Personal Kanban: Mapping Success for Independent Professionals with Tonianne DeMaria

Please note, this transcript is by AI, so there will be a few glitches, although most names should be accurate.

Nigel Rawlins: Tonianne, welcome to the Wisepreneurs podcast. Could you tell us something a little bit about yourself and where you're from

Tonianne DeMaria: Absolutely, first, thank you for having me, Nigel. This is lovely. I am originally from New York City, spent 23 years there. Uh, I cut my teeth in the fashion industry. Um, I was a buyer for a while, for about six years I worked in the industry, absolutely loved it. I got an opportunity to live in a little medieval farming town in Germany, uh, which effectively put an end to my fashion career.

But I jumped at the opportunity and I loved my time there. I did a lot of traveling when I was in Europe and, about after a year, I came back to the States, wound up in Washington, DC, and I went back to school for something that I realized I loved when I was in Europe and that was history.

So I went back to school to become an historian. So I did my undergraduate work and my graduate work in history. And, um, I worked as a public historian. I had my own gig. I worked with monuments, memorials, and museums. I was very interested in public narrative, how official narratives occur. And, I was actually working on a novel, an historical novel at that point, and I received a message from a mutual friend, Jim Benson and myself, and they said this gentleman is working on a book on social media, and he needed some help with some history background.

And so, this was probably about 16, 17 years ago. And so you didn't have a heck of a lot, you didn't have the spate of collaboration tools that you do now, but I had never met him in person. I was living in DC. And so what we would do every morning is we would jump, we'd jump online on Skype, we would jump into a shared Google doc.

And we, he had built this rudimentary visual tool Sticky notes, and it showed all the things that we had to do in the book, all the things we were currently working on, and then all the things we had completed. And we would just get into the shared doc. Now, we didn't, we had never met each other, so I bring that up because you consider the need for psychological safety with somebody that you're writing with, and I just want to put a pin in that, and I'll get back to that in a little bit.

But we would just write, and we would write for hours and hours and hours, and And, um, you know, I could see him in the doc, he could see me in the doc, we'd be redlining, you know, we'd have a little conversation. And then one day he said to me, Sweetheart, don't you have to cook dinner? And I said, I just ate breakfast.

He's like, it's eight o'clock where you're at. And I looked at the clock and I was like, holy smokes. We were in such a state of flow that we were working for 12 hours. And it was because I had the clarity over the work that I was doing. Um, I had the agency to change things if I needed to change them. He wasn't pushing work onto me.

I was able to pull work when I had the capacity to process it. Um, I was able to see completion, which gave me that amazing neuro reward, both serotonin and dopamine. And being able to pull tickets into 'done', like physically pull them into 'done', like having the kinesthetic feedback in them, it helped create a virtuous work cycle because I was being rewarded for completion.

Not just getting the neural reward for starting something new and the, and the reward that comes with novelty. So it really did help create this virtuous cycle. And that's pretty much how Jim Benson and I started with the whole Personal Kanban movement, I guess, after all this time.

Nigel Rawlins: That's probably very important because that's, that's how I came across you having read your book, the Personal Kanban, Mapping Work and Navigating Life. And yet, that was written in 2011. Now I reread it this week before I spoke to you, and it is, just, I don't even know how to describe it, just blew my mind I suppose.

I thought this is such a fantastic way of working. Now I did read it earlier and I did try it and, and I do use Trello now, um, but I realised that, I don't know whether it's me, I, I can be all over the place and I need a system to, to, to really start controlling because I, I say look I want to do this thing but I never get it done.

So, tell us a bit more about that experience turned into the book.

Tonianne DeMaria: So, we were writing blog posts about, so let me back up a bit. We were working on that one book. It was called Instant Karma. Ten principles of social media. This is the ascendance of the social media movement at that point. In fact, we had met over social media, over this silly little platform called Plurk at that time.

And, we're writing this book and in the interim, Jim got a call from a gentleman in Washington, D. C. where I had been living and he wanted him to do this project management job with him. And he asked me, he said, hey, would you like to, would you like to collaborate on this? And I said, sure.

So, um, Jim moves to Washington, D. C. for about six months, was, it was a six month gig. four months in, after we were sitting on the floor of his apartment, not having gotten paid the $80, 000 that we were owed, we just started writing blog posts about how he had moved, how he had closed his office in Seattle and moved to Washington DC, utilizing a board with sticky notes as a backlog.

So he had broken this board down into three columns. It was like options, doing and done. And he gave himself a WIP limit, work in progress limit, in that middle column on, on, on doing, for no more, no more than three tasks. And so we were writing about how he closed his business, how he, you know, packed up his office, how he shipped things out here, how he started to manage the process out here.

And we were doing this just, just through blogs. And people were like, where's the book? Like, what do you mean, where's the book? It's just, it's, and this was a direct quote from us. It's just sticky notes on a whiteboard. And then we started hearing from the weirdest places. We thought that, if anybody this would resonate with, it would be software developers.

Yeah, we heard from teachers, and we heard from parents, we heard from educators, we heard from homeschoolers, we heard from scout leaders, and they were telling us how their kids were utilizing this to learn the alphabet, to help with violin practice, and they were so excited to move those tickets, and that it was speeding up their progress, and we spoke with a social scientist, who started to explain why this was, why we were hearing from different generations, different demographics, all around the world, all different verticals.

They said, the Kanban is predicated on the story arc. So you have birth, conflict, and resolution. And that pattern is understandable in any culture. Right? And, and that is what made it so accessible and so compelling. But we likewise started to delve into the neuropsychology, the behavior economics, and the psychology about why this works.

