Over the past two weeks I’ve been celebrating the first (?) decade of Improve Something Today by putting together 10 posts. I wanted to share them with you as a bit of a wrap-up, and express again my gratitude for your being a part of this, for reading what I have going on, and for replying or getting in touch with your thoughts in various ways.
So: thanks again. And here are 10 things to read, if you like. Have a great time—I know I did!
I started the series with 10 things I’ve learned during this writing:
Part of looking back over the decade I’ve been working on Improve Something Today involved thinking about books. A lot of what I’ve written here is about books (e.g.). But here are nine books I feel like I’m always reading even after I put them down: three about work, three about the world, and three about Buddhism. They’re books I love! For each I offer a small invitation or comment. Take these as hints as to why these books in particular have made themselves comfortable in my brain.
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Links go to bookshop.org. Here you can order books, support local booksellers of your choosing, and allow some pennies to fall off as a commission for me. I keep a little storefront with all these books and more.
Three books about work
Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form, by Sianne Ngai (2022)
Ngai opens her book with this set of questions:
What are those of us living in capitalist societies saying when we call something a gimmick, regardless of the varying objects to which the evaluation is applied and varying identities of those applying it? What is being accurately registered about our world, and also our sociality or way of sharing this world, in this ambivalent, if mostly negative aesthetic judgment? And without the speakers necessarily or explicitly knowing it? We can work our way in with a more indirect question: Why are gimmicks often comically irritating?
We’re in a ‘comically irritating’ moment, here at the tail end, hopefully, of the interval where capital wants to inject LLMs into everything in ways that are ugly, ineffective, and gimmicky. There are so many reasons to be skeptical of this whole project, but the surface-level, knee-jerk reaction to the call-and-response chatbot as gimmicky is a good enough stopping point for me. Last week I had as much fun as everyone else kicking the tires on Google after it turned its search bar into whatever this is:
Brian’s Google experience from May 30, 2026.
It is this objection to asinine gimmickry that anybody peddling LLM integrations would need to overcome in order to get people to engage with the things. So far, the track record has not been great. I’m grateful to Ngai’s book for giving me some ways to think about this, since it has become a great concern of our moment.
Addiction By Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas, by Natasha Dow Schüll (2012/2025)
This 2012 book is based on the years of fieldwork that Schüll, a cultural anthropologist, did in and around Vegas. She noticed the integration of software design and user experience into the business of casino gambling in order to make devices and spaces into ‘machine zones’ which keep customers dialed in to a carefully designed plateau of unhappiness. The machines benefited from now-commonplace technological innovations like mobile payments and touchscreen UIs, evaluated using familiar-sounding measures like ‘time on device.’ Beyond Las Vegas, this book also stands as a remarkable prefiguration of what the dissolving of software design and user experience into capital has done to the rest of—by the time of this writing—the entire goddamn world. One outcome of reading this book might be to radicalize someone against gambling, if they weren’t already there. The effect it had on me was to radicalize me against corporate social media, because I noticed how these companies set their phalanxes of PhDs to similar projects of designing the various blue/bad websites and apps into these deeply harmful, riotously lucrative ‘machine zones.’
The Real World of Technology, by Ursula Franklin (1990/1999)
Such an incredible collection of talks. The passage people who’ve worked with me have likely seen is this, or something based on it:
Should one not ask of any public project or loan whether it: (1) promotes justice; (2) restores reciprocity; (3) confers divisible or indivisible benefits; (4) favours people over machines; (5) whether its strategy maximizes gain or minimizes disaster; (6) whether conservation is favoured over waste; and (7), whether the reversible is favoured over the irreversible? The last item is obviously important. Considering that most projects do not work out as planned, it would be helpful if they proceeded in a way that allowed revision and learning, that is, in small reversible steps.
The idea of ‘small, reversible steps’ originates here, with Franklin. And this short paragraph gives a framework for a multi-objective consideration that is totally possible and far beyond what organizations are doing decades later. The whole book is like this.
Three books about the world
Necropolitics, by Achille Mbembe (2019)
Put simply, this is a way of looking at political power in terms of who lives and who dies—going far beyond the ‘biopower’ sense of the state’s right to control the lives of people to a ‘necropolitical’ sense of permanent, deliberate positioning of people between life and death. Although there’s a lot more to it than that. This book has helped me discern the connections between many specific horrors of our christian fascist era here in America, from the failures of COVID to ongoing support for genocides to the denial of access to healthcare.
The Art of Loading Brush: New Agrarian Writings, by Wendell Berry (2019)
A passage:
Provision, I think, is never more than caring properly for the good that you have, including your own life. As it relates to the future, provision does only what our oldest, longest experience tells us to do. We must continuously attend to our need for food, clothing, and shelter. We must care for the land, care for the forest, plant trees, plant gardens and crops, see that the brood animals are bred, keep the house and the household intact. We must teach the children. But provision does not foresee, predict, project, or theorize the future. Provision instructs us to renew the roof of our house, not to shelter us when we are old—we may die or the world may end before we are old—but so we may live under a sound roof now. Provision merely accepts the chances we must take with the weather, mortality, fallibility. Perhaps the wisest of the old sayings is “Don’t count your chickens before they hatch.” Provision accepts, next, the importance of diversity. Perhaps the next-wisest old saying is “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.” When the bad, worse, or worst possibility presents itself, provision only continues to take best possible care of what we have, or of what we have left.
