead of knowledge trapped in email threads, management software, or individual minds, their systems make the invisible visible. Problems surface before they become crises. Routine work avoids becoming a problem. Opportunities for collaboration become apparent. People can offer help because they can see where it's needed.

Lessons for Every Organization

The Grand Rapids Fire Department's journey offers three crucial insights for any organization seeking sustainable improvement:

Start with leadership participation, not just support. Brad models visual management by simply using it. His personal board sits prominently in the hallway where everyone can see his commitments, challenges, and progress.

Design for evolution, not perfection. Their boards have changed dramatically over ten years because the team was empowered to improve what they encountered. The goal was never to create the perfect system, but to create a system that could become more perfect over time.

Focus on the real work, not the meta-work. Their visual management directly supports their mission: protecting the community. Every board, every sticky note, every huddle serves the ultimate purpose of being ready when someone needs help.

I’ve been talking to Brad for a long time now, watching how he runs a real enterprise with a lot more calm than anyone would expect. The Grand Rapids Fire Department have create a visual management approach that is humane, elegant, evolving, and sustainable work. When people can see what needs to be done, understand how their work connects to others', and know they have the support to act with confidence, extraordinary things become routine.

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

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

This is a 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 | Upcoming Events

This is a way of working made of ten principles that build upon each other. It is a way. A system. A whole. You can add to it, you can change it, but you must know why you are doing so. The quotes are all from the book The Collaboration Equation.

Humane Work reader-supported. Keep the words flowing and come to our monthly calls by becoming a paid subscriber.

The Way of Working: These principles create a virtuous cycle where meaningful work enhances professional development, cognitive health, and organizational profitability. We want to create conditions where people do their best work with dignity, purpose, and genuine satisfaction.

The Modus Way of Working (v.1.0)

1. Be visible.

Action: Make Work Visible Before You Try to Fix / Do / Assign / Accept It

"We cannot manage what we cannot see."

Transform invisible fear-based overload into visible actionable reality through visual management systems. When work becomes visible, teams see where help is needed and how to support each other effectively

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2. Be In Control.

Limit Your Work-in-Progress to Restore Your Humanity

"The most toxic behavior is taking on more than we can reasonably complete."

When you see overload (Be Visible), you can saying "not right now" to preserve cognitive capacity. Address self-inflicted overload (martyr syndrome), leadership chaos (conflicting priorities), and broken systems that create unnecessary work.

3. Be Honest.

Create Psychological Safety Through Shared Visual Systems "Every real collaboration has psychological safety."

Visual and controlled work provides the foundation for psychological safety by reduces politics that make honesty dangerous. When everyone sees what's happening and where problems exist, speaking up becomes safe and productive.

4. Be You

Build Your Personal True North to Navigate Overload"Your True North is essential navigation equipment when life gets harder."

Define your core values, behavioral boundaries, and quality standards. Create decision filters for opportunities and competing demands when everything feels urgent. Be you.

5. Be a Team

Design Right Environments Where Teams Define Their Own Culture"Culture is how your team knows they're providing value."

Co-create environments where professionals have what they need to act with confidence. Culture emerges from explicit conversations about planning, communication, and working relationships. Be a team.

6. Be Professional

Practice Humane Management Through the Seven Elements

"We need functioning human beings, and those people are usually mistreated."

When you visualize work, remember The Seven elements of any visualization: direction (planning), state (what's happening), triggers (actions to take), narrative (learning), culture (relationships), identity (purpose), and PDSA (improvement). Complete systems that respect people and create value. Be professional.

7. Be Effective

Embrace Collaboration Over Competition and Rigid Dogma

"Transparent communication and collaboration over rigid dogma."

Seeing work as it happens always shows us where we should be communicating better and evolving. Foster Creative tension with professional respect. Build systems where diverse perspectives enhance performance through structured conversations and shared problem-solving. Be effective.

8. Be Aware

Create Constancy of Purpose That Connects Daily Work to Mission

"People want their work to matter."

Ensure every professional understands how their work contributes to something larger and how they relate to their team members. Use visual systems and regular conversations to connect daily tasks to organizational mission and impact. Be aware.

9. Be Healthy

Build Antitoxic Systems That Prevent Rather Than React

"Toxicity is expression of individual and collective weakness."

Solve problems immediately and together. Address root causes: information starvation, decision bottlenecks, unclear roles. Build systems that contain and redirect toxic patterns through visual management, clear protocols, and continuous improvement. Be healthy.

10. Be a Leader

Act with Confidence Through Real Time Shared Professional Development

"Leadership is a verb that any team member can express."