We know that completion literally feels good. You get a neural reward from completion. But we also know that you get a reward from the dopamine of completion, and that makes you want to pull more tickets into doing. Prior to having a visualization, we would start multiple projects at one time because we're chasing, we were chasing the novelty, we're chasing that feel good.

And we know social media is based on novelty, right? We want it. We, we, we go into these rabbit holes because we're constantly seeing something new and that's exciting for us. So how do we build systems that reward us? For keeping novelty at bay. And that's what that WIP limit does. It makes you focus and finish.

And so, the other reward that we learned about, If I were to ask you, Nigel, You ever use a to do list? Okay. Have you ever done something that is not on your to

do list? And then what do you, and then what do you do?

Nigel Rawlins: you just feel guilty because you've still got to do that thing that you never get around to doing.

Tonianne DeMaria: Have you ever written down that thing that you've already completed on your to do list after you've completed it?

Nigel Rawlins: I do sometimes, yes, I have in the past, yeah,

Tonianne DeMaria: Could, may I

Nigel Rawlins: because I've done something, I'm glad, you

Tonianne DeMaria: Exactly, and you want the kinesthetic feedback of crossing it out, right? So we all do that. We all do that. So that, so giving us, giving us a system by which we are rewarded for completion, um, that feels really good.

Nigel Rawlins: I agree, I do have all the completions because I use Trello. It's, and I have the doing done there. Often I'll, um, do the job straight away. Cause what in my business, people, send me something that needs to be done on their website. I do it and then I just drop it into the done. Now I don't always go and have a look, but it's in the done if I need to tell them what I've done. But most of my work gets in that done folder. But as I said, I've got a Trello board for every one of my clients. And, uh, So I don't always get physically see it, so I'd have to have a massive great board if I was going to do it physically.

Tonianne DeMaria: Does your clients have insight into the status?

Nigel Rawlins: They just see the job gets done. They're quite happy.

Tonianne DeMaria: So when you don't hear anything else, that's really interesting. So chasing work. So one of the, one of the benefits, especially since lockdown and you know, the ascendance of, or I should say the normalization of hybrid teams remote work. What happens when we're not receiving work from somebody?

We make an assumption, they're lazy, they don't care, they're deprioritizing us. We make it about us. It's because we have no insight into their capacity. So, increasingly, we've been working with teams since COVID that are predominantly distributed. And you and I have had a conversation about this in the past.

We have a tendency to judge other people by the outcome of their actions, where we judge our own selves by our intentions. And that's not, that's not fair. So by giving, by giving teams insight into each other's capacity, their workload, what they're working on, because if I'm not hearing from you, and I know you owe me work, if we are sharing a board, I could look at your board and I could see where my work is on your board, but then I could also maybe see that you have busted your whip.

You have busted that number three. There may be 10 other emergencies that I could see on your board that are taking priority, understandably, that are taking priority over my work. But now I, I have insight into that. I am no longer calling you a slacker.. I am no longer personalizing why I haven't received that book. And that visualization is giving us a mechanism to have a conversation about maybe why your work is late.

And so now, we can have a conversation about you have these 10 other tickets in there. Is there anything that somebody else can take? Take ownership over. How do we help you manage your capacity? And prior to visualizing our work, how did we ever really know we had a capacity? You know, our capacity was basically, okay, have an eight hour day.

Well, that's not, work doesn't, work should not fit into eight hours. Work should flow and we are not unconstrained resources. We need a lot of slack. We should not be processing, you know, as knowledge workers, we should not be sitting at our desk for eight hours and just producing because where's the thinking, where's the reflection.

So that's one of the elements of Kanban that we appreciate is that at the end of the done, we often say done is not the end state of our work. So we will add another column perhaps after done that's retrospective. So after, you know, with some teams we'll have them put subjective well being on a ticket.

How did this piece of work make you feel? And they will use these highly sophisticated metrics. A smiley face. This piece of work made me feel really good. Or they'll have a face with, you know, just like a neutral line across for the mouth and it's ambivalent. It was fine, it was just work. Or then we'll see tickets that have unhappy faces on it.

And having that kind of feedback from a team member is really important because now you're learning about the work, right? It's a metacognitive tool, but now you're learning about why didn't this piece of work go the way that this person needed it to? And so you could have a conversation. And so what we do is when we see that final column, you know, with a couple of sticky notes from a couple of members of the team that are all unhappy, we will essentially do what they did at Toyota.

We will pull that proverbial Andon cord. We will stop the line and we will have a conversation with those team members and say, why all these unhappy faces? What was it about the work did you not enjoy? Did you not appreciate? Were you up against a too rigid of a deadline.

Did you not have the resources? Did you not have the skill? Um, And the reason that that is important, of course it's important to make sure that people are not being overtaxed and people are doing work at a humane pace. But because when I see people that are unhappy about the work that they are producing, that tells me that that is a quality problem.

Because if they continue to work in a manner that is not comfortable for them as knowledge workers, that is going to impede this, that is going to impede the knowledge workers toolkit, which is the prefrontal cortex, where all your executive functions reside, right? So we hire these people to prioritize, to make decisions, to problem solve, and once they're in a state of fear, once they are in a state of overwhelm, that is the part of the body that is going to be compromised.

So their machinery will actually slow down. So we want to make sure that we are building visual systems, systems, I should say. And in this case, visual systems that promote humane work environments for people. And by humane, I mean honoring the people that are actually doing the work and the needs of those people.

Nigel Rawlins: So, would I be right in saying that an awful lot of knowledge workers who have to work with ideas and solve problems and figure things out, don't have a system in place, they just have a mass of work possibly coming through, they don't have any um, work in progress limits, would that be the normal state of world?

Tonianne DeMaria: And they wear, and we wear, overwork like a badge of honor. I'm guilty of it, too. I mean I fall off of my personal kanban wagon all the time. It's it is a process. But yes, there's a lot of cognitive reasons for that. I mean we have a bias towards action. We feel we always have to be producing and that's a problem.

