The Decision Tax Your Team Pays Every Day

Most Teams Spend Hours Each Week Just Deciding What to Work On. Leaders Built That System. Leaders Can Fix It.

This is part of the Five Moments series — five experiences that reveal what a team's system is actually doing.

Ask a leader how their team's prioritization works and you'll get a confident answer. Strategy drives it. Stakeholder input shapes it. Quarterly planning aligns everyone.

Ask a team member and you'll get a different answer: they go to standup, they listen to who sounds most urgent, and they try to make a judgment call that holds for a few hours before something interrupts it. The planning documents exist. The strategy exists. But the actual daily prioritization happens in the hallway and the Slack message and the tapped shoulder.

This gap — between the stated system and the actual system — is not a communication problem. It is a design problem. And unlike communication problems, design problems have design solutions.

The Decision Tax

Every time a team member has to stop and figure out what to work on next — every negotiation about priority, every standup conversation that doesn't resolve cleanly, every moment of scanning a backlog with no signal — there is a cost. Not a dramatic cost. Just a small, consistent, invisible one.

Multiply it by every team member, every day, every context switch, and the number gets interesting. Research on decision fatigue in knowledge work puts the average worker at somewhere between 30–40 minutes daily on priority resolution: the work of figuring out what work matters most before doing any of it. For a team of eight, that's a full person-day per week spent not working on work.

Leaders rarely see this cost because it's invisible. No one puts "figured out what to do" in their time tracking. It shows up as friction — in missed deadlines, in the wrong things finishing on time while the right things slip, in the low-grade exhaustion that accumulates when everyone is working hard but nothing is clearly landing.

The decision tax is the invisible operational cost of an under-designed system.

When you ask your team for “more texture”.

What Leaders Actually Built (Without Knowing It)

When teams lack a clear, shared, visible system for prioritization, leaders often attribute the resulting confusion to individual failures: poor communication, insufficient ownership, not enough accountability. The team needs to step up. The right conversations need to happen.

What leaders actually built — by not building anything — is a system where prioritization defaults to whoever is most vocal, most urgent, or most senior in any given moment. That is the system. It just isn't the one the strategy documents describe.

This is the classic default problem: the absence of a designed system is not neutrality. It's a system. It just wasn't designed by anyone with the whole team's interests in mind.

Real prioritization systems are visible. A team that can see what's in progress, what's next, and what's been explicitly set aside — rather than just forgotten — is a team that can allocate attention deliberately rather than reactively. Not because they're more disciplined. Because the system makes the right call the obvious call.

What Building a Prioritization System Actually Looks Like

It is simpler than most leaders expect, and more influential than most leaders believe.

A shared board. The actual work on it — not a summary of the work, not a status dashboard for reporting purposes, but the work itself, visible to the people doing it. A WIP limit that makes in-progress work visible and prevents the slow accumulation of half-finished commitments. A backlog ordered by actual priority, reviewed regularly, so that pulling the next item is a read operation rather than a deliberation.

That's the infrastructure. The team meets it briefly, every day, to answer one question: does the board reflect reality? When it does, standups are short. When it doesn't, they've found something that needed to be surfaced.

The Priority Filter is the most practical version of this we've built. P1 is what must move today. P2 is what we intend to accomplish this week. P3 is everything else. When the team looks at the board, they're not choosing — they're reading. The choosing happened during planning. It's already done. The daily decision tax drops to nearly zero.

The Default Is the System You Built

The reason this matters for leaders specifically: you cannot exhort a team into good prioritization. You can document it, announce it, model it in your own work. But if the shared system doesn't make good prioritization the obvious, low-friction option, people will default to what's easy. What's easy is responding to whatever just arrived.

Teams that get this right don't make better individual decisions. They design an environment where the right decision is the path of least resistance. The leader's job is to build that environment — and then protect it from the entropy that accumulates in any system left unattended.

This isn't soft work. Making work visible, establishing a shared board that actually reflects what the team is doing, running regular backlog reviews — these are organizational infrastructure investments. They take time and intention up front. They return that time many times over when the decision tax stops accumulating daily.

The teams that trust their systems aren't luckier than the ones that don't. They just built something the others didn't.

For the individual experience of decision paralysis, see You Have Everything You Need to Start. So Why Can't You? on the Personal Kanban blog. For the team mechanics, see When Your Team Can't Decide What to Work On Next at Modus Institute.

Modus Cooperandi is where we write about the human side of work — leadership, culture, and the behavioral science behind how teams thrive. For courses and live events, check the Modus calendar.

Personal Kanban: Mapping Work | Navigating Life is the book that started the movement. For weekly essays, join us at Humane Work.

Leadership Under Load: Hidden Overload is Destroying Your Org

You're drowning too. As a leader, you're managing upward pressure, downward pressure, sideways pressure, and your own life (maybe pretending it doesn't exist). You're exhausted. You're making decisions you know could be better informed, better vetted…better.

You're not failing. You're operating under existential overhead nobody acknowledges…and so is every person on your team(s).

Your Hidden Workload Load

You have a lot of work, yes. You are also carrying what we called in the Personal Kanban book, “existential overhead”: impossible expectations, market instability, responsibility for people's livelihoods, your own health issues, imposter syndrome, decision fatigue, the weight of knowing what's broken (or that you don’t), international politics.