Enable professionals to have the information, authority, and support needed for good decisions. Good decisions are everyone’s job. Visual systems give people the information they need to act with confidence. Invest in collaborative capabilities and systems thinking at every level. Be a leader.

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

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

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 isn’t just a task.

I watched a project manager have what I can only describe as a quiet breakdown in her beautiful 18th floor office. She was surrounded by three laptops, two phones, and a set of kanban boards so full of different colors and shapes you needed a 2 hour conversation just to figure out what was going on.

"I’m seeing my work, but I can't remember what I'm supposed to be doing," she said. "I mean, I know I'm busy. I'm always busy. We are always getting things done, but there’s too much conversation once we start. There’s too many questions. I can’t focus."

This is the reality of work and leadership today. We've become incredibly sophisticated at starting things. We’ve been amazing at inventing new things we could be doing. There are literally limitless things we could be doing. We've mastered the art of being busy. But somewhere between "let's do this" and "we did this" something fundamental breaks down.

We've lost the ability to see our work as it actually exists: not as neat project plans or color-coded calendars, but as the messy, human, learning-filled journey it really is.

If you're nodding along, you're sharing my world where work is always an endless cycle of starting without finishing, reacting without reflecting, and moving without meaning. But there are ways to deal with this … and no, it’s not another productivity app or mindless rule about "crushing it."

Yes, it involves visualizing your work and yes, it involves Kanban or Personal Kanban…

Real Work is More Than You Planned For

People talk about productivity hacks and project management tools, and we love setting up our task boards with neat columns. But we're missing something fundamental: we're optimizing for busy instead of optimizing for human.

Here's what I mean. When was the last time you finished something at work and felt genuinely satisfied? Not just relieved that it was over, but actually proud of what you created and how you created it? When you could look back and say, "That was worth doing, we did it well, and I understand why it mattered"?

You're not alone in having more bad examples than good. As humans, we've built work systems that are incredibly good at keeping us moving but terrible at helping us feel we’ve done something worthwhile.

For leaders reading this: When someone on your team feels genuinely satisfied with their work, it means they know what they did, why it mattered, and that it was delivered with care. This isn't a nice-to-have, this is your most reliable indicator of quality work…of effectiveness. When people feel good about what they've created, they've done good work. Pushing productivity or efficiency will always leave you with shoddy output. Pushing for effectiveness and measuring satisfaction will always result in a self-optimizing team (which increases the productivity and efficiency you wanted without the quality penalties).

For everyone else: You feeling like your work was worthwhile and well-executed isn't being precious or perfectionist. It's the most honest measure of effectiveness we have. When something doesn't feel right to you, it's usually because something important was missing: clarity about the goal, support during execution, or time to reflect on what you learned. This is what being a professional is all about.

How We Actually Experience Work

When our work is invisible to us and others, it exists in one state: overwhelm. Everything feels and is equally urgent, nothing feels truly important, and we lose track of what we've actually accomplished.

But when we make our work visible (really visible, not just "task management visible") something interesting happens. We see our work in its natural rhythm: the figuring-out phase, the doing phase, and the learning phase.

Most people (even people doing Kanban) focus only on the doing. They ask "What are you working on?" But that's like asking a chef what's on their cutting board while ignoring the menu planning, the moment when they taste the dish to see if it's ready to serve, and the wait to see if the dish is sent back.

The truth is, meaningful work has three essential phases, and we need to honor all of them if we want to feel good about what we create together. To understand this and make it useful, we need to name things. I’ve chosen WIN, WIP, and WIR.

WIN, WIP, and WIR

WIN - Work in Navigation (or Initiation, or Intake)

You cannot win without a plan.This is where work begins its journey. Not just the obvious stuff like "new project approved" but all the messy, human work of figuring out what we're actually doing. The conversations, the clarifications, the slow dawn of understanding what this thing really needs. The prioritization and re-prioritization. Stop starting – start finishing starts here. This is more than a To Do column, these are columns that help you build a structure for doing the right work at the right time. This is where we ensure that when WIN becomes WIP, it is ready for the people doing it to focus and finish.

WIP - Work in Process (or Progress)

You cannot finish well without focus.I should hope we all know this one. Personal Kanban only had two rules at limiting WIP was one of them. It was called out because it’s the hardest (and we can do it without a good WIN before the WIP). Over the years we’ve found that limiting WIP isn't just a number "currently doing." It's the active wrestling with reality. It's where our plans meet the world and things get complicated. It's where we discover what we didn't know we didn't know. WIP is where the real work happens, and it's messier than any project plan ever imagined. Our WIP Whisperer class and our Toxic Waste class both deal with this head-on. When we don’t plan or review well, we create increasing amounts of unnecessary WIP with additional meetings, re-work, tossed-out work, coordination costs, discussed and re-discussed decisions, proving that tasks can’t be completed as assigned, and so much more. For almost all teams, most WIP is not visualized, but is a reaction to failure to create completable work in the first place.