So I In the book, we are very careful to make a distinction between between productivity, efficiency, and effectiveness. And I, I recognize some people view that as semantics, and we have, you know, the book has been translated into several languages, and we're very careful to pay attention to the nuance. We want to make sure that people are doing the right work at the right time, to the right degree, and that's, that's another thing that visual systems will help you do because it shows you what your priorities are.

It shows your options. Options are really important and language is really important. So in the book, we talk about the first column would be either backlog or 'To Do'. We have since changed our stance on the words to do. So we were, revisiting a client in Seattle, Washington. Now the location is important.

And so we had spent a couple of weeks working with this team and we were going back for something called a boardwalk where we go back and we look at their Kanban and we walk through it. And so we're doing a boardwalk and we're asking, we're asking the folks on the team, okay, so we see these blue sticky notes.

What are those representing? And they're telling us the blue sticky notes. And we asked them to go through the board and she's explaining the red sticky notes. Those suggest that those were fires and we're tracking those so that we don't just put them out. We actually could have a Kaizen event and figure out how do we prevent those from happening.

The green tickets, those are all this particular client and as you can see they're moving relatively unimpeded through the value stream, no problem there. The orange tickets, they tend to get munged up because they rely on a team in another country and we don't have really good communication established with them yet and I'm like, okay, so what is this?

What is it? And I said, what is that white ticket? And they're like, what white ticket? I said, there's that white ticket in your backlog. That has no writing on it. Is that, is that a placeholder? And she says, what white ticket? And I said, that white ticket. And she said, Oh, that's not white. That's yellow. It's sun bleached. This was Seattle. It was sun bleached in arguably one of the gloomiest places in the United States in the middle of winter. And, because the title of that column said, To Do this, this was an empty sticky note. There were no words visible on the sticky note. But because it looked like it was a mandate, people did not feel they had the agency to touch it.

And that's when Jim and I had a huge conversation about, well, we have to make sure that people have the agency to recognize when something is no longer contributing value. You know, lean talks a lot about the elimination of waste at MODIS, we focus less on the elimination of waste for the sake of eliminating waste and more on the creation of value.

So if something is no longer creating value, then that is wasteful, but just eliminating waste for eliminating waste sake, and that ticket no longer by virtue of the fact that there was nothing written on it, people should have felt comfortable getting rid of it, but they did not. And so that's why we changed that first column to options.

We want people to have a trigger to be intentional about the work that they pull. Don't pull it just because it says To Do.

Nigel Rawlins: Now that's really quite interesting. Now you, you brought up the value stream. So the people who work for themselves, the independent professionals that I'm trying to encourage, to understand that, well, you're calling it options, it was, was the backlog or, or ready to pull out into doing and done. You described that as a value stream because I guess as consultants or trainers or something, you start. And when you're finished. You should get paid. We should talk

about that, but we didn't finish when you mentioned that you were sitting on the floor writing those blogs and you didn't get the $88, 000. Did you ever get that money?

Tonianne DeMaria: No, no, never. We got a book, we got a book out of it instead. That's, that's, that, that's the way I, that's, that's the way I justify it. You know, it was, um, how do I want to explain this? When I, when, when he came to DC, we had lunch with this gentleman and again, I didn't know Jim very well. And we left lunch. And he said, how do you think that went? And I said, that was the most uncomfortable meal of my life. And as I tell the story, $80, 000 later that we didn't get paid, I swore. And another consultant gave me, this is not mine, but he told me, Toni, if you can't break bread together, you can't make bread together.

And. Yes, I recognize that I am a walking, talking Italian stereotype, but I maintain that if we do the human with each other, that's the quickest way to build trust. And there is nothing more human than sharing a meal together, right? There's a, there's a, an Italian saying that if you have, and I'm sure it translates into other languages as well.

We have two ears, we have two eyes, but only one mouth and the mouth gets lonely. So we should always share a meal together. And that's, that's a big part of, that's a big part of the consulting that we actually do with Modus Institutes. Like when I, I just did a value stream mapping exercise with a new team yesterday, and that's a fairly cognitively demanding task exercise because you're, you're likewise envisioning a future state.

And that relies on a lot more heavy, heavy lifting for your brain. And I tell them, you're all adults. Get up, walk around. Get some fresh air, look out a window, eat, drink, do whatever you can to feel like your machinery is fully functioning. I think we're going to be looking at the term professionalism a little differently now than we did prior to when we, when we were all co located.

I think it's also because we're, we are more hybrid now, we are inviting people, whether intentional or not, but into our homes now for work. And also I think the new generation is just not going to suffer through some of the things like we suffer through, like I'm starving and it's 10 o'clock in the morning but I can't dare leave my desk until 12. 15 when it's my lunch break. Now we know you're going to get nothing out of me for those two hours if I am starving and I have to write a thoughtful document for you. So I think that the psychology of work, the humanization of work, or appreciation for those things, people are finally paying attention to those post lockdown.

And I'm, I am there for that and I'm very excited about that. And that's very much where I've been spending my time is how do we create healthy, humane, visual systems, utilizing things like neuroscience, behavioral, behavioral economics, the psychology of work. And we learned all about that from the feedback we got from Personal Kanban and people who were finding value in Personal Kanban in very strange ways.

Nigel Rawlins: The fabulous thing we're talking about there is, is being real about your work. And obviously if you're working for yourself as an independent consultant, you have got agency. You can get up and go and make a cup of coffee, which I will be doing after this talk. It's early morning here.

So coming back to this value stream, , that's one thing that really hit me because I suddenly realized you've got to start a job and finish your job to get paid. So the value stream's really, really important. So that's another thing about the personal Kanban.

