It’s $2.99, or free if you have Amazon Prime.

This is the first in our new MemeMachine Series, which will be little eBooks like this that introduce a topic and begin discussions.

Here’s the writeup for it from Amazon:

Business runs on decisions. Recently, we’ve discovered that people aren’t the great decision makers we thought they were.

Business relies on estimates, plans, and projections – and we all know how accurate they tend to be. Careers are made, careers are broken based on accurate estimation and planning.

But what if the successes and failures of these projects were not based on the prowess of those making the plans? What if success or failure were more often the result of a more complex set of events?
Why Plans Fail directly addresses our ability of to plan, to forecast, and to make decisions.

Written by Jim Benson, an urban planner, software developer, and business owner who has planned and built everything from small software projects, to houses, to urban freeway systems – Why Plans Fail is told by someone with much skin in the estimation and planning game.

This short work is the first in the Modus Cooperandi Mememachine series – which looks specifically at underlying issues that directly impact the success of teams, companies, and individuals. The Mememachine series is meant to start conversations and advance discussion.

“There are two ways to slide easily through life: to believe everything or to doubt everything.
Both ways save us from thinking.”

Alfred Korzybski

Over the last several years, I’ve studied a lot of processes and watched communities grow around them. I’ve been a member of many of these communities. As processes gain credibility, they generate excitement. As excitement mounts, the human desire for perfection plays a funny trick on us: we begin to identify with the process.

The fact that we get our “blackbelts” or certifications doesn’t help with this. We’ve now invested ourselves in the process and we want to use it. And why not? By and large these processes are pretty cool. We see ways they can make life better. And we love taking the easy way out, so we treat the process as an absolute.

But by now we’ve all read the news that the map is not the territory.

A guy named Alfred Korzybski said this, and if you don’t know him, you should. He was a smart guy. He is the father of something called general semantics which basically says that language is fallible and it messes with our minds, our relationships, and our ability to get things done.

This is a big problem for business.

There is no one burger, there is no one process

Is this to say we should stop talking or looking at pictures? Is this to say that we should have no process?

No.

What this means is this, and only this: In business, all process is at best an attempt to describe or control reality. It will always be improvable, it will always be fungible, it will always be to some extent wrong.

While we can be well-versed in Agile practices from software,  traditional management from large business and government, Lean practices from Toyota and beyond, newer tools like Positive Deviance, and in a wide variety of creative or visualizing techniques – these aren’t enough.

Every project with every client involves some invention, because the context of every client or team is unique. Business says that it wants predictability and repeatability in its processes across the organization. What ends up repeating is failure – even if the process works well in some places.

Why?

Repeatability in process is a range, not an absolute.

In the Modus Press books, we may tackle a concrete concept like Personal Kanban or Scrumban, but our writing always hinges on continuous improvement and process evolution. The goal isn’t to apply a process, but instead to understand our work, our lives, and our relationships better so we can make more informed or enlightened decisions.

In business, we can take lessons from Six Sigma or Covey’s 7 Habits or Extreme Programming and apply them to any group at any time – but only if it’s relevant to their context. I’ve used computer programming techniques with social scientists in Vietnam and manufacturing techniques with technical support groups in West Virginia. The ideas in any process are always to get people to work together. But there must be a healthy ecosystem of ideas for success to flourish.

We should always be suspect of the objectivity of salesmen of a single product.

While that is a nice, quotable, and glib statement (please feel free to tweet it to death), it comes back to what Korzybski taught us. Process is a pattern language. You see – if language is inherently flawed – the more we limit our business vocabulary to a single process, the less language we have to work with.  The less language, the more opportunities to use imprecise words, apply ill-suited ideas, and ultimately and unnecessarily fail.

How to succeed

Success is the actual process. Everything else is a means to that end. Having teams and an organization that understands the current nature of their work, embraces the idea that improvement is always possible, and has a good culture of communication is the only way to start.  Further, we need to understand that failure is a building block of success. Controlled small failures that teach valuable lessons provide the only stable foundation.

Failure is like an explosion. Explosions hurt, they blow things up. So we fear them. But between 1680 and the 1860s, inventors stopped fearing explosions and invented the internal combustion engine. (There’s a chain of them and I don’t want to fight with people’s favorite historic interpretation.) That explodes all the time and has changed the course of history. They key is … little non-destructive explosions.

Also, be sure to check out everything else from Modus Cooperandi Press.

DO THE RIGHT THINGS

Personal Kanban

Machines need to be productive.

People need to be effective.

Productivity books focus on doing more, Jim and Tonianne want you to focus on doing better. Personal Kanban is about choosing the right work at the right time. Recognizing why we do the things we do. Understanding the impact of our actions. Creating value – not just product. For ourselves, our families, our friends, our co-workers. For our legacy.

