Season 2, Episode 7: Brian Kerr
Brian is a consultant who’s spent the last decade helping clients improve the quality and value of their work as they create space for lean transformation, practice continuous improvement, and get comfortable with change. More details: https://improvesomething.today/
For more information about Douglas Harding, here are a few places to begin:
Ernst Mach drawing that set Harding off on his adventure
Dan Klyn: Well, a welcome guests to another Sunday service. I'm so pleased to have Brian Kerr with me today. And, Brian is somebody that I first met about 15 years ago, I want to say. And, through the School of Information at the University of Michigan, he was a student there in the master's program and I was a new lecturer at the time back then and, we've stayed in touch, variously, I would say, Brian, ever, ever since. And, one of the reasons why I wanted Brian to talk with me today, there's a million of them, but I think the primary animating impulse is the way that Brian has resisted many of my enthusiasms about information architecture over the years and, much like my idol, Richard Saul, Wurman, I only really warm upon rejection. And so, through repeated rejections by a man whose point of view, I've come to trust and really value, when somebody that you, you trust and whose whose point of view you value tells you something different then what you want to hear—I would encourage all of you to find people like that and keep them in your life. And, I've been so, blessed to have you, in, in, in many roles in my life, Brian, but that's one of the ones that I'm most grateful for. So, how does that work for an introduction for you? How, how else can you explain yourself to my two guests today?
Brian Kerr: Explain yourself. Yeah. yeah, I mean, I was born at a young age, all that. I am, I am a Michigan, you know, the farm boy at heart, and, you know, I was, sort of floundering around in, professional job after, after I finished college worked for maybe five years or so. And then, my, my sweetie and I had the, like his and hers, let’s go get dueling banjos style masters degrees while the, while the getting's good. And, we ended up staying put, we were in Ann Arbor at the time, and I, spent some time at the School of Information. I took, you took your classes as a part of, one of the only, relatively few, courses I took in that department. That was a strange engagement and my, sweetie, was studying English as a second language instruction over at, over in, Ypsilanti down the road. So, yeah, I mean, that's where we first collided and, you know, one thing I really valued about that was really that, I think it was through your class, of course you, you taught—and also that same course, a couple of years thereafter, where I, you know, continued to meet some of the students that, you know, that I met a lot of people from that period of my life that I still kind of connect with and, move forward with. You know, I was thinking Dan about the, you know, I've got the like postcards and junk on the, on the wall back here and, you know, an astonishing amount of those are from students that I met through your coursework, which is just kind of a, kind of a strange thing, you know? So, yeah, so I'd say that's how we met and, and, we sort of kept him, kept in touch. And, I have done a lot of work that also coincided with the time when I more or less decided I just want to be it. A consultant. I just loved doing project based work. And so that's that period of time, about 2005 is when I started doing that, been doing it ever since. And you know, I do a lot of work that, you could look at it and say it's information architecture, or it involves the architecture of information. I, you know, do a lot of things through facilitation and so forth, but the point to that, but, as you said, I have resisted that label for better and probably for worse. And, and here we are, it's a beautiful, beautiful Sunday in the middle of summer. And what's undoubtedly the worst, the worst quarter of the worst year any of us have experienced in, in recent memories. So let's do it.
Dan Klyn: Yes, yes, indeed. And, And that's, I was going to ask you about the progression of your practice as a consultant over the 15 years or so that we've been knowing each other, but, but maybe based on what you just said, characterizing this, this current time that we're in. How about changes from, like, what did you expect the world would be in January or December last year. And, and then you're living now, I presume the way that, you know, the way that a lot of us. So did you, what are you not doing now or what's what do you, what have you had to do differently in COVID land?
Brian Kerr: Yeah, that's a good question.
Dan Klyn: I realize that could be an, an, a bottomless question. Like, well, fuck everything. But I'm curious, just as a consultant in particular, the kind of work that you like to do with other people, have you had a hand tied behind your back from that? Have you. Had to grow a different, appendage in order to keep doing what you do. I'm just curious about how this affects you in your real life.
Brian Kerr: Yeah. I mean, it's been a big change. I, you know, I also changed the, the, so I joined a consulting firm at the beginning of the year, or towards the beginning of this year. And with that came a real shift in the type of clients that I was working with and, you know, the people I was serving in my work. So prior to that for, you know, five or six years before that I was working mostly in the like health and human services environment. So, you know, mostly government clients, some nonprofit, like, and typically the sort of small to midsize government agencies. So I was spending a lot of time on the road, you know, I think it was about, it was about this time last year that I started a, a project where my client was the, the great state of Colorado, and, you know, the, the brain's in Denver or wanting to actually learn from what the different counties were doing across Colorado in a particular sort of continuous improvement way. And so that meant a lot of, you know, getting in rental cars and driving all across Colorado. That was great. That was fun. And I really do miss the, the part of the, the part of the worker. And this is very much a, this was the first hint of a sort of, you know, information architecturey thing, kind of sneaking in the, like the job shadowing or the, you know, let's go sit in the lobby for a couple of hours and just pay attention to what's happening, you know, let's hang out with the people that are answering the phones and, you know, listen in, if we can, all that, all that good stuff. And you know, not to say that that stuff has gone away way, but it's certainly different now. And, you know, there's a lot of that. A lot of that mode is very different as well in terms of, if there's a lobby it's super easy, especially as, you know, as sort of, you know, I, I dressed the way I do. I keep my hair the way it is, so I can just kind of like sit and be as sort of unassuming, vaguely, vaguely cheerful presence, you know? So it's easy for me to just sit in a lobby for a while and, do my waste walk or take my notes on what's going on. That's different and yeah, it is a little bit of a gap. But that said it's one that everybody I'm working with is negotiating as well. Right? Like how is that? How are all of those modes of interaction changing right now? So that's been a big shift. And I think along with that is just the, the…In hindsight, the really great move I made of, you know, joining in with, with some of my friends at, at unify consulting, you know, having a really strong sort of regional focus. So I'm the client I'm working for now is Path, global health nonprofit. So they've got a, you know, an office here in Seattle, but. Global. Right. So working with people on the West coast, the East coast in Asia and Africa, and we're just not, we're not in a world where, you know, you can demand that everybody be flowing in at great expense for some sort of, you know, grand kickoff kind of ceremony. So we're all figuring it out together. I don't know, I don't know what I expected any of this to be like, yeah. I mean, the only other comment I'll make is that right, right at the time, you know, here in, here in Washington state when, sort of the. You know, end of February, in the beginning of March, when we were all sort of getting serious about sheltering in place and changing what we were doing, I was actually doing my first project for a local client, like a client that I could get my car and drive to their office and, you know, half an hour, rather than. Rather than like going to an airport and going somewhere else. And that client happened to have been one of the sort of administrative or cost centers where a giant regional healthcare network. And that was just such a strange thing to just see it all happen, you know, right there. And in particular, the sort of, you know, some of the early innings of the, of people figuring out that, you know, their business was changing in some, you know, terrifying in inhumane ways. And just figuring out how to adapt to that. So that was, yeah, that whole, it's just been such a strange, such a strange season. And I think, we're back into the, we're all comfortable with our little rounded rectangles and smiling at each other. And, you know, at the end of every conversation waving like, like animals, you know, it's like, Oh, so good to see you. Bye. And it just, we don't know what to do, come up with these new norms and practices and yep. Yeah, just figuring it out. But the, you know, the, the big thing for me is, you know, so far, like everybody in my immediate cluster has been healthy, although you only have to go one more remove out and yeah. You know, people who have had, you know, one, one colleague of mine, you know, we dealt with his, you know, his, son graduate waiting from high school in a remote fashion, and then had a very close relative pass from COVID-19 within, you know, within a space of a couple of weeks. And it's like, you know, that's a terrible situation for that family. And, and also like, I'm very much at a loss in terms of, well, what can I do for this guy? Right. Like, I can't go. You know what I mean? I can't go.
Dan Klyn: Yeah. It feels, back to the analogy of, of you, you used to have a thing. You could do like a phantom limb where you want to reach for somebody, but there’s, there, you can't, you can't get there from, from here. And I'm, and I'm picking up on a little word you threw out: “waste walk”. Can you, I think I have a sense of what that is, but, but maybe, pretend that I don't. What is that? And have you found a way to do that without actually walking around and I'm thinking of a Tom Peters’ coinage of management by walking around the idea that there's this ambient, if we put our bodies into different places, with different combinations of people that, that we will learn in a, in a way that is not a gin rummy memory e-learning, that is experiential learning and, osmosis and things. I imagine a waste walk. When you walk around, can do things or maybe tell me if I'm wrong, but you can do different things when you're actually walking around doing a waste walk then if you're, stuck with one of these things on the screen, so what's a waste walk and how do you do it without walking?
