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Humane Work Podcast

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by Modus Institute

51 episodes

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We explore humane work, visual systems, and people acting with confidence. <a href="https://humanework.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast">humanework.substack.com</a>

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6/7/2025

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Recent Episodes

April 13, 2026

We Are All in Transformation

Individuals work in teams to create value. Individuals communicate in teams to create value. Individuals interact in teams to create value. Slice up the collaboration equation however you want…it always reduces to the same thing. We get together. We work together. We get things done.And what we’re doing, when we’re doing it, is transforming information into product.You have a plan. That’s information. You gather data. That’s information. You figure out what the client wants. That’s information. Then you make something out of all of it, it could be a sandwich, a Lamborghini, a skyscraper, a piece of software, a hospital. Work is literally the act of taking information and turning it into a thing somebody else wanted.It is not the task list. It is not the plan. It is not the KPIs. Those are scaffolding. Work is the transformation.And it always requires at least two people. There’s the person doing it and the person who needs it. Otherwise you’re just screwing around in your garage. Which is fine. But nobody’s paying you for it.What a collaborative team actually needsWe want strong professionals inside collaborative teams delivering strong work. Easy to say. Here’s the part people skip:Information doesn’t flow on its own.Nobody wakes up thinking, you know what, today I’m going to withhold context from my teammates. They don’t share because we’ve built systems that make sharing hard. Status meetings instead of visible work. Dashboards instead of conversations. Slack threads that scroll into oblivion. Emails nobody reads.Even Toni and I (who work together well) have had stretches this year where we got too busy and the information stopped moving between us. We felt its absence immediately. Then came the guilt, the frustration, the scramble to fix it. And by the time we looked up, we’d generated a pile of unnecessary work because we weren’t paying attention to what the team needed right now.That’s the whole thing. Right now.The four questionsIf you want your team to actually function, you need to be answering four questions continuously and visibly:1. What does the team need right now? What do you need to get your work done. What tools, information, contacts, time….Not what the plan says it needs. Not what last month’s retro said. Right now. This week. This hour.2. Who are we? What are the people on this team actually capable of? What do they want to do? What does their job description say they’re supposed to do? What is the work currently demanding of them that sits completely outside that description? Those are four different answers and all of them matter.3. Who are our stakeholders? Most teams I work with can’t answer this. Flat out. They don’t know who’s judging the work. They don’t know whose “yes” actually counts. So projects fail in this very specific, very predictable way: you do a ton of work to appease the one loud stakeholder who’s a pain in the butt, you ignore the three quiet ones, and at the end the quiet ones say this doesn’t give us any of what we needed and you feel like a schmuck.Don’t feel like a schmuck. Find out who they are first.4. What is happening right now? Not the Gantt chart. Not the roadmap. The actual state of the actual work. Where the blockers are. What’s moving. What’s stuck. Who’s waiting on whom.Make it visual. Make it real-time. Make it shared.It doesn’t matter where you put it. Miro. A kanban. An Obeya wall with sticky notes. A shared interface you built yourselves. What matters is that your team and your stakeholders agree that’s where the information lives and then you keep it current.Because the moment that information stops being current is the moment everything starts falling apart.If you’re underperforming, it’s usually because you’re under-informing.And this one is a rule: if someone on your team says they don’t feel informed, they are right. Don’t argue with them. Don’t tell them you sent the email. Don’t explain that it was in the standup. If they feel under-informed, they are under-informed. That is independent of whether you feel you gave them enough. It’s not about you.Quality of life, not work-life balanceI don’t particularly believe in work-life balance. I believe in quality of life. Work ebbs. Work flows. Satisfaction ebbs and flows with it. The job of a professional is to watch what you need and what the people around you need, and make sure the system is delivering it. That’s what a good team does. That’s what a good Obeya does. That’s what collaboration actually is when it’s working.If you liked this, stick around. Like and subscribe is appreciated but what I really want is for you to go look at your team tomorrow morning and ask yourself: can everybody here see what’s happening right now? This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://humanework.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2">humanework.substack.com/subscribe</a>