And the culture demands you pretend you're fine because “never let them see you sweat.”

So you control what you can (your team's work). You push harder. You micromanage because it feels like the only thing you can control.

This doesn't help your team. It makes everything worse, because they’re already loaded and have their own existential overhead.

The Problem Leadership Creates

You are under deadline pressures, market pressures, performance pressures. Expectations. So you end up ignoring existential overhead and invisible work, you create a system where:

• Your team operates at 30-60% cognitive capacity but you expect 100%

• Work stays invisible, so you can't help them self-organize

• People hide struggles until they burn out or quit

• You get blindsided by departures

• You lose experienced talent and have to retrain constantly

You end up micromanaging instead of leading…all while drowning in your own existential overhead.

A Better Way: Build Systems, Not Control

System 1: Make Work Visible

When work is visible (Personal Kanban, Obeya, any visual system collaboratively built with intent):

• You don't need status meetings

• People self-organize instead of waiting for you

• Dependencies become obvious

• Bottlenecks surface naturally

• Your team doesn't need constant oversight

This reduces your cognitive load too. The board holds their work. You don't.

System 2: Acknowledge Variable Capacity

Make capacity conversations normal: "What's realistic?" "What existential overhead is affecting people?"

Build slack. Reserve 20-30% for inevitable crises and human reality. Build systems with the teams for what happens when complexity, change, or the unexpected happen. (You know they will.)

Plan for actual capacity, not fantasy.

What This Means for Your Leadership

You reduce your own load: Less mental load, more strategic thinking, better decisions, real ability to support instead of just controlling.

You actually support people: Ask "What's really happening?" Adjust expectations. Help people signal reduced capacity. Prevent burnout. Keep experienced people.

You build psychological safety: When work is visible and capacity is acknowledged, people stop hiding. They collaborate, share knowledge, innovate.

What This Looks Like

Old: "Why is this taking so long?"
New: "Given what’s going on, and what we need, what do we need to adjust?"

Old: Performance improvement plan
New: Capacity conversation

Old: Expecting full output at all times
New: Planning with actual capacity and slack for reality

Why This Matters Now

Over 80% of your workforce is at risk of burnout. That's because organizations ignore invisible work + existential overhead while expecting full capacity.

Leaders who win:

1. Acknowledge people are human

2. Make work visible

3. Plan with actual capacity

4. Build psychological safety through transparency

5. Model this themselves

The Hard Truth

You can't force people to have unlimited capacity. It's neurologically impossible.

What you can do:

• Stop pretending they have it

• Build systems that work with actual capacity

• Make work visible

• Acknowledge existential overhead

• Create slack for human reality

• Model this yourself

When you do: Your team performs better, stays longer, delivers higher quality, actually innovates.

That's what happens when you work with reality instead of against it.

Learn More

Full Existential Overhead article - How strong teams rapidly adjust to change and pressure.

Full Visualizing Work article - How we can build systems to see individual, team, and company load and balance.

Free webinar- Jim and Toni discuss how overload and overhead work and can be managed

Paid workshop - Build these systems

When your best person gives notice, will you understand why?

They were probably drowning. They probably couldn't tell you without feeling weak.

Make work visible. Acknowledge capacity. Model vulnerable leadership.

Your people are waiting for permission to be human at work. Give it to them.

The New Normal: Remote Teams in the Time of Coronavirus

Tools might help you become more productive as an individual, but they’re not the answer to becoming a more effective member of a distributed team.

So what is?

My latest whitepaper (and my Modus Cooperandi origin story).

The Fundamental Problem with Business Process

If you can’t describe what you are doing as a process, you don’t know what you are doing. ~ W. Edwards Deming

A bad system will beat a good person every time. ~ W. Edwards Deming

Drive fear from the workplace. ~ W. Edwards Deming

Let’s take a second to emphasize who is important in these quotes.

Well, by golly, it’s people.

A company could put a top man at every position and be swallowed by a competitor with people only half as good, but who are working together. ~ Ed again.

As long as we see process as something other than how we agree to work, “process” will always be a tool of the uninformed to try to force the people actually doing the work to meet targets those in control assume to be important. We will continue to buy our “process” from books or consultants. We will have our “process” foisted upon us.

But there is a difference between process and operational imperatives.

Operational Imperatives are uninformed ways of working that we learn in classrooms or are poorly described in corporate manuals that come from outside the team. They are only improvable by management, because management owns them. Continuous improvement or an improvement mindset can only be held by those who have a burning desire to improve. All others will quietly toil under the regime. Stagnation and isolation will ensue.

Process, as Deming was describing it, is the social contract your teams and your organization agree upon to provide value. They define it, the engage it, and they improve it.  Process is intentional. If a process does not include a way to improve itself, it will not improve. If a process does not directly address quality, you will have shoddy product. If a process does not have a mechanism to connect with the customer, you will lose focus on customer needs. If process is not owned by the people engaged in the process, it is not process – it’s orders.

Let me be very clear: If you implement ways of working that the effected people do not have a hand in defining, you are setting up an operational imperative. That can and does work. It’s your choice. But know that you cannot set up that system can call it Lean.  You cannot set up an operational imperative and have someone else meaningfully improve it.

You also cannot start with an operational imperative (even if it’s super cool or accepted as an industry standard) and expect any of Deming’s warnings not to come true.