Brian Kerr: Yeah. Yeah. so, you know, so one of the things that I love doing, you kind of at the core of all of my work that, that I do for, for money and for love is, is continuous improvement, right? Sort of coming from, you know, Lean. You know, the Toyota production system kind of stuff. And the people that I work with are typically doing like knowledge work or service work, that kind of thing. So there's some, some translation that happens in there. And, you know, I just am totally bought into the idea of continuous improvement, in a way that perhaps you were totally bought into the information architecture. Right. That's kind of my, my thing. And, yeah, so, the short version of the story is there was a guy, Taiichi Ohno, who was a, sort of industrial engineer who got promoted up into management, and, you know, in Toyota in the, you know, right in the postwar period, he was a shop floor supervisor and then stepped up and he’s sort of the originator of what we would now call like the Toyota production system. The, the whole thing that eventually became called Lean when it was important to the United States through Toyota and, you know, the United States, Kentucky and elsewhere, and then some of the other car manufacturers, and he’s kind of famous for two things at this point, Taiichi Ohno, the first was this, quote that was interesting last year and it's now terrifying, which is that, you know, something, and of course, you know, he, he worked in wrote in, in Japanese, so it's all in translation and, you know, fortunately, my, my sweetie is, a, what do you call it? A Japan-a-phone. So I can always go to her with the like, Lean, you know stuff and say like, okay, this is what, this is why a bunch of, you know, doughy white guys in Detroit in 1980, something translated out.
Dan Klyn: It’s like, what, what, what is they miss?
Brian Kerr: Yeah. Like what, what are we actually dealing with here? But anyways, Taiichi Ohno, this was sort of like, you know, an effective, an effective leader, you know, in a manufacturing setting has to roll up his sleeves and wash his hands at least three times a day, and I was like, oh God, you know, that’s not nearly enough. That’s distressing. And it comes in with the, the, you know, the, the sort of implied sexism and all that, all that crap, all that. But, you know, but good point, right? You have to go in and sort of practice that management by walking around or just being in that place where work happens. And so a waste walk is where you just go and look for waste, that's happening, you know, and there's this whole distinction between sort of things that are happening that your customer values, it's important to that customer. You want to do more of those things, things that happen that aren't. And you want to do, you can bless those things. And so a waste walk is a way of going out and looking for waste. That's an ugly word, but I love it because, you know, you spend time in any sort of like group work dynamic, you know, you spend time creating stuff, that's waste that you don't need. And then you hopefully spend time noticing it and fixing it, or spend time fixing it after it gets into the hands of your client or your customer or whatever down the road. And so a waste walk is really just way of going to do that. And frankly, for me, not much has changed. I'm sure if people that are doing this kind of work and, you know, like a, whatever, like a manufacturing or shop floor kind of context, things may have changed for them. For me, it's always been, I've always had that, that pushback of, like what the hell do you mean, you know, we're, we're doing all of our work on a computer anyways. And so, you know, so I've had some tactics of saying, well, let's go to where the work gets done. Your desk, right? And just see what's happening there. And then, you know, there's so many, you know, so a lot of the wastes that come up are like systemic things where people trying to multitask, not something that human beings can actually do. And yeah, you know, it can still happen, but I feel like that's a, that's a negotiation that I got over, you know, five years ago. Rather than, rather than right now. I mean, obviously there's still some like physical contexts that you can't go to and walk around in right now, or you can't do that very easily, but for the most part, for the kind of work that I'm doing, it's not as big a change as you might think.
Dan Klyn: Hmm. That, that surprises me. And, maybe I'll keep fishing for this thing I want to hear about, but, and maybe it's just not real, for you, which is the, that. I was talking with Paul Bryan, who does the, a UX Strat Conference a couple of days ago. And he was talking about how at a loss he is as somebody whose business is too, engender and, do all the operations to make, to make gatherings of people happen. And he said something along the lines of like, I don't have a stage, so how do I do my thing? And it caused me to have a moment of, either co-opting his, his thing he was, observing or just seeing myself in it, which is, yeah, as a consultant I'm on stage. And I use something akin to stage craft to make certain things happen in certain kinds of meetings in how we run consulting as a business and, and not having that stage. We've now conducted a lot of those kinds of meetings that I would have been in person for through, through this, through Zoom. And I'm still, I mean, of course I want to say it or think about it this way. I'm still effective. But back to that phantom limb thing that I'm obsessed with. There's something about my embodiment and something about the bodies, like just then from the neck up. I don't, I don't know if a full, you know, like full frame video of the rest of everybody's. I don't know if there's a flat screen based way to get around, around or beyond this and that. And I'm inclined to, based on all the other funny ideas that I have to think, no, there is. You can't get there from here. That thing that I used to be able to do in the room with people, there's some of that that is no longer available, to anyone, not to me, not to them. And even while I'm still being effective, decisions are still being made. Progress is still—I’m, I’m, I'm still feeling resentful and, even maybe a little fearful about going downstream from activities and rituals and ceremonies that, that we've been able to succeed with in person. And here, here, we've, we've done the [inaudible] versions of those, and we're sailing forward from those and, and where we might be happy on the ship at this point, thinking, yeah, we know it's calmer waters. The further we go, the easier the sailing gets, here, I don't know what the…I think I'm paranoid about whatever it is that you can't do over the screen in those previous steps of our process, reaching into the future and, messing me up. And so I don't know if you can do anything with that, Brian, but that's the, that's along, that’s of the nature of the things I was hoping to hear from you is the, dammit we can't blank anymore. Or my, my capability as a professional is now, this little light of mine is under a bushel and, that sucks or something along those lines.
Brian Kerr: Yeah. I mean, it does suck, right? Like it is, it is nice to go like meet people. I mean, I definitely have the, just personally, I have, a pretty high level of comfort, engaging with people, you know, across the screen. But only after I managed to interact with them, at least once in person, I think there really is something like that happens, you know? And so, you know, I'm in, I'm in uncharted waters a little bit with my, you know, my previous project that, that sort of was starting at the same time that we were changing some of the things we were doing, in terms of, you know, our work and travel patterns, back in March. And then, you know, I started another project, just a couple of weeks ago. It was sort of in this mode and yeah, it is, it is uncharted waters for me we’re definitely, there, there are some things that I miss, right? And so, that's one example, just being able to like, meet somebody and see them embodied as a, as a person, right? And, the other thing I miss frankly, is, being able to, bring, like food or, or snacks that people like to a meeting. You know, I think there's a little bit of the, like the mother hen kind of thing in me where, you know, cause I really do like before meeting, like going around and saying like, Hey, I'm going to bring some stuff. Like, you know, that just the sort of like, like, do you, you know, do you eat meat? Do you eat wheat? All of that crap, just to, just to figure out like, what's the vibe it's, it's, it's like the, the best way to learn about what's actually happening in a client site. You know, like I remember a couple of years ago doing some work in a California, one of the, one of the non San Francisco Bay area counties, in California. And so they had like this sort of like super healthy, you know, snacks and stuff, but like, they were, you know, required to have like healthy food. And there was actually a person in the office and I won't, I won't out this person, but whoever he, or she was up on the third floor of their office space ran like a junk food store out of their cube. Right? With like, like candy bars and stuff, because, you know, and, and I've learned so much about that organization from just discovering, that right?
Dan Klyn: Yeah. Yeah. When a vendor comes over, we're going to feed them keenwah and nobody likes that stuff. So somebody’s got to provide the offset in here.
[Laughs] But, yeah, I do have that feeling of loss or detachment for sure. And, that's tough, but I do want to push back on, on, on sort of like caring about that too much, because I think there is a real opportunity here in terms of, for me, I think that doing, we want to do things in person because of the, you know, the very sort of details like choreography or stagecraft or whatever. I think about it in terms of choreography, right? In terms of what's the facilitator going to do and what are all the things that are going to look like happy accidents, but were pre-planned right? As part of what we're going to do in the room. I, I sure, I sure do miss that, but. I also know that that context isn't the best way for everybody to participate. Right? So like, I'm always looking for other ways for people to contribute, you know, like if it's a big room and, and people can't hear very well or uncomfortable speaking up in a big room, or there's like, you know, power dynamics in play, you know, you always have to have other ways for people to contribute and, you know, people have different learning styles. People have different ways of, of contributing. And so, it's important to have those. And I think all this has done frankly, is make one of the, the sort of most attractive of those modes, which is the like a workshop model. Kind of, you know, going into a room, it's made that a little bit harder. I think it's really flattened some of the other things right? In, you know, so if you have, a lot of those, a lot of those barriers to access or inhibitors to participation, have changed or can change now. And I see that as a, as a really positive thing. At least in terms of the work I want to do. That's all, a lot of it is about like, get your projects monitor, get your director, get them to communicate 10 times about what you're doing and then get them the hell out so that you can get the people who actually do the work to design how they're going to do the work in the future. Right? In a way that works for everybody, including the, you know, the sponsors and leadership and stuff. So in that kind of situation, you know, there are ways to do it that work better for, for everybody in the situation we're in now,. All that said, I'm just making the most of a crappy situation, right? If I could like snap my fingers and go back to a place where we could all be in the same room, I would absolutely do that. However, I do think that the way I do that would be better because I would be adding in additional stuff that I picked up. In the last, you know, several months. Yeah. So you wouldn’t let it stay there. After you snapped your fingers, they wouldn't be like, okay, now, now it will be that it would be with an eye toward, and to the extent that we've learned that there are people who can't participate as well, that there are, and one example I'm thinking of from my own work is, the home team and the global team that there was a huge offset, the home team got to meet in person with us. And then we had to put on a secondary version of that meeting that was already pre-constrained with lower expectations. And the organization had become fairly comfortable with the remote teams being, not full participants and, Yeah. So that's, that's it. Ronan had the question is there something possible in this new reality that wasn't possible before? One very specific example from my own work is a giant transnational corporation for whom the US-based headquarters team was the A-team and everybody else is B or C or D. Those other participants now have a shot at the same…I think it's, it's real, like, may have a shot at the same level of participation where before it was us and them. So do you, have you seen any, any other instances specifically in your work, Brian of a, of what you would after you snap your fingers go ‘but, but that thing we learned during the COVID time we're going to do that,’ is there a specific example?