WIR - Work in Review

Your work either improves, or it decays.I see painfully few teams or people respect WIR. They have a DONE column and think they are DONE. They will create definitions of DONE that are laughable in that they focus on when the work stops, not when the responsibility for the work ends or value for the customer is realized. Then people are surprised when the “bad work” listed in the WIP section above shows up. WIR is the entire reason to have a kanban…not DOING, but what happens next. Planning and Review are professionalism, In-Process is just execution. WIR isn't just checking boxes or getting sign-offs. It’s not putting in tickets for a retrospective that happens later. It’s not a Done column. It's the space where we learn from what has been released to the customer. Where we ask not just "is it done?" but "how is it doing?" It's where individual effort becomes team wisdom. It is where continuous improvement becomes continuous. It’s where we remember we are responsible for our work after the DONE column.

Why This Matters

Yeah yeah, I hear you, "Great, another three-letter acronym (or two) for my collection." But this has been a thing ever since we created kanban, and we’ve never stated it well. WIN, WIP, WIR point out what’s there, hidden beneath the chaos. We can’t calm the chaos without focusing harder on planning and reviewing. (For geeks I could go into PDSA here, but we can do that elsewhere).

For the rest of us…think about the last time your team felt truly synchronized. I'm know for a fact it wasn't because you all followed the same process or framework perfectly. It was because you were all clear about where things stood and why. You knew what was just beginning (WIN), what was actively in motion (WIP), and what was ready to teach you something (WIR). <- Not Done…

Hidden Information = Stress…When work is invisible, information is hidden and stress takes over.

Shared Information = Focus…When we can see the full landscape of our work (not just what's "in progress" but what's finding its footing and what's teaching us lessons) everything changes.

The Necessary Art of Making Work Visible

I want all teams to do the right work at the right time in a way that works for them.

WIN, WIP, WIR doesn’t need permission for you to start using it. You don't need to convince anyone or change any systems. Just don’t ignore it. You can begin with three columns on a whiteboard, three sections in a notebook, or three areas on a shared digital board.

Start with WIN (Honesty in what’s coming)Notice when something new enters your world. Not just the formal requests, but the questions that need exploring, the conversations that reveal hidden needs, the problems that are just beginning to surface. Give these things space to breathe before they become urgent.

Be honest about WIP (Honesty in what you are doing)Stop pretending you're only working on three things when you're really buried in fifteen. The “official work” on the board is not your real work in progress. Make all the work visible, even the stuff you're doing “because you have to”. Especially that stuff. The emails, the quick questions, the "this will just take a minute" requests…all of that belongs somewhere you and everyone else can see it.

Create space for WIR (Honesty in what you’ve released)This is the one most teams miss and it's the most important. When something moves out of active work, don't just celebrate and move on. Watch the work get used and ask: How is it doing? How is the customer better off? Is anyone using it? Did it hurt to do this? Do we have to do it again? What did we learn? What surprised us? What worked better than expected? Let the work teach you before it disappears into memory. And no, it is not the product manager or the product owner’s job to care about your work, it’s yours.

Use This Now

Right now, wherever you are, take a moment to think about your work and what stage it is in. Think about what you have been overlooking for the actual work involved in a task. Think about the after-release maintenance you are doing or ignoring and the impact those have on your day. Then, make that all visible, make it part of your Personal Kanban.

And that's when WIN, WIP, WIR becomes not just a way of organizing tasks, but a way of creating work that's both effective and humane.

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

Ethics: The study of what is right and wrong and how we should treat other people.

Ethical: Doing what is right and good according to rules about how people should behave.

Ethics and AI should be a very constant topic right now. AI can now write your LinkedIn posts, draft your emails, write your heartfelt apology to your spouse. For overloaded people, the temptation to hit "generate" and take the result and spread it around is nearly unavoidable. I’m watching people let AI do their thinking for them, and relish in losing both their individual voices and their humanity.

I've been watching this unfold across every platform, every industry. Less on substack, but it is creeping in. People cutting and pasting wisdom of the AI.

When I look at these posts, they aren’t “plagiarism” they are something even lazier. I'm calling this "AIgarism." (that Ai-garism, not an L) not outright copying someone else's work, but passing off AI-generated content as their own original thinking. These content-pollution-generators create a quick 2 minute prompt, get a confirmation-bias-laden result, and then bask in the glory.