Helping you visualize that and get your handle on it. And I think we were talking beforehand about people who may have ADHD yes ADHD.

Tonianne DeMaria: It was ADHD and Asperger's.

Nigel Rawlins: Is it normal nowadays that we're easily distracted? So a system like this is probably brilliant for people, because they can visually see, well, if I've got 55, 000 things on that board, which I must admit the first time I did, I did have, because for some strange reason, I've signed up for 20 different courses, and I've got 15 books I want to read, and I've got 18 clients I've got to look after, plus my stuff, so you can get overwhelmed. If you're working for yourself, that value stream is what pays for it all. It gets lost.

Tonianne DeMaria: Exactly. But how, how many of your tasks are actually value add tasks? So we have a tendency, let let me explain it like this. When we are working from a To-Do list, we optimize to cross off as many things on that to do list as possible. Okay. Because we get a reward. So, I may come in on a Monday morning, come in, come into my own office, and I'm like, Oh, I have, I have pay taxes.

I have, um, um, write a blog post. I have get back to Nigel about the recording. I have, you know, take my cat to the vet. I have get nail, make appointment, make hair appointment. I know. Making my hair and my nail appointment are going to take me two minutes, but I get to scratch those off first. Now, are they the most valuable task?

Arguably, they are the least valuable task, but my current system is rewarding me for quantity, not for quality of tasks. With the Kanban, you're able to see in your options, what are the options that are going to yield the most value. And I'm not saying that you should prioritize, always prioritize. You are, there's a lot of, there's a lot of understanding your context.

So I'm not saying you always have to pull your highest priority task. I am saying you have to pay attention that you do have tasks that are more, that, that yield more value. But here's the thing, I'm big into telling people I don't want you to manage your time. I want you to manage your energy. So sure, it's Monday morning.

I should not be making a hair and nail appointment first thing. I should be doing the most important thing, probably maybe the most, the most difficult thing, because I am freshest in the morning, and that's probably where I should do the most cognitively demanding tasks. However, When it comes to prioritization, we know that prioritization is one of the most highly cognitively demanding tasks because it envisions a future state, which is much more difficult.

And there's an element of risk in that, right? We don't know the outcome. Um, so I might prioritize my tasks for the day. But we may get to like one o'clock in the afternoon and I've just eaten lunch and I see what my other big hairy audacious, my b hag is, my big hairy audacious goal is. I just don't have the energy for that.

I know probably by two o'clock when I have my coffee that will kick in but at one o'clock, I just don't have it. That's when I pull, make the hair appointment task. You don't always have to pull the highest priority task if your capacity, your cognitive capacity, your emotional capacity.

You know, I'm not gonna pull the most important task at 445 on a Friday afternoon. I'm gonna pull the task I could probably complete. So, having different sized tasks in your backlog, having levels of difficulty, levels of enjoyment, those are, those are other ways that I will set up my system so that it's giving me what I need.

It's meeting me where I am in the day, my emotional state, my digestive state, what tasks are good for right after work, right after lunch. And like my writing tasks. So my business partner, he gets up super early in the morning and we'll just write. I can't do that. I have to get a lot of administration, administrative stuff.

When I write, I joke that I keep Sinatra hours. So give me between 10 and 2, 10 a. m., 10 p. m. and 2, 2 in the morning, my best writing because the rest of the country is asleep. I'm not answering emails. My Slack isn't going off. Nobody needs anything from me between 10 and 2 in the morning. The Kanban has showed me, based upon when I'm pulling tasks, how many tasks I'm pulling, it has likewise shown me when I'm most effective for doing administrative tasks, when I'm most effective doing creative work, when I'm most effective just doing writing. So it really does function as a metacognitive tool. It teaches you a lot about the way that you work.

And we're learning this. I mentioned at the top of the call that we thought we would be hearing from software developers and instead we heard from teachers and educators and kids. One of the most profound stories that I share, we were on a client site and, um, during lunch, a woman who was a mother came up to me and explained that her son was a slacker.

Her son was about 10 years old. They had moved, it was just her and her son, they had moved from the Ukraine to Canada. The client was in Canada. And he just didn't want to get any of his work done. And do you think, do you think that Kanban, And so what I did was, I said, let's set up his board. So I said, on each sticky note, tell me what course he had to do, how many times a week.

And as we set up his backlog for just one week, she looked at me and she started to cry. And I looked at her and I didn't say a word. There was, there were not enough hours in the day for us to move these tickets, and that did not include things like play, because he was a child. And she started to cry and she said, I don't believe I'm doing this to my son.

I get choked up thinking about it. And it was because she didn't see what his capacity looked like. None of us really know what our capacity is, right? I mean, Hofstadter's Planning Fallacy, you know, we will underestimate how long it takes us to do any, any, any task. Even if we've done that task before, we make a lot of assumptions about our work.

Cognitive biases kick in. And so we don't have a good read on what can we actually accomplish in a day and why that's important Is because so many of us get to the end of our days And we haven't stopped and then we look at our priorities for the day and we haven't touched one. And that doesn't mean that we were not effective during the day It's just that we don't have a mechanism to visualize the value that we did create and maybe if we are visualizing the value we created beyond the things that we planned would become better at planning because we would know throughout the course of every day, I tend to only get two things planned that I wanted to get done because there's all this other emergent work, which is completely acceptable.

It doesn't necessarily have to be fires, but in knowledge work, we know so much of our work is inventive. And at the end of the day, especially with people who are now working from home, we have to, we have to build in these rewards for people so that they're not working 24 hours and so that they're not, they're not existing.

Ultimately, any visual system I create for people at work, it's not for them at work. I want to create it for them as a human so that they can have a more fulfilling life at the end of the day.

