Mike Leber: Zero. And I think here we are. Jim Benson, welcome to the Agile Focal Podcast. Jim Benson: It's Mike Leber: Today, Jim Benson: good to Mike Leber: we're Jim Benson: be here. Mike Leber: super excited talking to you because you invented so many things or at least rumors are you're guilty for a couple of things. And I will explore personal Kanban, probably will explore probably the collaboration equation. I think that was your last book, right? Jim Benson: Yep, that is the most recent. Mike Leber: And of course, explore your today's view and, you know, approaches for helping organizations or say the other way around human beings to, to succeed in whatever they're thriving for. Jim Benson: Mm-hmm. Mike Leber: But for the beginning, maybe you can just give us a little bit of a hint who you are, where you're coming from with your work, what you're doing. Jim Benson: Okay. I can go very long with this. So I'm going to try and try and do this very quickly. All my life, since I was a little kid, I have liked collaborating with people and I have found that when you build a product, honestly with other human beings, it's built faster, it's built better, it's built stronger. That brought me initially into psychology as a field of study. and then into urban planning to try and build better built environments for human beings. They can get around and they can be happier. And then, you know, Kanban came out of that, some software development came out of that. Lean Coffee came out of that. But ultimately, for the last 15 or so years, Tony and DeMaria and I have been running around the world working with all of these different types of human endeavor. So it could be the UN. be the World Bank, it could be HSBC, it could be any small, medium, large organization of human beings. And everywhere we've gone, it's been individuals working together to create something and then usually working against lots of things that we're trying to stop them from doing a professional job. And my goal is to remove those barriers so that professionals can be professionals, get the right work done at the right time. and everybody's happy. And everybody's happy is an actual laudable end goal for the work that we do. Mike Leber: That's a super cool summary for how many years you're doing this. Jim Benson: uh, well, arguably 58. Mike Leber: for a lot of years. I mean, Jim Benson: But, Mike Leber: you're Jim Benson: but, Mike Leber: known. Jim Benson: but for modus itself, we started modus in 2009. So it's 14, 14 years of, of this. But my software company, Greyhill solutions, which I had from 1999 to 2009, our mission was to make government more collaborative and better stewards of their data. And so all of the software that we wrote at the time. did that in one way or another. So collaboration has always been at the forefront. Harald Wild: So to address the elephant in the room pretty early, and you mentioned it yourself, rumor has it that you invented the lean coffee. And if so, how did you invent it and why? What was the reason? What was the trigger? Jim Benson: Why would you do such a thing? Harald Wild: I'm going to go ahead and close Jim Benson: So, Harald Wild: the video. Jim Benson: yes, lean coffee was invented. For those who you can't see, you can't see me pointing, but right over here at a coffee shop with me and Jeremy Lightsmith, and Jeremy and I were having coffee and he said, you know, there's a lot of people in Seattle who are doing Kanban and personal Kanban. Why don't we start a new professional organization of groups so we can get together? We can have a meetup once a month and blah, blah. And I just thought about meetups and I was like, Oh my God, look, if we have a meetup every month, we have to come up with a topic. We have to find speakers. We have to get space. We have to buy pizza. We have to do all this stuff. And that just sounds like work. What if we just got everybody together at a coffee shop and we sat down and we threw down a quick Kanban and it said stuff you haven't talked about yet, stuff you're talking about, and then people can populate it, vote on what they want to talk about. And then we'll just talk about it. Because in the end, we'll have a product, and we'll have focus, and it won't be just a bunch of people standing in a room mingling. And he's like, that's cool. And so we did the first one in South Lake Union here in Seattle before South Lake Union was a thing. And it must have been less than a year. It was everywhere. All the conferences were doing it. People were doing it in their companies and so forth. It just ended up being a simple format with a very clear set of values. Again, to help people collaborate. In this case, helping them collaborate to have more focused conversations about things that they wanna talk about as opposed to the stuff that somebody thinks they should talk. Mike Leber: Awesome. Before talking about collaboration, and this is maybe a tricky thing, let's talk a little bit about personal Kanban. I mean, it might turn to collaboration because obviously personal Kanban is first of all collaborating with yourself and then thinking about who am I collaborating with and where I'm not sure how that works. You know, like saying, Jim Benson: Mm-hmm. Mike Leber: expanding a personal Kanban into a collaborative system. But what's the story behind this? Because this is super famous and I'm not sure if most people get the, the essence. Jim Benson: No, no, they don't. And I'm just going to go ahead and tell my story. And if other people want to argue with it, they can. Mike Leber: Mm-hmm. Jim Benson: So years and years ago, when I had Greyhill Solutions, like my software company, this guy walks into my office one day. And he says, hey, I understand that you have extra office space here. And I said, we've got a few extra offices. And he said, So can we sublease this? And his we was him, and frankly, I don't even remember who that guy was, and Dave Anderson. So Dave shows up a couple of days later. We go out to coffee or to lunch. And he shows me everything about his book, Agile Management. And it turned out that Dave and I lived literally three blocks from each other. So we started getting together once a week and trying to figure out how to implement the book Agile Management, because the implementation path wasn't very clear. And so we talked about that and talked about it. I moved. We had all sorts of life events. But at one point over here in the other direction at M'lady's Pub, one night on the back of a napkin, we drew out kind of what became the first Kanban. We didn't have a name for it. It just kind of became it. And Dave went off to Microsoft to do that with large organizations. I went back to do it with my small organization. And so we were more interested in the things that I'm interested in, which is, are we communicating? Uh, do we understand why our WIP limits are the way that they are? Uh, do we understand what we've done? Uh, um, are we happy with the work that we did? Um, and, uh, so that division. Between the Kanban method. which is about developing software in procedural ways with a very, um, mathematic focus. And then mine, which is doing almost exactly the same tracking, but it's from a more human, personal, personal focus. So personal Kanban doesn't mean Kanban for one, it doesn't mean Kanban for individuals, it means personal Kanban, Kanban for people, for humans. And that's how it came about. And it was interesting because for years, like literally years, Dave and I would get together and we would talk