The act of “describing your work as a process” does not mean you can say “I take this goop and form it into that shape and dry it in that hot box and put it in that container for shipping.” Your phone can say that. But why is it different?

Deming didn’t just say ‘describe your work as a process’, he also talked a lot about collaboration and constancy of purpose.  In other words, describing your work as a system means you understand not just the value stream of your work – any robot can do that. You need to understand that your process isn’t just mechanics, it’s psychology, it’s interaction, it’s invention, it’s improvement. Why we are doing this. For whom we are doing this. With whom we are doing this.

A process is how we express being human.

To make our process into a simple value stream is to cheapen all human endeavor and ultimate create bad systems in which to trap good people. It leads us into Jack Welch firing the alleged “bottom 20%”. It leads to process fads and certifications based on someone’s assumption of how work happens but never really fit any specific company. It leads to reliance on outside voices, rather than taking responsibility for our own future. It leads to industry “best-practices”, rather than optimization for our own context. It leads to wasting time, energy, and money on forced solutions that are expensive to change, rather than democratic solutions that change naturally.

Business process, therefore, is the combination of your system of work, your culture, and your relationships with customers and suppliers. Given that your working methods, how you interact internally, and how you supply value are what your company does … if you can’t describe these as a “process” then…you don’t know what you are doing.

On Vulnerability, Visualization, and Problem Solving - An Interview with Deb McGee at Lean Enterprise Institute

Deb is a Modus client with a high-demand job. She handles all of the requests for information, content, or support for the Lean Enterprise Institute in Cambridge, Mass. Every day, she receives calls from people who almost know what the want, she guides them to what they need. Each call is an opportunity to further LEI's mission, to help someone in need, and to improve her processes. Deb is thoughtful about her work and working with her has been a learning experience for us as well. In this video, she talks about using Personal Kanban for client management, the vulnerability of transparency, and using visual systems in the office to raise awareness and communication. This is truly a 15 minute masterclass on how to do it right.

Prioritization is a Symptom

"How do we prioritize all this work?" "What are mechanisms you use to prioritize?" "What if I have a lot of options that are all equal?" These are all valid questions and prioritization is an important function of both home and professional work. However, we find most often that prioritization issues, like trust issues, are a symptom of deeper problems. This video discusses what some of those root causes are and how we at Modus Cooperandi approach them.

The Lean Brain, Post 5: Improvement is Not an Option

Lean says: Seek Perfection What your brain says: This is the way we’ve always done things around here. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. It’s not “my job” to improve.

What’s at play here: Status quo bias. Zero-risk bias. Resistance to Change. Learned helplessness.

While Lean’s focus on respect for people endows the worker with the ability to implement change for improvement’s sake as they see fit, that sense of agency must be coupled with the psychological safety that allows them the freedom to fail.

Only in a safe-to-fail environment - one where employees are comfortable being vulnerable seeking out and attempting to solve sticky problems - can we tap into workers’ deepest potential and produce a culture of learners, experimenters, and creative problem-solvers, hallmarks of a successful Lean culture, one that recognizes overlooking human potential is among the greatest wastes.

One way to accomplish this is to ensure that the risk of failure is kept to a minimum.

Why?

Our brains are wired to do two things exceptionally well: to minimize risk, and maximize reward. Motivated to affect these ends in the service of our survival, our brains place a premium on certainty. Not only is exploring something novel energy-intensive (creating new neural pathways requires work), any deviation from the status quo - even if it is in own own best interest - is perceived as a risk to be avoided. Cutting-edge approaches, untested actions that run counter to the familiar present themselves as a threat to our brains much in the way the rustle of a potential predator lurking in the tall grass did for prehistoric man.

Despite its neuroplasticity, our brains are predisposed to resist the ambiguity inherent to change and the resultant stress science shows, triggers actual physiological discomfort.

So despite recognition that current conditions could benefit from improvement, it is understandable that we instinctively frame conversations about change in terms of its (perceived) risk rather than its potential (perceived) reward.

To be sure, there’s an obvious irony at play here: man’s survival as a species was and remains indebted to its ability to adapt to its ever-changing environment. While our brains might intensely dislike and do everything it can to resist change, neuroplasticity nevertheless allows it to create new neural pathways and by extension, new habits.

Which is fortunate. Because for both the individual and the organization in which s/he works, maintaining the status quo is a risk.

How to mitigate:

Evolutionary trumps revolutionary. Research reveals that large changes engage the amygdala - the part of our limbic system that processes emotions and responds to threats.

When it comes to taking steps towards improvement, the brain likes its change in comfortable doses.

Small scale, incremental improvements are powerful because the proposed change bypasses the amygdala – the brain’s fight or flight mechanism – so there is less resistance, less fear of the unknown and by extension, less fear of failure.

Not only are gradual changes physiologically more comfortable to engage in, they likewise have a lower cost of failure, and are easier to sustain and build upon.

Earlier posts in this series:

Introduction: 5 Ways Our Brain Can Thwart Lean

Post 1: Value is a Conversation

Post 2: Visualization Begets Alignment

Post 3: Flow: You Can’t Step in the Same River Twice

Post 4: Push is Blind. Pull is Informed. See Beyond the Silo.

