This month I’m remembering the life and work of David Mann, who passed away in late December. He was one of those Michigan lean people who had a big effect on me, although I only met him once, in passing, at a conference. That big effect was through his book Creating a Lean Culture: Tools to Sustain Lean Conversions. It helped me and Andre more skillfully support a couple of lean projects back in the day, including the one where I saw that when it all worked, it really worked. So, thanks, David.

Ruth Malan shared a free systems thinking (“systems seeing”) month-long daily journal. She encourages you to work through it, spending ~15 minutes on each daily exercise:

Ruth Malan (@RuthMalan@mastodon.social)

The System Seeing Journal “starter kit” (daily prompts and related quotes to reflect on) is up: (Pdf) https://ruthmalan.com/systems/2024SystemSeeingJournalStarter.pdf It expands on the #AdventOfSystemSeeing prompts (to a full month) and is a revision/extension to last year’s version.

Mastodon

Finally, Anne-Laure Le Cunff’s “The Science of Learning to Let Go” is one of those pieces I’m still thinking about a month after reading.

The Science of Learning to Let Go

Learning to let go is much harder than holding on. Why do we cling onto past sorrows, bad relationships, old things, meaningless goals?

Ness LabsAnne-Laure Le Cunff

(If you like that, and want something short enough to carry with you forever, contemplate Tilopa’s Six Nails.)

Books

Mike Rother posted a thing that included a citation from Ignorance and Surprise: Science, Society, and Ecological Design by Matthias Gross and I immediately picked up a copy. (Ever since I encountered one of the key concepts of my consulting practice in a tossed-off back page column about fish scientists in a 1995 ecology journal, I know to pay attention to these people (ecologists).)

I owe Mike and his outfit more detailed notes on this book, but for the moment let me share this amazing illustration. I give you the “house of the unknown” ↓

The ecological interventions (or experiments) Gross is concerned with tend to happen in “the real world” instead of a laboratory. And that’s the ledge I use to climb up into this book. Kaizen is the choreography that happens in order to allow people to make improvements to their own “real world” work and relations. I think we can learn a lot from this book’s framework about how people respond to various kinds of surprising conditions or discoveries.

On the site

Recent changes @ improvesomething.today:

• Added to the Junk Drawer → a placeholder for LinkedIn carousel postings I’ve been doing. These mostly reiterate items from the site, but in a format people seem to enjoy.
• Some changes to e-mail newsletter delivery, formatting, and list membership that hopefully go smoothly. (If you’d like to join, unsubscribe, or change delivery of the e-mail newsletter, this is the link.)

Course recommendation

I recommend The Center for Humane Technology’s free, self-paced, multi-mode course, “Foundations of Humane Technology.”

If you design or make decisions about technology products or experiences, you might take a couple of afternoons to work through this material. The shift you’ll grapple with:

And the course:

Foundations of Humane Technology Course - Center for Humane Technology

A free, self-paced online course for professionals shaping tomorrow’s technology. Join thousands globally, including people from top organizations such as Meta, Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and the United Nations.

HomeTom GruberCo-founder of Apple’s Siri

First, a remembrance of Freddy Ballé—the French popularizer of lean—after his passing last month. You may know his name from a few of the books he cowrote with his son, Michael Ballé. Dan Jones writes:

I can still hear his voice saying, “Keep your focus on the detail of the work and understand its significance for the customer and the system as a whole.” Thank you, Freddy, for your example and your inspiration.

Remembering Freddy Ballé

Rose Heathcote and Eivind Reke

Product-Quantity-Routing (PQR) Analysis and its close cousin, Work Unit Routing Analysis (WURA), are super underutilized continuous improvement methods for discovery and group sense-making and generally sorting things out. I’ve used WURA a bunch recently in my client work, and would like to write it up here soon. In the meantime, I am curious about how other people use PQR. Shahrukh Irani had this to say, in a very detailed post:

Kaizen event teams usually don’t have time to collect relevant data for all products. But with analyses already complete, the team could easily use just the PQ Analysis to segment their product mix into at least two areas, high volume and low volume. Then, using the PR Analysis for at least the high-volume segment, they could seek product families in that segment. Any product family found in that segment could then be the focus of a high-impact kaizen to implement a cell.

Minding your P’s, Q’s, R’s--and revenue too

Incorporating the PR Analysis (relating product mix and routing similarities) into a PQ Analysis (relating product mix and quantities), creates the PQR Analysis.

The FabricatorLean and Flexible LLC

We’re now a solid year into the impossibly tedious and generally underwhelming LLM/spicy autocomplete/ChatGPT era. Looking past the OpenAI+Microsoft clownshow currently underway, two things are clear:

1. These LLMs aren’t actually good enough to use for anything besides some Cal Newport style deeply evil “Deep Work” (aka middle-management strivers getting ahead by pushing lower status work onto lower status people in/outside an organization); and
2. They waste too much water.