Brian Kerr: Yeah, a couple of specific examples, actually. One is, I am a, I always try to make materials available in advance, in terms of like, just a concrete example, do a lot of like journey mapping or, you know, other types of, you know, let's build a picture because it tells a story and fight about it. And I always try to distribute things well in advance in terms of, what's the format, what are some examples? What is this going to look like? Because I know that there's going to be someone who looks at it. I think the importance of that has shot way up. And I can tell that there are people who appreciate it, you know, whether it’s, so I'm thinking about the project I'm working on now, but a couple of other projects that I'm trying to support, you know, it could be a language, language barriers where there's groups that, you know, because they're sort of the, regional offices of a larger group. Like the, the, you know, the, the primary mode is that everybody works in English and that's fine, but when you're throwing a bunch of jargon or a bunch of new ideas, you know? Yeah, why, why not give people an extra week or two to, you know, to, to make sense of things and, and, deal with some of that stuff up front. I think that's one. And then I think, another, another possibility. Another very real possibility is, you know, making it easier for, being more explicit about the idea that we're going to have more modes for doing things. Right? So I know a lot, you know, every, every engagement, you know, I always ask, like I always try to figure out what are people's learning preferences in terms of what training modes do people use? How do people like to hear messages and, and it seems like there's always this conversation about like, well we got this, you know, lot of preferences for what people want. And here are the two things we use here. So we're going to use these two things. I think that's a little more open. That's a little more up in the air right now, especially as a, you know, as a, whether you're like an internal consultant or an external consultant, you know, like, and I, I go back to Jerry Weinberg's precise definition there of like somebody who's been asked to help. Right? Like solve some problem for somebody. Part of that is you can smuggle in, whether it's, and at this point is mostly technology. Right? But it might be technology that, is like a platform for, facilitation strategies. Like for me, I always go to the liberating structures. I don't know if you've seen those Dan, we could talk about that a bit, if you'd like, but you know, just ways to make that happen. And I think that, I've been a little more successful coming up with new ways. And so like the concrete example would be, my previous engagement, they had that, one of the things that the client was doing was setting up, a, you know, they, they had this shift they wanted to have, which was, you know, there's 30,000 people in our organization that need to learn some new piece of software, right? Very standard kind of thing. And, they had their little training group and they were very much like in the, 'okay if you're in this one location, you can come into the classroom. And if you're in another location, you're going to sign up for this excruciating webinar where we're going to just recite what we would have told you in the classroom.’
Dan Klyn: ‘Please log into the LMS and…’
Brian Kerr: Exactly. And they were able to actually shift that into, you know, sort of a micro learning kind of environment and make, make stuff available in a bunch of little pieces and a bunch of different media. It made their job a lot easier, I think, because then, you know, that also lets you, instead of having like your three, three comma two day training course or whatever, you know, a series they could think about it in terms of, okay, here's our like 200 little pieces of content that we have, and here's how they're sequenced and here's how we can stack them up to help somebody, you know, of those 30,000 people, there's some people who just like, yeah, need to, how do I access the system and look at my stuff, versus the people who are in there all the time. Right? Like that's their job is to operate this, this system, so they could you know, so they could set up that environment and then they can do it all the cool, like learning system or analytic stuff and say, okay, what's the like top 10% content that's being used? Maybe we should update that. And like, what's the, you know, what are like the search misses? Maybe we should add those things, you know? And so it's a big shift there. But it works better for everybody. And for whatever reason, you know, I just have this feeling that people are going to continue to be more open to it going forward. Right? Right now people are open to it up necessity. Cause they're in crisis and you know, somebody who swoops in with an idea, it's like, okay, here's how we're going to do this. And here's how it's going to work. You know, there's a lot of energy around that right now. And there’s one more thing I should throw in here, Dan, that I should have mentioned earlier. I think one thing I've seen is that it is okay, at least maybe I'm just really lucky, but in terms of the people I work with and the clients I work with, it seems like it's becoming, increasingly more okay to acknowledge that people are like humans and have lives and families and stuff. Right? And so the, like the, you know, the, the watershed moment for me was, you know, fairly early on in all of this, when there was a, a vice president who was doing like a report out on some stuff we were doing. And so she was, you know, she had like the, you know, the standard, like, okay, here's the slide deck that we made, she’s going to report the slide deck to a bunch of people. I don't know why I'm in the meeting, except that I'm in the meeting. You know what I mean? And you know, and she's like, hey everybody, I got my kid here. I'm going to feed my kid yogurt. You're going to hear that. If you hear extremely cute yogurt noises, that's what's going on. And, and that was great! Right? It was great that she was okay. That she felt comfortable doing that. And I’m sure that had that like cascade effect, but it's like, I hope we don’t, I hope we don't lose that too much. ‘Cause I think that so much of the, so many of the things that people do in professional settings, you know, basically reward assholes, right? It’s like who have, you know, have that like privilege and latch onto it or will, you know, like get, get rewarded for Being evil, right?
Dan Klyn: Yeah. They, they suppressed their colleagues' knowledge of their, whatever else that they're dealing with. And that, that was helpful to keep that out of the office and yeah. Yeah, the, the compartments don’t—can't hold under this. And so, so if, if there can be an assumption that, the compartment, the compartments are, are, permeable, you're going to see something of somebody's real life now, and then that's going to be okay. Yeah. Yeah. That's a better world than the one we were in before.
Brian Kerr: Yeah. Well, in, in the, you know, I know the various, one thing I've been thinking about, and I've been talking to a couple of people at, at Unify about like what, you know, what we should do about this, like, or how we should acknowledge this this year. But I think it's going to be really different when the, the, a couple of a couple of them have already passed in fact, but most of the equal pay days are coming up fairly soon. Right?. In terms of the, the days that demonstrate, you know, the different, pay gaps, gender, and otherwise in the United States, I hope that we can make something of that just in terms of saying, okay, these pay gaps exist. They're real. They, they’re evil. They perpetuate this awful stuff, and by the way, that's happening, right when everybody's figuring out like, who's going back to school in the fall, like what's happening with children. You know, we've got two little boys, there's a lot of conversations in our house about like, how all that's going to work, but it just seems like, you know, even given everything else, I mean, it seems like there's a, there's, there's some sort of opportunity there to, to, to, to, you know, to not just let that be like a sort of like, ‘oh, that's, that's bad. Right. That's awful. But I guess that's just the way it is,’ you know, we've been doing that too long anyways. But something's going to be different this year. I just feel it
Dan Klyn: Good. How about…there’s information architecture and Austin Govella is listening in and, and he's, he's an old, and he remembers this and he works in an Agile way. So maybe, maybe he'll have something to say about this as well. Big design upfront, and, that information architecture is big design upfront. And that there's something incompatible with Lean and with, Agile and, whatever it is that information architecture is, is that, and my sense is, where maybe that was, more of a problem in the past that it is somehow less of a problem now, but, but that could just be because of the definition of information architecture changing or something. So I'm curious if that has any currency with, with you as a, are you comfortable being called a Lean practitioner? And if so, as a Lean practitioner is information architecture, something that doesn't come up because it's presumed to be, one of the tools of that other way of doing it.