Humane Work is an increasingly rare voice in the world. Help us stem the surge of uncollaborative behaviors and keep us all working together by becoming a paid subscriber.

AI is an Idiot, but it isn’t the Problem

The real problem isn't that AI exists. It's that we're predisposed to abuse it. We want so badly to not be overloaded, we look at AI like the savior that will deliver us from overwork. It’s a fairly nice word calculator, but it is by no means an employee or replacement for actual thinking.

When I’m writing or creating with others, I use AI tools as part of the process. Just like I use a word processor or a spreadsheet. But just like I’d always check the math of a spreadsheet (human), I am amply involved in what I produce otherwise. This paragraph was originally organized by my AI agents, but I’ve rewritten nearly every word.

To do my work, I work by what we’re calling a "Balanced Work" approach to AI collaboration. It's built on a simple premise: humans stay in the driver's seat, AI handles the minutia, and we are always second guessing the results we are given.

In every post, I am trying to provide a mini-system. A way to look at work. This is an idea, a model…

Jim Benson’s Ethical Balanced AI Work Flow

Step 1: Ideate as and with People (Creative)

I muse, I mull. I converse. Real ideas come from human conversation, from wrestling with problems alongside other people who see the world differently than you do. From taking time to combine what you are thinking with what’s happened over your life. So I start here. Individual and collaborative. Come up with ideas.

Step 2: AI Organizes and Compares Information

Once messy, beautiful human ideas are ready, I expose them to AI. The AI then sorts, categorizes, and structures information. The AI then is subjected to a series of questions like, “What else has been written about this?” “What criticisms are there about ideas like this?” My AI is my mediocre research assistant, giving me a mediocre product that I then need to interpret and edit. The AI never gives me the “right” answers. It gives me acceptable organization.

Step 3: Human Selection and Filtering

I am very interested in making my points clear, fully understanding my own words, and owning the product. Experience, expertise, and worldview are inputs for the actual product. We review the AI's recommendations and choose what fits our goals, our values, our vision. There is serious second-guessing of the AI recommendations here. (You wouldn’t believe how many times AI agents will quote me to me with things I never said).

Step 4: Human Refinement and Direction

I then take the selected ideas and shape them with human expertise. I look at the original thesis, I see how working with the AI has provided me with additional detail, and I write an article based on this new information.

Step 5: AI Processing

The AI processes the refined direction, with prompts specifically designed to critique the product, build the ideas deeper, and give me other helpful sources.

Recursive: Steps 2 to 5 repeat while creating the product.

Step 6: Human Voice and Authenticity

In this last step I rewrite the piece entirely in my own voice. I am writing a Jim Benson / Modus article or course or whatever. The final words need to be human to have human impact that last longer than clicking “like.”

Don’t Cut and Paste People

This has been a process that allowed me to question my assumptions and use AI in an ethical way. When used with a group, I find this:

Eliminates ego-driven perfectionism. Writing as a group often takes forever. With the AI, there’s this “processing” element that I find helps no single person getting attached to "their" idea. The work becomes about the best outcome. Weirdly, the impersonal nature of AI can help depersonalize work in a healthy way.

Maintains human ownership. Even though we are using AI in the mix, humans are making every significant decision. People are simply using a tool to amplify capabilities and provide additional information that may be unknown to them.

Preserves authenticity. It’s still your hypothesis, your learning, your voice. Step 6, where we rewrite one last time, creates (because you are actually creating it) real information from your real head and heart and typed with your real hands.

Come join the conversation

If you are a leader or a team member that wants to confront the toxicity in the room, please check these courses out and join the conversation.

* Cleaning Toxic Waste Is a toolkit and a community for restoring health at work.

* WIP Whisperer helps you visualize your overload, manage it more humanely, and rediscover pride in what you do.

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

Taming Digital Chaos: Practical Strategies from the Kanban Evolved Course

Modern work is overwhelming, not because we’re lazy, but because digital tools and platforms constantly compete for our attention and give us so many options…so many things we could be doing with our time. We always feel the FOMO of these options and then get stuck in productivity hellscapes.

In our latest Kanban Evolved session, we will tackle this overload head-on, workshopping the impacts of this on us and why simply tracking tasks on your Kanban isn’t enough.

The real enemy isn’t just a long to-do list, but the attention economy organized crime syndicate employing ample tricks to steal our time. Notifications, apps, and endless online temptations are meticulously designed to hijack our focus. That’s why our course, covering everything from Personal Kanban to Kanban Method and everything in between, goes beyond basic task tracking or throughput… we are dealing with you … your team … your work.