I’d encountered that second point repeatedly, but not really understood it until I read this, by Manuel Pascual in El País:

Many data centers use cooling towers to prevent overheating, the same system used in other industries. It is based on exposing a flow of water to a current of air in a heat exchanger, so that the evaporation cools the circuits.

This method is more energy efficient than electric coolers, but it involves a significant amount of water evaporating (i.e. not returning to the circuit).  Approximately 20% of the water used in cooling systems (that which does not evaporate) is discharged at the end of the cycle into wastewater treatment plants. “This water contains large amounts of minerals and salt, so it cannot be used for human consumption without being treated first.”

Artificial intelligence guzzles billions of liters of water

The growing thirst of data centers, which use water to cool their equipment, is beginning to cause tensions in the territories where they are located

Ediciones EL PAÍS S.L.Manuel G. Pascual

(Thanks Bill for passing that link along.)

Finally, all the chatter about spicy autocompletes “ruining” software development brought to mind one of my favorite pieces of online writing—Ellen Ullman’s 1998 two-part essay “The dumbing-down of programming.”

The computer was suddenly revealed as palimpsest. The machine that is everywhere hailed as the very incarnation of the new had revealed itself to be not so new after all, but a series of skins, layer on layer, winding around the messy, evolving idea of the computing machine. Under Windows was DOS; under DOS, BASIC; and under them both the date of its origins recorded like a birth memory. Here was the very opposite of the authoritative, all-knowing system with its pretty screenful of icons. Here was the antidote to Microsoft's many protections. The mere impulse toward Linux had led me into an act of desktop archaeology. And down under all those piles of stuff, the secret was written: We build our computers the way we build our cities—over time, without a plan, on top of ruins.

My Computer. This is the face offered to the world by the other machines in the office. My Computer. I've always hated this icon – its insulting, infantilizing tone. Even if you change the name, the damage is done: It's how you've been encouraged to think of the system. My Computer. My Documents. Baby names. My world, mine, mine, mine. 

Read “The dumbing-down of programming” part 1 and part 2.

On the site

Recent changes @ improvesomething.today:

• I culled books from the reading list (eventually I’ll add new ones), and
• switched the site appearance from Ghost’s previous/old default theme to its current/new default theme.

Course recommendation

This season I’m luxuriating in an online, affordable, six-week information architecture course with Dan Klyn and a few new learning friends. Now, I first studied information architecture back in grad school, in a course taught by Dan in 2006 or so. It’s awesome to revisit this way of apprehending and creating environments more than 15 years later, and to do so with one of the people who have really pushed/pulled the discipline forwards. This is absolutely a course you should consider taking in 2024.

Intro to Information Architecture (IA) - Remote Course — The Understanding Group (TUG)

This course meets for six (6) consecutive Tuesdays at 1pm Eastern starting November 14th. Course Dates: Week 1: November 14, 2023 @ 1pm Eastern Week 2: November 21, 2023 @ 1pm Eastern Week 3: November 28, 2023 @ 1pm Eastern Week 4: December 5, 2023 @ 1pm Eastern Week 5: Decembe

The Understanding Group (TUG)What We Do

It is 1976. Neil Diamond saunters onstage at The Last Waltz and introduces his performance of ‘Dry Your Eyes’ by saying:

“I’m going to do one song for you, but I’m going to do it good.”

Isn’t that what we all want? We want to do something once, and to do it good. And easy enough: the first step is to be Neil Diamond.

The rest of us should probably acknowledge that—whatever the work is—we’ll have to do it more than once, because it almost certainly won’t be done good the first time.

My friend Dan gave me the notion of a “now that I see it” moment. This occurs when a work-in-progress becomes real enough that people can say a sentence beginning with “Now that I see it…” and ending with things like:

• “…it’s completely wrong” or
• “…we forgot this important detail” or
• “…this will never work for this particular reason.”

Methods for building quality at the source, shifting left, set-based design, and so forth all help elicit “now that I see it” moments as early as possible.

By arriving earlier to “now that I see it,” we also arrive earlier to the wrong place, to the just-revealed insight, or to the key constraint. It is hopefully early enough that there is wiggle room to learn and iterate and retry.

Airbrushing the side of a van is delightful. It is a job that can take as much time as you care to give. But you only have to outline those first few flames and/or wolves in order to wedge open space for the objection that what we really need is a bicycle, or for the idea that we might be able to take the train.

I leave you with this dismal little project management couplet:

“Now that I see it” is certainly true;
That’s why to use tape first & then glue.

(This advice does not apply to Neil Diamond or to his beaded shirts.)

I’ve written about the power of noticing before:

• noticing why people resist change,
• noticing (‘going to the gemba’) as a bedrock practice of lean,
• noticing as a way to close meetings,
• and so on.