Brian Kerr: Yeah. Yes, you can call me a Lean practitioner. That's fine. You know, in terms of the, the 30 second word fight I usually just end up just talking about continuous improvement because I feel like that's a better description of the activity that you're trying to do as opposed to like the like discreet improvement or the big bang improvement, you know, it’s continuous improvement. But Lean is fine. You know, that's where the stuff came from and all of the lean stuff came from, you know, you want to tell the story, you have to talk about like weaving, you have to talk about textiles. That's where it started. And that's, you know, that's that's the story. But, in terms of the information architecture thing, I think IA is sort of a victim of its own success in a lot of ways where one of the things I talk about when I help folks set up a, you know, like a Lean management system or continuous improvement framework, is that, you know, you have to do it at, at the beginning. But if after a while you find yourself sitting in a lot of like meetings or discussions where people are talking all the time about Lean or continuous improvement, you’re probably doing something wrong because it should just become part of what we're doing. Right?
Dan Klyn: Like an innovation department is automatically a emblem of failure.
Brian Kerr: Yes. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It should just be, you know, it's like, about as interesting as if you were sitting around and remarking and I'm like, ‘oh wow, isn't it cool that we're all these like multicellular organisms, you know, vaguely bilateral symmetry most of the time.'
Dan Klyn: [Laughs].
Brian Kerr: And, you know, it’s like yeah that’s true, but it's not really, it's not, you know, necessarily super useful. And I think a lot of the…I think, at least my, my sort of slag on a lot of the sort of, polar bear book style IA, like from way back in time was that it did have a little bit of that, a little bit of that big design up front feeling. But mostly that you, you're necessarily in that world of the like intermediate artifacts, right? It's not the actual thing that you need to…
Dan Klyn: Aha.
Brian Kerr: …You know, so you're creating that you're creating things that you, that no customer in the world should really care about. Right?
Dan Klyn: Well, that gets back to waste.
Brian Kerr: Yes! exactly. So, yeah. So for me, the connection is really something that, that you, said to me many years ago, Dan, which was that idea of like, now that I see it, right? There's always that moment where people are like, ‘Oh, now that I see it, you know, it's totally wrong and we need to change everything.’ And so cause—
Dan Klyn: ‘As if we hadn't been showing you all along with our wireframes’
Brian Kerr: Yeah, exactly.
Dan Klyn: ‘Specifications’.
Brian Kerr: It’s all about moving that point up as early into the process as you can. Right? Because it's going to happen and it's valuable. I mean, I think that is, is like, that's probably my favorite part of any continuous improvement project, at least, the part where you get to, you know, you get to have like the three different groups, you know, sit down and compare notes and say like, like, you know, we, it's sort of an inflection thing. It's like, you know, ‘we do it that way. Or like we do it that way.’ Or, you know, whatever that, whatever that response is, I love that part! It's just so fun! And so, you know, when I, and I should also say that in the, you know, whatever 15 years or so that I've been doing this consulting work, you know, maybe the first half of it was more about people were paying me for software that did something, you know, and then the second half of it, it was more this continuous improvement stuff. And the reason I made that shift is I just got bored of working on stuff where, you know, we delivered the software, everybody got paid and it didn't make any damn difference because nobody stopped to ask, like, ‘why are we doing this?’ And ‘who is it for?’ And ‘how do we know if it's any good?’ And at that point, you're, you're talking about continuous improvement, you know, this sort of like str—what they would call the sort of strategy deployment, right? Like how do you, how do you decide what you're going to do as a group and do it in a way that makes your customer happy? And I really felt that pain when I was working on software, right? Of like, like, okay, great. You know, I just billed you for two weeks of work to do this thing so that you could give me this, you know this little insight that if we had been able to collectively get it earlier, it would have been a lot faster and a lot cheaper for everybody. And, you know, maybe a little bit of a, of a perverse incentive for me in terms of doing that work. Right? And I know a lot of people can build careers and consultancies and stuff out of that. You know, sort of exploiting that, but, for me, I just got, I just got really tired of it. And so, in terms of the information architecture, as a, you know, is it a, is it a like, method or is it like a system? Are we talking like tools? Are we talking like systems or is it like a cult? Right? And I think you could tell a story about any of those, but for me, yeah, I think a lot of those methods and a lot of the ways of thinking that again, I, I go back to the, the polar bear book and that weird little forward, maybe you can help me with this, Dan. It's been, it's been a long time since I've been back in Ann Arbor. They have that forward, right? Of, yeah…The forward where they talk about, is it Leopold brothers? What's the bar like, like you could tell tell that like Lou sitting in some bar and I think it's Leopold brothers. He was talking about like the bricks on the wall.
Dan Klyn: Oh, that must be in the second or third edition.
Brian Kerr: I think it's, I think it's the second edition, yet, not, not important, but what is important is that, is that idea that, that, you know, you can take some of those things. And I think that sort of energy and frustration was built into at least some of the stuff that Lou is doing. Cause I mean, I've seen him at play/work before, you know, and so the, the, the whole game is really all about saying, how can we use those things to head off these really expensive ‘now that I see it’ moments they happen, you know, after, at the end of a project or two years after the end of the project, you know, like, ideally you want to get those things upfront
Dan Klyn: When it's in QA and about to launch, that was the time that it most made me want to break stuff.
Brian Kerr: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and, and so, the, the connection to continuous improvement stuff is another one of those great, like Lean principles, the idea of building in quality at the source where we're very eager to build quality in, In terms of like quality control or QA, you know, towards the end of a process. And, and can in fact, pat ourselves on the back about that, I say, ‘well, isn't it cool that we’re like fixing all of these mistakes’. And I guess it is cool, but that's your inventory of stuff to not do again, right? To, to figure out how do you slow down and building quality of the source. So you're creating fewer of those things earlier on. You know, I worked for a little while, I, I should say I dabbled for a little while in the area of like software accessibility and I know some of our mutual friends and colleagues, still play in that world. And, and that's an area where I think it's really easy to see, you know, in terms of, if you have, some simple, if you, if you, if you can get…The whole, like, from the very start of a product conversation all the way through development, if you can keep a couple of really simple rubrics in mind about how to make what you're making accessible, then it's not like it happens for free because you built that in at the start and you've sustained it all the way along, but that's way better than, you know, releasing your stuff and.
Dan Klyn: And then there's a bug that says, ‘make it accessible.’
Brian Kerr: Exactly. And then you bring in, you know, so and so, right. And, and, and they tell you, yeah, this is a, this was a simple problem to solve, you know, three years ago and a virtually impossible problem to solve right now. And they're, they're in is the, you know, accessibility consulting industry. Right? And so, again, the earlier you can get to those things the better. And, and that's where I've gotten a lot of value out of the, you know, out of the information architecture, not as, not as anything that people are asking for, Right? And not as anything that frankly I'm saying I'm delivering, but I'm pulling from, from that, that corpus to, to make it happen. And, and yeah, I think it's probably, there, there has been some shift there in terms of the, the, you know, in terms of, I had that big design up front feeling at, at a point. And I don't, I haven't really pondered it enough to tell you what I might attribute that, attribute that shift to, but I, I've definitely seen it. I agree with that.
Dan Klyn: Well, I was, I was, I perked up when you were talking about information architecture as, and these are not your words, but as working on a meta thing and not the things themselves and, and that that is, or was, less satisfying to you than, than other kinds of work. And it, and it reminds me of an initial problem that I had and might still have in trying to embrace some of the ideas and working methods that, Christopher Alexander has written about and that he did in his, construction, design, build, business. And, one of them is the idea of working at the site. At one to one scale, not off of drawings, but mocking up in the place where the thing is going to in the world. And back to the things themselves, and there's a lot of, phenomenology and other kinds of, philosophical ideas that I've bumped into now, now in my desire to understand Chris Alexander and that that's one of the bigger disconnects and talking about Lean and the idea of what is waste that a drawing that you then…or somebody else, maybe somebody draws it and then somebody else takes that drawing someplace else and then does something. And then somebody else takes that and gos some, and you're not at the place where the impact of these changes would be instantiated and change the world that that's, that that's a fundamental in compatibility with, working in terms of information architecture and diagrams and schematics, and the kinds of building living structure at one to one scale through mockups and, collaboratively with multiple participants using feelings as the first class citizen, the, the criterion for accepting or deciding to undo whatever we did today. And so I'm curious, I know that in the past, you've gone as far as to name your business…Was, was, was a Different Chairs, doing business as for you Brian, back in the day?
Brian Kerr: Yes, it was.
Dan Klyn: Yeah. So, so for, for my listeners benefit, Brian had used the name of one of Chris Alexander's patterns in the name of one of his businesses. So that's another, another, set of strands, that, that, that connect us. And so I'm curious what you, what you've made of Chris' ideas. And has there been changes in how you've thought about this stuff from your Different Chairs time, which is taken from the Pattern Language, and then I'm curious forward from there, if you've taken on some of the ideas of the, from The Nature of Order, in your work and is Chris somebody who's relevant to what you're doing today.