Laozi’s Dao De Jing: A New Interpretation for a Transformative Time, by Ken Liu (2025)
I love that this is called an interpretation because, in addition to his own translation, interposed throughout the text Liu offers historical commentaries, his own commentary, and little bits of context and memoir. The effect is to get a reader to slow the hell down a bit and engage with the text. The Dao De Jing is compact and unadorned, which means it’s easy to whirl through it and slot oneself in the category of having read it. This interpretation gives the opportunity to slow down a bit, to linger, to think.
Three books about Buddhism
A Guide to the Bodhisattva Way of Life, by Śantideva, translated by Wallace & Wallace (1997)
It’s true that Śantideva lit a fire under me:
Upon finding the boat of human birth now, cross the great river of suffering. O fool, there is no time for sleep, for this boat is hard to catch again.
My guy knew a few things. First, he knew that “just as lightning illuminates the darkness of a cloudy night for an instant ... occasionally people’s minds are momentarily inclined toward merit.” And second, he knew the spirit of awakening—what it means to aspire for it, and means for venturing towards it. My meanderings have involved study and reading and practicing in various contexts and communities; all along the way Śantideva is there for me to return to. His energy and inspiration crackles across the centuries. I see him as the Victor Frankenstein of awakening, laboring away at the expense of sleep and sunlight until something astonishing arises.
Seeing That Frees: Meditations on Emptiness and Dependent Arising, by Rob Burbea (2014/2025)
This is a fairly dry primer on, manual about, consideration of emptiness. I never met Burbea. He passed away a few years ago, but a friend of mine studied with him and she says he was the real deal. On the basis of this book, I believe it. Emptiness (suññatā) is one of those concepts that takes some effort to make friends with, and Burbea’s work here has been really beneficial for me in this regard. The companion website for this book is a good starting point.
The Other Shore: A New Translation of the Heart Sutra with Commentaries, by Thich Nhat Hanh (2017)
People sometimes ask me what book they should read about Buddhism. In one regard, this like asking someone what book they should read about bicycling. It’d probably be better to just get on a damn bike, ideally with friends, and figure out how to go. That being said, people write books about all kinds of things, and this small book is a beautifully written discussion of the Heart Sutra alongside Nhat Hanh’s last translation of the same (it’s a text he fiddled with over the course of a long life).
A method for documenting & understanding processes when people say there isn’t a process.
WURA WTF
An easy way to understand Work Unit Routing Analysis (WURA) is to start with its predecessor, Product-Quantity-Routing (PQR) analysis.
You’ll find PQR analysis used in settings where there are a lot of small-batch custom orders. Take a print shop, paint shop, or light manufacturer that has to set up and configure workspaces and equipment for a specific run of work, ship those off, and then re-set and re-configure things for the next, different, run. This is an environment where some things are always different, and other things are always the same. Knowing which materials—supplies, stable intermediate forms, scrap/junk, and final products (P)—are being produced and in what quantities (Q) as they’re routed (R) across the shop becomes the basis for various insights.
WURA was the extension of this analytical approach to clinical settings, and from there into other types of work—including the hopelessly computer-addled work I get involved in. To call the products of labor ‘work units’ (WU) upon which one could perform a similar routing analysis (RA) is a meandering walk but it eventually gets us to the WURA acronym.
My experience has been that some people have heard of PQR and others WURA. The happiest people have heard of neither.
When you might use WURA
WURA is a great fit for low-volume, moderate complexity, highly variable work. When I hear something like “we don’t have a process” or “every <instance> is different” I consider whether WURA might be an appropriate format to use.
I’ve personally used WURA:
To document various ways projects got approved inside a corporation while bypassing the official, mandatory approvals mechanism.
To discern how a real estate company prepares distressed properties for sale at auction across various geographies, property conditions, and the like.
To understand billing procedures for a professional services firm across its various lines of business and combinations of customers, industries, and project types.
How to run WURA
Note: click or tap an image to see it full-width.
Describe a single scenario
First, document a single scenario in a single row in a data table. In this example, there are six major process steps, numbered 1-6 and each given a short but descriptive name.
The easiest way to get this down is to follow a single ‘work unit’ around and see what people do. This initial scenario doesn’t have to be a typical or even common case; it’s merely the first one you’re writing down. Don’t worry about exceptions handling or alternate scenarios yet. These will get their own rows later.
Any methods you’ve used elsewhere for identifying and distinguishing process steps will work here. (For example: look for transitions, hand-offs, or notifications.)
A single scenario is documented. It has six process steps.
Document additional scenarios
Next, document as many additional scenarios as you encounter, using the same format. Number process steps in sequence. Add new process steps as you see them. This list is totally unordered at this point. Keep adding exhaustively.
Exceptions, special cases, rush jobs, undisussables—each get their own row.