Beyond all this, I spend a certain amount of time and effort on a meditation cushion, where mental noting has been a tremendous relief and balm over the years. (Briefly, mental noting is a practice of noticing and ‘tagging’ or ‘noting’ without discussion or judgement any and all experiences, including sensations and thoughts, as they arise.)

There is some capability and a lot of joy that travels alongside seeing things with a little less presumption, a little less judgement, and a little less of a rush towards sense-making.

Noticing while out and about

A great way to try different ways of seeing and experiencing is to play some of the games in Rob Walker’s The Art of Noticing. One example is the “secret scavenger hunt” of looking for security cameras while running an errand: which cameras want to be seen?—and which want to remain hidden?

The most fun and easy starting point for The Art of Noticing is a series of 12 short (7-minute) audio segments from Waking Up. Walker explains his premise and shares a bunch of little games you can play anytime. Listen here:

The Art of Noticing | Waking Up

Open the door to a deeper understanding of yourself—with guided meditations and insights for living a more examined life.

wakingup.com

Note: Waking Up is a paid, subscription service, but using the link above you can access a free 30-day trial, no payment method required. This would be plenty of time to listen through The Art of Noticing. Waking Up will also give you a free subscription if you want to use it but cannot easily pay for it.

The ant’s puzzle

How is observing the bottoms of coffee mugs (a Rob Walker staple) similar to looking carefully for those places where workplace environments produce errors, injury, and waste?

And what do both of these have in common with the experience of sitting quietly for a moment and paying careful attention to the quantity of thoughts that arise unbidden and just as quickly fall away?

I don’t have a tidy answer. I wish I did.

I can see that these three are related somehow, meaningfully. It is as if they were three legs of a stool that I—as an ant—endlessly crawl to and fro and back to, without apprehending the larger structure. I will keep trying, and I encourage you to give it a go as well.

I’m starting a new client project next week. Now, I’ve been at this for a long time—it’s consulting project #74 (& yours could be #75!). Along the way, I cobbled together a short checklist for the first days of a new engagement.

Here it is:

1. understand the project,
2. understand the client, &
3. understand the work.

Sounds simple—and it sometimes is—but I’ve watched skilled people create problems for themselves by rushing in. Hell, I’ve been one of those people.

Understanding the project

Take as given some sort of plan or statement of work or agreed-upon outcome—which is great, but not what I’m interested in up front.

Instead, the very first thing I wonder is: who wants the results of this work to be good (also, what might ‘good’ mean for them)? And the second thing is: who is worried it will be bad (and what are they worried about)? I might host a premortem in order to get people talking specifically about the bad things that might happen. This helps me suss out who cares about what, and who else should have been included that hasn’t been (yet).

I am also drawing pictures in order to answer questions like: why this work? and why now? A round of ecocycle planning can bring this to light. Another approach is to map the value chain, which will reveal some dependencies, possibly hidden, and clarify what’s super important and what’s not.

Understanding the client

How does a client want to interact with the consultant or the consulting team? ← You would be amazed at how often consultants do not ask this.

I follow Jerry Weinberg’s advice (“Your methods of working are always open for display and discussion with your clients”) but it’s an invitation, not a demand. Some clients want to work “at the elbow” and participate in the mess from beginning to end. Others want to check in weekly, or monthly. Dial this in and you’ll know whether to work with the metaphorical garage door up or down.

When getting to know a new client, I will pay attention to what they react to in materials (documents, plans, etc.) and what it’ll take to get good feedback on those materials. I remember the client for whom we did a full style adherence pass on even the roughest drafts and sketchiest ideas before putting thing in front of them—because otherwise we’d get a sequence of comments about images being imperfectly aligned and nothing else. And that’s OK—giving thoughtful feedback is hard and people are busy. Sometimes clients, or their teams, need an idiosyncratic feedback container & review process in order to elicit the right kind of notes at the right time.

At the same time, I figure out how to make myself easy to fire. I recently ended a project 2 months early due to my client’s budget getting jerked around. This came at precisely the worst time: I was close to wrapping up, but not quite finished. Even so, I was able to hand things over in an orderly way. I’d kept things organized as we went, so the various transitions (or “knowledge transfers,” to use the unlovely jargon) were easy to make. I could focus on communication and relationship and problem-solving, rather than scrambling to claw half-baked work items together.

An old consulting boss said she never wanted her clients to create a dependency on our services. There’s always more work to do, and people mostly remember how they felt at the end of something, no matter how miserable the middle portion was. Being easy to fire means that I can always find time at the end of a project—even when they end early or suddenly—to make the ending nice and calm and appropriately bittersweet for everybody.

Understanding the work

Finally, I will begin to indulge my curiosity. Not just in the work specifically entailed in the project, but in everything surrounding it. This is the fun part! It’s also where, as my friend Andre says, “every project is a lean project.” I start this by going to where the work happens, and spending time with the lowest-status people doing the work, and paying attention. The point is to learn the process, notice where it breaks down, and find the places where success hinges on tacit knowledge. (Read my field guide on the 6 MISSED wastes for more on how.)