Brian Kerr: Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think I sort of had this. I think a lot of people have that sort of dual exposure to Christopher Alexander in terms of, you know, I saw the, some of the like, not really some, there are a few architects, like, what's the, what's the, what's the, the way to say it, like actual, honest to God, like licensed architects in my life that really didn't, you know, like maybe, you know, like, Oh, I had to, we had to read a chapter of that dumb thing. You know, in school, whatever. And then there were some planners, like urban planners and sort of planner-adjacent folks in my life who love Christopher Alexander. So that was the first thing, one thing I noticed, right? Where it's like, there's this group of people that love this guy. And then of course there's like the, Ward Cunningham who I am, who, I like am very loosely connected with, from all of the like Wiki collaboration stuff. Also from, you know, 20, 20 years ago, like way, way back when, and Kent Beck, you know, they sort of like poached that for the, you know, whatever, like the Portland Pattern Repository, and then the gang of four stuff, which, which I always, I'm just completely, you know, rolled, rolled off my feathers, like when I was working in software, like I never…
Dan Klyn: Didn't get any on you.
Brian Kerr: Yeah. Yeah. I didn't, it didn't stick, but it's like, where where's this coming from? Like why, why is this important? So yeah, I mean, I like, I really enjoyed the, the, it's the real house book. It's the, you know this, what’s the, I've got this one, Community and Privacy.
Dan Klyn: Oh, yes!
Brian Kerr: Yeah, that's probably the, the one that, that I, you know, that I still keep on my bookshelf. But yeah, I mean, I think what I really liked about the, the, not so much a Pattern Language per se, but just sort of the other, some of his journal articles. And then I think comes out big time in the sort of more cosmic, you know, you want to get into The Nature of Order, whatever, it's just that the, the, thinking at different, at different scales, right? And this very sort of humane way of, of thinking about like what, you know, what do people use the space for? Like the sort of like built environment? Like, what is it for and how do we, how do we know if it's any good? Right. And, and, how do you listen to people and the different chairs thing, I mean, it was. I just really, I just thought that was a beautiful passage from that book. Right? In terms of talking about the human, like differences and differences in ability, I haven't actually read the passage in awhile, so I don't remember exactly, but you know, something to the effect of, like, you know, it looks nice if you blow out a room with a bunch of homogenous chairs, but then, you know, if you have, like, that's sort of what I think he describes what I would, what I would see as, as sort of like junky coffee shop aesthetic at this point of like different like mismatched chairs and stuff. And then people will be able to like find something that works for them. And I just really liked that as as a way of, if I recall when I picked that business name, that was when I was deep in the, the, the, the throws of agonies of the, software accessibility kind of thinking. And a big part of that world was, and still is sort of, rejecting the idea of, of health as a binary, right? That like people are healthy or sick. And I think that, that's something that comes across a lot in some of Alexander's writing, just in terms of saying like, you know, some, some people want to stand, so people want to sit. Some people want to move. Some people want to stay still and you know, people are different heights, you know, like just, just really basic stuff like that. But, but I just, there was such a warmth from that. So, that's been really helpful to me, but in terms of, you know, is, do I actually use that pattern language? And of course, I think he had this idea that that would be like just an exemplar, right? Like one of many things.
Dan Klyn: A pattern language, not the pattern language.
Brian Kerr: Yeah. So no, I don't really use any of that, but I do, I do think, I, I do think fondly of, of, you know, that book and the sort of signifier of like there's people who talk about Alexander without having read the book are people that I can kind of pay less attention to. And people who talk about one of the books that are not a pattern language, are more likely to be interesting people, I guess there's that rubric. But, yeah, it's, it's mostly just, a real, an artifact of, of kind of where I was a little while ago, but that part of me is still there. You know, it hasn't gone away. I just haven't really carried it forwards.
Dan Klyn: Well, one of the, one of the things that is more, current in your interests that you shared with me when we talked earlier this week, Brian, that I’ve..I need another Anglo Saxon smart guy in my life right now, a dead old white one, like the, like, I like, I, I don't need that, but yet, you turned me on to Douglas Harding, an obscure English architect, who has a phenomenal cosmology of the sort that caused CS Lewis, who, I'm not a very big fan of, to reply to him: ‘You have made me drunk. And I have not been so intoxicated with ideas…’ He couldn't remember the last time he was so affected by a manuscript. So, so since you and I talked, Brian, I've been doing a little bit of instigation and I will share my screen, just for one moment to show, this drawing, which was a mind bomb for Harding. And it appeared in, a work of physics I want to say, is that right? It was, and it was the idea that, what you are able to know of yourself from a first person, subjective reality, that there’s a hole where your head would be, that you don't have access to that part of the illusion of, us as individual beings. And that, there's a radical, radically different way to behave, that he talked about as being headless and that when you and I would get together, if we were going to have a meaningful exchange that that isn't meeting face to face, that that is us exchanging the emptiness where our heads were. And just so what little I've dug into this. Brian, it's just been fascinating to me. So, so I'm curious if you could, do a quick sort of primmer or a tour of the, this man's ideas. And are you thinking of using these in your work? Is what I'm most crucially interested in. I can see how you would use this in your being a nice person. But, on somebody's clock doing somebody's work, bringing them ideas from this headlessness. I'm curious, what that, what that's about. So what can you tell me that I have not learned in three hours of YouTube rabbit holing on Douglas Harding.
Brian Kerr: Yeah. Well, I mean, if you've done that much and you probably know about it, as much as I do about Harding like this
Dan Klyn: I have, it's been, I've been not able to do other things and wanting to learn about this.
Brian Kerr: Yeah. Yeah. So, so here's the, I'll give the very short, the, the, the history of, of where I encountered Harding, because I think that that is an interesting thing. And, and I don't, I'll get real for a minute. I don't mind being real for everybody. I would say maybe like, two years ago, three years ago, something like that I, had my own sort of like mental health crisis. Right? And, came out of that, realizing it was like, oh, I actually am a very anxious person. Right? Like I have depression, I gotta do all this stuff. And. So I went and did, I went in and sort of started to learn about what it's like to be a human being. And I feel like I'm sort of the, and I'm happy to talk about that if we, you know, if you, but one of the, one of the things that happened is I sort of re discovered this, the, I had been kind of curious about like meditation and mindfulness and all that crap at various points. But I, it really has become a big part of my life at this point, to the extent that, you know, until the world ended a couple of months ago, you know, I sat regularly with some people here in Tacoma and we, you know, have done this very like systematic way of figuring out, okay, what, what does this mean for me to the extent that I am, you know, really engaging with a lot of like Buddhist concepts and stuff like that.
Dan Klyn: Yep. Yep.
Brian Kerr: All that to say, as part of that, I discovered the On Having No Head essay that, that Douglas hurting wrote and concerningly, I actually found the essay, reprinted in full in a book that I read when I was a child. So yeah, Douglas Hofstadter, and, what's the guy, Dan Dennett, collection. They, and they made fun of it, right? Like they sort of, oh, this is, this is this childish, you know, way of looking at the world, which I think is a fair reaction. So that was, would have been my initial encounter with Harding, but then I sort of discovered that as essentially his concept of headlessness as a way of getting around, that, there's the, the sort of the, particular Buddhist expression that's expressed in a couple of different ways that has to do with recognizing the self is an illusion. Right? And, and that's something that I picked up on in various, you know, philosophical strains and et cetera over the years. But what I loved about Harding was he has, he has some very simple, he calls them the pointing experiments of ways of basically seeing that, you know, that, you don't have to, you don't necessarily have to be identified with your own thoughts. Right that like you can say, oh, whatever I am, my thoughts are out there. And I think most of us are most of the time kind of wandering around into this condition where some stimulus happens. We have a thought, we identify completely with that thought and think that's who we are. And that's just sort of how we exist. And you can decouple from that, you know, quite a bit, through various practices. And, you know, that was really helpful to me personally, in terms of, for example, anxiety of saying, oh, like the fact that I have literally like hundreds of thoughts an hour about like being worried about things could happen. You know, the correct response is to say, you know, thank you, my, thank you body for doing all of this stuff to try to keep me safe and keep the family, you know, safe and all that, all that crap. And, you know, the, The Headless Way I think is one of maybe four different approaches that I have encountered. Two of which come from Buddhism. One comes from a different tradition that all have that same characteristic of it’s something that you can kind of do, it’s an experiment that you can try to sort of get to that personal insight and it works for you or it doesn't. And you know, yeah. And, and after all of that, at some point subsequent to that, I discovered that Doug Harding made his money as an architect and Dan, you and I were talking, you know, prior, there's like no information about, pretty much anything that he did with that part of his life. ‘Cause I think he was overshadowed, it was overshadowed by the, you know, weird cosmic stuff that he, he came up with, around all of this.
Dan Klyn: Well, well allow me to read just one quote from, the Hierarchy of Heaven and Earth, which is “So thoroughly, have we insulated the human from the cosmic that, when at last they are brought to the effect may well prove overwhelming as the pent up energy is discharged in a flash of illumination, revealing undreamed of beauty.” I, I, I, that's that's the sort of thing that I, I love.
