It is a beautiful Friday, birds chirping, sun out, window open at 6:30 am. Putting the final touches on The Collaboration Equation with Tonianne and my editor. Should get the book cover in a few days and beginning layout by late next week.
This paragraph from the book is why I keep doing this. We see such flaming examples of anti-collaboration, misinformation, and poor management that we become dejected, despondent. It’s easy and lazy to be jaded. Being professional and optimistic takes energy, it requires action.
When I see projects like this one, where a team has defined their own right environment, has set up processes to make it happen, and then see the shared, collaborative rewards…it works. It just works.
This is at the end of a story where their team had a fairly stressful, if not traumatic, day. A problem arose and the team immediately went to work making sure the impacts of the problem were dealt with. After they dealt with the problem, they immediately built a new process that made sure that problem never happened again.
They did this without push from me or management, they calmed the situation and solved the problem because they were collaborative professionals and that behavior was an expectation they had of themselves and each other.
Please go off and build something beautiful with someone else today.
If you’re having trouble finding that right environment with your team, give us a call. We absolutely love this stuff.
About Jim Benson
Jim Benson is an award-winning Lean and Agile systems designer. He is the creator of Personal Kanban and Lean Coffee. He is the co-author (with Tonianne DeMaria) of the best seller: Personal Kanban. His other books include Why Limit WIP, Why Plans Fail, and Beyond Agile.
He is a winner of the Shingo Award for Excellence in Lean Thinking and the Brickell Key Award. He and Tonianne teach online at Modus Institute and consult regularly, helping clients in all verticals create working systems. He regularly keynotes conferences, focusing on making work rewarding and humane.