When people tell me things like “we don’t have a process“ or “every x, y, or z is different,” I’ll break out a work-unit routing analysis (WURA, sometimes also known as product-quantity-routing (PQR) analysis) worksheet and become a student of the variation I see and hear about. This gets me on the way towards sorting things into value streams or some other aggregation.

Despite the experience or expertise that the client presumably hired me for, in these moments the value I bring is that I can look with a beginner’s eyes and wonder with a curious mind.

Last but not least: actually doing the project

But that is—as they say—another story, and shall be told another time.

I’ve been visiting these particular trees for years. Each time, I wonder: is this a view of perfect stability, or of a system building up potential until it changes—collapses, in this case—into something new?

There’s a lot of tension here, and a lot of strength.

When I see these trees I also see Stewart Brand’s pace layers:

Some things are moving faster than those trees. Animals. Water. Me. You. And other things are moving slower.

The more you sit with this, the more beautiful it becomes.

And then we go to work, where projects are shuffled around in tidy little intervals, even though “whenever it starts is the right time.”

New beginnings are not linear

Transformation happens when it’s going to happen… and when it’s time, it happens fast, noisily, and irreversibly, like a tree falling.

When a sandy bank erodes and trees slip into the saltwater, we tend to think that’s bad. The tides and the weather and the climate got to ‘em.

When a group of people get to a moment of shared insight and identity and possibility, we tend to think that’s good. The choreography and structure and careful engagement got to ‘em.

Either way, what happens is a sudden shift from one state to another. The visible shift is a result of accumulated actions over time.

Not everything starts at the same time

Seven years ago I tossed out the “house of Lean”—with its ossified, layered columns and foundations, it was a powerful vision poorly communicated.

Instead, I taught for a while from this doodle:

(Aside: these are shearing layers, after Stewart Brand’s How Buildings Learn.)

What I liked about this little house is that it helped people sort out their approach to continuous improvement as a collection of things that start and stop and change over time and at different rates.

These days, I tend to get people to the same point using ecocycle planning:

I guess I’ve reached the point where I want to work from a picture of trees growing, rather than a picture of a little house.

In my imagination, though, creative destruction is not “plowing” or the little controlled burn in the image above, but rather a huge tree slipping off and down into the tide, where it will drift and—at its own pace—break down and provide shelter, enrich the food web, become the beginning of many things. Whenever it starts will be the right time.

Most continuous improvement events fail. The longer I do this, the more I study the reasons why.

Today’s reason for failure is disconnectedness.

Earlier in my consulting days, I’d say “yes” to any one-off continuous improvement project that came my way—things like sitting with a new group to do an A3, or a hosting a half-day kaizen (improvement) event. I figured that if some folks had a problem to fix and a sponsor willing to open space for them to work things out, it couldn’t possibly hurt, and might even help.

The events themselves were always fun. It’s fun to gather people together for a few hours and enable them to learn from each another in surprising ways. It’s fun to go where the work gets done and notice weird things happening there, to fix problems, to enjoy snacks and coffee and the company of others.

But I became dissatisfied with the success rate. Here’s what happened:

• Sometimes the events worked.
  Ideas arose, people made changes, the changes stuck.
• Sometimes they sort of worked.
  Maybe there was a short-term change for the better, but then things reverted back to the way they were before.
• Sometimes they didn’t work at all.

Only some of the improvements and ideas that come out of those events stuck over time.

It’d be absurd to expect all of them to.

Everything is interdependent. We’re all connected. To pick up a particular piece of the muddle and draw a tidy rectangle around it and work on it in isolation is to miss nearly everything.

Disconnected improvements—the wrong way

My least favorite kind of continuous improvement activities these days are those that are totally atomized into sealed, useless little containers.

Two examples:

1. My local medical system had this unhealthy campaign where they exhorted employees to find improvements within their “sphere of influence,” e.g. nothing involving anything anywhere else up or down the value chain, and with no support, no budget, etc. What a perfect ossifying, inane waste of time.
2. A local giant software company calls it “reducing toil.” This is literally unhinged, as in, not connected to anything. Now, Bucky Fuller’s formulation of “doing more and more with less and less until eventually you can do everything with nothing” is one I can get behind. But to instruct or be instructed to “reduce toil” is pointless. It implies that there is a huge backlog of useless work that people are doing for no reason at all, and that all of it could be excised if only employees were more individually attentive and generically more capable. Inside giant organizations, you will find these infinite sequences of no-value bullshit work that people do all day. They exist because because they were produced by management, over time. They can be unwound or removed only the same way. Merely “reducing toil” makes my blood boil.