about the differences of the experiences that we were having with those two formats. Even after we formed Modus Cooperandi originally and then Dave left, we still kept having those conversations. So that's the personal Kanban origin story. Mike Leber: And that probably, I mean, talking about collaboration, that already brings up this topic probably, you know, like is it Kanban, personal Kanban, it's all about transparency. It's like Jim Benson: Mm-hmm. Mike Leber: seeing the truth, and I think we pointed to this already, truth, reality, the very relative things, because everybody creates their own reality. So we look at something and then make up our stories and our mind. Jim Benson: Mm-hmm. Mike Leber: What does transparency mean for you in this sense for systems of human beings and in the wider scale like organizations? Jim Benson: So I have seen, as has probably everybody listening to my voice right now, people enter meetings with other people. You go through, you have a conversation that is not written down by anybody. You make very clear decisions by the end of that conversation. And one week later, people have extremely different memories of what was discussed. However, If people go to watch Star Wars, by the end of Star Wars, they tend to not have giant different memories of what was done. And no one's going to always going to say, you know, Luke Skywalker worked in a bottling plant in Milwaukee or, you know, just the drift isn't going to be there. And the reason is because the narrative was both visual and there was a conclusion. So the reason that a story has a story arc is because you go from kind of the, the easy beginning through the complexity and then you solve the complexity at the end of the movie and then you have a full complete story arc and human beings, we never do that. So visualizations, whether they're Kanbans or something else, when you're having a meeting, create that visual cue or those visual cues that help people. both align and then maintain that alignment. Now, if you use the visualization and then no one looks at it again, Mike Leber: No. Jim Benson: that then the visualization didn't happen. So the visualization needs to stay visual and needs to stay part of what you're doing so that people remember what that story arc is of the decisions that you made. Mike Leber: Right. So that's, that's super cool. Adding to this, and I think we somehow mentioned it too. I believe, I mean, in organizations, people tell stories and we know still, and even if we visualize what, for example, is being told in the hierarchy, and then a couple of lines downwards is understood is sometimes different or what people want to tell is different. And that Jim Benson: Mm-hmm. Mike Leber: brings me to trust. Right? Like honesty or behavior that basically helps people like leaders showing up and telling the truth or telling what's behind happening behind the curtains. Jim Benson: Mm-hmm. Mike Leber: So the technique I understand, but how do I get finally people to tell what has to be told? Jim Benson: So it's incredibly easy to destroy trust. And we can see that in global politics at the moment, that almost all global politics is right now based on actually destroying trust or destroying collaboration rather than building it. And, um, I hate to put it this way, but any idiot can do it cause Trump can do it. And he's an idiot. Uh, so when we want to build trust, there needs to be a system to build it. The way that you. destroy trust is you remove systems of trust. So a system again is a coherent set of actions that says like, if this happens, this result will occur. And that doesn't mean fully standard work. Like every time a piece of work comes in, we will do exactly this. It means things like, if we come across something that's really complex or we don't know how to solve it, then we're going to react this way. Number one is, We're going to rejoice in the fact that we found the complexity, not get mad. We're not going to blame the person who found the complexity. And then we're going to go through a series of steps to calm it. We're going to get together. We're going to discuss it. And then we're going to do BCD and E whatever those next steps are, uh, to, to work our way through that complex situation. And, uh, the second. major thing that I see that people don't do that destroys trust is we all get very busy. When we get busy, we become little narcissists. We become focused on ourselves. And then we do two things. We stop talking to other people and we stop trusting other people. And then when we stop talking to other people, they stop trusting us because we're not talking to them. So the systems of the visualization beyond Kanban, so Kanban is like where you start, but it's certainly not what you need to manage a project. If you're managing a project right now and you're just using Trello or Asana or something, you're not doing enough. You're not respecting what your project actually needs. But we have a bunch of those visualizations together and they tell a complete story. Then people know how to do what Tony and I call act with confidence. And then trust just, trust is there. Cause the lot of distrust is just you not being able to act in a confident way when a certain situation happens. Mike Leber: Right. Harald Wild: That's really interesting. And we had the transparency and the power of transparency, which helps to create trust because if something is transparent, then it's factual based and Jim Benson: Mm-hmm. Harald Wild: you can talk in other ways about that. But yeah, in that way, and if you look at the power that you can unleash in a company you have transparency in work and the discussions that you make possible because of those facts you can see. Jim Benson: Mm-hmm. Harald Wild: That's really powerful, I guess, but there is another aspect and I would like to know your opinion on that. If you climb up the ladder in the hierarchies in companies, I sometimes have the opinion that it's harder and harder to accept reality. And if you visualize work and create transparency... then accepting reality might be way easier than if you talk about like the standard processes in companies. What is your opinion on that when hierarchies have like problems accepting reality? Jim Benson: Right. So the first thing is that I think that is absolutely the case, that anytime you have groups of people who silo either vertically or horizontally, that breaks down communication of real-time information that people need in order to do their jobs. And I will I will start with a more inflammatory thing that never has to leave the quote unquote bottom rung. The number of times I have gone into a group where they talk about how great their Kanban is and then you'll go in and there'll be nice backlog, perfectly groomed and then you'll have some to-dos and then you'll have some stuff that's in flight and then you'll have one column with a ton of crap in it and then you'll have a few things that are in done. And the ton of crap is the testers. And if you ask software developers, if you say, you know what, you guys can't code until all that testing is done, then they're like, well, what am I gonna do? Because they can't even conceive that they would do the testing. And at that point, I fight the urge to become physically violent. So the other side of this is we'll go in and we'll do a right environment exercise with a team. And the leader of that team, or maybe the leader's leader, will hire us. And then we'll get into the meeting and we'll be the first kickoff. And