Humane Work Podcast

Check out our calendar of events , classes at Modus Institute , or call just us . Leadership books love to talk about people being our greatest asset. We all do. Unfortunately, workplace stress costs nearly a trillion dollars a year in the US. $917 billion annually . Toxicity costs money. Not a wellness issue. A strategic failure. Right now, rather than dealing with the issue, we are laying people...

Stop assigning people “jobs” and start recognizing patterns. Here’s how teams really work together. Nobody shows up to work and says, “I’m a Scrum Master” or “I’m a Product Owner.” with anything other than fear and imposter syndrome. Strict roles just aren’t how work actually works. They are a convenient fiction. False certainty. Self-defeating. Sure, you can give people those titles. You can writ...

Personal Kanban Class | PK Book | Modus Institute | Our Calendar Why Stress Exists—And What It’s Telling You Stress is a signal. It’s your brain telling you that how you are working is broken . When you don’t know what to do next, when work arrives undefined, when people aren’t available, when tasks are un-completable, when you’re forced to do work that obviously doesn’t need doing, when you are i...

Modus Institute | Our Calendar of Events | Our Kanban Class Why We Treat Ourselves Like Nobodies We manage work like it’s just generic toil. Work becomes anti-human, a pile of tasks handed down by nobody and received as nobody. No context. No ownership. Just something to do. No wonder people don’t identify with their work, don’t want to engage in continuous improvement, and don’t feel motivated to...

Personal Kanban Book | Our Popular Kanban Class | Modus Institute Humans are driven by productivity, wanting to fill every minute with action . We’re wired to want to be useful, stay in motion, and prove our worth. We prove to ourselves, our colleagues, and our managers that we are useful. Multitasking promises that we can do more, faster, and please the managers and upper managers who are all dem...

Jim, Kevin, and Jesse talk practical work. Continuous improvement is hard work and it isn’t just something you do .. and it is “done.” That’s part of what continuous means. It’s what Deming, Ohno, Goldratt, Shook .. everyone has warned us about. That we are engaged in continuous refinement, learning, and making things work better for the customer, the company, and the people doing the work. This i...

Learned Helplessness learned help·less·ness | noun | /ˈlərnd ˈhelpləsnəs/ Learned helplessness is when people stop trying because they’ve been made to feel like nothing they do can change their situation. At Modus Institute, we have a real problem with the term “learned helplessness.” Yes, learned helplessness is very real, but it is framed as “learned.” “Learned” suggests there’s an element of wi...

When teams go off the rails or get stuck in toxic patterns, there’s usually a breakdown in one of four fundamental areas (the C’s). Here’s how to diagnose what’s going wrong and fix it. Whether you’re trying to build a healthy team from scratch or figure out why things have gone sideways, I keep coming back to the same four diagnostic questions / lenses / points. They’re at the heart of everything...

Modus Live Online Obeya Calendar | Modus Institute | Collaboration Equation Book We work in companies to be in the company of others. Human others. We smile. We laugh. We get upset. We … do things. Sometimes fun things, sometimes frustrating things. Often work is painful, with too many tasks, too many voices, and no clear place to start. When this happens, it’s tempting to just blame it on other p...

Strategy Course on Modus Institute | Karl and Jim Live Workshop in Bristol Nov 2025 Work sucks, work is wonderful. We’ve been thinking about strategy lately. Not the retreat-in-Cancún kind where executives disappear for a weekend and return with glossy presentations nobody asked for way. The collaborative way. The effective way. Strategy created by the messy, collaborative, utterly human process o...

Modus Institute Online Classes | How We Can Help You Ghosts in the Machine Teams don’t argue because they’re “bad” People argue because their systems are bad. Everyone has surprise dependencies, last-minute requests, and the endless slog of “bad exciting” work (the stuff that blows up your day). I’ve created another design to solve this. Let’s set you up to actually collaborate effectively. What y...

“Hell is other people.” And, because work is nothing if not ironic, heaven is too. The difference between the two isn’t people , it’s the system they are in. At work and on earth this is a system we create, inhabit, and serve. People like to work together. People like to focus. People like certainty, even when things are fluid. Certainty is a funny word. We focus on it being an infallible plan, re...