Connecting improvements—the right way

Ideally, specific lean interventions are part of the daily work. In one classic formulation: Work = Job + Kaizen. Ideally, they are supported by leadership through a lean management system. Ideally, they are broadly understood and intelligible by passersby within and without the organization.

Connecting improvements—the “strongly OK” way

But if that condition does not exist (it very rarely does), then what? Should you say “no” to everything? Or say “yes” to everything and hope that some of it sticks?

My move, and it’s a pragmatic or “strongly OK” move, is to connect continuous improvement activities to something that is already valued and understood by the organization. This connection is what you can establish at the outset, and cling to after an event is over.

It’s the hook you hang the continuous improvement hat on.

In our “strongly OK” world, connect continuous improvement projects to (from most to least preferred)…

1. Safety, quality, or satisfaction—for customers, employees, or suppliers. Must be quantifiable.
2. Business value—show how the current condition is costing the company money. Must be quantifiable, and something that is already familiar and meaningful to people.
3. A executive’s important initiative. But initiatives don’t last long, even the important ones, and some people will not be on board. This is a weaker connection than it might seem.
4. The organization’s mission, vision, or strategic plan. These things probably exist under a thick layer of dust. They’ll motivate continuous improvement to the same extent they motivate anything else in the organization—which is to say, in the typical case, very little. If your organization is the exceptional one, great, move this up to the top of the list.

By connecting a continuous improvement event to one of these, and making that connection strong and broadly communicated, you increase the odds that the event—or its results—won’t drift away in the wind.

I recently shared an introduction to Liberating Structures, the methods that filled the “facilitation gap” in my own continuous improvement practice. Now I want to get specific about the Liberating Structures that have been most valuable to support continuous improvement activities.

I’ve tried many… these are the ones that stuck.

Planning

• Ecocycle Planning—an initial conversation that can help an uncertain team figure out what problems or opportunity areas to work on. Starting with a portfolio-level listing of major systems or activities, people locate each of those in its overall lifecycle. The resulting ‘ecocycle’ is an overall picture of which things need fixing, maybe some things that could be skillfully closed down, and certain things that need to be nurtured into further growth. There’s your first swing at a schedule of continuous improvement projects.

During an improvement activity

• TRIZ—a scavenger hunt to find existing system behaviors that produce bad outcomes. Fun, terrifying, energizing, and 100% based on the expertise of those most familiar with the work and its frustrations. TRIZ can bring apparently disconnected groups together and let them see how their collective work is both interrelated and necessary. It also gets people laughing.
• 25/10 Crowdsourcing—a machine for generating bravery, starting with the question: “If you were ten times bolder, what big idea would you recommend?” The activity ends with a tantalizing presentation of the weirdest, least intuitive ideas that were elevated or supported by the whole group. There are always a few ideas you can go do immediately, the ‘ten times bolder’ premise be damned.

Afterwards

• What/So What/Now What—group closing reflection and commitment. Can scale up or down, but this is the smallest possible closing that helps people make sense of what just happened and decide what they’ll take away from it.

Look, they’re all good

There are dozens of Liberating Structures. Even if you are familiar with some of them, others will be new. I encourage you to seek them out. For example, I only started using Ecocycle Planning in the last year or so, but it has already gotten me out of a couple real pickles.

Quiet isn’t. Here’s what I mean:

You write this sitting in the back garden, where the barest breeze is enough to rustle the limbs and leaves of the fruit trees, to raise a little hiss from the tall grasses, and to awake a larger, fuller breathing from all the trees beyond. You hear the chittering of birds jockeying for position at the feeder, or the occasional squabble of gulls or crows. A fence gate clacks, a vehicle revs, an airplane passes low on its return to base. You hear the sound of your fingers hitting keys on the keyboard, even though you use the quietest keyboard money can buy. You hear your breathing and the rustling of your linen shirt. You hear your teeth grinding, which is how you know you’re lost in thought.

That’s quiet. It’s active, it’s noisy, it never stops. Even in a perfectly still, empty house there is an ongoing tumble of things to hear.

But—there’s something else entirely. Take out your hearing aids, set them aside. So much drops away. The breeze becomes a pattern of pressure and temperature on your skin, in your hair. This is the real silence, the silence that opens up once you shut down all the hissing, buzzing quiet. For a little while, you don’t have to worry about how much work it is to listen to people. You don’t have to adjust position, posture, device settings at the beginning and end of every single conversation, forever. You can unhook the 20% of your awareness that is held to listen for voices, always standing by to begin the energetic work of listening.

Being tired

I am usually tired after a day of work—especially onsite—because listening to people is hard.

• On the one hand, I love listening to people, because people are interesting, and listening is one of the best ways to learn about them (the other best way is watching). And my whole thingy of doling out lean methods and thinking across an organization depends on getting people to speak with one another.
• On the other hand, listening to speech is something that so far as I can tell comes easily to most people, but is a lot of effort for me. Reading is easy. Listening is hard. That’s just the way it is.