Nigel Rawlins: that's incredibly important. So knowing that your day hasn't been wasted and that's an awful thing to say, wasted, because, you know, if I go out for a walk, I don't have any pets, but often, often meet dogs with their owners when I go walking, and it's a wonderful feeling. So that, that's part of being human.

So let's go back to it. So one of the problems about being in an office, I guess, and working from home, even if you're working remotely, or you've decided to work for yourself, is you do have to organize yourself. And, and the Kanban board, Is one way of doing it. So could you go through a process that maybe somebody who's going to work for themselves, and you work for yourself so you have to organize yourself as well. And running a business, there are several things you have to do. You've actually got to, well, you've got to get client work, so you've got to do some marketing. You've, uh, you know, if you do get client work, you've got to do their work, so you get paid.

Then you've got all your admins, right? And then you've got to have a life. So how would you suggest to somebody who's suddenly got to the point and said, well, look, I've got to have a better system. Where would they start?

Tonianne DeMaria: One of the benefits of a visual system is that you are able to surface patterns and through those patterns you learn about the way that you work. So for me, I use color, I use shape, I use avatar. So the way that I would do something like that is I would color code marketing I would color code business development, social media.

We have an online school called Modus Institute. I would color code faculty responsibilities. I would color code course creation. So that I understood, based upon the tickets that I pull into DONE, in their color, where are my efforts focusing? That's one way I would do it. Size as well, you know, smaller tasks, smaller ticket.

Maybe I can, now I'm very careful not to, I know in software development, T shirt sizing, estimating, I'm very careful with not really estimating the amount of time a task is going to take me because anybody who has ever said, Oh, I will be at the meeting in five minutes, I just need to go get this printed out.

Knows that there is no such thing as a just five minute task, especially when something as innocuous as a printer is involved. Something is going to happen. So I would probably start with that. I would likewise start with the simplest value stream. So we spoke about value stream. All a value stream is, are the steps you take to create value.

And you tend to work backwards when you're creating a value stream. So what is, what is your done? What is your definition of done? And so for people starting out, I would start out with the most simple value stream, which is your options. You're doing a pen and then done. And then what the pen is, is for work that maybe you've done some work on it. Maybe you had to make an appointment, you know, you schedule dentist appointment. Well, you call the dentist, you left them a message, but now you're waiting back. If you were to leave that ticket in doing, then you're creating a bottleneck. You can't pull another ticket in there.

So what I would do is I would move that into the pen. So simplest value stream options, DOING, PEN and DONE. Where a real value stream comes into play is when, let's say you have a project, and you utilize at the top of your Kanban the steps for that particular project. So it could be your sales funnel, it could be, you know, getting out a blog post, it could be creating a class.

And so that's what you would put at the top and you would have the different stages in that. So right now, Jim Benson and I are in the process of, um, in a week or so, we're going to be teaching a class on Obeya. When Obeya is, it's Japanese for large room or great room. And it's a visualization that teams could use.

It's an actual room where all the information they need for their team, their project, whatever resides. And we're going to be teaching a class in that. In order to ensure that we're not having meetings, status meetings, we never have status meetings cause the Kanban always tells me who's working on what, where they're at.

So instead of status meetings, we utilize that time for working sessions where we'll actually work together. So what Jim and I would do is we create a value stream for class. What does done look like on that class? All right, is done, when it's delivered to the student, or is done when the student is happy with it, or is done when students evangelize that class and tell other people.

So the first thing you have to agree on is what is your definition of done. For now, I would say it's just release the class. Well, what is the step right before that? Well, maybe some marketing. Step right before that. Okay, maybe working with my tech folk to get the class up onto our LMS.

What is the step before that? Well, it's to Let my faculty do a dry run of the class to make sure they're happy with it. What is the step before that it's me completing the class so we would work backwards One of the reasons we work backwards is we want to work from: what is the value that the client will be pulling from it or the end user will be?

We also do it backwards because it's very difficult to lie backwards I like telling people if you've got teenagers at home and you want to know where the holes in their story are, have them tell you their story backwards. You will spot the lie. And so it's very difficult for it's it's when we do value stream mapping exercises with people or we help them value stream for their kanban and we have them work backwards it also trips them up and makes them realize that they're ingesting so many assumptions into the way that they're working.

And why that's important for teams is because if you and I are on the same team creating the same product, but we're working in two different ways. There's probably going to be duplication of effort. There's going to be inconsistencies in quality. There's going to be, we're going to be working over each other.

There's, we're going to be losing money. We're going to be losing time. So this is another way of aligning the way that you are working and I am working. And if we bring a third person in now, everybody's working in the same way. One of the exercises we give people is, um, you're inviting us over for dinner. And you're making us a hamburger. Give us a value stream for that. And what's fascinating is how many people are like, okay, first I go out and I kill the cow. And then somebody's like, okay, I pulled the meat from the freezer. Another person is like, I'm going to go to some fast food restaurant, and we asked them, we're like, well, what is your end point? And some people the end point is just, you've made the sandwich. Another people the end point is, we're going to have coffee and dessert afterwards. For another person the end point is going to be that, Jim and Tony can't wait to come back to my house because I served them.

And so we show them through that exercise, how we all have very different assumptions about not just the steps that we are all taking in a project, but what does the end state look like? So until we visualize, until we have an exercise where all of us are agreeing on what this end state is, and I think it was Covey who talked about green and clean, I haven't read that book in years, but he talks about telling his son, I need you to go clean the garden. Son cleans the garden, comes in, father looks outside the window and sees nothing has changed. Is the son a slacker? No, the son cleans it to the extent that he thought it needed to be cleaned. So instead, he said, okay, this is, this is my standard. I want it green. I don't want any leaves on the grass. I don't want there to be any toys around or anything.

