What do you do when a client throws out the very system you helped them create? In this episode, Jim Benson shares a humbling consulting mistake that reshaped how he thinks about assumptions, client readiness, and what “success” really means.
Check out all episodes on the My Favorite Mistake main page.
My guest for Episode #4 of the My Favorite Mistake podcast is Jim Benson, the creator of the “Personal Kanban” method and an expert making work flow and decisions easy. He is the CEO of Modus Cooperandi and is a Founding Partner in Modus Institute. And, he's co-creator of the “Lean Coffee” meeting format.
Today, Jim shares a story about working his mistakes and assumptions that he made when working with a large telecom / communications clients that had thrown out the new cross-functional way of working that Jim had helped them put in place. It's a mistake that was humbling to Jim and a mistake that he cheerfully learned from.
Jim is co-author of the book Personal Kanban: Mapping Work | Navigating Life. You can find him on Twitter as @ourfounder.
Video Podcast:
Quotes:
Subscribe, Support, Rate, and Review!
Please subscribe, rate, and review the podcast — that helps others find this content and you'll be sure to get future episodes as they are released weekly.
Automated Transcript
Here is the cleaned-up transcript. I have removed the timestamps, corrected stutters and filler words (like “um,” “you know,” “uh,” “blah blah blah”), and smoothed out the conversation flow for readability.
Mark Graban: Episode four, Jim Benson, CEO of Modus Cooperandi. What's your favorite mistake?
Jim Benson: That's right. I would hate to pick my most favorite mistake because that's like picking your favorite kid or something.
Mark Graban: I'm Mark Graban. This is My Favorite Mistake. In this podcast, you'll hear business leaders and other really interesting people talking about their favorite mistakes because we all make mistakes, but what matters is learning from our mistakes instead of repeating them over and over again. So this is the place for honest reflection and conversation, personal growth, and professional success. Visit our website at myfavoritemistakepodcast.com. Thanks for listening. And now on with the show.
We're joined today by Jim Benson. Among other things, he's the co-author of the wildly popular book Personal Kanban. Jim, how are you doing?
Jim Benson: Good. How are you doing?
Mark Graban: Doing great. I'm really happy to talk with you today. Let's just dive right in. You've given this some thought ahead of time. What's your favorite mistake, or at least a favorite mistake?
Jim Benson: A favorite mistake. I would hate to pick my most favorite mistake because that's like picking your favorite kid, but I adore all my mistakes. I always say that the story that comes to mind most for me is several years ago. Now, Tonianne [DeMaria] and I went to work in the headquarters of a nameless, major communications and entertainment giant that's based in Philadelphia and takes up almost all of the downtown area.
We went to work with a group that was like triple-matrixed. Everybody had four or five bosses and nobody could actually make a decision or get anything done without running things through an always-changing, questionable chain of command. When we asked the vice presidents of this group why we were there, they said, “You're there to make us more collaborative and work together and care for each other more.”
We said, “Well, you do realize that you have been in the top five most hated companies in America for over a decade.”
And they're like, “Yeah.”
So it was like, well, you don't get there accidentally. It's not like, “Oops, I forgot to care about people.” You have to make a conscious effort to be there. So I'm not sure that you have the culture to do what you're asking. And they said, “No, we absolutely have to do it. We know we have to grow. You don't have to change, go.”
So we went off and we talked to all these teams and the teams were like, “All we really want is when we get a piece of work, we want to be able to form a work cell that will allow us to complete the work,” or what in Agile they call a cross-functional team. That is just an indication that most people are usually locked in silos, and multiple people from multiple silos are required to get a thing done, and they can't. So they're like, “Just let me get my freaking work done.”
Mark Graban: Would this include launching a new product or service or even things smaller than that?
Jim Benson: Even things smaller than that. In this case, even fixing a bug, anything at all required it. On one level, they were divided between backend, middleware, and front end. And then they were in functional areas like mobile or desktop across the other direction. So anything that they did would touch a set-top box, it would touch a mobile user, it would touch everything. And so the team said, “We want to be cross-functional teams.”
We went back to the vice presidents to say, “Hey, we've got to warn you guys. These guys want to be cross-functional teams.” They said, “That would be great.”
“Maybe you don't get this, but they're re-orging without you. So right now you are relevant. When you move into the new world, you will not be.”
And they said, “No, that's absolutely what we want.”
And so the teams became cross-functional teams. Their productivity went up, their enjoyment of their work went way up. Yay, all this great stuff. And then sure enough, the vice presidents one day woke up and said, “By golly, I'm irrelevant.” And then they shut the whole thing down.
They had 80 people in the group. 16 people immediately left. So I had an immediate 20% attrition. People kind of tasted freedom and they're like, “Whoa, it tastes pretty good.” But then the contract ended and they're like, “Do not come back. Don't do that to us again.”
So for years, that was how Tonianne and I told that story. It was a mistake to even go in. It was a mistake to let them start because it hurt people's careers. It did all of these things and the corporate culture wasn't ready for such a change.
But what happened while we were running around bad-mouthing them was that internally—now this took five years, okay, so it wasn't like five months…
Mark Graban: But it was a really long time from the VP saying okay, to doing away with it? It took five minutes?
Jim Benson: No, getting them to bring it back took five years. So they said you can do it, and then over the next 60 months, they worked as a group to figure out how can we comfortably internally change our culture, change our organization, to do these things better.
And so the story now has a happy ending. They actually do have cross-functional teams. They got rid of the crazy multi-matrix, five-dimensional management system. And they've just made incredible strides to be a better group inside a better company.
So I went from a very frustrating mistake to then the mistake being not giving professionals and people the benefit of the doubt or credit where credit was due. I realized that no, Jim, just 'cause your ego wanted them to change in two months or just 'cause your ego wanted to be proven right about them sucking so bad, they actually didn't. They actually did the right thing in a while. They just did it on a timeline that the company could stomach.