Being lucky

I’m lucky that I was born where and when I was. I started using assistive technology when I was a toddler. The pile accumulates and updates as I age: fewer knobs, more touch-screens. My first hearing aids were unlovely wasp-like devices to catch and boost sound in delicate little curves mirror-matched to my hearing loss. Machines for converting an expensive, wasteful heap of disposable batteries into speech, music, the clatter of life. Over the decades the hearing aids have become accessories to everything else—to the car, to the computer, to the iPad. My iPhone doubles as a discreet little roving mic to pick up what you’re saying in that noisy cafe. You put your phone on the table for whatever reason. I put my phone on the table to hear what you say.

Being a talking animal

As a child I read Carl Sagan’s “Cosmos”:

We are the local embodiment of a Cosmos grown to self-awareness. We have begun to contemplate our origins: starstuff pondering the stars; organized assemblages of ten billion billion billion atoms considering the evolution of atoms; tracing the long journey by which, here at least, consciousness arose. Our loyalties are to the species and the planet. We speak for Earth. Our obligation to survive is owed not just to ourselves but also to that Cosmos, ancient and vast, from which we spring.

I read Albert Camus’ “The Myth of Sisyphus”:

At this point of his effort man stands face to face with the irrational. He feels within him his longing for happiness and for reason. The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world. This must not be forgotten. This must be clung to because the whole consequence of a life can depend on it.

For most of my life, I thought this was the project: to obliterate the silence of the world, offensive in its mere presence, by filling it up with speech, and to use speech to do good things. To speak for the earth, since (after Rorty) the world does not speak, only we do.

Being comfortable

Last year, I sat a silent meditation retreat for a week. It was an important experience, and I also complained about it a lot. The first day or two or three I really struggled as I found myself alone in our very quiet family cabin. The longer I sat the more noisy and rattly it all became. At a certain point I pulled out my hearing aids and that made all the difference. I could rest.

The silence I expend so much effort and money to dispel became exactly what I now wanted to sit with. I couldn’t hear the daily chants or the heart sutra with my friends in the Zoom sangha, but that was OK—I knew what we were saying. On that retreat I realized how much work I put into listening, even when there is no need to hear, or nothing to listen for. That silence produced stillness, and in sitting I fell away from the logics of attainment and progression that had haunted me for decades (and still do).

I used to get deeply unhappy or funky when I couldn’t wear my hearing aids for whatever reason. But these days—here’s my secret—the instant I am alone, out they go. I want the world to be safe and lovely and a place of liberation and flourishing for everybody, and I feel somehow closest to that world when I am in the world of silence. I also want to sit and talk with people and listen to them all day every day—to chat ceaselessly with my friends, to gossip with everyone at work, to learn what my past clients are up to, to listen to one child give an artist’s statement for his most recent tongue-preserver-and-colored-pencil apparatus, or to, at nighttime, listen to the other child practice his violin, or to Liana singing and playing guitar.

They say the body is a city with nine gates.

Two of mine happen to be a little finicky.

I truly believe that if I could begin again at life with a body that could hear better, or more typically, I wouldn’t go for it. While I might have an easier time and have fewer large out-of-pocket expenditures, I just don’t know what it’d be like to live in the world of hearing. It’s a wonderful place to visit. But the world of silence is where I began and where, I think, I will end. It’s the underlying fact of my life. And I have a good life; I do good work.

It’s on that basis I embrace disability, and my disability, and—this month—disability pride.

Happy birthday to the ADA.

So much of continuous improvement comes down to gathering a small group of people together (ideally with snacks) and opening a space so that everybody can decide what to do next.

The Lean books and teachers I learned from taught me what needed to happen—the observations, diagrams, analysis, ideas, and plans—but couldn’t convey how to get all this to occur within groups of people who were happy, unhappy, skeptical, annoyed, burned-out, eager, curious, tired, distracted, in pain, lost in thought, worried, hungry, or optimistic.

Facilitation is its own separate skill.

Like the other so-called “soft skills,” it is hard as hell.

But eventually, Liberating Structures gave me the methods I needed.

No new thing under the sun

Each Liberating Structure is a recipe for a small, generative group interaction. Flip through the collection and you’ll find short definitions and plenty of examples, along with detailed, insightful facilitation guides.

As you explore, many of the formats and activities might seem familiar—and for good reason. Very little of this work is original, which is why nearly all of it is useful. For example, the What, So What, Now What? Liberating Structure is one particular expression of a device you might have seen in academic or business writing (as Chris Argyris’ ladder of inference) or in community development (my teachers at the Institute of Cultural Affairs call it ORID, an unlovely contraction of “objective, reflective, interpretive, and decisional”). The point of this particular Liberating Structure isn’t to be innovative, but instead to give just enough structure to help a group to listen and reflect on its shared experience. And it, like all the others, is offered with attribution and links to further reading to satisfy the eggheads.