Tonya and I are just standing there, and standing there, and standing there. And finally somebody's like, are you going to start? And we're like, well, we're waiting for. those leaders to arrive and they said, oh, no, they're not coming. Because we're a self-organized team or because they're servant leaders or whatever, but I'm like, no, they're team members. And so the more that we create that division, the more that division is going to be a division. And so what we need to recognize is that a cross-functional team is truly cross-functional. It includes developers. It includes testers. It includes. your PM or your PX or your product owner or your scrum master or whatever, that those people are part of the team and that if they don't show up for those types of planning, then there will never be trust. And so it's not, I don't believe it's the hierarchy that's doing that. I believe it is the distance between divisions of labor. and that those things need to become Venn diagrams and overlap, not box with a very long line leading to the other box. Cause there's a lot of, there's a lot of impedance in that, in that communication line that destroys the signal. And then, so those people that we think are being willfully ignorant, they're literally just getting a lot of noise and they're just begging for signal. That's my speech. That's my sermon. Ha ha ha. Ha ha ha. Mike Leber: You mentioned the word we wanted to actually look closer into. You mentioned this right environment, right? Upper R, Jim Benson: Mm-hmm. Mike Leber: upper E, which you use in your latest book a lot in the collaboration Jim Benson: Mm-hmm. Mike Leber: equation. What is that for you, the right environment? Jim Benson: So Mike Leber: How Jim Benson: the Mike Leber: do Jim Benson: right Mike Leber: you? Jim Benson: environment is, it's, it is an environment where professionals get the information they need to do the right work at the right time and act with confidence. Mike Leber: Is this sort Jim Benson: That's Mike Leber: of Jim Benson: it. Mike Leber: a true North way we'll just put it out and let people explore if you put that into reality in one of your initiatives to say, Hey, there is something like that. It's pointing into a direction and let's explore what it means for us. Jim Benson: One of my favorite laments of a COO at one point was we came in to work with a team. The team was extremely, the morale was extremely low. They had been beaten several times. They, they had tons of learned helplessness. They were not, they did not believe that they could make their lives better in any way, shape or form. After a short bit of work. We were able to convince them that they could try a few things. And those few things were actually fairly large. Like you should reorg yourself. And when they were able to do that, and then they were able to install some pretty impressive changes, things got a lot better. They got happier and so forth. And then finally, you know, we said to the COO, you know, they're just glad that they finally have agency. And they're just glad that they finally have agency. And the CEO is like, I told them a million times that they had agency and they could do whatever they wanted. So a true North set by somebody else who doesn't provide any system to get to that true North makes about as much sense as me telling my wife, you know what? I really liked my time in Cape Town. You should walk over there and check it out. And then she, you know, gets to go through a couple of mountain ranges and a few oceans to get to Cape Town. We have to, as a group, decide what our right environment is. And it's not like a platitude. It's not like we want to be cool or something. It's actual, an actual system that says, this is how our culture operates. This is how our communication systems operate. And those things are underwriting our ability to act professionally by X, Y, and Z. And then you go off and do that and then you watch it and then you improve it. You do the work. Mike Leber: Right. Jim Benson: That's, that's, that's another second sermon. Mike Leber: Haha Harald Wild: So when you implement these things or develop those things in companies, then you always have the culture that eats everything else for breakfast in Jim Benson: Yes. Harald Wild: companies. So how do you develop or how do you integrate culture in companies? Because they might be so different. Some companies might... fight with their arrow culture and then learn that Jim Benson: Edwin. Harald Wild: it's a learning culture that they want and not an arrow culture. And those majority levels of companies, how do you integrate those in the right environment? Jim Benson: So it definitely helps to have an existing culture of at least communicated respect so that you can leverage that. But there are cultures and there are subcultures. So when I was growing up in Grand Island, Nebraska, I was an angry punk rocker. It is pretty clear in Grand Island, Nebraska, which is in literally the middle of nowhere surrounded by people who don't think very often, that we were a subculture. but we were a fully defined subculture. We had our ways of dressing, we had our ways of communicating, we had stuff that we did. So your corporate culture is going to be a constraint on what your team can and cannot do, but it is not going to in general completely dictate what your team can and cannot do. So what we find... is that when we go into organizations, there's varying levels of oppressive constraint, and that those levels are always less than people think they are. So we imagine a lot more oppression that's actually there. So just like the COO is saying, they always had the ability to act on their own, to engage in their agency. They felt like they couldn't, and they felt like they couldn't for good reason, right? So when we start off the right environment, we actually define the culture that we want to see. And it's not like the culture of like, we want more hugs and Legos. It's the culture of things like we want to have each other's back. We want to make sure that complexity isn't something we fear. We want to make sure that when we make plans and those plans, and we learn something that's going to change those plans, we want to make sure that we can communicate that. We want to know what's going on in real time. We want to be able to work closely with other teams. And then you take that culture. And then you make process out of it because process is always an instantiation of your culture. It's just like Conway's law that says that a product is the product is the embodiment of the culture that creates it. The same thing's true with process, which is why agile and lean routinely fail. You're trying to shove someone else's process on a culture that isn't designed that way. And it's because the culture isn't designed at all. Mike Leber: Do you use Jim Benson: I can Mike Leber: the... Jim Benson: really go on about this stuff. Mike Leber: Yeah, we'll dive into that because I'm a little bit curious about how you use the term culture. I mean, are you just bringing it up as a sort of a context to, you know, attach to? Or do you refer to any model or anything? Because I know culture is heavily discussed, right? We know we can't touch Jim Benson: Yeah. Mike Leber: it, we can't see it. It's actually Jim Benson: Oh, Mike Leber: vague. Jim Benson: I catch it and I see it all the time. Mike Leber: Right. Jim Benson: And that's, that's what, that's what tweaks me about this is that we use culture to eat, to be like the soul. But culture isn't the