Seek to keep process steps at approximately the same level of detail. Split, combine, and rearrange in order to match what is actually happening.
Various scenarios are documented. The initial scenario is now about halfway down the list.
Annotate with frequency & quality data
At some point you will exhaust scenarios people can show you or that you can observe. Someone might say that “every <instance> is different” but the finite length of this scenarios list indicates otherwise—at least when viewed from a this level of abstraction.
Once you’ve gotten here, annotate the list with a few data points for each scenario. What’s important to measure? Use your best judgement, tempered by availability of data. Two good starting points are those shown in our example:
Frequency: # of ‘work units’ produced via this scenario over a certain time (a month, a quarter, a year).
%C/A: percent complete & accurate; this is a percentage of work items that are both complete (nothing missing or broken) and accurate (correct) as they exit each scenario.
Not shown here, but much more powerful, is to also measure %C/A for each process step. In this case, you’d want to measure how often work items enter the given process step without quality issues.
This can also be a good moment for a conversation about accuracy and how it is or should be determined.
Frequency & quality data for scenarios (right columns); scenarios count for process steps (bottom row).
Initial analysis—what do scenarios have in common?
Sort and slice. In this example, about half of the scenarios, and a majority of the overall volume, begin with the same process step (‘Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet’, seen in the second column of the table). Ask yourself what these have in common.
What about scenarios that start with some other process step? Extend this initial analysis to also include the ‘Sed vehicula audio sed rutrum imperdiet’ process step and you’ve identified where most work starts, even though “we don’t have a process.”
Scenarios arranged by process steps.
You might also notice a little set of three process steps, highlighted below, that are a feature of several scenarios. What might these have in common? What’s the case for scenarios relying on one or two, but not all three, of these process steps?
Lines of questioning like this can help you notice possibilities for simplifying or standardizing work in beneficial ways.
Highlighting the initial process step for most scenario and an interesting cluster of three.
Initial analysis—clean up outliers
Another very quick analysis is to look for the true outliers. The highlighted process steps below appear only in a handful of scenarios, and only one of those scenarios (‘Sed non erat gravida/tellus’) arises at a decent frequency. These process steps might be eliminated entirely, possibly even by adjusting or removing the scenarios they are a part of.
Anything that can be removed entirely is a treasure.
Highlighting the bigger ticket scenarios.
Possibilities for further analysis
Determine which process steps contribute most to overall volume. This is an area where WURA can get you in trouble, because the most visually busy process steps might not be the ones you’re looking for.
Isolate process steps where errors are produced and build in quality along the way.
Measure worker sentiment/happiness with each scenario.
Group scenarios into scenario families based on their similarities. Organize continuous improvement at this scenario family level if working on individual scenarios one at a time doesn’t seem like it’s enough.
Now that Improve Something Today is a decade old, here are some of your favorite—and my favorite—of the things I’ve offered to date.
Reader favorites
Based on the extremely limited data I get and the emails I receive, the most enduringly popular posts here are the procedural items or how-tos. For me, these are marked by the curse of knowledge: I forget that they’re useful to people, even as I refer to them or use them myself.
A six-word poem to be appreciated, for today, as a poem.
These are Tilopa’s ‘six words of advice’ in their entirety. A thousand years old, jostled about in layers of translation and interpretation. Would’ve originally been six words, but it’s hard to pull that off in English. They are:
Although these words are the basis for various practices, you might want to further explore them as a poem in translation, a beautiful and simple thing. The linked document gives the Tibetan source (itself a translation from the original, now lost), a transliteration, and both of McLeod’s English translations.
Following on Jerry Weinberg’s point that ‘the money is usually the smallest part of the price,’ what other prices are to be paid, and how should a consultant approach these contributions?
The money is usually the smallest part of the price.
I see five contributions to successful consulting projects: money, effort, attention, memory, and wisdom. You’re going to need each of these to pull any nontrivial project off.
Knowing this, you are equipped to notice that a broad set of people might end up making these contributions. Not all of them will know or care about your work in advance. They may not even be associated with the organization that is hiring you.
Your direct client will put in a lot of effort and attention. But they may have a boss or sponsor who directly or indirectly approves the budget, and someone else might actually pay the money. Effort will come from many other people too: everybody you bring into a meeting or workshop, for starters. Spending time, paying attention. See these words we use?
Memory and wisdom are squishier. Some people know what’s what, what has happened, and how things got into the mess they’re in today. If you can find these people and learn from them, that is their contribution. Wisdom is sometimes embodied in memory, sometimes not. However you find it (hint: listen for the undiscussables), wisdom is the greatest gift of all.
My suggestion is this: consultants should attend to each of these contributions with the same level of care as they would pricing. I think a lot of us do this instinctively. But it’s good to do it deliberately, and to draw a picture as we go. In the same way we’d justify a monetary price by showing what we’ll give in return and why that’s important, we can justify each of these other contributions to the individuals and groups making them, and receive them with gratitude.
Brian Kerr
Brian Kerr
Brian Kerr
Brian Kerr
Brian Kerr
Brian Kerr
Brian Kerr
Brian Kerr
Brian Kerr