Brian Kerr: Yeah. I love it too. I love it too. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and then in terms of brass tacks, like how do I use this in work? I mean, I think there's the, there's the basic level of that, like yeah. Clients pay me for this because I go, you know, before I do a workshop or whatever, I can go like clear my head. And I think, I, I think I had a cute blog post about that at some point, like sort of like, you know, Harding talks about how you can like look in a mirror and see like, oh yeah, you're out there. Like now I'm in this little Zoom screen, right? And it's just like a great way to be able to just sort of flush all of those individual like concerns and stuff, and really just, fill yourself with, with empathy, which is like a dangerous, volatile, you know, substance of humanity when you're in a work setting and just really pay attention to what are people at? What do they need? How can I help? So that's the first, that's the first thing, that sort of, it, it affects my practice in a, in a way that’s totally positive. I think the second thing is that, that, there is a real embrace of like contingency of the idea that it doesn't matter how things got to be the way they are. It's more just like a, what can we do to make them, less bad. Right? And, and I think there's a real, there's a real connection there. And there are some little, you know, there are some little practices here. Yeah. Oh! Ronan, awesome comment in the chat there. Yeah. So, so there seems to be an, oh, so common in the West assumption here that had equals mind, with that in mind what if the heart is the seat of the mind? Yes! Yes, absolutely. And that's a you know, I think sort of, trying to gloss some of the Harding stuff and also some of the like Dzogchen, like, some of getting into some, some particular, practices. It's, it's hard to talk about it without doing it and we're not doing it right now. Yeah, Harding talks about in, On Having No Head this sort of a fairly, I think asinine, but helpful comparison of like, you know, you could think of a lot of times, again, in, in it's a very like Western kind of thing to think of ourselves as like this house. And our actual self is somebody inside, like looking out the windows or like operating this vehicle.
Dan Klyn: Yeah. We’re a thing that piers out from two round holes.
Brian Kerr: Right, right. Exactly. And, you know, little like windows or dashboard or whatever, or a windshield rather. And, you know, and, and I think part of the point that Harding is trying to make available to frankly, and there's a lot of stuff with Harding’s own life, to his, like, ultra conservative, like low-church family that he didn’t talk to for a very long time, like make accessible to them this idea that, okay, you're not this little like person looking out the windows, you know, you're not like this mind and you're not this like body, but you, you have this more sort of, expansive presence, you know? So when, so in The Headless Way, he talks about, you know, having lost his head, he, he gained a world. Right? So I think he is trying to push past that in some of his work, in terms of the, the, you know, and there's a lot of really interesting, you know, sort of non-dualism stuff in there, but, yeah, I think it's definitely important to, to acknowledge. And I think a lot of times I've resisted any sort of like mindfulness at work kind of crap, because I think a lot of that just encourages people to like sit and think with their eyes closed or like be happy. And that's not what any of this stuff is about. So if I could figure out a way to truly incorporate it into the work, I would, I haven't gotten there yet. What I have done is collided with and bounced off of some people who do that. Like the, you know, the sort of like, mindfulness at work for like, you know, meditation is performance enhancement stuff. And I. That's bad. That's not for me. So, I do feel like there's something there. I don't know what it is, but I'm not, you know, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna push it too hard.
Dan Klyn: Well our, our guests have had, I've been waiting patiently and I would love to give them a crack at you, to ask you some questions, Brian, but maybe I think I had one last thing I wanted to ask you, but I may have lost it now. Let me see, oh, um, yeah.
Brian Kerr: Uh oh.
Dan Klyn: Yeah. It's one of those, you saw my face just did. I am obsessed as you know, with what ‘good’ means.
Brian Kerr: Yes.
Dan Klyn: And, that gets into things like virtue and inherent value.
Brian Kerr: Mhm.
Dan Klyn: And Chris Alexander's teachings have helped me in this dimension incalculably but it's still, it's, it's, it's still a quest for me, what does good mean? And is, have you been in a situation where you are constantly improving something that isn't good?
Brian Kerr: Uh…yes.
Dan Klyn: And do you, have you said no to a client…
Brian Kerr: Yes.
Dan Klyn: On the basis of your ethics? That you could improve something today, but your thing is wrong. And so I'm going to choose to not improve that for you because improving something that's bad multiplies suffering, or multiplies harm.
Brian Kerr: Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, so there are a couple, a couple dimensions to that and I, I can keep this real short ‘Cause I know, I know we're over time…
Dan Klyn: Well you, you can go as long as you like [laughs].
Brian Kerr: But I don't know what, I don't know what time means. [Laughs] I don't know time means during the context of this meeting or yeah. Or right now. Okay, so, yes, there's a couple, there are a couple levels of elevation to think about this sign, right? And so the first is, you know, I have always tried to, you know, I've always tried to be picky about the people I collaborate with and like the clients I work with, you know, to the extent that like, I'll just, I'll just name names. Like I, you know, I came very, I was under consideration for a project at Amazon. And like that would have been a real decision for me to make. Right? And, and I know, you know, and, and, and, yeah, cause I, cause I'm very, very much like I liked working in the, the, you know, human services arena. Kind of for that reason. And I'm very fortunate that the, you know, the client I'm working with now, you know, sort of like, if they weren't spending the money on us, they would be spending the money on, you know, decreasing, inequities and access to health around the planet. So my challenge is to, you know, to…
Dan Klyn: God, yeah, make it worth that?
Brian Kerr: Right.
Dan Klyn: God, yeah.
Brian Kerr: So, yeah, so, so I'm fortunate in that, but also I think mostly by dent of just luck, I have, I haven't had to really make those like super hard decisions, right? Like am I gonna…
Dan Klyn: Are you gonna eat or are you gonna work?
Brian Kerr: Yeah. Yeah. Am I going to work this quarter for, you know, you know, not even one of the blue websites. I mean, that would be like a question, right? But I would do it and I would say, what do I, you know, what can I do to, you know, make this work? But like, you know, defense is an industry that I've never touched and, you know, and I, and I live in an area where that is the, you know, in my like congressional district, that is the industry, for example…
Dan Klyn: Well yeah, Jeez, if you can’t, if you're not going to work for Microsoft or, or Amazon or defense, what does that really…
Brian Kerr: Yeah. Yeah. Well, we'll see what happens. Yeah. Yeah. So, so that's kind of the, that's kind of my immediate level of that, which I will be the first to admit is just an extremely, like asinine way to think about it. Like, I don't want to do things that make me feel icky or that make me confront these issues, but I mean, I'll, I'll live up to that, you know? And I wish I had a better answer for that, but I don't, you know, I think the, the more interesting challenge in terms of the, yeah, continuous improvement, you know, or, or any, any of the work that any of us do here is about, you know, making things better for some definition of better. And what does that mean? How do you, how do you get there? Right? And, and I think there's a lot of, you know, a lot of the work that I end up doing is about getting people to elicit from people and compare and contrast their different visions of what they're trying to do and what good means to them.Right? And so, you know, the, I’m thinking of a project I spent most of 2019 working on, which was related to, related to, Medicaid, in, in Colorado. And you know, that's like a big machine, big part of the economy giving people healthcare, right? And the people who work in that system have a lot of different objectives, right? Are they trying to like keep people healthy? Are they trying to keep families healthy? Are they trying to make their numbers look good? Are they trying to not get a fine? Are they trying to get people enrolled in programs? Are they trying to reduce fraud? You know, and, and so, and so I think a big part of it is getting people to just be clear about like, what are I values? What do I care about? And then also get, leadership to say, okay, this is what we're, this is what we're trying to do. This is our strategy. And then you can build a whole theory of change off of that. So that's a big part of the work, like those actual conversations about the value proposition, right? Like what is our, how do we propose to do something, and what's the value we want to create? And that's value in terms of like economic value, really distinct from the, like the more interesting sense of the word value, which is also there as well. So, I think, you know, for me, and, and, and the work, having those conversations is just a big part of it because, you know, there've been people who have, sort of a realized why they're not a good fit with their organization because you know, maybe they, they, you know, they care about different things than the organization does, right? And they value different things or, or you'll have, you know, leadership that's not a good fit with the culture that's already there. And that can go both ways, right? I mean, I can have my strong preferences about, you know, you know, who's right. And I'll advocate for those. So, you know, one way that really plays out is the building quality and it sort of thing again, because, you know, instead of expanding so much energy on detecting fraud in these programs, let's put the energy into getting people connected with the right services in the first place. Right? And, you know, the, the, then the counter, the counter example in that world would be the sort of, Clintonian like, mean, lets means test everything, which is now the officially that like bipartisan consensus within the United States of like anytime anybody needs some help let’s put them through this grinder to make them demonstrate that, you know, they deserve it. And, you know, it was very cut and dry in that world, right? Because people could have their different perspectives and you could see it. In the place I'm in now it's, it's a little different, but, in terms of the, you know, what the goals people are trying to get to, but it's still, I would say about half of the work, really, to get people, to just sort of state, to be able to elicit a lot of times, it's, it's at the core of what people do, but they can't really speak about it because nobody's ever asked them, you know, it's, but being able to get that information for people and share it and figure out, well, how do you, how do you make that all work? And, I think the most important piece is just to, you know, to make it, to make it okay to have those conversations. And I think that's probably the most important thing that I do as a consultant. You know, I bring in some templates, methods, workbooks, presentations, you know, that's great. But I think that is the real work because once people see how they're aligned or not, then they can choose to work together or not, or are we going to kind of like continue along and also figure out…That’s a good explanation for a lot of the, you know, a lot of the like fights and stuff that can happen, disagreements. When, you know, it's like, you know, are we, are we trying to sell as many widgets as we can? Or are we trying to, you know, sell fewer, you know, fewer widgets that make a happy customer for life, right? Like just some of these really basic, like distinctions. And I think in some cases there is a, there is a clear sort of like moral, angle, but in a lot of cases, there may not be, you know, and, in any case, the thing that I can do, the activity that I can do is try to draw that out from everybody using—guess what—a lot of, facilitation techniques, a lot of, you know, things that, that you could look at, you could squint at from a certain angle and say, ‘oh yeah, that's, that's the information architecture.’ But the actual information is, is more about the sort of strategy or like the, the people's answers to the question of why are we doing this? Why is this important to do? Or alternately, why was this important to do when I took this stupid job five years ago, and now I'm totally burned out and just sort of doing the minimum to skate by, but like, what was it that, you know, what, what was it that got me excited about this in the first place? ‘Cause I think, again, we're largely fortunate enough to work with people who are also fortunate enough to have had a little more hand than, than most in terms of choosing what they're doing. So if you can connect to that, I think that's really valuable.