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Tonianne is partner & principal consultant at Modus Cooperandi, co-author of the Shingo Research and Publication Award winning Personal Kanban: Mapping Work | Navigating Life, co-founder of Kaizen Camp™ and Modus Institute. Toni explores the relationship between performance, motivation, and neuroscience, is passionate about the roles intention, collaboration, value-creation, and happiness play in “the future of work,” and appreciative of the ways in which psychology, Lean, systems thinking, and the work of W. Edwards Deming can facilitate these ends. She enjoys Coltrane, shoots Nikon, butchers the Italian language (much to the embarrassment of her family), is a single malt enthusiast, and is head over heels in love with her adopted home, Seattle. Follow her on Twitter @Sprezzatura.

The Lean Brain, Post 3: Flow - You Can't Step in the Same River Twice

Lean says: Manage Flow Your brain says: My work isn’t linear. My day is filled with interruptions and so I don’t have the “luxury” of flow.

What’s at play here: Functional Fixedness.

If there is one area where there’s not an obvious transfer of Lean principles from manufacturing to knowledge work, it’s understanding how flow can in fact be achieved when work is creative and contextual rather than isolated and prefigured.

On the factory floor, workers create a fairly static set of tangible products in a predictable way, while constantly aiming to reduce variation to produce uniform output.

In the office, whether their work products are largely inventive (e.g. software development) or relatively standardized (responding to a customer service call, for instance), knowledge work is fraught with variation.

Myriad people, products, projects, processes, experience levels, and information sources (both tacit and explicit), coupled with the requests for clarity and / or adjustment these constituencies make can combine and compete to create a sometimes bewildering if not cacophonous work environment.

Confusing and noisy - yes. Wasteful? Probably not. Quite the contrary, in fact.

In knowledge work, value is created through often unplanned human interaction. Water cooler conversations, instant message exchanges, seemingly interminable and ostensibly “useless” meetings, and serendipity combine to create customer value. Indeed, oftentimes customers themselves end up contributing to this continuous conversation.

Office workers usually have multiple projects with their own constituencies, deliverables, and anomalies. This creates a “noisy” interdependent environment with a very different relationship to variation than the one that exists on the shop floor. When it comes to knowledge work, variation - change - is a constant. No two financial audits will occur the same way. No two court cases will require the same strategy.No two treatment plans will offer the same course of action.

Oftentimes this change is how an organization learns. In the office, learning is the driver of successful projects, myriad improvements, and satisfied stakeholders.

Because of this, knowledge workers’ value streams have a very short shelf life. This does not mean they have no value stream, nor does it mean that their value streams are an effort in futility. Rather, their value streams ebb and flow with the work itself. They will stabilize and allow for the creation of a project-specific value-stream, but one which will always require continuous adjustment and improvement.

Therefore in knowledge work, flow comes not through relentless standardization and waste reduction, but through the continuous optimization of processes with a very short shelf-life. When it comes to optimizing flow in the office, the value stream is in a perpetual state of kaizen (which will be discussed in the next section).

How to mitigate: 

In the office, flow is interrupted not by communication per se, but by unnecessary communication or the interruption of focus. For a person or a team, their focus is maintained when they have a single task that they are allowed to complete unimpeded.

The issue in the office is that countless tasks are being processed simultaneously and whether they are self-imposed or external, interruptions are both frequent and inevitable. This is necessary for the organization’s learning, but it does not have to arrive chaotically. They can be batched to process similar tasks together. They can be analyzed to see where they emanate from and why. They can be scheduled. They can be be processed more thoughtfully.

Visualizing work as a team, as well as interruptions, allows team members to see when an interruption is least disruptive. Limiting WIP lowers the amount of potential interruptions (less people asking for status or seeking additional information). And techniques like working meetings and Pomodoros allow staff to sequester themselves for short periods of focus.

The overall goal to achieve flow in the office rests in creating pockets of focus to allow work to achieve completion. We do not, however, want to over-regulate work or stifle conversation because, while it is often unplanned, this type of variation is where true learning occurs.

Up next in The Lean Brain series: Push is Blind. Pull is Informed. See Beyond the Silo.

Earlier posts in this series:

Introduction: 5 Ways Our Brain Can Thwart Lean

Post 1: Value is a Conversation

Post 2: Visualization Begets Alignment

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Tonianne is partner & principal consultant at Modus Cooperandi, co-author of the Shingo Research and Publication Award winning Personal Kanban: Mapping Work | Navigating Life, co-founder of Kaizen Camp™ and Modus Institute. Toni explores the relationship between performance, motivation, and neuroscience, is passionate about the roles intention, collaboration, value-creation, and happiness play in “the future of work,” and appreciative of the ways in which psychology, Lean, systems thinking, and the work of W. Edwards Deming can facilitate these ends. She enjoys Coltrane, shoots Nikon, butchers the Italian language (much to the embarrassment of her family), is a single malt enthusiast, and is head over heels in love with her adopted home, Seattle. Follow her on Twitter @Sprezzatura.

The Lean Brain, Post 2: Visualization Begets Alignment

Lean says: Map the Value Stream Your brain says: I’ve been doing this so long, it’s become second nature to me. The steps are right here - in my head.

What’s at play here: Illusion of Transparency. Curse of Knowledge/Information Imbalance. Status Quo Thinking. Groupthink/False Consensus Effect. Availability Bias.