March 24, 2026

This Person Wouldn’t Do That

Go to <a target="_blank" href="http://Titanauts.com">Titanauts.com</a> to see more about the book and help launch the mission.I have spent a lifetime in rooms with people who are changing. Not in any dramatic, cinematic way. Like aliens busting out of their chests, but changing like people actually change. People change slowly, awkwardly, and usually at the worst possible time. You know, like why change is inconvenient and people say they don’t like it.I’ve facilitated hundreds of value stream mapping exercises, A3s, retrospectives, design sessions. I’ve watched smart, capable, seasoned professionals navigate genuinely stressful revelations without flinching. Requirements that don’t match reality. Workflows that are held together with habit and denial. Processes that exist because someone built them in 2007 and then got promoted.They handle all of it. They’re professionals. They rise to the occasion.And then one of them falls apart over something that doesn’t seem important.Someone laughs too hard. Someone goes quiet or bursts into tears. Someone gets angry about a sticky note and storms out. And the rest of us (facilitators included) have this instinctive response, which is: Wow. That was weird. Hope it doesn’t happen again.What we should be saying is: Where did that come from?So I wrote <a target="_blank" href="https://titanauts.com/">The Social Life of Small Enclosed Spaces</a>, and it’s about a crew of people on a long-duration mission to Titan. They’re stuck together in a spacecraft for years, dealing with corporate surveillance, AIs that may or may not be trustworthy, and the slow-motion realization that the system they’re inside was designed to use them.Standard Tuesday, really, for anyone who’s worked in a large organization.The book is Lean and systems thinking wrapped in a space opera. It’s got value streams and kanban and organizational design, except they’re happening between people who are also dealing with murder, espionage, and an oligarch who thinks she owns them. It’s very much a book by me.And that was great, and then ... the characters became people. And started doing things I didn’t plan for.Now, you’d think the conductor of the orchestra wouldn’t be surprised by the music. I designed these people. I built their backstories, their motivations, their arcs. I knew where they were going.Except I didn’t. Because characters are people, and people are predictably irrational, and characters are worse — because you think you have control over them.*People are people, so why should it be, I should expect them to at predictably? * Jules Park is my security chief. He’s sarcastic, profane, and ready with a one-liner for any occasion. He’s the guy who walks into the crisis meeting with his coffee, arms crossed, chair tilted back, sarcasm buffer fully loaded. He handles everything.Until he doesn’t.And when he hit his breaking point (which I did not schedule) I found myself doing the exact same thing I tell facilitators not to do. I said: This person wouldn’t do that.Which is exactly what we say in meetings when someone breaks pattern. We say it about Larry when the project goes sideways on his watch. We say it about the team lead who suddenly can’t take one more requirement change. We say it about the developer who was fine for five sprints and then just... wasn’t.It’s a weird form of fundamental attribution error. We blame the person for the state of the thing, because they’re the last one holding it. But what actually happened is that they’re the part of the system where the complexity landed. They didn’t break the plan. They’re where the plan’s assumptions ran out.No plan survives contact with Larry and Larry might not survive either.There’s something else that happens in those rooms, and in the book, that I think we don’t talk about enough.People have epiphanies on a different schedule than you do. Or than you wish they did. And that’s why we have other people (sometimes you are the slow one).In any VSM exercise, you will watch people go from their current state to a future state. They know, roughly, what they expect that future state to be. But it never is. And the delta between their expectations and where they actually end up we think is just process improvement. But it’s not...it’s a personal change. It’s internal. It rewires something.Someone says: “I guess this lean stuff isn’t so bad.” Someone else says: “I thought you were a jerk, but I realize the system was making me assume that.” These are epiphanies, and they arrive when they arrive...often at a point that’s wildly inconvenient for the facilitator or the project plan or the person sitting next to them.In the book, this happens constantly. Rash (my military botanist), the quiet guy carrying a heavy load, doesn’t become a radically different person over the course of the mission. But he softens, he learns, he has experiences that change him.In any enclosed space (a spacecraft, a conference room, a project team) you either soften toward each other (align) or you calcify (become brittle). Those are your options.All systems want people and events to be predictable. That’s the entire architecture of control. Control the inputs, control the outputs. Decrease variation. Standardize. Garbage in-garbage out...an adage that is a joke at recycling plants that have garbage in, usable materials out.Life gives us a lot of garbage. We...get to use it creatively.In the book, Wei Lin, the HOMEGA director, has built an entire corporate infrastructure around the premise that if you coerce the right people and constrain their options sufficiently, they’ll perform as designed. (Any resemblance to any current oligarchs is purely coincidental.)And right now, outside the book, we’re living in the real-world version of that assumption. We’re in variation soup. The amount of ambient uncertainty that people are carrying around...economic, political, personal, existential...is staggering. There is no predictability right now. And there are people who are trying very hard to make sure that remains the case.So when someone in your next planning meeting has an emotional response that doesn’t fit your model of them — when someone on your team hits a trigger you didn’t see coming — please try to have the space to ask where did that come from? instead of that was weird.The crew’s refusal to stay predictable isn’t them acting out, it’s just them growing and responding to the system they are in. And that’s been the most beautiful thing to see while writing this book.It was an annoying form of self-humiliation, watching the characters in the book act like real people. Their plans didn’t survive contact with reality because the plan was bad, it was because people are alive. They learn. They change. In the face of complexity and variation, they change. And that is a very good thing. It’s what makes us all human. It’s what makes value stream mapping and Personal Kanban work.So. Two very Modus things.One. If you’re someone who works with teams (an agile coach, a project manager, an organizational designer, someone who stares at value streams and wonders why they never quite do what they’re supposed to) this book is for you. It’s a novel about systems thinking and human messiness and what happens when you lock a bunch of smart, broken, funny people in a tin can and send them to Saturn’s largest moon. It’s funny. It has a lot of coffee in it. And the AI has opinions.Go to <a target="_blank" href="https://titanauts.com/">titanauts.com</a> and help me launch it.Two. When you’re working with people in any context, in any room, on any project, try to have the space to recognize that they are encountering what you’re encountering in a different way. Their responses, even when they’re inconvenient, can be incredibly helpful to making sure you do the right thing at the right time with the right people.That’s the real value stream. The human one. It’s why we do what we do.Jim Benson is the creator of Personal Kanban and the author of The Social Life of Small Enclosed Spaces. He’s been a process guy, a psychology guy, an urban planning guy, a design engineer guy, and now a fiction author guy. All of those things collide in this book.Modus Institute × HOMEGA This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://humanework.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2">humanework.substack.com/subscribe</a>