Dan Klyn: Nice. Okay. We have a question from Austin and, while I read this, Leah and Ronan, if you have questions, you are welcome as well. So I'm just gonna read this. People can use waste as a cudgel to limit or defer work they don't agree with. What tactics do you have for defending work you see as important to learn and improve the process, even when you have trouble articulating that value to others? At what point should you just trust a team member to identify new work for the team? At what point should the team just trust you to do what you need to do to do your job? Wow.
Brian Kerr: Yeah, those are some good, those are some good questions. Yes. Yeah. Well, and I think that, I think that buried in that is, is really this, the conversation that you and I were just having, Dan, this idea of like, what's, you know, if I don't agree that this was important and, and I'm putting myself in myself in the shoes of like, somebody embedded in one of these processes, right? Like, oh, if I don't think this change is important, I'm just gonna lean back across my arms and, and, and wait it out.
Dan Klyn: I’ll reserve my feedback until it's in QA. And then I will say, now that I see it, it’s wrong and…
Brian Kerr: Yeah, yeah. Or in the case of the—
Dan Klyn: Torpedo the whole shebang.
Brian Kerr: Yeah. Yeah, I mean, you know, I was fortunate, I feel like I was fortunate personally to start my career working in higher education. Right? Cause I was at a sort of systems analyst role at the University of Michigan.
Dan Klyn: I think only said, you, ever, in the history of mankind, that gratitude, but please go on.
Brian Kerr: Yeah.
Dan Klyn: I'm sure. I've never heard that.
Brian Kerr: Yeah. Well, and then to work in government, right? Because those are two environments where you have people who are, you can identify where people still have the opportunity to become quote, unquote lifers, right? To say like, I've got this gig. If I, if I don't agree with any particular initiative or request or whatever, I know that I can just wait it out.
Dan Klyn: I can keep my head down and work here for my whole life.
Brian Kerr: Exactly…
Dan Klyn: Yeah. Yeah.
Brian Kerr: Exactly. Like the, you know, this bozo like middle manager or director or whatever that has this thing that I don't like, I can outlive them. Right? And, and I will get, I will get my, like, you know, 3% cost of living thing every year.
Dan Klyn: 401(k) matching is happening constantly behind the scenes.
Brian Kerr: Right, right, right. So, so the point is, the point is that, because there are a lot of, you know, there are a lot of environments where it's like, okay, here's the change that's going to happen, I'm going to communicate it to you once really poorly. If you don’t, If you don't perform up to spec, then we're going to, you know, we're going to, sunset you or whatever the current euphemism is, right? And..
Dan Klyn: Permanently outsourcing program.
Brian Kerr: Exactly, exactly. So that's one world, right? And then there’s the other world which is the one that I sort of started out in where, you have to, you have to coax people into doing anything. And so the connection to using waste as a cudgel is you have to agree in order to do, in order to start reasoning about like waste and customer value, and again, doing, you know, a lot, you could think about one of the basic sort of approaches that I use is sort of a, what would be, what constitutes sort of a gussied up journey map, decorated with some stats that let you get into the, you know, just start, start doing some, some math about where does the time go? Where do mistakes happen? Where do people get pissed off and using those as starting points for changing what's happening. Right. So in that context, yes, people can use waste as a cudgel. What are they, what are they, you know, what are they hitting at? Yeah, there’s, there's work that's uncomfortable or, you know, work that you don't think needs to be done or that you don't want to do, or you don't think should have to be, should you be happening at all. And so then it's important to be able to link those back to, to the overall value proposition, which again is a fancy way of saying, what are we trying to make? Who are we making it for? How do we know if it's any good? So you have to get, you have to have that conversation first. And if that conversation hasn't happened, then yes, you're going to be in the situation that, that, that Austin, I think is sort of hinting at where, you know, people, people know how to like gain that system. Right? And that's great because people are making these sort of smart decisions for themselves. And I actually support people doing that when they're in that situation, if you don't want that to happen, you got to change the system. And the way you change the system is by actually talking about strategy, right? Like what are we trying to get to? They have this theory of change. How are we going to get there? That is a theory of change because you can prove it or disprove it, but you can try it out and have it not work and try something else. And you have the mechanism for changing it, which is all of the continuous improvement stuff, the post-it notes and you know, math. Right? But…
Dan Klyn: Yes.
Brian Kerr: But, kind of in the middle, do you have to have that connection between what are we trying to get to, and, are we going to agree to get there together? If you don't do that, then you're going to get into that situation. However, even if you do all that work, there are still going to be people who say, you know, this is, this is something we should try to stop doing because it's, it's not value added work. That's the lingo, right? In terms of adding value for the customer or not. And people are again very skilled at doing that. And, and I see that as an opportunity as well to, to sort of say, ‘well, okay, why is it important for us to do that?’ Right? And so there's a lot of the, okay, we're doing that cause it feeds into some status report, least it goes on to somebody's desk and nobody ever looks at it. So you might have that happy outcome where you can just stop doing that. And it doesn't make a difference. It could also be that, ‘oh, we need to do that for some reason.' And then it's an opportunity to go back to that person and say, ‘okay, we need, it turns out we need it to have this. Let's figure out how we can do it in a way that isn't as irritating to you personally.’ Right? Cause I think that if people see over like a multiyear term, that there is this, that it is okay to improve the performance of an overall system and improve what customers get by making things better for the people that are doing the work, you know, I think for the most part they'll buy into that. It can take a little while, but I think that's, that's what you have to be pushing towards. And until then, yeah. You're gonna have people pushing stuff around, you know, pushing work around, promoting the work that they want to do. And, I think a lot of it is a lot of what you said is, is also has to do with, with trust, you know, and, yes, you know, a team should, should trust everybody in the team. And I think a lot of that is the, for me connects back with the like, headlessness stuff of like, not getting so caught up about like, well, what, you know, like, why am I pissed off or irritated about what this person is doing, but really understanding, you know, that they're, what's, what's the game they're playing? Right? And maybe one time out of a hundred, it is, it’s just somebody who's sucks and doesn't want to do any work, but, the vast majority of the time, it's like, they're worried. What are they worried about? They're worried about defending something. They're worried about change. They're worried about losing something that's important to them and, you know, the…To quote, or to misquote Stewart Brand, noted possible plagiarist of Douglas Harding, you know, we're, we're going to be as gods. We might as well get good at it, right? Like change is always happening. So a big part of it is when people bring you those things, and the question that, that, that Austin posted to me, they're, they're they're indicators that people are, people are worried about change or people are loss averse, and you know, all of these things we know about people and those are opportunities to, you know, to work on that system. Fix the system, not the people, right? People are fine. I don't know, that's not a very satisfactory answer to Austin's question and it's an overly long one, but it's, you know, it's like, it’s the closest I’ve got.
Dan Klyn: Those are the kinds of answers that we value here. And, curious if Austin has a followup or an objection, to how you handle this question.