Personal Kanban asks only that we visualize our work and limit our work-in-progress.

Visualizing work allows us to transform our conceptual and threatening workload into an actionable, context-sensitive flow. (We see what we are doing.)

Limiting our work-in-progress helps us complete what we start and understand the value of our choices. (We cannot do more work than we can handle – choose work wisely!)

Combined, these two simple acts encourage us to improve the way we work and the way we make choices to balance our personal, professional, and social lives. Neither a prescription nor a plan, Personal Kanban provides a light, actionable, achievable framework for understanding our work and its context. This book describes why students, parents, business leaders, major corporations, and world governments all see immediate results with Personal Kanban.

Following World War II, U.S. automakers focused on increasing productivity to meet a seemingly insatiable domestic demand. Meanwhile in Japan, faced with a decimated economy and limited resources, Toyota discovered their success hinged not on increasing productivity, but effectiveness. To this end, the nascent auto manufacturer launched a fairly radical campaign: to create a culture of continuous improvement, where the workforce had clarity of purpose and the ability to affect change. This innovative way of thinking (later called “Lean”) transformed this small island nation into a world-class producer of recognizably high quality automobiles. Toyota’s reputation for excellence rested on destroying the myths of productivity and control, replacing them with effectiveness and flow.

The secret to their success can be the secret to yours.

Personal Kanban borrows from several Lean principles and practices. With just two simple acts – visualizing work and limiting work in progress – Personal Kanban gives us clarity over our work and our goals, and the unprecedented ability to deal with distractions, manage expectations, make better decisions, and ultimately find a healthy balance between our professional, personal, and social lives.

It is a simple, elegant mechanism that helps us manage ourselves, but also lets us share our work, our goals, and our epiphanies with others. It is a visual launch pad to personal effectiveness, spontaneous collaboration, and an integrated life.

Personal Kanban: Mapping Work | Navigating Life discusses not only the mechanics of Personal Kanban but also how concepts like the flow of work and systems of continuous improvement are easily incorporated into how we live.

Advance praise for Personal Kanban

Personal Kanban is a must read for knowledge workers and their leaders who recognize that old productivity models don’t apply to knowledge work and seek a more realistic and centered approach. The ideas are deceptively simple but in that simplicity is their strength. As soon as I finished reading it, I started drawing out the landscape of my projects and felt much the better for it.
~ Carmen Medina, Deputy of Intelligence (Retired), Central Intelligence Agency

Personal productivity systems usually fail in practice because of complexity and they don’t reflect the collaborative nature of real work. Personal Kanban provides the simplest structure that could possibly work and lets you achieve a state of flow.
~ Ross Mayfield, CEO SocialText

Personal Kanban shows you just how revolutionary the technique is, and is a must read for student to senior citizen who wants support to do fantastic work. Personal Kanban is simplistic and will become second nature; not only does it change with you and your life, it will change your life.
~ Patty Beidleman, Pre-school Teacher, Non-Profit Organizer, Caregiver and Mother

Clarity Means Completion: The Psychology of Kanban:

Clarity Means Completion: The Psychology of Kanban – Jim Benson

Personal Kanban and the Individual Coder:
Personal Kanban: Optimizing the Individual Coder – Jim Benson

Our three projects so far have been:

Collaboration eLearning Packages

UN Food and Agricultural Organization – Rome, Italy

Modus Cooperandi worked with a team of 20+ authors, editors, and eLearning specialists to build a comprehensive set of lessons around collaboration, community, and team building. Jim and Tonianne helped devise a group writing system using a variety of online tools to facilitate communication and collaboration. Additionally, we were principle authors on three sections of the eLearning package itself. Once complete, the system will be translated into six languages, and made available to UN staff and those interested worldwide.

OzonAction’s 2010 Social Media Plan

United Nations Environmental Programme, OzonAction Unit – Paris, France

OzonAction is the UNEP’s group which, with the ambitious goal date of 2010, helped phase out the manufacturing of ozone depleting substances (ODS) such as chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). Now, in its second phase, two additional ozone-depleting chemicals are on the chopping block: hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) and MethylBromide. While OzonAction could certainly use their existing and successful methods to meet their deadline for the removal of these two compounds, they’ve chosen to incorporate social media to eradicate them ahead of schedule. Their success in the past has not made them complacent, and Modus Cooperandi is helping to create a social media plan that will provide the organization with actionable steps that won’t overtax their budget or their staff. The goal here is to provide the maximum benefit for OzonAction without getting caught up in the fads or hype of the social media movement.  OzonAction’s goals are serious, and so their use of social media should be directed in a way to reflect that sense of gravitas.