And I want it clean. I want, you know, I want the trash picked up. Articulating or agreeing upon, having a team agree upon, what is our definition of done? It avoids so many quality issues at the end of the day.

Nigel Rawlins: So where would they start with that? Cause I'm thinking, do you need a great big whiteboard or you can have a little whiteboard? How do you manage that physically?

Tonianne DeMaria: For an individual or for a

Nigel Rawlins: for an individual

Tonianne DeMaria: Okay, you know, for an individual, there's so many great tools out there. Currently, I'm using a tool called Kanban Zone, which I love because there's so many drop downs that you can put individual tasks, you can put images in it. Um, so I'm using, I'm using Kanban Zone currently.

You can do it on a Miro board. I don't know how many people are using Miro or Mural, creating a, utilizing a whiteboard. You could use it just, you know, I have, in as much as I can, I utilize online tools. I will then break down my tasks even further and they're on my wall over here. And it's just, or I'll have them on my desk.

You know, I'll pull like three tickets off my wall, slap them on the left hand of my desk. Hopefully they'll wind up on the right hand of my desk at the end of the day. And so what I will do is I will have people say, Take everything out of your head, all the things you need to do. One thing per post it note, put them in a backlog.

Put them in your options, put them in a backlog, whatever you want to call it. That's your first column. Your middle column is going to be your doing. You're going to give that a WIP limit. We like to use three as a WIP limit. It's not a rule. There's only two rules to personal Kanban. It's visualize all your work and limit your work in progress.

What you limit to, limited to, is ultimately up to you. We feel three is a comfortable number. And then your final column, then you have that PEN and then you have DONE. And then I will look at my backlog and I say, okay, what are the three most important tasks I should do today? And I will pull those into doing, and I will start working on them.

And then if I, I'm dependent upon somebody else or have to collaborate with somebody else and I'm waiting on I'll put that in the PEN and then as I work on something, I will pull it into DONE, pull something else into DOING, do a little work, pull it into DONE. A tool that has always helped me extend the value of my personal Kanban.

Francesco Cirillo came up with this years ago. It's called the Pomodoro technique and Pomodoro relates to the tomato timer. And what he does when can't get enough focus, when everything is going on, I will turn. My Slack status, I will put a little tomato next to my name, which everybody in my organization knows Toni's gonna do a pomodoro, don't bother for 25 minutes.

I will turn the kitchen timer on for 25 minutes, you could do it on your, on your desktop. And for 25 minutes I will do nothing but that task. I will not get up and get a cup of coffee. I will not flip through tabs on my desktop. And it is amazing what just 25 minutes of intense focus can do for your effectiveness. And so I try to keep my tickets To about 25 minutes, if I can, simply because I like to know at the end of the day, I have a lot of completed tickets. And when people ask me, how big should my ticket be? I often joke that for the longest time, Jim and I had write book in our, on our board, which is just write book.

Well, you're not seeing any action on that ticket, so it's going to be the most demotivating ticket ever. So I tell people, break down your tickets, your tasks, such that you see tickets in your done column at the end of every day. Gamify it. Do what you need to be effective, and to see that you're being effective.

Because that will create that virtuous cycle.

Nigel Rawlins: That's the thing I was thinking about is, if you've got a fairly big project with multiple parts to it, you're saying it needs to be broken down. So your, um, your options board could be full of tickets. So how do you manage a project in Kanban?

Tonianne DeMaria: So you talk about big, that's really interesting. So, um, they've done studies that has showed that there is a crossover in the brain between the part of the brain that processes physical pain and the part of the brain that processes social pain. So what are social pain?

So Dr. David Rock of the Neuroleadership Institute came up with this concept called the SCARF Method, and SCARF is an acronym for Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness, and Fairness.

SCARF is arguably an alternative to Maslow. These are elements that trigger either risk or reward in humans. So when we are building visual or human systems, we should be aware of these things because as I mentioned to you earlier, they've discovered that there is a crossover in the brain that processes physical pain and social pain.

So if I were to ask a group of people, tell me about a time, where you broke a leg or you broke an appendage or you know, you were sick. People would probably tell me, but if I were to say, now tell me a time where you had your heart ripped out. I would pay attention to the people I'm asking and you could see viscerally, it is a very different experience.

We process that social pain in the same part of our brain as we do physical. Because of that, we know that that will likewise, impede our prefrontal cortex, our brain CEO. So we want to be very careful not to trigger those risks. So what are those risks? Overwhelm. Fear. So when you have a big project and you have a sticky note that says, you know, do taxes or write a book. It's going to engage your brain's fight or flight mechanism. It's too big. It's too risky. There's too many unknown variables. And the brain does not like risk. The brain optimizes for two things to minimize risk, maximize reward. So what is it going to do? It might shut down. It's going to fight or flight.

So what we want to do with our tickets, with big jobs is we want to bypass the amygdala. We want to make it so imperceptible, so it's just another thing that we have to do. This is essentially the element you've heard the word Kaizen. Japanese for small incremental improvements. Why are incremental improvements far more sustainable than wholesale transformations?

Well, because they're not as risky and they probably cost less. And because if they fail, you can look at it as an experiment. So we want to keep things, tasks, small, manageable chunks. So the bigger the project, just break it down into chunks because you do want to be able to get the kinesthetic and neural feedback, a neural reward that you're achieving completion towards your goal.

So again, you have a big, a big project. Let's say it's a book. Currently I am working with the translator for personal Kanban in Italian. If I were to have a sticky note that just says, You know, Italian translation, that's just too big. So I needed to break that down. So the way that I'm bringing it down is by chapter. So each ticket would be a chapter. And so I'm working on a chapter, but then I would break the chapter down into either 10 pages each or five pages each so that I am not just working on one chapter a day so that I do see that I've got three tickets in doing and that likewise helps me, with novelty. The brain loves novelty.