March 19, 2026

The Book That Wouldn’t Wait

I didn’t decide to write this novel. It decided to be written.That’s not a cute thing to say. That’s what happened.I was attempting to sell my house. Running a company in a business-hostile environment. Writing a book on toxic waste. Onboarding new clients. Supporting existing ones. Working with students at Modus Institute. Tonianne was stressed. I was stressed. My wife was stress. My mom is stressed. All of this stuff going on that makes you compensate by going quiet and tight and efficient in all the wrong ways.When we get like that, we do what we’re trained to do: we go to the board. We pull the next ticket. We execute. We survive. We go task focused, work-to-rule.We don’t, generally, write novels. Mine is called <a target="_blank" href="http://titanauts.com">The Social Life of Small Enclosed Spaces</a>.The Work That Keeps Us HumanBut creativity doesn’t care about your backlog. Or your time management. Or even your level of nervous exhaustion. So, for me, this character named Laura Marquez kept showing up. Urban planner. Systems designer. Living in a world of oligarchs and mega-corporations and people just trying to figure out how to be good to each other inside systems that weren’t designed for goodness. She’d tap me on the shoulder in the middle of a workshop prep. She’d hand me a line of dialogue during a client call debrief. I’d scribble fragments. I made songs out of some of them.<a target="_blank" href="http://titanauts.com">The Titanauts</a>, as people, refused to wait for me to be ready.And this is the reason for this post. This is true of a lot of important things. The conversation you need to have with a colleague. The decision your team has been avoiding. The pivot your org knows it needs to make. These things don’t wait until your calendar clears. They just keep accumulating pressure until something gives.So I started writing. And the next thing I knew, I was in it. Laura’s voice was my flow.And she was saying, “Write this, or lose every shred of humanity you have left to stress, fatigue, and the horrible narrative that is now.”Systems Thinking in Narrative FormI thought I was writing Office Space in space. Funny, light, a little irreverent.The book had other ideas.It wanted to talk about complicity. About how we end up inside systems that do harm, incrementally, quietly…not because we’re bad people, but because the system is designed to move us toward certain outcomes regardless of our intentions. We do little bits of harm. Then a little more. Until one day we hit the straw-breaks-the-camel’s-back moment, and we have to make a choice about our own agency.Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it achieves.That’s usually attributed to Deming. A lot of people have said it. What I know is that it’s true. And the corollary (the part we forget when we’re stressed and pulling tickets) is: if we don’t like the results, we can change the system.We’ve done it before. We’ll do it again.The Characters Who Turn Out to Be the PlotWe’re all people. We all show up when we can, do what we can. And sometimes those cans are musts. Sometimes they are wannas. As I was writing the book, I had this same experience with the characters that I see in every value stream mapping exercise. The characters I thought were supporting the plot turned out to be the plot.The quiet ones. The people who don’t announce themselves. The ones who seem like they’re just... there. Bumping along. Doing their work without fanfare.And then suddenly…they move everything forward.You see this on teams constantly. You map the work, you identify the leaders, you talk to the loudest voices in the room. And then you find the person who’s been quietly holding the whole system together. The one who knows where everything is, who’s translated every decision into action, who everyone else depends on without realizing it.We live staring at the beams of our teams and miss the rivets. And damn, it’s humbling to learn the same lesson over and over again. Writing <a target="_blank" href="http://titanauts.com">The Social Life of Small Enclosed Spaces</a> was a multi-year value stream mapping exercise I didn’t know I was doing.A Different Kind of Review CycleI want to tell you something about how this book was actually made, because I think it matters for how we work in general. It’s about Lean and Agile and how we won the battle against AIDS and how we’re going to get our planet back from the banality of hate.So, my normal process is to play with ideas in blogs and social media posts. But these ideas were so deep. So personal. And often alarming. I couldn’t just get into LinkedIn and say things like, “Wouldn’t it be wild if Jeff Bezos destroyed local commerce worldwide, then moved to a tax haven turning his back on the city that made him wealthy, bought major media, and then backed a banana dictatorship?” Because it wasn’t on brand. Oh, sorry, inside voice…Anyway, normally, I’d write the whole book, give it to humans, wait months for feedback, incorporate, repeat. It’s waterfall or popular agile. It’s slow. And