It was day four of the value stream mapping exercise and tempers were beginning to fray. Despite having worked together for years, the members of this outwardly cohesive development team struggled to identify the basic activities needed to create value for their customer. While at 17 steps they agreed they were close to completing a first pass of their map, they couldn’t seem to reach consensus when it came to certain conditions and boundaries and for some, even the target was nebulous.

If they couldn’t agree on how they currently operate - without that clear baseline - how could they improve their future state?

Oftentimes the curse of expertise is the assumption that other people’s interpretation of events matches our own. So long as the value stream is left implicit, the steps - the order, the handoffs, the standards - are highly subjective. As a result, effort is duplicated. Unnecessary churn occurs. Bottlenecks and work starvation become business as usual.

And no one seems notice.

How to mitigate:

Especially when it comes to non-routine creative work, eliminate assumptions and normalize expectations by making the current state explicit. Visualizing steps essential to the process exposes mismatches, surfaces non-value-added steps (waste), and promotes constancy of purpose.

Up next in The Lean Brain: Flow: You Can’t Step in the Same River Twice

Earlier posts in this series:

Introduction: 5 Ways Our Brain Can Thwart Lean

Post 1: Value is a Conversation

---

Tonianne is partner & principal consultant at Modus Cooperandi, co-author of the Shingo Research and Publication Award winning Personal Kanban: Mapping Work | Navigating Life, co-founder of Kaizen Camp™ and Modus Institute. Toni explores the relationship between performance, motivation, and neuroscience, is passionate about the roles intention, collaboration, value-creation, and happiness play in “the future of work,” and appreciative of the ways in which psychology, Lean, systems thinking, and the work of W. Edwards Deming can facilitate these ends. She enjoys Coltrane, shoots Nikon, butchers the Italian language (much to the embarrassment of her family), is a single malt enthusiast, and is head over heels in love with her adopted home, Seattle. Follow her on Twitter @Sprezzatura.

The Lean Brain, Post 4: Push is Blind. Pull is Informed. See Beyond the Silo

Lean says: Establish Pull Your brain says: I work best under stress! Chaos motivates me!

What’s at play here: Brain on Stress. Learned Helplessness.

Most of us have seen the iconic “Job Switching” episode of I Love Lucy, where the titular character and her BFF Ethel find themselves doing a stint as line workers at Kramer’s Candy Kitchen. Subjected to organizational silos and a despotic supervisor who rules with a capricious conveyor belt and leads with the threat of expulsion, the women’s only KPI is to ensure not a single piece of candy makes it into the packing room unwrapped. Aligning their performance to this solitary target, they resort to hiding unwrapped chocolates in their mouths, their blouses and most memorably, in Lucy’s oversized chef’s hat.

Their excessive WIP and struggle to keep apace at 100% utilization, coupled with a toxic KPI which makes zero mention of producing a quality product, creates a system that forces an overwhelmed Lucy and Ethel to produce defects and hide wasted inventory necessitating rework, causing stress and chaos, and ultimately resulting in burnout (not to mention their respective stomach aches and ultimate dismissals from the company).

At this candy factory, supply rather than demand drives process. Work is being pushed onto Lucy and Ethel when they have neither the capacity to process it nor a signaling mechanism to slow it down or make it stop when a moment to breathe is needed. Upstream workers in the kitchen have no insight into the capacity of downstream workers in the wrapping room and in turn, workers downstream in the packing room are no doubt starved for work as they are left waiting for product.

Devoid of any context beyond their own work station, the hapless line workers - through no fault of their own - are oblivious to the fact that the wrapping room is part of a larger system. As a result, they are incapable of seeing the impact of their work-as-a-bottleneck on other parts of the value stream.

When we become overloaded, we focus myopically on our tasks rather than on their flow. Constantly forced to react we fail to be thoughtful about what it is we are doing, conceding control over our situation. Confronted with our own lack of agency we default to relying on others to push work on us, rather than pull it ourselves. Once this learned helplessness takes over, flow breaks down, and any hope for kaizen becomes futile.

How to mitigate:

This classic TV clip masterfully breaks almost every tenet of Lean thinking. Lucy and Ethel lack clarity over their roles, their goals, and the value stream; they have no visualization mechanism to understand their own capacity or a communication mechanism to convey it to others; they are assigned to a supervisor who rates rather than develops their performance; they’re driven by fear in the form of a useless KPI; they are afforded zero respect (agency) to stop the process when problems arise nor do they have the slack or support to so much as suggest improving their process.

Pull requires us to build thoughtful systems that allow for upstream and downstream transparency, continuous feedback, respect-as-agency, and easy adjustment to ensure changes and improvements are made in context.

Pull provides pockets of predictability and pause, allowing downstream workers to plan for, focus on, and complete work with quality while having enough slack to pursue kaizen opportunities.

Whereas pull in manufacturing seeks to prevent overproduction, so too does pull in a knowledge work setting.

What is overproduction in knowledge work? Burnout.

While extreme stress might serve as a positive motivator for physical performance and as such, prove beneficial to athletes, studies show it has the opposite effect on knowledge workers, impacting cognitive capacity - actually contributing to WIP - compromising overall performance and quality.

Whether actual or perceived, physical or cognitive, extreme stress activates the brain’s threat circuitry, shutting down all non-essential functions so as to direct the body’s attention towards eradicating the potential danger. Among those functions considered “non-essential” are digestion, the immune system, and most important to knowledge workers, higher level thinking. When we are stressed, the neurotransmitter dopamine floods the prefrontal cortex - the part of the brain responsible for executive functions - which includes our ability to concentrate, plan, organize, memorize, learn, problem-solve - the very skills essential to knowledge workers.