Here’s how we help Kanban practitioners at every level fight digital chaos:

* Not all tasks are equal: We teach you to filter your backlog before putting items on your Kanban.

* Well-defined solo work: Easy-to-complete tasks that you can handle without much distraction.

* Collaborative work: Tasks best accomplished in pairs or groups. Working together reduces distractions and increases focus—your energy stays with the person, not on random notifications.

* Danger zone tasks: Anything requiring internet deep-dives, social media, or heavy use of AI. These can pull you off track and into rabbit holes before you realize it.

* Today’s Work = Balanced Portfolio: Move tasks into the “Today” column that play to your strengths: some for solo focus, some for collaboration, some best tackled with time blocks (like Pomodoro sessions).

* Focus Time = WIP Limit of One: Dedicate a column for deep work—strictly one thing at a time—to ensure true progress and avoid spreading yourself thin.

The Kanban Evolved series isn’t just about moving stickies; it’s about rethinking how you work so you avoid the traps of modern digital chaos. Every session is hands-on, fast-paced, and designed to help real people tackle real work challenges. Helping you get more done, with less stress, and more focus where it counts.

Our workshops run regularly so check the Modus Institute calendar and join us whenever you need practical tools and actionable insights to take back control of your workday.

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

A Modus Model Monday Post

Work keeps surprising you by taking too long.

You can write it off to interruptions, to things "not being explained right"… but it's time to embrace the complexity and build systems that help you see it coming.

Hofstadter's Law Hurts

"It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law."

Douglas Hofstadter said this haunting quote way back in 1979. And it's been steadfastly ignored by anyone who has tried to estimate work ever since. It looks like this is about estimation and time, because when we estimate we ask ourselves, "How much time should this take?"

The cruel fact is, this isn't about time at all. It's about complexity…the kind of work where the solution emerges as you do it, where each step reveals new steps you didn't know existed. Complexity makes you yell "why doesn't this work?" "Why isn't this done yet?" As unexpected issues arise, as things don't work as we expect, we fall victim to complexity.

We don’t need to be victims.

Weird Work in the Now

Humane Work is reader-supported and community driven. To be part of the Modus calls and events, become a paid subscriber.

For solopreneurs, remote workers, and anyone attached to distributed teams, we don't have someone to tap on the shoulder when you discover that "simple" client request actually requires learning three new tools, navigating two different bickering teams, and somehow making them all play nicely with the meeting invites you are sending out. It can feel like you are on your own with the "surprise" complexity, and your client is wondering why the two-hour task is now on day three.

But the problem here isn't the extra time…it's that you don't even know it's complexity. You might blame yourself for the estimate. You might blame an app or someone else for "slowing you down." But the fact is complexity exists, sometimes we can see it, sometimes we can't. But it always happens.

When we and our colleagues/clients don't respect this, we deal with broken trust. With yourself, with your client, with your team. When you consistently underestimate, you start to feel incompetent, even when you're doing brilliant work solving problems you couldn't have planned for.

Or is that true?

How You Can Plan for Complexity

You can plan for them. You know they are coming. So what can we do to make sure they are part of the work and not a crisis?

The answer is not better estimation. The answer is making complexity visible so you can manage it rather than be blindsided by it.

AI as Complexity Detector (Not Eliminator, and not Immune from it Either)

AI promises to help and sometimes it delivers. AI can break down complex tasks, research solutions faster, and generate starting points when you're stuck in that "how do I even approach this?" moment. I will create plans, make them detailed, but also tell the stories of why the work is necessary, who is asking for it and what I think might get in my way.

Give that to an AI agent (of any complexity) and prompt it something like. “What am I missing?” “Where might this fail?” “Where is there hidden complexity in this work?” And then have a conversation with it.

This has proven very helpful, not in that the AI gives me solutions or may even be “right”, but it does what LLMs do best, scour the world for patterns that match the one I’ve set up and compares that diffuse data to my situation. This points out areas to take another look at, question the design, or have appropriate conversations.

It's not all roses here and AI is not your buddy. AI can also make Hofstadter's Law worse in sneaky ways. AI gets less reliable as complexity increases. It starts making subtle errors when your project involves multiple interconnected systems. More dangerously for people, we over rely on the tool. AI can then make you overconfident in your estimates. When AI spits out what looks like a complete solution in seconds, it's tempting to think the work is nearly done. It’s tempting to think we have a product and not an input.