Most of the Liberating Structures are small, with time commitments beginning at around 15 minutes. As you practice them, you may find yourself planning events by chaining a sequence of Liberating Structures together. There’s even a Liberating Structure for having group plan its own event—what my friend Dan calls choreography, but the Liberating Structure is called Design Storyboards.

And Liberating Structures are a great boost to continuous improvement efforts because they loosen up hierarchies and create new ways for people to learn from one another. This is an important part of Lean, and it’ll happen eventually—but some carefully deployed Liberating Structures can help things along. Some of the structures, like Ecocycle Planning, fit directly into the portfolio planning and management systems that sustain continuous improvement over time.

Getting started

The stuff is available online and is free to use. Read up on the Liberating Structures web site, starting with the LS Menu.

I recommend the excellent, free LiSA app for your phone or iPad. (LiSA also runs on recent Macs.) LiSA is great for quick reference, as well as for working out an agenda using a chain of Liberating Structures.

Beyond that, the very best way to learn Liberating Structures is to watch, do, and teach. (It’s also the best way to learn anything.) For this purpose, my friend Alyssa recommends this monthly international, online meetup.

Big changes, small changes

It’s only fair to let the Liberating Structures folks have the last word. Because what they want is what I want, too:

“We want everyone to learn to foster big changes by inviting people to make small structural changes in how they work together.”

People write for lots of reasons: To become famous. To make money. To sell. To connect. To join. To have written. To create social proof. To influence. To communicate. To make a world. To right a wrong. To increase the n. Because everybody else is doing it. Because someone else said they should do it.

Today, 23 reasons I think you should consider writing online. Pick one reason, pick them all, make them your own.

Reasons

1. To allow a small number of as-yet-unknown, possibly very consequential people to feel as though they’ve gotten to know you a bit, before you ever speak. (I’m a consultant. 3 out of 4 interviews I have with prospective clients involve them bringing up something they read or listened to from this web site. I enjoy that.)
2. To make your first conversations with certain new friends immediately engaging and specific, since they will have already apprehended your bullshit and felt there was something there.
3. To disqualify people who don’t grok what you are up to. They will glance off the edge of your atmosphere and float somewhere else.
4. To sort things out, to somehow make sense of an absurd world, and cram the results into enough of a structure that it becomes hopefully intelligible to at least one other person.
5. To dispel the curse of knowledge. You know much more about certain things than most people, and your life experiences mean those things have become connected—intertwingled?—in contingent, weird, productive ways.
6. To dispel the curse of knowledge. You probably don’t realize how much you know about the stuff you know about. Lay it all out on a page and, goddamnit, turns out you know a lot. That in itself is good to know.
7. To dispel the curse of knowledge. Here is a super powerful capability: to be able to borrow the perspective of someone who doesn’t know the same things as you do, and support them as they develop their own expertise.
8. To get clear about the language you want to use. And I don’t mean cussing (you must swear at least a bit in your writing so people will know they are dealing with a human being and not some tediously apologetic autocomplete LLM). I mean knowing what things you are thinking about, and what you would like to call each of them.
9. To identify your lil’ shortcuts, jargons, and irritants.
   (For me, these include the words “just” and “here.”)
10. To find out where you are wrong.
11. To find out where you are right.
12. To eventually give each idea its own URL, which is cool.
13. To take these ideas—now having their own URLs—and e-mail them to those who want to read by email, publish in an RSS feed for those who want to read by feeds, and the like.
14. To maybe even circulate these URLs across the various algorithmic hellscapes (LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.), giving people something to glance at between the advertisements. Your items are errant kibble in the feed, but you can automate the postings and just—see #9—let the machine operate.
15. To locate the people who are your people. Bring them in, wherever they are. One person a month is fine. This is the real deal.
16. To have a very slow conversation with someone over the span of months or years.
17. To accumulate a “swipe file” you can borrow from when called upon to present, speak, convince, design, etc.
18. To draft a book, one page at a time, with the garage door up.
19. To create the conditions for eventually revisiting your old stuff and noticing with horror how your thinking has changed over time.
20. To get other people to tell you what to read next: this link, this article, this book. You’ll always have a backlog.
21. To learn.
22. To practice.
23. To figure out who you are, so you can become that person.

When planning a change, the topic of resistance always comes up. Resistance is the space—sometimes big, sometimes contested—between:

1. What someone would like other people to do, and
2. What they actually, already do.

As I listen to many managers and consultants talk things over, the sense is that resistance is generically bad: an obstacle to surmount, a difficulty to overcome, a blockage to clear away so that human beings—in their naturally absorbent, towel-like condition—can soak in an infinite amount of change.

Approached this way, calling a person or group “resistant” is a complaint without recommendation. A wish that things were other than they are. It prioritizes the opinion of the wannabe change-maker over the knowledge and expertise of the people being asked to change.