Utilizing a light-weight, flexible visual control like a Personal Kanban provides knowledge workers with a framework for understanding personal and team workloads and workflow. It gives them transparency into both the upstream supplier and the downstream customer’s context, as well as the opportunity to recognize and communicate to others their capacity to take on or defer more work. The associated WIP limit prevents them from taking on more work than they can handle, limiting cognitive stress thus allowing them to focus on and finish with quality only those tasks they have the mental capacity to process.

Up next in The Lean Brain: Post 5: Improvement is Not an Option

Earlier posts:

Introduction: 5 Ways Our Brain Can Thwart Lean

Post 1: Value is a Conversation

Post 2: Visualization Begets Alignment

Post 3: Flow: You Can’t Step in the Same River Twice

---

Tonianne is partner & principal consultant at Modus Cooperandi, co-author of the Shingo Research and Publication Award winning Personal Kanban: Mapping Work | Navigating Life, co-founder of Kaizen Camp™ and Modus Institute. Toni explores the relationship between performance, motivation, and neuroscience, is passionate about the roles intention, collaboration, value-creation, and happiness play in “the future of work,” and appreciative of the ways in which psychology, Lean, systems thinking, and the work of W. Edwards Deming can facilitate these ends. She enjoys Coltrane, shoots Nikon, butchers the Italian language (much to the embarrassment of her family), is a single malt enthusiast, and is head over heels in love with her adopted home, Seattle. Follow her on Twitter @Sprezzatura.

The Lean Brain, Post 1: Value is a Conversation

  Lean says: Define Customer Value

Your brain says: I’ve seen this countless times before - I know what my customer needs better than they do.

What’s at play here: Expertise bias. Overconfidence effect. Ivory tower syndrome. Ego.

There’s an old story about a man standing along a riverbank. He doesn’t see a bridge, but he does see someone on the opposite bank fishing.

“Hey!” he shouts across the water. “How do I get to the other side of the river?”

The other man yells back, “You’re already on the other side of the river!”

Perspective. More than our own exists. Unfortunately we’re not wired to immediately see things beyond our own context and so from an anthropological standpoint, having a self-centered worldview makes perfect sense. Man’s survival did not depend on knowing what his fellow hunter-gatherers thought, felt, or needed. Biologically speaking, seeing things from our own side of the proverbial river is cognitively expedient - it’s quick, convenient, and let’s face it practical.

Acknowledging there might be an alternative or even multiple perspectives, acknowledging “their there” might deviate from our own requires mental effort. When we fall into the trap of assuming only one truth, of applying a singular mental model, we miss inherent complexities and nuances obliterating not only the possibility of finding better alternatives, but we guarantee that we will at some point fall short of our customer’s expectations.

How to mitigate: Your gut instinct, you experience, your myriad belts and certifications and mastery aside, you do not know what your customer wants. And THEY are the arbiter of value, not you. Replace assumptions with humility. Ask open-ended questions. Endeavor to gain an unbiased understanding of - and deeper insight into - what your client explicitly wants and why.

Next up in The Lean Brain series: Visualization Begets Alignment

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Tonianne is partner & principal consultant at Modus Cooperandi, co-author of the Shingo Research and Publication Award winning Personal Kanban: Mapping Work | Navigating Life, co-founder of Kaizen Camp™ and Modus Institute. Toni explores the relationship between performance, motivation, and neuroscience, is passionate about the roles intention, collaboration, value-creation, and happiness play in “the future of work,” and appreciative of the ways in which psychology, Lean, systems thinking, and the work of W. Edwards Deming can facilitate these ends. She enjoys Coltrane, shoots Nikon, butchers the Italian language (much to the embarrassment of her family), is a single malt enthusiast, and is head over heels in love with her adopted home, Seattle. Follow her on Twitter @Sprezzatura.

Introducing The Lean Brain Series by Tonianne DeMaria

While heading to a session at the most recent Lean Transformation Summit, I found myself confronted with signage that posed the following open-ended question:

“All problem solvers must…”

Given how the work we do at Modus Cooperandi focuses largely on the nexus between Lean for knowledge work, behavioral economics, neuroscience, and the teachings of W. Edwards Deming, one response in particular resonated:

“Understand how their behaviors are contributing to the problem.”

While Lean offers us a set of principles and practices to help us create value for our customers, for our organizations, and for ourselves, it’s our brains that seem to pose the greatest challenge to its successful implementation.

But it’s not our fault, you see. Our brains hate us.

Okay, so maybe that’s a bit harsh. They do nevertheless tend to act in their own self-interest to conserve cognitive energy - opting for rapidity over reason - often sabotaging our best intentions with their behavior-impacting shortcuts. Which is precisely what Jim Benson and I have encountered in the hundreds of workshops we’ve offered where we ask participants, What is your biggest impediment to implementing Lean?

The universal response? Myself.

To understand why this is, we need to look no further than the System of Profound Knowledge (SoPK). With SoPK, Dr. Deming explains how people and processes are all part of a complex web of interrelated systems. Among those is our cognitive system.