soul culture is our agreements with each other about how we're going to treat each other professionally. It is literally an implementable, improveable, visualizable and actable. Uh, it is a thing. But what we treat it as is it's like, ah, you know, we've just got this culture dude and it's like no you don't What you you're lazy and you won't do the work and so from a from a social scientist perspective from a from a social psychology perspective Cultures exist they're measurable and they're awesome and they're constantly undervalued, which is why almost every acquisition is painful. Because it's not an acquisition, it's an invasion. It is some other culture coming in and imposing it upon yours, for better or for worse. So we've got to get a handle on that. So for Tony, Ann, and me, when we build out a value stream map, that is an instantiation of the culture. So we will ask in the value stream mapping exercise, where do people collaborate? Where should you communicate? What is it that you get out of this step in your work? Who's learning? Who's suffering? What isn't learned? And those things, that's why we start these right environment exercises, mapping out the work. Cause the work right now, just like that Conway thing, the work is a direct reflection of the culture that you have allowed to occur as opposed to the one that you've built. Mike Leber: Would you as a team or you alone, if you assess maybe initially a potential new client, also deny a client because of their existing culture, to say there are certain Jim Benson: That has happened. Mike Leber: settings where you just say no. Jim Benson: That has happened and we're in a good position to where we can say no, which doesn't mean that we turn away difficult clients. But it is to say that if you have a corporation that is run by an obvious megalomaniac that has then populated all of upper management with a bunch of narcissists. we're probably not going to take that project because the patient's already dead. But there are a lot of other companies where you've got a middle management stack that is confused as to how they can help. And that has caused a lot of dysfunction, but it's not because the people are evil or certifiable in some way, it's because the system has just decayed over time and needs a reset. Uh, so we will tend to look for either the people who are just like, they really know what they want and we're going to come in and it's going to be kind of, I'm not going to say the word easy because these things are never particularly easy, but that the people are invested in finishing, or we're going to take kind of that other side of, of this is a really interesting challenge and, or frankly, it's a company that we believe in. And we're taking out a lot of clients right now that are just companies that we believe in. We believe in their mission. We believe that they're actually going to make the world better and that they understand that upfront. Mike Leber: Right. Harald Wild: How is it with support from the top management or the understanding of the top management? I mean, pretty often the knowledge of implementing such things or developing those processes or work environments, top management doesn't really understand what is being done or what are the principles behind it? What are the principles Jim Benson: Mm-hmm. Harald Wild: of the top management? tools that are being used, how important do you think is the knowledge in the top management and the support of the top management? Jim Benson: Well, I would say that it is not entirely necessary, but crucial, Mike Leber: Okay. Jim Benson: which is as confusing to me to live as it is to say. So we've had tremendous success in places where we didn't have that buy-in from the top. But what we did have was enough indifference that people could get their work done anyway. Uh, but the best experience that I've had that I talked about a lot in the book is at Turner construction in New York and every Turner project in New York is worth hundreds of millions to billions of dollars. It's more funded than any startup you're ever going to find. And each project is a startup. You start with entirely new staff. You start with a project that hasn't been done before in a place that hasn't been touched before in that way. And so while I was there, built a couple of hospitals, built a couple of upper education buildings and office buildings and stuff. And at those projects, there's two levels of upper management. There's upper management in the project itself. So the project executive is basically the CEO of that multi-billion dollar project. But then that person reports to a general manager back in the main Turner office. And then above that person, there are, is another two layers of management. And at the very top of all of that sits a guy named Peter Davern. And Peter Davern was very interested in making work better. So his personal buy-in meant everything to my success on these multi-billion dollar projects. that were done by teams of over 100 people coming in at various times to do various things. So when agile tells me things like pizza team crap, it's like, no, these teams literally was a team of 100 people and we were able to communicate every day and, and it's okay. People can talk if we build the system to make that happen. We just haven't been very imaginative about how we build our systems. Mike Leber: I think Jim Benson: Did Mike Leber: we're Jim Benson: that answer Mike Leber: aware Jim Benson: the question? Mike Leber: of language in such organizations, by the way, which has a little bit of military background, right? I call it the traditional organization, right? The incumbent Jim Benson: Mm-hmm. Mike Leber: sometimes, like, you know, Harland and I got a few of these words together, deadlines, you know, head off, reporting to, war room. All of these words point to a culture that's obviously not too collaborative. Call it this way. Jim Benson: Hahaha Mike Leber: What a ways out here. I mean, again, I know you come in here and say the right environment, right? And we need to Jim Benson: Yep. Mike Leber: do something about the culture, but I often, and that's, that's my question to you. I often experienced teams who gave up hope, you know, the point to the Gallup report, a lot of people who quit in inside already, they, they laugh at you. They, they smile at you, but internally, they just say, I just want to get to my pension and then I'm out, or just want to do Jim Benson: Mm-hmm. Mike Leber: my nine to five. How do you get these systems moving? Somehow. Jim Benson: So this Mike Leber: If Jim Benson: is Mike Leber: at Jim Benson: this Mike Leber: all. Jim Benson: is my favorite one of my favorite Turner stories. Mike Leber: Ha ha. Jim Benson: And let's see if I can let's see if I can get through it without tearing up. I'm in a meeting. We're having lean coffee, actually. And it's an open lean coffee at the Turner headquarters. And somebody asked the head of lean for the New York area. I said to him, you know, hey, Doug, what's the. What's the best lean project that's going on right now? And he said, well, that would be the Greenpoint project. And the person looks at him kind of like, and he's like, what? And he's like, I thought you said the Greenpoint project. I said, yeah, I did. And I said, but isn't that run by John Sanchez? And she's like, yeah. And it's like, he's an asshole. And so I thought that was funny. And so the next time I saw John Sanchez, I said, hey, you know, I learned something the other day. He said, what? I said, I