The key insight: Use AI as a complexity detector, not a complexity eliminator. When AI initially identifies something as complex and then struggles to give you clean, consistent answers about it, that's your early warning that you're dealing with complex work that should trigger a second look on your part.

The Hofstadter's Law-Resistant Kanban

Your Kanban is the only place to find ways to trigger the right ways of working for different types of work. Here's how you can structure your work to catch complexity before it catches you:

Add Complexity Columns in Your Planning Columns:

* I am Comfortable With this Task: Clear path, known solution, minimal dependencies

* This is going to be some work: Multiple steps but predictable, expertise required

* I am worried about this task: Something feels weird. The definition doesn’t seem right. Solution emerges through doing, learning required

Build Triggers into Your Doing Columns:

The earlier you can detect complexity, the sooner you can talk to other people about it. Complexity always requires conversations and collaboration. Flag Kanban tickets that encountered complexity so you can study them later and detect them earlier.

* Slow moving vehicles: Task has been in progress longer than estimated

* Learning required: You've had to research or learn something new

* Scope creep: The task now involves work you didn't originally plan

* Lots of chatter: This task was repeatedly planned, talked about, and refined. Unplanned conversations, unplanned meetings, or rework.

Track "Discovery Work" Separately:

Create a lane or a column for discovery work. These are tasks where you realize you need to learn something before you can estimate the "real" work. Simply creating the column or swim lane for this makes your brain say, “discovery might be a thing.” Then you watch for it, your barrier of what requires discovery becomes lower. Then you are honest about it. This makes the invisible visible and helps you communicate that some work is inherently unpredictable or that some work simply requires another look by a group of people.

Make Discovery Part of the Plan, Not the Crisis

We once had a client who wanted a detailed specification for a project that was inherently complex. We knew the outcomes we wanted, but the path required significant learning and experimentation. Instead of creating a false specification that would inevitably be wrong, we invited the client into our daily work. They attended every huddle, had access to all our work as we were doing it, and made every decision with us.

When the client could see and share in our discoveries in real-time, those discoveries became collaborative problem-solving rather than scope creep. When we hit unexpected technical challenges, they became shared challenges rather than our failures to estimate properly. Hofstadter's Law was still operating in full force, but it became a shared experience rather than a source of broken trust.

Your Next Steps

* Acknowledge complexity exists in your current work

* Add complexity indicators to your planning process

* Make discovery work visible to yourself and your clients/team

* Use AI as a complexity detector / sounding board to quickly get rid of complexity that is already solved or to alert you to areas that might cause you to stumble

Hofstadter's Law isn't a bug in complex work, it's a feature. People often try to avoid the complex work by trying to plan it out of existence, but the most valuable work often involves solving problems we couldn't have anticipated. When we solve problems our competition doesn’t, we win. Instead of fighting it, build systems that acknowledge complexity, make discovery work explicit, and turn surprises into shared problem-solving.

Your work will still take longer than you expect. But now you'll see it coming, plan for it, and turn those "surprises" into the collaborative discovery work they really are.

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

Everyone's talking about flow…that magical state where work moves smoothly through your system and your team is made of productive energy. Flow can’t happen if you are experiencing drag…and every team does. You can't have flow without addressing drag.

You can visualize your work all day long, set up the prettiest Kanban board in the world, and limit your work-in-progress religiously. But if you haven't identified and tackled the hidden forces that slow, complicate, and muddy your work, you'll never achieve the flow you're chasing.

Where Drag Lives on Your Kanban

Drag isn't inefficiency. Drag isn’t just a bottleneck. Drag isn’t simply having too many task. Drag is the visible manifestation of deeper political, behavioral, and emotional forces. Drag shows up in every column of your board (which means we can deal with it).

In Your Backlog Drag is the Work People Won't Touch

Look at those tickets that have been sitting there forever. People aren't pulling them because they're uncomfortable with:

* The complexity ("This looks like a career-ending task")

* The political implications ("When I finish this, it goes to that leader I don't trust")

* The vague definition ("I don't know what this actually means")

* The perceived ownership ("I think this might be someone else's job")

The emotions behind it: Fear, confusion, avoidance, and the quiet hope that "maybe it'll just go away."

In Progress Drag is the Stuck and Struggling

In the active state, that point between starting and “finishing” (it gets even worse at finishing), we have tasks stalled for days or weeks. This isn’t because they are hard it’s because of:

* Complex work given to one person (they're drowning alone, trying to fix something that needs collaboration)

* Constant interruptions (they can't maintain focus or are being intentionally derailed)

* Hidden overload (clean Kanban, messy calendar full of meetings)

* Political hot potatoes (they're dragging their feet hoping priorities change)

The emotions behind it: Overwhelm, frustration, the internal dialogue of "I've been beating my head against this for five days and now I'm the jerk holding everyone up."