Work Begins Strong People join teams to create. People like building things. Small groups ignite fast. Teams start strong. New teammates gather, share an idea for what’s possible, and launch real work built from back-and-forth exploration, shared vision, and a real sense of moving forward together. For a while, each member holds tightly to the same direction, fueling progress with every conversati...

Social media, politics, relationships, constant updates, and the plain noise of daily life can be pretty unfriendly. Destroying our calm, as they said in Firefly. While we might think many of these are totally unnecessary; they eat up our focus and fuel our anxiety. Without intent, our best energy is totally drained before we reach the work that matters. Why Focus Feels Impossible It’s natural to...

I am currently involved in three projects that need to happen quickly, have a lot of unknowns, and require some serious human collaboration. All three projects are using AI as a processing tool for all the information we need to process. It isn’t replacing anyone, it’s doing some specific functions that would take us weeks to get done otherwise. It’s always flawed, but it’s always useful. That's w...

John Shook and I were standing in a factory. He breathed in deeply and smiled and sighed, “You know, I just love factories.” He looked so at home, at peace. He was in his element in the factory we were in. The feel of it. The sound. The energy. The flow. The mistakes. Dude just loves factories. When Toni and I are doing our Modus-style value stream mapping workshops, this is kind of how I feel. It...

Modus Institute | Upcoming Events In this episode of the podcast we are speaking with Brad Brown, Fire Chief of Grand Rapids, Michigan, and Alex Baszler, their performance and management reporting specialist. What gets me about Brad and Alex’s system isn’t just that they have boards to manage the department, it’s the more-than-decade of sustainability. Most workplace improvement initiatives flame...

Modus Institute | Upcoming Events This is a way of working made of ten principles that build upon each other. It is a way. A system. A whole. You can add to it, you can change it, but you must know why you are doing so. The quotes are all from the book The Collaboration Equation . Humane Work reader-supported. Keep the words flowing and come to our monthly calls by becoming a paid subscriber. The...

Work isn’t just a task. I watched a project manager have what I can only describe as a quiet breakdown in her beautiful 18th floor office. She was surrounded by three laptops, two phones, and a set of kanban boards so full of different colors and shapes you needed a 2 hour conversation just to figure out what was going on. " I’m seeing my work, but I can't remember what I'm supposed to be doing, "...

Ethics: The study of what is right and wrong and how we should treat other people. Ethical: Doing what is right and good according to rules about how people should behave. Ethics and AI should be a very constant topic right now. AI can now write your LinkedIn posts , draft your emails, write your heartfelt apology to your spouse. For overloaded people, the temptation to hit "generate" and take the...

Taming Digital Chaos: Practical Strategies from the Kanban Evolved Course Modern work is overwhelming, not because we’re lazy, but because digital tools and platforms constantly compete for our attention and give us so many options…so many things we could be doing with our time. We always feel the FOMO of these options and then get stuck in productivity hellscapes. In our latest Kanban Evolved ses...

A Modus Model Monday Post Work keeps surprising you by taking too long. You can write it off to interruptions, to things "not being explained right"… but it's time to embrace the complexity and build systems that help you see it coming. Hofstadter's Law Hurts "It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law." Douglas Hofstadter said this haunting quote way...

Everyone's talking about flow …that magical state where work moves smoothly through your system and your team is made of productive energy. Flow can’t happen if you are experiencing drag…and every team does. You can't have flow without addressing drag . You can visualize your work all day long, set up the prettiest Kanban board in the world, and limit your work-in-progress religiously. But if you...

Can You Feel It? Work feels heavier than it should. How we relate. How we communicate. And how we don’t. Deadlines slip, tempers flare, and once-motivated people withdraw. It feels like it’s “just work”, but it doesn’t have to be. Workplace toxicity seldom arrives with fanfare and announcements, it hides in invisible bottlenecks , muddled handoffs, and unspoken tensions. Toxicity oozes slowly. We...

In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity. —Albert Einstein Some of you might be thinking, “ yeah, this had better be a really great opportunity…. ” Every morning now, my day starts with a walk through my mother’s Omaha neighborhood (which is a huge and weird neighborhood. Not quiet suburb, not quite city, very 1960s). It’s a simple daily routine, walking with some friendly faces, changing rout...