It's not necessarily always great for us though, I mean, we're in the middle of writing something and then we get an alert on our phone. That's novelty and novelty can be risk. So the reason that the brain pays attention for novelty is because when we were living, on on the plains, and we heard a rustle in a bush. That's novelty. That's something out of the ordinary. That could very well be meaning to kill us. So we had to pay attention for novelty. We're always scanning our environment for risks. Now we scan our environment for risks that are not going to kill us, but that novelty Is that alert on our phone?

And so I was teaching a class one day, and it was on something pretty, pretty intense, pretty cerebral. And there were about five people at this table, and this gentleman's phone kept going. He kept getting alerts, social media alerts, and they just were nonstop. And you could see it was clearly upsetting everybody else at the table. And he said, Oh, it's okay. I'll just handle it. He takes his phone and he turns it over.

And I, um, I said to him, well, what does that do? And he's like, Oh, I, you know, it won't distract us anymore. And I, I looked at him, I said, is that really not distracting you? Are you really not wondering who is trying to contact you? What is so important on your phone? And he looked at me, he's like, well, yeah, but I could just run out and do it.

I said, but, between now and when you run out to do it, that's going to be hanging around in your short term memory, and that is going to be compromising your focus, your attention, your ability to learn, your ability to remember. So keeping novelty at bay is very useful when it comes to us being productive and effective.

And again, that WIP limit helps us with that seeing how close we are to the endpoint helps us with that.

Nigel Rawlins: Now, isn't that interesting? Because, in a manufacturing job, or a job where you had to use your hands, it was pretty obvious what you had to do. But in knowledge work, it's not. And I don't know if we've ever been taught to actually do knowledge work.

Tonianne DeMaria: That's the problem So so many people are enamored with the idea of TPS Toyota Production System. Arguably what put Toyota on the map as this fledgling loom company prior to World War two, right? And they see that it revolutionized, and they want to superimpose it on their marketing firm. And that, it makes me, it makes me sad that I believe the reason people are doing that is because they are not given the time to think about the work they're doing at work.

They just have to do. So of course it makes sense that they're going to, this worked for Toyota, perfect. We're going to do it here. You're not a fledgling automobile manufacturer in the post war era. You're just not, and you're never going to be. And you're likewise not Spotify, and you're likewise not Valve, and you're likewise not all these other amazing organizations that have taken a methodology. And utilized it to good effect. So being intentional about the way that you are adapting. We did not take Kanban from Toyota and apply it to knowledge work without tweaking it. I mean, I understand the need for recipes. I understand the need for religions. It gives people a sense of security and safety. So the thing about knowledge work versus manufacturing, People on the, on the factory floor probably understood how the machinery worked. Do we understand how the machinery of a knowledge worker works? So I mentioned, I mentioned SCARF, Dr. David Rock's model that stands for Status Certainty Autonomy Relatedness and Fairness. This is one of my favorite models ever. If we're building visual systems for people. We need to make sure that cognitively they're getting everything that they need.

So status, the S in Scarf. We need to make sure that they are not threatened by either their lack of status, by somebody having more status, more power. So how do we do that? Well, we can do that with Kanban by they're able to pull work when they have capacity. They do not, they are not beholden to somebody with a director or, you know, a higher title, pushing work onto them.

There is enough respect that they have agreed on that is ingested into the system that people, no matter who they are in the organization, only pull work when they have capacity for it. There is no such thing as a peon. Everybody's a human. All right, so that's status. Certainty. You have certainty when you're looking at the Kanban because you know everything that you have to do at a glance.

There are no surprises in that. Now, sure, things are go, emergent work is going to surface, but at least you know you can stop one thing. You don't have to accomplish everything at once that we know that that's, that's a priority. Autonomy. Again, you have agency and autonomy over pulling your own tickets and nobody pushing things on you, not acknowledging that you have a capacity.

Relatedness is huge. You now see that you are not alone. You now see where you fit into the overall creation of that end product. That feels good. And then fairness. You won't have, Nigel, you will not have, Okay, we know that we're going to give Nigel a WIP limit of 1 and we're going to give Tony a WIP limit of 6.

That just doesn't happen. So you have that, you have that balancing. So there are a lot of elements of SCARF that visual, visual systems just by virtue of being visual help you with. Um, the fact that we process visual information so much quicker than we do, written information right there is going to help with cognitive capacity.

It's going to free up some cognitive capacity. The fact that we have the ability to show you instead of telling you I'm overwhelmed. Prior to visualizing our workload, if you came into my office and said to me, I don't see you working, why are you not working? Then I look like I'm a slacker.

But if you see my board and you see what I'm working on right now, you could clearly see I'm thinking about what I'm doing. It likewise gives me a mechanism. If you are, if you are my manager and you walk into my office and say, Hey, I have this five minute task, you know, you come at me with status. So right there and then I'm probably gonna not even question it because you, you come with, with some political authority, with some clout.

But now that I have my board, I can look at my things that are already agreed upon that we've prioritized. I can look at my board and say, this is great. I love this ticket. Should this supersede these other tickets? And invariably that's a conversation that you can now have.

So it's not that Tony doesn't want to do the work. Now it's a negotiation between me and leadership and they could say, Oh no, you know, this could wait or yeah, this is way more important than that. But in the absence of the visualization, I was stopping everything regardless of whether or not this was really important.

So yeah, understanding the needs of the humans doing the work is so important, especially now. You know, we're, we're confined to these 32 inch monitors now. You know, we don't know who's married, we don't know people's dogs names, we don't know, you know, what somebody did over the weekends anymore.

