The Fallacy of Work / Life Balance

"Yes, well that's the fallacy of  work / life balance, isn't it? I mean...it's all life.”~ Lean Coffee participant, Sydney June 2011

The Fallacy of Work / Life Balance – Work life balance is more than personal and it is more than a choice. Whether we are employers or employees, we need to recognize and respect that “work” is part of life, not some opposing force we balance against life. Studies show that a strong collaborative corporate culture helps organizations weather the current economic downturn better. Pre-Lean Campconversations have drawn focus on this fallacy and toward respect in the workplace.Work / Life Balance. It's one of those concepts that just simply falls apart under the slightest scrutiny. At what point at work do we cease to be alive?I've just come off two weeks of working / living with AMP, a large financial services firm based in Sydney, Australia. This is a conservative company that is examining just what "conservative" actually means. The conclusions people were coming to were very exciting for me.Several people agreed that people at AMP bifurcated their lives. They would come to work, focus on work, and then leave at the end of the work day to return to their homes and presumably to their “lives.” Everyone agreed that this scenario was true…for other people. But not for themselves.As we spoke they realized that they were holding back at the office, because they assumed their co-workers were bifurcating their lives – but in reality very few people actually did so. Everyone was wanting work / life … balance?No.They like their work. They like their lives. There was no division. There was no opposing weight to balance.What they wanted was their home life to respect their work life and vice versa. They wanted these two elements of their lives to stop being a zero sum game. Some days home life happened during working hours. Some days it was the other way around.Some days …? Or maybe all days.Definitely all days.Life happens during life hours.Work / Life Balance is a fallacy. It's all living. Right now, you are living. Wherever you are reading this, you are living. And everywhere you go today, you'll be living there, too.Now, I ask you. In this moment, what is the thing of highest value you could be doing?Think about it.Then do it.Image by Tonianne DeMaria Barry. 

You Cannot Yell at a Board with Stickies on It

Arguments are not productive

It is now two weeks before your major deadline.For the last four weeks, you’ve barely slept a wink. You know your team is behind. They know they’re behind. But the deadline is firm. Your team promises you - nay, vows to you it will be done on schedule. You, in turn, promise the client who in turn, promises their bosses. Their bosses are promising their clients …Everything is riding on this release.You close your office door and look at the remaining unfinished requirements. You begin to add up the time you think it will take to complete.Nope. Not even close.You go to your team and tell them what you’ve found. They get upset and begin yelling about how meetings like this are what slows them down. "If only we could just do our work!"You yell back. "We’re too far behind! We’ll never finish!"The situation is as predictable as it is unnecessary.What we have here is not necessarily a failure to communicate but instead, a confluence of avoidance behaviors exacerbated by a lack of a visual control.Huh?Okay, it’s kind of convoluted, so let’s bullet it out:

• No one ever had a device that could show - visually - the state of the project and the context in which decisions were made;

• Since no one could see what was happening, they relied on reports that lagged decision-making and often told an incomplete story;

• Incomplete elements were then left to be discussed in meetings, which were often adversarial, conducted hastily, and poorly documented;

• People were then required to rely on individual memory and interpretation of events;

• When these memories diverged, they became angry when their interpretations were perceived as being different from reality;

• Divergence from reality then became a point of conflict;

• The points of conflict were argued about;

• Those in positions of power declared their faulty memory to be the standard, and those who were not in agreement were treated like failures;

• Blame for divergence from schedule or delivery promises was then directed towards "the failures,” and

• Everyone loses: product is late, the workforce is demoralized, management is angry, money is lost, quality is deprecated.

Visualizing work on a kanban can help depersonalize arguments

Short form: No one had a status board to point to and say Look! You see? That is what is going on! Regardless of which side of the management / worker or client / consultant fence you might sit, reality is much easier to address when you can actually see it.A kanban (see image) is a status board. It shows who is working on what, which tasks come next for each group to pull from, and the rate at which work flows through the system. In addition to being a powerful project management tool, the kanban also decreases the animosity frustrating work can generate.You see, the issues that slow production are rarely sabotage, subterfuge, or incompetence. Instead, they're more likely due to lack of necessary information, conflicting expectations, hidden policies, and the intricacies of knowledge work. Seldom is it personal. But we personalize it nevertheless, because it’s all we have. We can’t make our tools work faster, so we yell at our people.A visual control gives the team a gift: a disinterested third party that merely reports reality. The kanban becomes an interactive arbitrator. Our work is no longer the responsibility of one person. On the board it becomes an object (the sticky note) that everyone involved wants to move. The inability to move a sticky note becomes a shared responsibility, and is no longer personified by the last person holding the task.In this way, the board depersonalizes work. Now, rather than yelling at each other, you can get together and yell at the stickies on the board.Wait, that sounds pretty stupid.If yelling at a sticky note seems stupid, why did it ever seem like a good idea to yell at your co-workers / employees / consultants? Did you think abusing them was going to spur them to greatness?With the kanban, we can look at the work as it happens, discuss changes that need to be made, and work towards our release date with realistic expectations.Image “Argument” by Fred Camino Image of kanban by David Laribee