2010 Human Development Report for Vietnam

United Nations Development Programme – Hanoi, Vietnam

Over the past two decades, with the rise of globalization, Vietnam has experienced unprecedented economic growth. With one of the fastest-growing economies in the world, Vietnam has graduated to a mid-tier economic power. For this nation in transition, the current global economic downturn has left Vietnam with both options and opportunities. Countries in the United Nations need to provide a Human Development Report (HDR) to guide policy and funding both internally and externally. In many cases, the HDR can be several years between issues, and Vietnam is no different. For this project, UNDP and the Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences (VASS) have gathered researchers and scientists from several different agencies within and outside Vietnam to create the HDR. The goal of this project is to have a full-fledge HDR, with detailed and directed recommendations, ready for the Vietnamese General Congress in October. Modus Cooperandi is facilitating this effort by implementing a collaborative management system, coaching researchers on collaboration as the document is authored. Rather than merely having a document constructed of distinct sections authored by independent researchers, the goal here is to bring all the researchers together and inform the sections with one voice, and in real-time. This should result in an end-product that makes consistent points throughout, as opposed to individual points in each section. Recommendations will then be bolstered by coherent arguments threaded throughout the entire document.

A basic Personal Kanban on the iPhone or iPod Touch

You asked for it, and we listened. Today we are proud to announce the launch of the first Personal Kanban iPhone app, iKan.

When we set out to build it, we decided to focus on a few key things:

1. Small Screen Many Tasks -  We wanted to make the best use of the screen real estate on the iPhone, so we built the app vertically.

2. KISS - We wanted the initial release to be extremely basic. In future updates we will respond to YOUR needs, and additional features will be based on YOUR input. So please keep us posted as to the direction you’d like to see iKan take. We already have a long list of upgrades in our pipeline, but are primarily interested in how you are actually using the app.

3. Use Your Data - Integration with other popular time- and backlog-management tools. In the first version, we have importation from Zen.  (But we can only import your data). If you import a project from Zen, you will bring that project’s value stream with it.

4. Start with Basics then Build to Suit - Each iKan starts with an entry-level Personal Kanban value stream with Ready / Doing / Done sections. You can however, create your own column headings and set your own WIP limits.

In the coming weeks, we’ll have a series of short tutorial videos for iKan – so stay tuned!

Special thanks to Jeremy Lightsmith, Gary Bernhardt and Corey Ladas who were all vital in making iKan a reality.

Get your copy of iKan at the iTunes Store.

For more information on Personal Kanban, see the Personal Kanban web site.

The Food and Agricultural Office of the United Nations (Photo by FAO)

Modus Cooperandi has begun a project to help the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) create on-line training courses in distributed collaboration.  Modus joins thought leaders and experts from around the world in building a curriculum that will help workers from FAO and other organizations collaborate from a distance.  The project’s aim is to provide knowledge of patterns, practices and tools that facilitate distributed collaboration and knowledge sharing – making remote locations no longer isolated , and providing expertise more quickly and at much lower cost. The resulting materials will be made available in seven languages and is scheduled for public use by the Summer of 2010.

This is the first in a series of Modus Cooperandi’s InfoPaks. They are downloadable, and work like a narrative whitepaper. Think of them like graphic novels for business.

In InfoPak One: Personal Kanban at the World Bank, we discuss the experience we had leading a rapid development project at the World Bank, specifically, how visual controls work with small groups, and why they are preferable to traditional team management.

This InfoPak is best read by clicking the “Full” button above. It’s also designed to be downloaded to distribute to others. Over the next few weeks, we will post more InfoPaks on Personal Kanban. Please feel free to comment and let us know what you think.

World Bank in Washington DC

Modus Cooperandi is excited to announce our upcoming personal kanban project, where we will use our Personal Kanban techniques in a directed exercise with knowledge workers from around the world.  From the 21st through the 25th of September, Jim Benson and Tonianne DeMaria Barry will be working with The World Agroforestry Centre and the World Bank to lead their Capacity Building Program on the Opportunity Costs of Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Land Use Change (OpCost) Writeshop, at the World Bank Institute in Washington D.C. The intent of this directed exercise is to create a comprehensive technical document. As small working groups and as a unified team, participants will use personal kanban to maintain project coherence and track completion. The project is expected to achieve rapid release of a highly technical product by knowledge workers from around the world.  The multi-lingual, multi-disciplinary group will benefit from personal kanban’s visual controls and work flow.

We will be blogging and tweeting about the event as it unfolds.

Photo: Brixton