So giving people the opportunity to not make assumptions that you're them and I'm in us and, you know, that we are working on different projects when we're just working on different parts of the project. We have a program in our online school called LAVM, Lean Agile Visual Management. And we offer it as either a cohort or individually at your own pace.

And so currently we're putting through a cohort of about 10 people all around the world. These people have never met. And we put up an Obeya. So basically a, a room for all of them in, in Miro, that all the information they need to collaborate, to communicate, all the information about what the definition of done for each of the sections of this program looks like.

And the first visualization I put up in there was getting to know you. It's just a silly visualization like name, where you work, what are you reading, what do you enjoy, what are your hobbies, what do you hope to get out of this class. And people filled this in. And then I started noticing little sticky notes.

Hey, you ride horses? I ride horses too. Or, oh, I love that book. If you've loved that book, you should do this. This was all before we ever got together for our first meeting. These people were all different ages. All different demographics from, I think, four continents. You have to, and now they are required to self organize as a team to get through this course. Do the exercises together, do, and there's so many different time zones. These people make me want to cry. The very first time we all got together, Like, hey, Ahmed, it's so nice to meet you. They knew each other. People were having conversations and I didn't even need to be there. They came up with a name for their team.

They became an us, and it was the visualization that kicked it off. And now I have these beautiful artifacts from, I think we're on our, we're on our fourth cohort of this Lean Agile Visual Management. And I get a note from, Genevieve, a couple of months ago, who was heading over to Spain, and was going to go meet two of the people from her, they were in the first cohort, they actually became friends.

I have other people from a previous cohort, who are now teaching together. And it was the visualization that did that, because we didn't have the benefit of sitting down and literally breaking bread together. So we had to figure out a way to fast track psychological safety, and the visualization we found did that.

Nigel Rawlins: This sounds so fantastic, all of it. So we're probably coming to the end now, how are people going to learn more about this? You have an organization that helps train that and you run camps as well

Tonianne DeMaria: Yes, so our company, our consulting company is called Modus Cooperandi for a reason, because we believe that everything is the result in one form or another of collaboration. Jim, my business partners and co founders latest book is called The Collaboration Equation.

Individuals and teams create value, and so that is very much our MODIS, if you will. The extension of that is MODIS Institute, which is our online school, and we also have an online community, so anybody can join. It's free to join, and we have conversations about exactly what we're talking about today, um, human ways to work.

For the individual, for the solopreneur, the entrepreneur, um, for people starting out. We have, we have a fairly large community there of people who are white knuckling. They don't want to leave work because they don't know what's going to come next, but they're well beyond retirement age, but they just, they just, they get as jazzed about this as we do.

And we talk about things like visualization of work, tools, methodologies, but more so we talk a lot about the humanity behind why these things work. So the class that we have coming up, the class about OBEA, how to build an OBEA, there's a large component about the psychology of work. That's very much a part of MODIS Institute as well.

And so they can absolutely come there. They can reach out to me. I can, I'm always happy to have conversations with folks, giving them options for where to start. But I think at the end of the day, the easiest thing to do is take everything out of your head, put one thing per post it note, slap it on your wall, give yourself, three things at any given time.

Pull things into doing, and start working like that. And I tell people, don't even do it at work. Do it for home. You know, do it for, if you have to, if you have a project at home. If you have to, if you have a to do list for your household, you know, just maintaining your household, I do that. I have, you know, grocery shopping, clean, clean kitchen, you know, empty fridge, throw out trash.

And it's just those little things during the course of the day that I'm able to pull into done. It doesn't become onerous anymore. But, we tend to fetishize the complex. This could not be a simpler system. As is evidenced by the fact that we have three year olds. So, one of my favorite stories, and I'll end with this, is we had heard from a single mom of three little ones who had read the book and she said it was a nightmare getting her little ones out of the house in the morning.

And so what she did is she created a Kanban on the wall and it was low. It was really low on the wall. So the little ones could reach it. She used like masking tape or, and just like sticky notes and, and she would put, Um, make bed for each of them and, uh, brush teeth and make sure backpack, you know, was ready for school.

Make sure your lunch was packed. And for the littlest one who couldn't read, she had images. So there was an image of a toothbrush. It was an image of a bed. And she said, When the littlest one was having difficulty doing stuff and the other kids were finished, they would swarm and help the littlest one, because now it wasn't, they were competing with each other, but they were also competing with themselves, but now they were this group.

And she said they were showing up at the front door 10 minutes before school every morning, because they were so proud that they had pulled all their tickets . It became a game. became a game of work. So, you know, that's, it's as simple as it gets. Give yourself a system that rewards you for the work that you're hiding and acknowledge that, as, as I, I recently saw this on a needle point, we are not human doings, we are human beings.

So if there's anything I want Personal Kanban to help people do better. It's that you enjoy your life and you actually live. Because if there's anything the past couple of years have taught us, is that life is very, very precious. And so if you're not accomplishing the things you want, like date night, put it on the list.

If you want to join a book group, put it on your kanban. If you want to start a habit, put it on your kanban. You want to start meditating, put three meditation tickets on your board. At the end of the week, if you've pulled one into done, congratulations, you now meditate. Use the board to be kinder to yourself and to start living.

And that's, that's the best advice I could give anybody. Be kind to yourself.

Nigel Rawlins: I think that's brilliant. I will put all these links in the show notes. So Tonianne, thank you very much for being my guest. It's been a wonderful conversation. It's really a reinforced, Personal Kanban for me, and I do recommend people read the book.

Again, I'll, I'll put all the details in the show notes. So thank you for being my guest.

Tonianne DeMaria: Thank you so much. I really enjoyed this. Appreciate you.