Personal Kanban Webinar Friday Feb 18th 11am PST 2pm ET

zipcast logo-dark-sm

The awesome people over at Slideshare were gracious enough to ask us to help launch their new web conferencing product Zipcast. It should come as no surprise that we were honored to be asked and said "yes" immediately. Outside of Twitter and our own web site, Slideshare has been the single most effective tool we've found to spread the Personal Kanban meme.Slideshare currently hosts 3 of our Personal Kanban presentations. Combined, these slide decks have enjoyed approximately 30,000 views over the last year.So on Friday, we will be doing an Intro to Personal Kanban Zipcast. This webinar will cover:

• What is Personal Kanban

• Why is it necessary

• What is existential overhead

• How to set up your first Personal Kanban

• What "pull" means

• Using Personal Kanban solo and with kids, family, and teams at work

• A few interesting design patterns

Don't forget: Friday February 18th: 11am PT, 2pm ET please tune into our Zipcast page.And be sure to check out the awesome lineup of people helping Slideshare launch their new product.We're looking forward to seeing you tomorrow.

How I Cook

Mixed Wine and Sour Cherry Reduction

I frustrate people when I give cooking classes. They want measures. They want me to tell them what to do. Cooking isn’t like that. Cooking is about flavor, it’s about texture, it’s about the experience. It’s not about tablespoons or grams or whether something is prepared at exactly 375 for 20 minutes.So when your grandmother gives you her coveted, top-secret recipe for baked boiled squirrel al fresco, it will never taste the same as hers… if you follow the recipe. Because your grandmother doesn’t use the recipe, either.Whether it is soy sauce or olive oil or even something as universal as sea salt, a tablespoon from one producer will be very different from another.Just consider the variation among beef:

• USDA select (3rd grade) corn-fed beef from a grocery store that has likely been plumped with water;

• aged, organic, Choice steak (2nd grade) from a natural food market like Whole Foods or Choices;

• a Prime steak (1st grade) from a quality butcher; and

• a super-select Wagyu steak.

Bone-In Pork Chops with Mixed Wine Sour Cherry Reductions and Asian Pear

Bison Burgers with Maytag Blue Cheese and Grilled Naan

All will have flavor profiles and textures that vary wildly. The worst cut of Wagyu will be light years better than even the best cut of choice. So why would you ever expect food to taste the same from mere measurements?Just recently, I picked up a great looking piece of meat at Whole Foods. I decided I wanted to make pot roast in our slow cooker, which I’ve not used in years. I dug it out of storage, cleaned it up, and went to work on the pot roast.My wife Vivian asked what recipe I’d be using. I looked at her perplexed. What recipe? I simply couldn’t fathom using a recipe. I wanted pot roast. Granted, I’ve never actually prepared a pot roast. But that was besides the point.Later that evening we had pot roast, and it was quite good. Did I use a recipe?No.I used 12 recipes.The miracle of the Internet means that I don’t have to consult a book and choose one person’s vision of a particular type of food. I can now get 5, 10, even 100 versions of the same dish and see what is the same, what differs, what makes some unique. I learn about what Pot Roast is…not what one person says it is. Then I can begin to cook. I know what types of ingredients I need, what ingredients I have on hand, and what the flavor is I’m shooting for.Recipes end up being like “best practices.” In business, when a company encounters a problem, they often look for a set series of prescriptive, easily to follow steps that have solved that same problem elsewhere. The clincher here is that most problems are unique.Like ingredients, people are all different. We interact differently, we deal with change differently. Best practices are often followed as rote guides, and then fail.Why?Because we followed the recipe, but we didn’t actually cook.We follow what other people say will work, but we don’t find out what the gestalt is of what it is that we are making. We focus on instructions and not on actual goals.To truly solve problems, we need to be creative. We need to understand the various whys of a problem and then devise solutions. Otherwise we are merely treating symptoms.Remember, when working with visual controls like Personal Kanban or management processes your goals and the system you have employed to realize them are what’s important. The idea is not to become a slave to your board.  Whether it is building software, finishing a report at work, teaching your daughter the alphabet, or creating a perfect pot roast - other people can offer advice, but you are the chef.

Motivation Through Visualization: Seeing What is Really Important

Visualizing What is Important

When we wake up in the morning, we have a pretty good idea what we want to get done that day. To make those daily goals explicit, we created the Today (link) column for Personal Kanban.Our Personal Kanban serves many functions:

• It tracks our current work;

• It shows what we’re excelling at;

• It shows where we may be falling behind;

• It gives us an appreciation for our context;

• It lets us know when we’re overloaded and could use help; and

• It shows the status of our projects.

But our Personal Kanban can also inspire us. For me, there is one major goal I have that drives almost everything else I do. It’s very personal and important to me, so we put it in the Modus Cooperandi Personal Kanban as a reminder. That’s what I’m working for. It’s that yellow task up there, cryptically labeled “H4M&D.”For me, H4M&D gets a little closer every day. Even though the ticket doesn’t move, if I can close out my day with the understanding that I truly am a little closer to that goal, then the day has been a success. Granted, some days I move only the tiniest bit closer, but closer is still closer.I would recommend that you be judicious when putting anything like this in your Personal Kanban - make sure it is that important. You don’t want to clutter your board with 20 bits of inspiration that  get in the way of your work.Use your Personal Kanban to inspire. Make your inspiration visible and begin to work towards it. Like mine, some of your goals can be audacious. Keeping them visual is keeping them relevant. It helps you pull the right tasks, slog through the hard ones, enjoy the easy ones, and see them all in the context of your greater goals.