In Done Drag is the Lies We Tell Ourselves

We are so good at completing incomplete work. The Done Column is where teams don't expect to find drag, but it's often the biggest source. These are tasks moved to "Done" before they're actually complete because of:

* Sprint or deadline pressure (we need to show progress)

* Bureaucratic demands (compliance says it's done, reality disagrees)

* FUD—fear, uncertainty, and doubt (better to call it done than admit we're stuck)

* Lack of care or training (we don't know what "good" looks like)

The emotions behind it: Resignation ("I hate this task, I hate my job, I'm just moving this so people leave me alone"), desperation, and the dangerous comfort of "acceptable completion of unacceptable work."

From Drag to Flow and Finding a Path Forward

Flow is drag's positive opposite. Where drag creates stress, confusion, and stagnation, flow creates clarity, energy, and steady progress. You can see it on your Kanban when:

* Tasks move steadily left to right

* The board stays balanced—no columns pile up

* Team members collaborate visibly across different steps

* People celebrate progress as cards hit "Done" (and actually stay there)

The Transformation Process

To move from drag to flow, you need to:

* Be Honest: Make all work visible, including the emotional and political dynamics around it

* Plan Like a Professional: Set realistic limits, create psychological safety, and address the root causes of avoidance and fear

* Create Real Team Focus: Align team priorities, establish clear definitions of "done," and build systems that prevent the behaviors that create drag

The Human Element

Remember: drag isn't just about process. It's about people living with bad process. Those stalled tickets and half-finished tasks represent real human experiences of fear, confusion, overwhelm, and resignation. The path to flow requires not just better visualization or stricter WIP limits, but creating an environment where people are (not feel, they actually need to be) safe to:

* Ask for collaboration when the work requires it (not ask for help, but acknowledge the work requires a team-lift)

* Find ways to learn together (not ask for help when they don’t understand)

* See realistic and exciting work and act on it (Not push back on unrealistic expectations)

* Finish work properly and professionally(Not move it to done because of fear or sick mechanics).

Your Next Steps

If you're struggling to create flow despite having a good Kanban system, look deeper. What behaviors and emotions are creating drag in each column? What conversations aren't happening? What fears are driving people to avoid certain work or push things through before they're ready?

Flow isn't just smooth work movement. Flow is the visible result of clear systems, team trust, and a focus on doing the right work at the right time for the right reasons.

This post accompanies a deeper exploration of flow, drag, and the psychology of Kanban. If you're ready to move beyond surface-level process improvements and address the human dynamics that make or break your workflow, consider joining us for Personal Kanban Evolved where we workshop these exact problems with real teams doing real work.

Because if you're interested in flow, if you want a good working environment, you need to understand not just how work moves, but why it gets stuck and what to do about it.

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

Can You Feel It?

Work feels heavier than it should. How we relate. How we communicate. And how we don’t.

Deadlines slip, tempers flare, and once-motivated people withdraw. It feels like it’s “just work”, but it doesn’t have to be.

Workplace toxicity seldom arrives with fanfare and announcements, it hides in invisible bottlenecks, muddled handoffs, and unspoken tensions. Toxicity oozes slowly. We don’t notice it and after a while it becomes normalized. People can’t remember any other way work could be.

Then, because we can’t see the toxicity, we blame each other, we blame our bosses, we blame our employees. We blame the customer. We blame the government. We blame policy. We blame blame and more toxically blame.

Humane Work is reader-supported and certainly a labor of love…and work. To receive new posts and support our work, and be invited to member only lean coffees, and other perks become a paid subscriber.

Stop That

Until your team can see where the pain originates, it can’t begin to heal.

Toxicity lurks and grows in shadows. When how we work becomes visible, both toxicity and cure are immediately seen.

Why Toxicity Persists Unseen

Most teams don’t set out to be dysfunctional. They inherit broken systems, ambiguous roles, and overloaded communication channels. Gifts! A from these gifts, stress mounts, psychological safety evaporates, and turnover stealthily erodes momentum. These forces operate beneath the surface and our traditional metrics (focused on measuring what we know) miss them entirely.

Bring Toxic Patterns into the Light

When things are hidden, the obvious answer is to make them … not hidden. Make the complexities of work clear and how you work collaborative. Mapping the real flow of value renders silent friction visible. Once everyone sees the same picture, they share language, ownership, and the agency to fix what hurts.

