After doing Lean Coffees for a few years and hosting Lean Camp Seattle last year, it became clear to me that conversation creates information – and that was compelling.

So we launched Collaberwocky, a series of conversations about collaboration.

This runs exactly like a Lean Coffee. We get together with a few participants, we build a kanban, vote on what we’d like to discuss, then we discuss.

The first five episodes are with Corey Ladas, author of Scrumban, and Jabe Bloom, CTO of the Library Corporation.

This first Episode is “Intentional Cooperation” in which we discuss creating teams and processes that intentionally foster collaboration.

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

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.

Conversation Creates Knowledge

Over the last few months, I’ve had the good fortune to be a featured guest on three different podcasts discussing Personal Kanban. In the Yi-Tan calls, we discussed Personal Kanban and Personal Kanban for teams. In the Social Media Breakfast Seattle Podcast, we explored the relationships between Lean thinking and social media. Of course, Personal Kanban comes up there as well.

Yi-Tan Call #261 – Personal Kanban With Jerry Michalski’s group, I discuss Personal Kanban, how it started, and how it works.

Yi-Tan Call #268 – Personal Kanban for Teams Again with Jerry’s virtual roundtable, I discuss how Personal Kanban and other kanban applications work for teams, groups, and organizations.

For Social Media Breakfast Seattle Lean Management and the CIA Heidi Miller interviews me about lean management, social media, Personal Kanban, and what’s happening in the Intelligence Community.

Later this month I’ll be featured on the Business 901 podcast, talking even more about Personal Kanban, but this time interviewed by Joe Dager, who focuses on marketing and lean principles.

Where: Twitter

Hashtag: #pkflow

Modus and personalkanban.com are hosting a “Tweet-a-ban.” Whether you’re a Personal Kanban practitioner or just have an interest in improving your productivity, join in on the asynchronous, 24 hour long global conversation. For details click here.

Modus Cooperandi is pleased to announce the release of its second Personal Kanban InfoPak. In Personal Kanban 101: Achieving Focus & Clarity with Your First Personal Kanban we discuss the essentials for getting your board started. Topics addressed include how to establish value stream, backlog and WIP, and why there are only two hard rules to implementing this productivity tool.

As always, please feel free to download, distribute, comment and let us know what you think.

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