learned that you're an asshole. And he said, yeah, I am an asshole. And I was like, you've always been like a big teddy bear. I said, what's what happened? And he said, well, look, our entire culture was built on screaming for my entire career. So we've been there like 30 years. And this is another thing about construction, like people were there like 30 years. And so it was like for 30 years, I was really good at it. So if something went wrong, you'd pull people into your office, you'd yell and cuss and scream at them and make them feel like crap. And then when you'd completely broken them, you'd scream at them a little bit more just to make your point. And then, and then, uh, and he said, I was really good at it. He said, but then when we started the green point project, we put up a sign that said no yelling in the trailer. I couldn't yell in the trailer anymore. He said, I had to figure out new ways to like get my pointer across. And he said, so I was really good at that. And he said, but really, I mean, who wants to live like that? So it didn't work. So I get really emotional about this because this guy had built his career on anti-collaborative combative activities that he personally didn't even believe in. And if you would have asked him before the project, do you think that if we put a five word sign in your trailer that it will change your life, he would have said no. Why the hell would I do that? But the group bought into humane practices that changed the game. They changed the rules of the game. They changed the rules of what the reward was, what an outcome was. And they turned a guy that people knew as being an asshole into a really nice guy. And what was the benefit of that? You can't even begin to measure it. All of the people that came in as what they call level ones starting their career on Greenpoint, probably less likely to quit because they weren't in a hostile working environment. They probably had a better onboarding. They probably had better upskilling. They probably were able to talk to people in different disciplines more because people weren't scared to act. Yes, there are a lot of people out there who have been beaten into either learned helplessness or into patterns of behavior that are destructive. There is a very small subset of those people that don't want to change. And Mike Leber: That's Jim Benson: I've Mike Leber: it. Jim Benson: done this in the US, I've done this in Germany, I've done this Mike Leber: Right. Jim Benson: all over the world. And I'm finding that this is a universal constant, regardless Mike Leber: Okay. Jim Benson: of how hierarchic or not hierarchic the country is or the company is. Mike Leber: It reminds me a little bit on, I'm a big fan of Marshall Goldsmith and his stories. And I think he once tells this story about the flight attendant, when he just says, I'm on a flight of United Airlines, whatever. And there is one grumpy stewardess, you know, who is just trying to get rid of her stuff and always sad face and everything. And on the other aisle, there is a smiling person, same job, same company. Jim Benson: Mm-hmm. Mike Leber: It reminds me on, you know, you write a lot about agency, taking responsibility and becoming aware of your agency. And then, but also then stepping forward. Jim Benson: Mm-hmm. Mike Leber: Like, you know, because I was just thinking about, you know, systems create people, but finally people have to create systems. There's a little bit of a hen egg problem. Who, Jim Benson: Mm-hmm. Mike Leber: who starts first? Jim Benson: So there was a, yeah, and it's a, so for example, yeah, who starts first? So how do you, as somebody who might not be a C level person, how do you make the people in middle and upper management more comfortable so that they become less mean? So what is it that is scaring those people? And can you find a way to provide them with that? Because nine times out of ten, it isn't good or bad news, it's just simply timely information Mike Leber: Hmm. Jim Benson: provided in a way that they can ingest. So I know that if I'm running a project and the project is going like crap, but I have reliable information and that crap doesn't surprise me. I can deal with a lot of crap. And I can deal with a lot of crap and good humor, but the surprise of the crap, especially if I find out that people have been hiding the crap from me, which they will in a hostile working environment every time. then I don't get the information that I need as a leader to act with confidence. So therefore, I try and micromanage and control people thinking that that's going to get me the information rather than building systems that will rather than identifying what the information is with the people who are doing the work and then finding a better way to build those dashboards or make those meetings or see those visual controls. Mike Leber: Does that mean we're lacking social competence? Like, you know, I might be a project manager, I'm super proficient with my tools, with the framework and everything, but I just lack empathy for those I'm working with. Jim Benson: Yeah, so the human race is really good at hating each other, fucking things up and dying. Those are really the only things that we do reliably. Harald Wild: Thanks for watching! Jim Benson: So we have to work at everything else. So every, like, otherwise we'd all be like, every marriage would just be like total bliss every day. We'd be like, yay, I'm so married. Mike Leber: Yeah. Jim Benson: So when we go to work, like if you're on one of these Turner projects, you're married to a hundred other people. You didn't even date, you just showed up and there they were. So, so we have to figure out like, how do we protect each other? How do we help each other? How do we make sure that we were not surprised in a bad way? Or when a surprise does come up, we have a intelligent adult, humane reaction to it. Mike Leber: Now you just connected the dots, I think, because before you were talking about the space, right, where people meet, what you just mentioned, we're mean with each other, we're assholes. That's easy when we don't see each other. When Jim Benson: Mm-hmm. Mike Leber: I'm right on social media and don't know the person and even don't see them, I can call them anything in a second. But when we are in the same room and feel other people and sense something, that changes the whole game. So it sounds Jim Benson: Mm-hmm. Mike Leber: like... That's what you were up to, right? Creating these spaces where people can meet and see each other. Jim Benson: Yeah, yeah. And I'll push that forward and then I'll pull back. So pushing that forward, the Ruth Bader Ginsburg or Coney Island hospital project that I was working on, where they had the best, what you call a war room and what we would call an OBEA, but a best central location for all of the information managing the project. where they had a culture of continuous improvement and of unflagging respect for other people's professionalism. When COVID started and they got the message from Turner's central command that everybody had to go home, the other teams all wrote back worldwide, wrote back to Turner and said, That team went into their Obea and said, what do we do next? And they built up a plan of how they were going to work remotely on a construction project, which had never been done in the history of construction projects. And then the work that they did became the template for how all other projects across the company. Reacted to COVID and they did that only because they had a right