Mark Graban: Was it a matter that it took five years for the culture? Was somebody trying to move that culture along? Did the world change around them? Was five years later a different competitive environment somehow, I wonder?
Jim Benson: When we went in, it was the beginning of the different competitive environment. So that was when it was clear to them that Hulu and Netflix were going to change the industry. It was way before Amazon Prime started making their own content. That obviously changed the market entirely, but they saw that the writing was on the wall then. But that didn't mean that they were prepared for the level of internal disruption that was required to do that.
So that took them a while longer. And it did actually take some leadership staffing changes, but as a group as a whole, they didn't stop working to try and make things better. And I don't know… that gives me hope.
Mark Graban: It seems like there's probably a fairly commonly occurring mistake in organizations. It's human nature. We see something coming, but we rationalize not taking action until maybe now it's a huge crisis. There's the most recent book called Upstream by Dan Heath, solo writing the book Upstream, where the idea of solving a problem upstream is always more effective and less expensive than waiting for it to become a huge downstream issue.
Jim Benson: Yep. When the cost of change is low.
Mark Graban: But going back to the scenario, was it a mistake in trying to push that change across functional teams through so quickly? It sounds like you had people, the client, who wanted it to happen.
Jim Benson: So, years ago, a writing partner of mine and I started writing screenplays and we went down to LA and we took a class in screenplay writing. The very well-known screenplay guy came out and said, “Before you start this, you have to ask yourself: Do you want to write a screenplay? Or do you want to have written a screenplay?”
And that has always stuck with me. And so very much in that VP suite, there were people who wanted to have transitioned. They didn't necessarily want to transition. They just figured that those people would just do their work in a different way and it wouldn't affect them personally.
What they didn't realize is like, every month they created this massive 80-page document of key metrics that they would then pore over and say, “Ooh, this one went down slightly. Let's kill them.” No one was giving them the metrics anymore because they're like, “No, dude. We know that's not worth our time.”
And that was one of the big things that went, because that was what they used actually for them to report up. So it wasn't that their people thought they were irrelevant, cause they couldn't care if they became completely irrelevant in their group. That was fine because they could just go golfing. But if their bosses saw that they were becoming irrelevant, that was a problem.
Mark Graban: That kills the income stream that makes it possible.
Jim Benson: It does. It doesn't show up well in your annual review.
Mark Graban: No, it doesn't look good on your LinkedIn. “My stretch goal was to become irrelevant.”
So in terms of takeaways and lessons, if you were to come into a similar type of situation today where you've got a group of the people doing the work saying, “We want this change, we want it now,” are there reflections or things that you would do differently to avoid that being pulled out from under them after two months?
Jim Benson: So that's the big question then: what in that whole relationship was actually the mistake? And in my mind—thank you, coffee appears—the mistake wasn't necessarily anything that we did while we were there, because I think that was the impetus to change that needed to happen. The mistake was assuming that just because a particular client or company had a particular reputation, that they as human beings and professionals couldn't get beyond that reputation.
So in my practice, what I took from that was to be clear upfront about what I see as the trajectory of the initial actions. So to be louder with the VPs saying, “Here's what's about to happen to you,” but also not to ever stop anybody from being on this program later. So I don't want to stop them from making the best mistake they ever made. And I gather that for a lot of people at Comcast, that actually was the case. That was like one of the best mistakes that they ever made. Some of them because they went and found other work, some of them because they stayed behind and changed the company.
But sometimes that initial pressure to move that heavy object needs to be extreme. And the thing that makes that initial object move isn't the same thing that will carry it forward as it starts moving. I was first gear. So yeah, I guess just to come back to that one thing, is that it initially raised my intolerance for people, which I think was the mistake. And then when they turned it around, that was a big, humbling experience for me. Cause I was like, “Oh crap. That wasn't fair.”
Mark Graban: Well, thank you for sharing that story. I appreciate the reflections and not being afraid to share that. Our guest today has been Jim Benson. He's the co-author of the book Personal Kanban. And Jim, what else do you have going on professionally? You've got some relatively new offerings for people online?
Jim Benson: Yeah, we've been busy during COVID. So we've completely revamped our Modus Institute online school, where we teach collaborative management. It's kind of like the best of Lean, the best of Agile, the best of behavioral economics brought together into the best of Deming into one collaborative package. That's at modusinstitute.com.
We've launched a new app called Endeavor Hub, which is a group decision-making application, which helps groups come to alignment by making things visual and allowing people to see things from different perspectives at the same time.
And hopefully everyone who has written a book cringes when you try and say when a book is going to come out, but hopefully in the fall, What's Your Modus—which is the working title right now for the book on collaborative management—will be out. And it is rife with stories like this from 12 years of interesting and weird experiences now.
Mark Graban: Well thank you for giving a bit of a preview. Instead of a short podcast, there's enough to fill a book.
Jim Benson: There are many things and I hope that everyone has that many experiences.
Mark Graban: Again, Jim Benson, thank you so much for taking some time and for being a guest today.
Jim Benson: Awesome. Thanks, Mark.
Mark Graban: Thanks for listening. I hope this podcast inspires you to pause and think about your own favorite mistake and how learning from mistakes shapes you personally and professionally. If you're a leader, what can you do to create a culture where it's safe for colleagues to talk openly about mistakes in the spirit of learning? Please subscribe, rate, and review. The podcast website is myfavoritemistakepodcast.com. See you next time.
This episode explores a real-world consulting mistake involving assumptions, client readiness, and learning the hard way. Consultants and leaders will gain insight into adapting their approach when change efforts don’t stick as expected.