Brian Kerr: Yeah. Or utter rejection of what I said, that's fine as well.
Dan Klyn: I see a change in his status, in the sidebar here. So…
Brian Kerr: Oh, this is exciting.
Dan Klyn: He Just renewed it though. Ope, and, nope. Maybe not. Not all of us are always in a place where we can talk when we're on these things. So, you are welcome to continue to not talk. Leah and Ronan. Do you have any, ideas that you would like to share with Brian or questions? I'm just going to read a, I'm just gonna read some more of this. “The whole lacks, nothing, but even the Godhead needs a photosphere to shine, feathers to fly, legs to walk our earth, fins, to swim. Every setting board is a calvary, every collector's pin a crucifers nail, every dust, grain, every electron and proton, every point instant is Bethlehem. Every nest is the manger. Every womb is Mary’s.” Goosebumps. I just love this stuff. So…
Brian Kerr: That was the part, that was the part that got C.S. Lewis excited like that, that, that, that idiot couldn't, you know, he never met like a specious metaphor he didn't fall over backwards for, so it's just [crosstalk].
Dan Klyn: Well, but there’s so much, I think there’s so much in Harding for the rest of us to love, and I'm thinking of Mr. Wurman's love of opposites and ignorance. When, when Harding said that “knowledge that is not counterbalanced with knowledge of ignorance is mere dead weight.” Yeah. I encourage all of you to go find a, find your belonging in the work of D.E. Harding because I certainly have thanks to Brian's pointing me there. Okay. Well, it is a Sunday. Brian, what do you do on Sundays when you're not talking to old friends on the internet? What are you going to go do now?
Brian Kerr: Yeah, well, the schedule that we kind of have is, and this is the acknowledging that people have families and wives and stuff is, my, so I, I got it easy, ‘cause I'm just like a consultant, you know, like I just do what people want and…
Dan Klyn:[Laughs].
Brian Kerr: Whatever. My, my, beautiful sweet wife and Leanna who, I don't think you've ever met her, Dan, even though—
Dan Klyn: No, I, well, no, I met her once, either at work and tile or after class once.
Brian Kerr: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Yeah. You know, she, she somehow runs two, she runs a little like, well, she's, she's got writing projects, she's doing some of which are like, for money and some of which are for, you know, the world that needs to read what she's writing, which is awesome. She runs a QA business, and she mostly runs like homeschooling slash interference for two little boys right now. I don't know how she does all of that. So usually what we've been doing is, she gets Saturday as like her day. It's sucks. I wish he could have more days, but that's kind of, because I've got clients stuff, that's kind of what we do. And then, yeah, Sundays, is just all the other weekend stuff. ‘Cause we kinda try to compress it into one day. And in particular now we're really fortunate to be out at the, my, In-laws had like a, sort of a, what is it a one quarter interest in a little cabin over in Kitsap County, out in, out in woods. And we laid in some, terrifyingly, expensive satellite internet. So I could mostly work from there. So Leanna and the kids are out there. I'm going to head back in. And it's a sort of like, well, Dan, you, you, you have, I have a question for you, Dan. So we did a little, we did a little pre-flight call. When was that? Thursday? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, totally. Totally. I had a, [laughs] I had a meeting on Friday, a conversation with somebody that, well, someone, another former student of yours, Dan, who is now a superstar in Seattle, who I'm trying to convince to come work with me at a Unify consulting. But I had a conversation with her on Friday morning and we were both alluding to the previous conversation we had had about it last week, like the prior week. And it turns out it was Thursday afternoon. So like somehow for two, for both of us Thursday, afternoon to Friday morning turned into a week. That's how it's been anyways. So my question for you, Dan, when we, when we spoke, when I was out at the cabin versus here at the office, what is different? Like, I, I'm, I'm sincerely curious because my little rectangle emanates from that cabin and from this office, what's, what's different?
Dan Klyn: If the cabin's internet worked, you should always do it from there. And when you're not doing it from there, I would recommend taking a photograph from where your computer was when we spoke and then use that photograph as a Zoom background. It's a, it's a space that opens up that is made of wood. And you know that it's by the water, just in how it was put together. And I, and I was able to infer that, cause I I've seen pictures, from time to time of you out at the beach, but no, the what's different is your face is closer to the camera, which, I'm not sure that that makes as big of a deal of a difference, but, an artifact of the world of work behind you, you and, you know, I saw an Antero bang back there. So I'm thinking of people that we know in common who have, some of those things behind you I know from our relationship, but, but your place, your, your the beach house that you were broadcasting from the other day had an entirely different feel and with your beautiful manscaping there, and just the way that you show up Brian, I like you better there. I'm just going to say it, even though the internet sucked and it was real laggy, so.
Brian Kerr: Yup. Yup.
Dan Klyn: Yeah but I feel like that is a, that's a place that I would like to be in. Where, probably my environment here is not too different from the one that you're in there. It's like, no, this is the, we're in a work environment, we’ve got the stuff that makes us happy when we're here. But this isn't a, this isn't our real lives. This is one of our places that we do work. And it was a delight to see you in your real life.
Brian Kerr: Yeah. Well, thank you for indulging that, that answer. I think that's a super indulgent question for me to ask, but you know, again, with, with our, you know, with that world that we're in, right? Like I feel, I feel like I'm not where I am when I'm doing work. I feel like I am where, you know, like if I'm reading a book or if I'm just like taking notes on something, you know, then that, that feels a lot more real than getting on a conversation like this. And, and, and it's, it seems like this great loss in a way, right? Because this is also where we can make some of those, some of those connections, right? And like, this is where I can, you know, see my friends and, try to get stuff done at work, but it also just feels so you know that, so.
Dan Klyn: [Crosstalk].
Brian Kerr: Douglas Harding has a picture of like, like intersecting concentric circles with rays shooting out that that could explain it in a way that I cannot.
Dan Klyn: Yes. Well, I hope everybody does their homework and looks up The Hierarchy of Heaven and Earth. The visual explanations in there about what it might mean for us to be good to each other and to ourselves. I just think there's so much there. I told you this last time, Brian, but it happened again. I feel better when I talk with you and, I'm so grateful that you were willing to, and to do it again. And, and maybe if, if airplanes become a thing again, there's that beautiful train station in Tacoma with the Romanesque arches that I so need to see and [inaudible] stuff there. I can even get an interview with, with Dale through, through Richard next time that I'm there. So, I can't wait to come to Tacoma, but, but I do wonder is that months, is that, when is that? It's impossible to know. So.
Brian Kerr: Yeah. Yeah.
Dan Klyn: So until then, please [crosstalk]
Brian Kerr: I feel like there's also the, like the Olmsted, the Olmsted tour, right? The, like how would you describe that stuff? Like the super like sort of square cement crap.
Dan Klyn: Beautiful is where I would start.
Brian Kerr: Well, I think, I think of a park, which [inaudible] magic trick of like, you're, you know, it's a park, built on an overpass, like right over I5, it’s a super busy freeway, but it, you know, gives you this illusion of like flowing water. Like integrated with the traffic noise, but I that a lot, so yeah. We'll, we'll have lunch there sometime.
Dan Klyn: I think that's a Lawrence Halprin production there, the one that you're describing and I've always wanted to see it, so.
Brian Kerr: Oh yeah! Yeah, yeah. And then the, oh, who's Olmsted? Oh yeah, the, park clocks in Portland that, yeah, cause there's, I always get the there's, because doesn't help him have, he has a sculpture in the park block somewhere. He's got some stuff down in [inaudible] Yeah. Well, anyways, yeah, first we need to let airplanes become a thing.
Dan Klyn: [Laughs].
Brian Kerr: Oh my, Oh my goodness. Dan, I am going to require to you as a closing comment to read what Ronan put in the chat, because that's blowing my top off here. I love it.
Dan Klyn: What if it turns out that all this connection technology is like training wheels for an inherent ability for our hearts to reach out and connect over both space and time? Well, that's what it is. Yeah, we've, we've always had this and each of you that is present here, two a person are people that I love and, my heart needs to connect with yours. And so yeah, each of you in different ways, man, I love Ronan. Thank you for saying that. And, yeah. Yeah. I'm going to challenge myself to think about this as training for. Some inherency that I have that is a good, ‘cause usually I think of it as some fuckin’ shit I got to do in order to, have a half-ass version of the thing that I really want. And that is a gigantic difference that might change. Yeah. ‘Cause, Brian, I'm glad that you were able to, to admit it. Yeah. Mental health wise, it’s, it's It's a crap shoot for me on a day to day basis. So that is a beautiful way of saying it, Ronan. Thank you. I'm grateful for that and grateful for all, all the rest of you as well. So, just like, Brian said at the top we'll wave at the thing. And, I'll see you in a rectangle. I'll see each of you in one of these rectangles sometime soon. Thank you.