environment. They had a Harald Wild: Thank Jim Benson: defined Harald Wild: you. Jim Benson: culture. They had. They had the visual controls. So that's the physical room. But now we're on the other side of the COVID fence. And I don't think any of us are working with any groups that are co-located entirely at all, unless we're working with a restaurant. So now, when people need to have that type of personal interaction, we have to put plan it more. And that takes away some of the authenticity of the way people respond. Because if there's one thing that you want to do when you get on Zoom, it's get off of Zoom. There is, you know, we tried all through all and everyone tried through all of COVID saying let's get together and have some scotch on Zoom. And it never quite worked. it still felt like a Zoom meeting in which you were trying to have scotch. So that, yeah, that, that personal dance is still there and it's harder than ever because now it's seen as an additional expense. Mike Leber: Are we too Harald Wild: So Mike Leber: dogmatic? Harald Wild: is it that it's necessary to be in the same room for real collaboration? And is that some part of the reason why we see so unskillful or little collaboration in organizations? What is going wrong in organizations? Why is collaboration... Jim Benson: Well, organizations have always sucked at being collaborative, which is why we're all employed. But right now, we're hampered by our tools. We have tools that kind of work to facilitate this online communication. But nothing can replicate being in person. So if I have 10 people. in a room, I can at any given point in time have five different conversations happening that are productive. If I'm on Zoom, it's one. And I know you can have breakout rooms. Yay. But when you're in a room and you have those concurrent conversations going on, they might feel like they're... Like it's a lot of noise. But what it is actually 10 brains getting together in parallel processing whatever the problem is. And so we're squishing down, we're constraining the amount of processing we can do online. So that means that when we build an online event, we have to be very cognizant of how we keep people active. And then, so like these companies that have hybrid work, What we've been telling people is if you're a team and you're doing hybrid work, make sure that when you go into the office, it's all full on collaborative time. If you go into the office and sit alone at a desk and type stuff, you lose. So the only way to leverage that now is to say, okay, there's certain types of collaboration we can do online. There's certain types of collaboration that are better spent in a room together. And so what I tell our teams is when you get into the building, You got to make sure that you can always see each other and that someone's holding a whiteboard pen. But what they were doing was they were literally just going to work on arbitrary days and then getting on Zoom and talking to the people who weren't in the office. And you're like, that's not that's not the thing. Mike Leber: Wouldn't that be a solution for every organization? Because you just mentioned hybrid. Jim Benson: Mm-hmm. Mike Leber: What if we just say, hey, office time is just what you said. It's here for a certain type of interaction and not just for spending eight hours in an office, right? Jim Benson: Right. So HSBC in London is closing down their very large building in Canary Wharf and they're moving to central London. What they could have done, what they literally could have done, was taken half of the space that they had in Canary Wharf and they could have leased that space to Starwood or Hilton or somebody and had them build a short stay hotel and then kept the other half of the space and turned it into collaborative working space so that when someone came from Bahrain or from South Africa or whatever to work with the rest of the HSBC people, they stayed right there at some reduced rate. And then you could have had global collaboration all the time. They could have gone to, you know. one, you know, one of the airline groups and just said, Hey, airline group, we are going to buy a block of generic tickets from you. And our people can just call them in when they need to. They rather what they did instead was they, they shrunk down their office size and said, you know, you have to come into work a couple of days a week. That's a, that's a failing proposition, but they had right in their fingertips. Mike Leber: Mm-hmm. Jim Benson: Like everyone wants to stay at Canary Wharf. It's like totally awesome. So they could have, oh, it's such a lost opportunity and companies like this are flushing this right and left. And it could have been passive income for the rooms that weren't being used because other people coming for canary wharf for other reasons could have stayed in the hotel. I'm full of ideas. Mike Leber: Thanks. Jim Benson: But the point there is that we're right now, we're trying to figure out our way, negotiate our way as a global culture through what hybrid work means, but both our toolkits and our consideration for what that work actually means is so underdeveloped. I mean, we still think that Trello is a Kanban tool. What the hell? It's like totally not a Kanban tool. Mike Leber: sure. Jim Benson: But that's maybe another conversation. Mike Leber: Yeah, yeah. The question is, I mean, you know, what it what it takes, I mean, there, I'm aware of there is a lot of debate around this hybrid Jim Benson: Mm-hmm. Mike Leber: and onside and, you know, choose where we want to work. It might be driven number one by trust again, right, this sort of, who knows if this person really works, right? Number one, number Jim Benson: Yeah. Mike Leber: two. Jim Benson: Elon Musk will be quick to tell you that he doesn't trust anybody that works for him. Mike Leber: Right. Well, he's a special person anyway. Jim Benson: He's definitely a special case, yes, but Mike Leber: And. Jim Benson: he's not dissimilar from the head of Mike Leber: Yeah. Jim Benson: Hewlett-Packard Mike Leber: Bye. Jim Benson: or even Facebook. Even Facebook has had struggles with that. Mike Leber: I heard today even Zoom is calling in their employees back to the offices, which is a little bit ridiculous, right? They don't trust their own pool. Jim Benson: Yep. Yeah, they should have considered the look of that before making that announcement. Mike Leber: Right, right. But let's change the topic a little bit. I think Harold, you wanted to point to this lean thing, right? Lean is an interesting word because, you know, Jim, you were a lot, you know, running under this umbrella. But the question is if you're comfortable with it, because Jim Benson: Mm-hmm. Mike Leber: I don't know what lean means to you. It has some taste, right? And it's certainly not where it originally comes from. It's an assertion, right, from outside. Jim Benson: Right. Mike Leber: What do you feel about lean as such? Jim Benson: So being senior faculty at the Lean Enterprise Institute, for Mike Leber: All Jim Benson: me, Mike Leber: right. Jim Benson: has been a very interesting proposition. It would not be unlike me being part of the senior folks at Agile Alliance. So my relationship with both of these process religions is pretty much exactly the same. The religions themselves are filled with zealots work at cross purposes for the good things in both Agile and Lean to happen. So they come in and they, and people say, I'm going to beat you over the head with the Agile stick, or I'm going to beat you over