Five Steps to a Healthier Workplace

* Map your Current WorkWhen you map your work, you map your culture. You map how you help or hinder each other.Gather the team and build a living map of every step, decision, and handoff. physical sticky notes, a digital Kanban board, or an online whiteboard. Color-code stalled items, repeated rework, and unclear ownership so trouble spots leap off the wall. (Pro tip: work backward from the final outcome to surface hidden dependencies.)

* Spot the Toxic BullseyesOn your map, highlight areas that feel hostile, powerless, or perpetually stuck. Don’t blame, just find where your current system creates tension. These “bullseyes” often cluster around overloaded experts, murky priorities, or silent approval loops. Seeing them in your process transforms blame into problem-solving.

* Expose the Agency GapsAsk, “Where do people feel they can’t act with confidence?” Mark these zones in a bold color. They’re direct indicators of psychological safety breaches. Empowerment starts by recognizing where it’s missing.

* Visualize Your Reality and Your Path, Not Your Wishes and FailuresYou now have something extremely powerful. You know how you want to work together and how you are currently working together. Now, for the first time, you know what you want your kanban and other visualizations to show you. Everyone on the team wants to complete their work with quality and on time. Before your planned work, slow throughput, and defects were all you visualized, so all people could see is how they failed. That failure came from not knowing how you could work well together. Now you do, so you can visualize your two products: culture and completion. (Pro tip 2: You can’t complete without culture.)

* Co-Create Rapid RemediesConvene short, blame-free sessions in front of the boards. Brainstorm “today-sized” experiments: clarify a policy, smooth a handoff, or redistribute decision rights. Small, visible wins build momentum and restore trust. Work together to work better together.

Your Next Move

Reserve time this week to visualize your team’s workflow, if you do it right it will take some time. Identify a single toxic workplace sign and tackle it together. You’ll find many and they are much less threatening than they sound. Most of the time, it’s something like setting a policy for where certain information goes or when someone needs to focus.

Want more? Come see us at Modus Institute and sign up for the VSM class…or if you’d like to do something more involved drop me a line on LinkedIn and we’ll talk about doing a value stream mapping exercise or looking a how you are working together.

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

In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.—Albert Einstein

Some of you might be thinking, “yeah, this had better be a really great opportunity….”

Every morning now, my day starts with a walk through my mother’s Omaha neighborhood (which is a huge and weird neighborhood. Not quiet suburb, not quite city, very 1960s). It’s a simple daily routine, walking with some friendly faces, changing routes, a few conversations with neighbors and their dogs. But this walk has become more than just exercise. It’s part of my routine, my base, my bit of certainty when everything else is full of change.

I can think, process, plan, invent. And today, make this video (which might become a regular thing).

Why Routines Matter

A daily walk is standard work: something you do in a regular, repeatable (but not monotonous) way. Standard work is not rote, but it helps you write. It isn’t standardization, but it is a standard. You might choose a new path today, but you know you’re walking. You know the feeling of putting one foot in front of the other. That’s the reassurance and the power.

When life is turbulent our routines give us a steady platform. It might seem unimportant, even silly. Anything that brings predictability is the foundation you need to respond elegantly.

Elegance

Humans need a balance: stability and change working together. Too much unpredictability, and our brains go on high alert. We lose focus. We get stuck in fight-or-flight mode. If we let instability win, we can’t be fully present or effective. This is a battle. I’m sorry, but it is.

We will lose focus. We will become frustrated. But we must find that elegance of response…for ourselves, our work, or our loved ones, and perhaps generations to come. Right now isn’t a stressful time because of something small or immaterial.

“Don’t sweat the small stuff” … right now is not small stuff.

We need to respond swiftly, decisively, elegantly. So we start at a starting point.

We create our simple routine (walking, making breakfast, journaling, video games, music, anything that grounds you). We create the foundation. Then we build and build hard. Turn building into that routine.

This is the only way I know to focus and deal with the chaos, the surprises, and the unexpected.

Try It Yourself

* Pick one daily ritual, however small.

* Do it intentionally every day this week.

* Notice how having that bit of certainty affects your energy and mood.

* Add more, intentionally building a structure of reflection (learning) and action (doing).

This Video

The Rick Mercer walking around videos have been so overdone in the last 3 or 4 years that I was hesitant to do one. But on the walk, it felt right. And the weirdness of it likely will keep them short, plus maybe I can highlight things while walking. So expect more of them from time to time. Maybe I’ll make it part of my routine.

Want more? Come see us at Modus Institute and sign up for the VSM class…or drop me a line on LinkedIn and we’ll talk about doing a value stream mapping exercise for AI enhanced teams together.

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