For me, resistance is something else entirely: it is a jewel.

It’s a treasure, but not one you have to dig for—instead, it presents itself every time, sparkling, tough as hell, multifaceted.

When you uncover resistance

Withhold judgement, but bring as much equanimous observation as you humanly can. Think of resistance is a sign, a smell, an opportunity.

A sign that people care about something. What are people afraid of losing, or trying to hang onto, or worried will happen again? There’s wisdom there. Figure it out. Importantly, people in this state may not be able to clearly identify or explain their worry. Draw a picture, make a model. Once there is a shared explanation, that frustration will evaporate.

A smell that something important has been overlooked—or even if it hasn’t, that not everybody affected has had a chance to sort things out to their satisfaction. It’s also possible that what you smell is the melting plastic odor of burnout: the organization may be at the tail end of a series of botched changes. This is an indication to take special care.

An opportunity to locate the people who really give a shit and bring them around to your cause. Often, the most resistant people are just a few steps away from becoming your biggest boosters.

The lesson of history

In the 1980s, Sara Fine studied how librarians approached and responded to technological change over time, and produced an outlook I find super helpful whenever I encounter a new group of people grappling with change. I hope you do too. I leave you with this, from Fine’s “Technological innovation, diffusion and resistance: an historical perspective” (1986):

“Perhaps the lesson of history is that resistance will always exist, that acceptance of a current innovation is no assurance that the next level of change won't be resisted, perhaps even more vigorously, as people make commitments to what they have achieved and mastered. Perhaps it is also the lesson of history that resistance to change is just as crucial to our survival as is the acceptance of change. Perhaps the purpose of resistance is to give us pause, force us to slow down, and impel us to pay attention to our basic human needs and values.”

2023 is the year of headwinds: of the “soft macro.” You may have started hearing once again—I sure as heck did—an old, wet noodle of a rallying cry:

“We have to do more with less!”

This particular cliché keeps coming back. I heard it at my first job after college, where it was issued as a resource for bravery, an utterance that utterly backfired. In the decades since, I keep hearing it.

Each time, something about the phrase makes me want to fill in the blanks—“Do more (of what?) with less (of what?).”

As far as I can tell, the general usage seems to be:

• Doing more of this → Making money for the company
• With less of this → People

OK, that sucks! But first, wanna know where the slogan came from?

Bucky Fuller’s “ephemeralization”

Yep, Bucky Fuller. Back in the 1930s, he wrote about ephemeralization—a particular Fullerism he defined as the capability of technological advancement to do “more and more with less and less until eventually you can do everything with nothing.”

Here it is, on page 279 of Fuller’s Nine Chains to the Moon (1938):

If you are not versed in Fullerese and would like to save yourself hundreds of pages of extremely turgid reading, just know that in his framework “doing more with less” entailed:

• Doing more of this → Curing disease; eliminating infant mortality; providing housing and food for every family on Earth; and increasing the standard of living—and the freedom available for science, for art, for play, for leisure—forever
• With less of this → Time, space, and energy

What I wonder is… how’d we get from all that—from the translation of “science into bread and butter for people”—to the current jargonic usage, where it means nothing other than “please continue to do the work of five people but with 3, even though our company already sheds cash like a housecat made out of money.”

In the 2023 “soft macro” condition of “doing more with less,” the mechanism by which people are meant to actually accomplish this is deliberately undefined. It’s the same old management-by-objective horseshit: “more with less,” but with no material or managerial support, an effort totally unlinked from the value chain.

From five to three—but what of the two?

In lean management, there’s an answer for what to do when people come up with improvements—even improvements so effective that they take the work of five people and turn it into the work of 3. There has to be an answer, because as soon as an organization starts a serious practice of continuous improvement, it will find improvements like that. Always. They’re just lying around, and the lean methods will uncover them.

Anyways, the lean management answer is this: OK, 3 people will now do that work previously done by five, in a way that is safer, faster, more reliable. This frees up the remaining 2 people to go do something else within the organization. Maybe it’s helping another group get ahead, or helping peers learn continuous improvement. Maybe it’s starting a new project. Nobody loses their job. Nobody is “catapulted” (read: laid off) to the next stage of their career. And all this gets accomplished in a way that everybody can see the improvement, the increased value created for customers, and that the work has now become less harmful and annoying, etc.

It’s critical that management believe in this answer, communicate it effectively, and stick to it over time.

Why? Because that’s what moves an organization:

• from the (bad) condition where people worry about working themselves out of a job, or observe that they will be punished and/or ignored for noticing problems at the workplace…
• to the (good) condition where people become deeply engaged in noticing problems and designing improvements to their own work.

It may not be Bucky’s Utopian, humanist vision of translating “science into bread and butter for people,” but it does mean helping people get the work done on time, with less hassle, and respecting the wisdom and capabilities of everybody involved. And… at least for now, you know, I’ll take it.