the head with the Lean stick and what isn't happening is people aren't saying, you know, Lean is an awesome toolkit of problem solving, collaboration, workflow tracking, statistical analysis tools that there is no question. are unbelievably valuable. Agile kind of coming from the other direction, if you cut out all of the fluff and nonsense, is about are we going to be aware of ourselves as a team and are we going to support each other in completing good product? So Lean is super focused on the product. Agile is super focused on the team. Almost no one is focused on the people. except me. Mike Leber: This is your phone, Joseph. Jim Benson: And so in the collaboration equation, one of the things that I was trying to get across is that individuals are the things that work in these teams and these teams have to create value and these teams never work alone. So Agile shoots itself in the foot by creating these super tight teams that end up becoming silos that won't talk to other teams and they have to manage their dependencies. Mike Leber: Mm. Jim Benson: Good luck with that, guys. And then in Lean, it's so about the work that you forget that human beings are doing it, even though the central tenet of Lean is respect for people. Mike Leber: Hmm. Yeah. Jim Benson: So I love all of the elements of Lean. What I don't love is how solidified it has become for some people, which is the same thing that I don't love about Agile. that calcification, that crust that we've built around them, we can join them together and we can create an actual humane world of work that people will get their work done. It will be perfectly statistically trackable and everybody will be happy. Mike Leber: Right. That's a good Harald Wild: So Mike Leber: point. Harald Wild: in that context, what is your opinion on management versus leadership? Jim Benson: So it's a whole chapter of the book that my editor frankly forced me to write. I was like, I don't want to write about it. He's like, no, you have to write about what collaborative leaders looks like, dude. And I was like, it won't be what you want to see. So this is what I think. Management is the setting and achieving of a goal. So it is making sure that the things that we have promised. people arrive more or less in the condition that we promised them, and that it is fundamentally reacting professionally to changes as we're doing so. So management is not about making the schedule. It's about making the product and learning during the schedule. And leadership comes a little bit before that. So leadership is conveying before the project ever starts. that during this project we are going to learn and that there is a window of completion that we are going to make. It is not going to be done on June 27th, but it is going to be done between June 15th and August 30th. It might be a little bit early, it's probably going to be a little bit late, and anytime we find something that is in our way. we will immediately communicate it to stakeholders who might be expecting it at a certain time. And that's what, you know, we, uh, in construction, if you're late by one day with an office building, it can cost millions of dollars in fines and fees. And change happens every day on a construction site. And we need to complete those projects without killing the people who are doing the work. So, so being able to deal elegantly with change is a primary hallmark of leadership. Leadership is also a verb. Okay. Leading is a verb and leading can happen whether you've been at the company for 15 minutes or whether you own the damn thing. It leadership is nothing more than seeing the right. thing that needs to happen now and getting other people to do that right thing. And often that's going to come from people who are higher in the hierarchy, but it cannot be exclusive to those people. They're, people higher in the hierarchy are very capable of killing leadership. but they also have to provide space for it to happen. Mike Leber: Maybe is it time to even think about leadership less about a singular act from one person, but more, you Jim Benson: Mm-hmm. Mike Leber: know, as a result of interaction? Because, you know, there is often this question about followership, leadership. I think Henry Mintzberg talks about, what is it, community ship? We're sorry enough, he's Jim Benson: Uh huh. Mike Leber: tired of leadership and all of this stuff. But it only happens when people interact, right? And some people start agreeing on something, energy is basically, you know, their entropy is basically increasing. And that's not about one person. It's not the leader. It's the system, Jim Benson: Right. Mike Leber: right? Leadership takes place. Jim Benson: Leadership by one person is dictatorship and there's a difference and there's a difference for a reason. Mike Leber: Hmm. Jim Benson: So why did it take 17 years for Tears for Fears to come out with their most recent album and then it took 14 years for them to come out with the album before that? It was because Roland Orzabal was a dictator and no one wanted to work with him, regardless of the fact that he was one of the most brilliant people in music. Mike Leber: Hmm. Jim Benson: And, and this most recent album, it's pretty clear that he's dealt with a lot of his demons. If people haven't listened to it, I highly recommend it. Mike Leber: and... Okay. Jim Benson: But if you go back and listen to the album, uh, bitches brew, uh, which says by Miles Davis, but it is, it is by a group of people. And it's all live takes, it's all improv. And you will hear at any given point that Charlie Hayden is leading, Herbie Hancock is leading, Miles is leading, because Mike Leber: Right. Jim Benson: the work and as it flows requires different people to come to the front at different times. Mike Leber: Right. Jim Benson: And that if we don't allow for that in software development or whatever we're doing, then what we have is dictatorship, or we have us being short order cooks for work. Do this now, do this now, do this now, do this now. And it's really easy with Kanban to fall into that path, to fall into that pattern. Just put the user story there and I'll type it up, but otherwise don't talk to me. It's like, no, dude, you have just become a silo. You've become your own little dictator of your own little world. So that's like, yeah. in elegant dismount. Mike Leber: When you come in, I mean, that's again about your book, that the nice thing is you're not just dogmatic and saying, hey, we need hierarchy-less organizations and holacracy, we mentioned it already, but there is sort of reality in that sometimes includes a hierarchy of managers and what else, but what's the secret speaking to those, at least at the moment, owning authority? telling them the truth without pissing them off. Because that's a Jim Benson: Yes, Mike Leber: little bit of a challenge, right? Jim Benson: how to speak truth to power. Mike Leber: How do you speak truth? Jim Benson: So there's two things. One is that most people who react badly to news are because they're frightened of the implications of the news. And we as a human race are so frightened of so many things or the root cause of any one person's fear is very hard to track down. It could be something that happened when you were three. It could be something that happened three minutes ago. And, you know, for middle management quite often, the proximate cause is that they have been given a set of KPIs that are unobtainable and that they can't come up with a way to rally their team to help them either meet or