Modus Cooperandi : Evolution will lead you to unexpected places

Years back, when I was championing Scrum at Microsoft, I was mortified by the idea of being pigeonholed as “the Scrum guy,” not least because that might give people the wrong idea about my endorsement. What I was really trying to say was, as always, about conceptual frames. I was doing my damnedest to help people to see the frame as well as its contents.

As it was then, so it is now. I love my Lean blog, and I have a good deal more to say about the subject. I intend to keep it on the front burner for quite some time yet. I am completely delighted with the response that I’ve had from the software development community. But I still bristle at the thought of being “the kanban guy,” because it is my nature to bristle at such things.

I actually look forward to some far off day when I can let it cool down and focus on other things. Not the least reason for that is that I have interests that are relevant to design and management that are tangential to the topic of Lean. Actually, some of them would probably be recieved as outright heretical by any Lean purist. Fortunately, Jim and I are retooling the Modus Cooperandi website to provide more of a voice for those ideas.

One of those areas will be about the management of temporary, ad-hoc organizations of small, independent participants. Lean seems to be historically oriented towards durable, persistent organizations - perhaps a more Japanese world view. I have become more interested in the behavior of transient, situational organizations. Some of the particular topics will be resource pool management, auctions, coordination games, and social media. And yes, in our relentless pursuit of quality and economy, we will continue to put on our Lean frame from time to time in order to discover opportunities for improvement, because “you can take the man out of the flow, but you can’t take the flow out of the man!”