I didn’t decide to write this novel. It decided to be written.

That’s not a cute thing to say. That’s what happened.

I was attempting to sell my house. Running a company in a business-hostile environment. Writing a book on toxic waste. Onboarding new clients. Supporting existing ones. Working with students at Modus Institute. Tonianne was stressed. I was stressed. My wife was stress. My mom is stressed. All of this stuff going on that makes you compensate by going quiet and tight and efficient in all the wrong ways.

When we get like that, we do what we’re trained to do: we go to the board. We pull the next ticket. We execute. We survive. We go task focused, work-to-rule.

We don’t, generally, write novels. Mine is called The Social Life of Small Enclosed Spaces.

The Work That Keeps Us Human

But creativity doesn’t care about your backlog. Or your time management. Or even your level of nervous exhaustion.

So, for me, this character named Laura Marquez kept showing up. Urban planner. Systems designer. Living in a world of oligarchs and mega-corporations and people just trying to figure out how to be good to each other inside systems that weren’t designed for goodness. She’d tap me on the shoulder in the middle of a workshop prep. She’d hand me a line of dialogue during a client call debrief. I’d scribble fragments. I made songs out of some of them.

The Titanauts, as people, refused to wait for me to be ready.

And this is the reason for this post. This is true of a lot of important things. The conversation you need to have with a colleague. The decision your team has been avoiding. The pivot your org knows it needs to make. These things don’t wait until your calendar clears. They just keep accumulating pressure until something gives.

So I started writing. And the next thing I knew, I was in it. Laura’s voice was my flow.

And she was saying, “Write this, or lose every shred of humanity you have left to stress, fatigue, and the horrible narrative that is now.”

Systems Thinking in Narrative Form

I thought I was writing Office Space in space. Funny, light, a little irreverent.

The book had other ideas.

It wanted to talk about complicity. About how we end up inside systems that do harm, incrementally, quietly…not because we’re bad people, but because the system is designed to move us toward certain outcomes regardless of our intentions. We do little bits of harm. Then a little more. Until one day we hit the straw-breaks-the-camel’s-back moment, and we have to make a choice about our own agency.

Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it achieves.

That’s usually attributed to Deming. A lot of people have said it. What I know is that it’s true. And the corollary (the part we forget when we’re stressed and pulling tickets) is: if we don’t like the results, we can change the system.

We’ve done it before. We’ll do it again.

The Characters Who Turn Out to Be the Plot

We’re all people. We all show up when we can, do what we can. And sometimes those cans are musts. Sometimes they are wannas.

As I was writing the book, I had this same experience with the characters that I see in every value stream mapping exercise.

The characters I thought were supporting the plot turned out to be the plot.

The quiet ones. The people who don’t announce themselves. The ones who seem like they’re just... there. Bumping along. Doing their work without fanfare.

And then suddenly…they move everything forward.

You see this on teams constantly. You map the work, you identify the leaders, you talk to the loudest voices in the room. And then you find the person who’s been quietly holding the whole system together. The one who knows where everything is, who’s translated every decision into action, who everyone else depends on without realizing it.

We live staring at the beams of our teams and miss the rivets. And damn, it’s humbling to learn the same lesson over and over again. Writing The Social Life of Small Enclosed Spaces was a multi-year value stream mapping exercise I didn’t know I was doing.

A Different Kind of Review Cycle

I want to tell you something about how this book was actually made, because I think it matters for how we work in general. It’s about Lean and Agile and how we won the battle against AIDS and how we’re going to get our planet back from the banality of hate.

So, my normal process is to play with ideas in blogs and social media posts. But these ideas were so deep. So personal. And often alarming. I couldn’t just get into LinkedIn and say things like, “Wouldn’t it be wild if Jeff Bezos destroyed local commerce worldwide, then moved to a tax haven turning his back on the city that made him wealthy, bought major media, and then backed a banana dictatorship?” Because it wasn’t on brand. Oh, sorry, inside voice…

Anyway, normally, I’d write the whole book, give it to humans, wait months for feedback, incorporate, repeat. It’s waterfall or popular agile. It’s slow. And honestly, by the time the feedback comes back, you’ve already moved so far from the original thinking that the integration is painful.

I couldn’t just turn to my usual editor friends and say “Read this” every few minutes. Because they would very quickly (a) hate me and (b) get lost in endless version control.

So, I built a set of AI advisors. Deming. Buckminster Fuller. Elinor Ostrom. Kevin Lynch. David Lynch. Others. I’d write a section, describe my goals for it, and ask them to respond from their respective frameworks. The feedback was immediate. I could write, get a response, but it wasn’t rewriting my text… it was oblique perspectives from the amalgam of my history. It was an instable set of filters to challenge me to adjust, write more, get another response, adjust again…rapid cycles, tight loops, evolutionary design in real time. Discuss, Envision, Edit & Expand Repeat. Yes, it’s the DEEE model. Which I just invented while typing this. So… let’s make a graphic for it.

What that meant was that when I gave the manuscript to humans, to people like Kathy Gill, who became the patron saint of this project, I gave them something complete enough to be useful. I didn’t waste their time with roughness I could have resolved myself. I respected their attention by arriving prepared.

And even with that Kathy came back with over 100 edits and suggestions. A HUNDRED!

So, in Personal Kanban land…in humane work land. This is respect for people. This is making sure that other people aren’t on the hook to process your backlog refinement.

Writing in Defiance

I want to be honest about something.

This has been a very difficult time for me. I’m going to let that float without detail, because what the specifics aren’t as important to any of us as the fact that you probably know exactly what I mean. You’ve been there, are there, are helping people through there.

And when we’re there, we tend to think that creative work, expressive work, human work is a luxury we can’t afford. But what I found was the opposite. This crew kept insisting that hope was possible. Even when I wasn’t feeling it and certainly when they weren’t feeling it. I seriously take out a lot of frustrations on these poor people.

It was my keep hope alive message, an artistic momentum pulling me forward toward a place I couldn’t see yet from where I was standing. One night, while watching Australian Masterchef, I scared the hell out of my wife by yelling, “Why the hell did you do that?”

And she’d like, “WHO? WHAT HAPPENED?”

And I said, “Rash just did something he absolutely shouldn’t have. That I didn’t want him to do. And now the book is entirely different.”

And she stared at me…for more than a comfortable amount of time…and went back to watching Australians cook. (Imagine the Laura look below on a multi-racial Hong Kong born speech pathologist).

That’s what good work does, by the way. Not just art. Good systems work. Good team work. Good process. It holds the shape of what’s possible when you’re too tired to hold it yourself.

Come On This Ship With Us

We’re all on Spaceship Earth together.

While we’re here, we might as well have good people to work with. Good friends. Good collaborators. People who are thoughtful, who are building interesting things, who want the system to stop blocking them from doing the right thing.

That’s the community Tonianne and I have been building for 15 years and are not…going…to…stop. That’s what Modus is. That’s what this book is about…under all the oligarchs and spaceships and corporate absurdity and AIs and all of the goodies.

This is about the practical and the humane. Where do the tomatoes grow? How do we get the right thing to happen, at the right time, with the right people? How do we make up for our faults and build systems to make those faults less likely? When are we going to take other people seriously and not for granted?

Pre-orders are open at titanauts.com. There are also some games there…yes, I had fun building the site, and yes, you should go play. Yes, I say funny things. Yes, the book is funny.

Thank you for being part of this. Genuinely.

— Jim

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