better communicate the way that they are meeting those KPIs. other than to say, get this done by this point, or blah, blah. So when we have problems speaking up, as it were, we have to figure out where the impedance is in that particular set, in that communication, which is a overly wordy way of saying that we just need to communicate better. We need to figure out what the middle manager needs. And if you are a middle manager, you gotta tell people. So if you have KPIs that you have to meet, you have OKRs that you're responsible for, you have some other set of letters that are making you not sleep at night, you gotta sit down with your team and you gotta say, look, here are the things that I, and therefore you are on the hook for. You all have brains. We're paying you all probably over $100,000 a year to sit around and do user stories. when you could actually be helping us solve these problems. No one works in the software development industry. We work in the problem solving industry. And we tend to think that we're just there to type up some code. Well, guess what? ChatGPT can now do that for you. You're all obsolete. So the only way you're gonna stay employed is to actually solve some damn problems. And the only way you can solve the problems is if you, pointy-haired managers if you let people know what the problems are. And no, that doesn't make you irrelevant. It makes you the coordinator of solving that problem, which is unbelievably important, especially if you solve the problem. So become part of your own teams. Harald Wild: So having Jim Benson: Thanks for watching! Harald Wild: a guest with your expertise, we have one task to do, which is predicting the future. Jim Benson: Okay. Harald Wild: So what is your opinion or what do you think will change in knowledge work in the next five to 10 years? And you just mentioned one important word, which was chetch-e-p-t, so AI Jim Benson: Mm-hmm. Harald Wild: kicks in. And I'm asking this to spread some hope for the younger generations, so maybe... Jim Benson: So, things, so if we're going to talk the future, we have to talk complexity. Complex problems in the Kenevan. world are best solved by groups of people, not by algorithms or language models. Stuff that you can describe quickly can be given to a language model. So if your job is to do things where I could write a user story and you would go do it, you are in danger. Because user stories were foolish to begin with. And now we know why. Because if you can do that, you can be automated. But what you can do every single day is actually understand what the use case is and come up with creative ways to solve that use case. So product owners should not be handing you piles of user stories. They should be discussing with you the strategy you're going to use to solve problems. And the future is going to be based in storytelling and problem solving. Yes, chat GPT can come up with predictive initial stabs at those things, but it won't be able to solve something that it can't search for. Yes, future AI will be able to have more. creative processes in one way or another, but ultimately they will always be derivative. Harald Wild: And maybe that's the reason why there is that saying that user stories are not to be written, but to be discussed. Jim Benson: Mm-hmm. Harald Wild: And that maybe that's the sense of them. Jim Benson: Yeah, yeah, we do say a lot of things, right? Mike Leber: why it's called story, right? And don't be mentioning all its story. But Jim Benson: Yeah. So, Mike Leber: yeah. Jim Benson: I just not... The thing is, I'm always seen as ragging on Agile, but the thing is, I'm not ragging on Agile, I'm ragging on all of us and our lack of desire to actually get in and define our own work and do it. Agile can help us do that every single day, but what we do is we get lazy and we expect things like user stories to do part of our work for us. And it just... And we can claim that we don't do that, but... I'm sorry, I've watched it at hundreds of companies now. It happens. Mike Leber: Right. It's one of these questions, we're at the end of our conversations was an amazing one, but it always brings us back to the roots for the future, right? It's, it's less about what we can get better done, but it's more about what systems would we need to change in order to get different kind of society? Jim Benson: Mm-hmm. Mike Leber: You know, it starts with a primary education, how we socialize, how we bring up managers, Jim Benson: Mm-hmm. Mike Leber: certain professions and all this stuff. Without changing this, you know, we will always get the same kind of problems. Probably. I'm not sure what your take is on that. Jim Benson: Well, Mike Leber: Final question. Jim Benson: yeah, well, growing up in a country that fundamentally hates educating people, uh, Mike Leber: Hmm. Jim Benson: we, Mike Leber: Stay Jim Benson: we have Mike Leber: true. Jim Benson: almost no early childhood education in the United States. We're desperately trying to kill off what public education that we have. Uh, and so I see through like STEM, uh, a lot of people coming up who are good at typing code, but not a lot of people who are good at creative problem solving. And it scares the hell out of me. It terrifies me. My favorite Paul Simon quote is, the future is beauty and sorrow. And that's always been the case, and it will continue to be the case. But the question is, can we bring ourselves as a global community, can we bring ourselves to create more of the beauty and to help us avoid some of the very Um, the, uh, the number of homeless people in London is far less than the number of homeless people in my city of Seattle Mike Leber: Hmm. Jim Benson: because they have been proactive in making sure that people have access to the services they need to not become so, and, uh, um, we're going to have to work hard to maintain those. in society and in work, otherwise we're going to be in for a world of hurt. Sorry, I should have ended a little more happier than that. You wanna ask me something else? I'll say something happy. Yeah. Harald Wild: Well, Mike Leber: I think Harald Wild: in the Mike Leber: there Harald Wild: end, Mike Leber: is. Harald Wild: it's about value and not Mike Leber: Right. Harald Wild: about ending with happiness. So, Jim Benson: I'm sorry. Harald Wild: but I think that describes the whole podcast episode. It was of great value and of great insight. And thank you so much for sharing that with us and Mike Leber: Thanks, Jim. Harald Wild: sharing your opinions with us. Jim Benson: I'm always happy to do so. I'm hoping it helps someone. Mike Leber: or provide all the links to your platforms, to your company, your books with the show notes. Jim Benson: Mm-hmm. Mike Leber: And so everybody who listens and listened, just watch out for the detailed descriptions. And again, it was not a sad ending. I think it's all about hope. And you mentioned a lot of times agency, everybody's invited to take responsibility here. Jim Benson: Mm-hmm. Mike Leber: And that's basically it. And Jim, once again, thank you so much for having joined us here and spending your time with us. All the best Jim Benson: Absolutely. Mike Leber: for the next upcoming months, second half of the year. Jim Benson: Yeah, yeah, this will be a fun one. Moving, we're moving Modus Institute, our online school, to a new platform and it's gonna be beautiful. It's Mike Leber: Awesome! Jim Benson: gonna be beautiful. Mike Leber: So great news ahead. Take care! Jim Benson: All right, thanks guys. Harald Wild: Thank you.