In contrast to that which is found on the factory floor, knowledge worker’s “machinery” - their brains - can be capricious, rendering thought processes less than reliable, and actions less than rational.

For Lean thinkers who engage in knowledge work, even a cursory understanding of how the brain can contribute to behaviors impeding Lean’s five key principles (as Dr. Deming instructs, having an understanding of psychology) is crucial to identifying where Lean efforts might become sabotaged.

So stayed tuned for my latest series of posts: The Lean Brain.

Post 1: Value is a Conversation

Post 2: Visualization Begets Alignment

Post 3: Flow: You Can’t Step In the Same River Twice

Post 4: Push is Blind. Pull is Informed. See Beyond the Silo

Post 5: Improvement is Not an Option

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Tonianne is partner & principal consultant at Modus Cooperandi, co-author of the Shingo Research and Publication Award winning Personal Kanban: Mapping Work | Navigating Life, co-founder of Kaizen Camp™ and Modus Institute. Toni explores the relationship between performance, motivation, and neuroscience, is passionate about the roles intention, collaboration, value-creation, and happiness play in “the future of work,” and appreciative of the ways in which psychology, Lean, systems thinking, and the work of W. Edwards Deming can facilitate these ends. She enjoys Coltrane, shoots Nikon, butchers the Italian language (much to the embarrassment of her family), is a single malt enthusiast, and is head over heels in love with her adopted home, Seattle. Follow her on Twitter @Sprezzatura.

Business Starts with Social and Succeeds with Respect

If you are reading this, you are likely human.

Congratulations, I'm human too.

Everyday we all wake up and wonder what the day will bring.  We wonder who we will meet, what conversations we have, and what we will do.

We all want to do things.

In business we have processes, we have bureaucracies, we have rules.

We also have hopes, dreams, and expectations.

I*(Fuel+System)=Value

Each individual in your organization is there to take fuel (hopes, dreams, and expectations) and use the system (processes, bureaucracies,and rules) to create value (stuff people need).

Businesses are made up of people, working together, to achieve profit and success. To realize those expectations, learn lessons, and remain in business.

No company is made up of autonomous, self-organizing units. Successful businesses are, however, often made up of mutually-supportive, self-organizing units.

This extends from the individual to the team to the group to the division to the corporation.

It is a nested social network of value creation.  As anyone who has watched the rise of the Internet can tell you, social networks are powerful drivers of value, change, and action.

At the heart of the social network is the individual. A person who collaborates with another person, persons, or groups. A person who wakes up every day wondering what the day will bring.

Your working systems drive your culture which drive the products you build, your time to market, and your relationship with your customer.

Tonianne and I have build our careers on this relationship. Yes, your team is fractured / your organization is low-trust / your work flow has clear but unsolved bottlenecks ... why?

Usually because you focus entirely on the work and not the people.

When we work with groups we apply systems thinking which traditionally teaches to look to the system and not the individual for the root cause of problems with behavior or social breakdown. This is almost always exactly the right thing to do. Those edge cases are simply that, edge cases.

But systems thinking cannot ignore that the people who are in the current system have needs and expectations which have or will become dreams deferred. They will or perhaps have become cancerous. These side-effects of historic lack of respect therefore show up as resistance to change, even when that change is clearly positive.

It is clear that the social system of the org and the procedural system are not separate. We need to balance our examination on the processes and the people. Not to blame, but to ensure that the new systems we create understand who is working in them.

Using a variety of proven tools, not the least of which is simply listening, it is possible, perhaps even not-difficult, to get organizations not only working efficiently (easy) but working effectively (much less easy).  An effective organization learns, quickly reacts to changes in the market, and values coming to work.

Over the next two weeks, I will present tools or techniques we use or simply tell some stories depicting how we pragmatically and systemically include the individual in creating an effective organization.

Distributed Teams not Distributed Silos

The notion of a successful distributed team seems like a wonderful, yet unobtainable dream. But stop and think, how often are your non-distributed teams successful? When have they been successful and why?

It’s never because of your plan or because you hired the best people. It’s not because you got expensive new project management software. It’s not even because you had executive buy-in and freedom to make your own decisions.

Successful teams have only resulted from one key ingredient: clarity.

People need to know what work is being done by whom, what their own roles are, when to ask for help or provide information, what decisions they can safely make on their own, what is being completed (imagine, seeing progress makes you successful!), and knowing the people they are working with.

For a distributed team, this is hard to achieve and maintain because team members exposure to each other is often limited (if non-existent). They not only begin to feel isolated, but they spend a lot of their energy either acting in good faith in a way that doesn’t help the team or wondering how they should be acting. Trust begins to erode when meetings focus on what is going wrong rather than what is happening in the project as a whole. These lead to a loss of alignment, as people try to figure what is really going on and speculate as to why breakdowns are occurring.

It’s not long before your distributed team becomes distributed silos.

Distributed systems have weaker links between their components (the team members). Russell Ackoff defined a system as “the interactions between the components.” If we have weak links, we have a weak system.

To avoid this, teams must constantly be aware of:

• Roles: What things that need to be done are being done and by whom (not job descriptions, but actual roles). These can be shared or individual.

• Boundaries: When does an action by me require talking to you?

• The Product: Goals, status, and customer.

• What is in Flight: We can’t collaborate if we are working in distributed silos. Team members must know in real-time who is working on what, when they are stuck, and when they have successfully completed their tasks.