honestly, by the time the feedback comes back, you’ve already moved so far from the original thinking that the integration is painful.I couldn’t just turn to my usual editor friends and say “Read this” every few minutes. Because they would very quickly (a) hate me and (b) get lost in endless version control.So, I built a set of AI advisors. Deming. Buckminster Fuller. Elinor Ostrom. Kevin Lynch. David Lynch. Others. I’d write a section, describe my goals for it, and ask them to respond from their respective frameworks. The feedback was immediate. I could write, get a response, but it wasn’t rewriting my text… it was oblique perspectives from the amalgam of my history. It was an instable set of filters to challenge me to adjust, write more, get another response, adjust again…rapid cycles, tight loops, evolutionary design in real time. Discuss, Envision, Edit & Expand Repeat. Yes, it’s the DEEE model. Which I just invented while typing this. So… let’s make a graphic for it.What that meant was that when I gave the manuscript to humans, to people like <a target="_blank" href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/kegill/">Kathy Gill,</a> who became the patron saint of this project, I gave them something complete enough to be useful. I didn’t waste their time with roughness I could have resolved myself. I respected their attention by arriving prepared.And even with that Kathy came back with over 100 edits and suggestions. A HUNDRED! So, in Personal Kanban land…in humane work land. This is respect for people. This is making sure that other people aren’t on the hook to process your backlog refinement.Writing in DefianceI want to be honest about something.This has been a very difficult time for me. I’m going to let that float without detail, because what the specifics aren’t as important to any of us as the fact that you probably know exactly what I mean. You’ve been there, are there, are helping people through there. And when we’re there, we tend to think that creative work, expressive work, human work is a luxury we can’t afford. But what I found was the opposite. This crew kept insisting that hope was possible. Even when I wasn’t feeling it and certainly when they weren’t feeling it. I seriously take out a lot of frustrations on these poor people.It was my keep hope alive message, an artistic momentum pulling me forward toward a place I couldn’t see yet from where I was standing. One night, while watching Australian Masterchef, I scared the hell out of my wife by yelling, “Why the hell did you do that?”And she’d like, “WHO? WHAT HAPPENED?”And I said, “Rash just did something he absolutely shouldn’t have. That I didn’t want him to do. And now the book is entirely different.”And she stared at me…for more than a comfortable amount of time…and went back to watching Australians cook. (Imagine the Laura look below on a multi-racial Hong Kong born speech pathologist).That’s what good work does, by the way. Not just art. Good systems work. Good team work. Good process. It holds the shape of what’s possible when you’re too tired to hold it yourself.Come On This Ship With UsWe’re all on Spaceship Earth together.While we’re here, we might as well have good people to work with. Good friends. Good collaborators. People who are thoughtful, who are building interesting things, who want the system to stop blocking them from doing the right thing.That’s the community Tonianne and I have been building for 15 years and are not…going…to…stop. That’s what Modus is. That’s what this book is about…under all the oligarchs and spaceships and corporate absurdity and AIs and all of the goodies.This is about the practical and the humane. Where do the tomatoes grow? How do we get the right thing to happen, at the right time, with the right people? How do we make up for our faults and build systems to make those faults less likely? When are we going to take other people seriously and not for granted? Pre-orders are open at <a target="_blank" href="https://titanauts.com/">titanauts.com</a>. There are also some games there…yes, I had fun building the site, and yes, you should go play. Yes, I say funny things. Yes, the book is funny.Thank you for being part of this. Genuinely.— Jim This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://humanework.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2">humanework.substack.com/subscribe</a>

51 total episodes available

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What is Humane Work Podcast?: We explore humane work, visual systems, and people acting with confidence. <a href="https://humanework.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast">humanework.substack.com</a>
How often does this podcast release new episodes?: This podcast updates daily.
Where can I listen to this podcast?: This podcast is available on 4 platforms including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and more. You can also use the RSS feed directly.
Does this podcast accept guests?: No, this podcast does not typically feature guests.

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