• Collaboration Opportunities: As often as possible, team members need to work together to complete tasks. This builds rapport (very important) and strengthens communications between distributed team members.

When you add these elements together, both team members and the project benefit from greatly increased clarity. People know what is being done for whom, and why. They know what’s being completed so they can interpret breakdowns in the context of overall success. Best of all, accountability, which people spend way too much time worrying about, will be evident in completed work by the team as a whole (no longer any need to come up with productivity metrics or other morale-destroying systems).

All teams, distributed or co-located, will benefit from this clarity and collaboration. We’ve all seen it. Any team you’ve been on that’s been successful has likely known what their mission was, what their role was, and had the information and authority to act.

These elements are explored in depth in Modus Institute’s Successful Distributed Teams class.

Consulting and Learning are Mutual

My favorite part about getting to interview @ourfounder is listening to the gratitude he has for his clients and what he learns from them.

— mrsungo (@mrsungo) February 4, 2016

When you are a consultant or, worse yet, seen as a thought leader, people hire you expecting to know "the answers".  At best what you actually know is paths to make sense of problems, communicate them, and then solve them. No consultant should ever arrive knowing the answers. If they do, you could have just asked them over the phone or read their book. Canned knowledge is a commodity. Problem solving is not.

Let's face it, work is a challenge. We have to not only get along with other people, more importantly we need to understand other people. Our colleagues aren't fungible, they aren't machines. They are stuck in the same problems we are. They are just as much a part of the problem as we are and they are just as much a victim of the problem.

Since writing Personal Kanban, (now 5 years ago) we've worked with companies, governments, and individuals around the world helping them get control of their work - but you never do that without solving some problem. They all want Personal Kanban to come in, plug in, and start running.

I can state unequivocally after nearly 25 years of project management, business ownership, and process consulting - that no tool has ever single-handedly fixed a workflow issue.

In an upcoming interview on Dave Prior's Projects@Work, Dave mostly asked me about how I learn from my clients. That's Dave's tweet up above after the interview (I'm @ourfounder on Twitter). He was laser-focused on that topic.

The fact is that as a consultant my only job is to learn from my clients first. Then I take the tools at my disposal and use them with the client - so they learn those tools or ideas and can use them on their own next time.

We've walked into situations where:

• the entire company hated each other
• people were so overworked that they had no idea how to prioritize, estimate, or complete their work
• poor quality had created blame cascades so rich that no one could trace the source of the problem
• bad service delivery has caused a customer riot
• one toxic person with great power was destroying an otherwise very successful company
• growth had taken a successful and focused startup into a sprawling confused mid-sized company with too many clients
• great ideas spawned so many projects that nothing got done
• bureaucracy had ground innovation and autonomy to such a halt that no one could act

and more. Every client has had unique elements and predictable elements. No one has ever been mundane.

In no case was this ever a problem because people were incompetent or evil. Each time there was a system we could build with our clients that helped them see and confront their issues. That would be impossible if we didn't listen first.

Collaboration Interview with Nancy White

Without collaboration, we cannot have business. It's the fundamental fabric for what we build, how we build it, and how we work with our customers. Collaboration is also the core of how to have a successful distributed team, which we teach about at Modus Institute. We took time to interview Nancy White an international practitioner (maven) in collaboration and getting distributed teams to plan their work, stay in alignment, and achieve success.

Yes, Distributed Teams Can Be Successful: Announcing the Launch of Modus Institute

Distributed teams are notorious for causing managers and workers strife. We love the idea that we can work from anywhere, but isolation and communication breakdowns can play havoc with trust and alignment. Regardless of their challenges, distributed teams are not only here to stay, they are increasingly becoming the norm. In our work with clients the past few years, one common theme has emerged: how can we make our distributed teams successful?

In response to this need, we’ve created the first on-line course in establishing and maintaining a cohesive distributed team. We provide a set of tools and ways of working that will enable distributed teams to work together much more effectively.

It isn’t technology or contracts or job descriptions or better direction that contributes to a  distributed team’s success...it’s clarity. This clarity falls into four key components:

Clarity of purpose and expectations: Everyone on the team needs to know what the team expects from themselves, each other, and the project itself. This sets a social contract between team members that says, “We are building this thing, I will do this work, you will do that work, we will collaborate on this other work, success looks like ________.”

Clarity of communications: Everyone on the team needs to know what communications will come from where and when they are likely to arrive. Take the guesswork out of finding meeting invites or documents. Declare what technology is going to help us and how. Declare regular meetings, check-ins, and ways of collaboratively working.

Clarity of immediate work:  How do we work? What is our process? How do I know if something is stalled? How do I know who is doing what? When can I help? When can I ask for help? These questions require real-time tactical information about what the team is building, who is doing what work, and how close you are to meeting your goals.

Clarity of action and improvement: What does the project “going right” look like? What do I do when I see that it’s “going wrong?” When can I improve something on my own? When does it require a conversation? How can we act quickly and decisively?

In the Distributed Teams class we cover these elements in four simple management tools and three cultural norms. The class is built to be a quick no-nonsense examination of the principles you will need in order to have a successful distributed team.

This course is $599. To introduce the course, we are giving an introductory rate of $249 until August 1st, 2015.

Sign up now and join our growing community of practice in successful distributed teams.