Go to Titanauts.com to see more about the book and help launch the mission.
I have spent a lifetime in rooms with people who are changing. Not in any dramatic, cinematic way. Like aliens busting out of their chests, but changing like people actually change. People change slowly, awkwardly, and usually at the worst possible time. You know, like why change is inconvenient and people say they don’t like it.
I’ve facilitated hundreds of value stream mapping exercises, A3s, retrospectives, design sessions. I’ve watched smart, capable, seasoned professionals navigate genuinely stressful revelations without flinching. Requirements that don’t match reality. Workflows that are held together with habit and denial. Processes that exist because someone built them in 2007 and then got promoted.
They handle all of it. They’re professionals. They rise to the occasion.
And then one of them falls apart over something that doesn’t seem important.
Someone laughs too hard. Someone goes quiet or bursts into tears. Someone gets angry about a sticky note and storms out. And the rest of us (facilitators included) have this instinctive response, which is: Wow. That was weird. Hope it doesn’t happen again.
What we should be saying is: Where did that come from?
So I wrote The Social Life of Small Enclosed Spaces, and it’s about a crew of people on a long-duration mission to Titan. They’re stuck together in a spacecraft for years, dealing with corporate surveillance, AIs that may or may not be trustworthy, and the slow-motion realization that the system they’re inside was designed to use them.
Standard Tuesday, really, for anyone who’s worked in a large organization.
The book is Lean and systems thinking wrapped in a space opera. It’s got value streams and kanban and organizational design, except they’re happening between people who are also dealing with murder, espionage, and an oligarch who thinks she owns them. It’s very much a book by me.
And that was great, and then ... the characters became people. And started doing things I didn’t plan for.
Now, you’d think the conductor of the orchestra wouldn’t be surprised by the music. I designed these people. I built their backstories, their motivations, their arcs. I knew where they were going.
Except I didn’t. Because characters are people, and people are predictably irrational, and characters are worse — because you think you have control over them.
*People are people, so why should it be, I should expect them to at predictably? * Jules Park is my security chief. He’s sarcastic, profane, and ready with a one-liner for any occasion. He’s the guy who walks into the crisis meeting with his coffee, arms crossed, chair tilted back, sarcasm buffer fully loaded. He handles everything.
Until he doesn’t.
And when he hit his breaking point (which I did not schedule) I found myself doing the exact same thing I tell facilitators not to do. I said: This person wouldn’t do that.
Which is exactly what we say in meetings when someone breaks pattern. We say it about Larry when the project goes sideways on his watch. We say it about the team lead who suddenly can’t take one more requirement change. We say it about the developer who was fine for five sprints and then just... wasn’t.
It’s a weird form of fundamental attribution error. We blame the person for the state of the thing, because they’re the last one holding it. But what actually happened is that they’re the part of the system where the complexity landed. They didn’t break the plan. They’re where the plan’s assumptions ran out.
No plan survives contact with Larry and Larry might not survive either.
There’s something else that happens in those rooms, and in the book, that I think we don’t talk about enough.
People have epiphanies on a different schedule than you do. Or than you wish they did. And that’s why we have other people (sometimes you are the slow one).
In any VSM exercise, you will watch people go from their current state to a future state. They know, roughly, what they expect that future state to be. But it never is. And the delta between their expectations and where they actually end up we think is just process improvement. But it’s not...it’s a personal change. It’s internal. It rewires something.
Someone says: “I guess this lean stuff isn’t so bad.” Someone else says: “I thought you were a jerk, but I realize the system was making me assume that.” These are epiphanies, and they arrive when they arrive...often at a point that’s wildly inconvenient for the facilitator or the project plan or the person sitting next to them.
In the book, this happens constantly. Rash (my military botanist), the quiet guy carrying a heavy load, doesn’t become a radically different person over the course of the mission. But he softens, he learns, he has experiences that change him.
In any enclosed space (a spacecraft, a conference room, a project team) you either soften toward each other (align) or you calcify (become brittle). Those are your options.
All systems want people and events to be predictable. That’s the entire architecture of control. Control the inputs, control the outputs. Decrease variation. Standardize. Garbage in-garbage out...an adage that is a joke at recycling plants that have garbage in, usable materials out.
Life gives us a lot of garbage. We...get to use it creatively.
In the book, Wei Lin, the HOMEGA director, has built an entire corporate infrastructure around the premise that if you coerce the right people and constrain their options sufficiently, they’ll perform as designed. (Any resemblance to any current oligarchs is purely coincidental.)
And right now, outside the book, we’re living in the real-world version of that assumption. We’re in variation soup. The amount of ambient uncertainty that people are carrying around...economic, political, personal, existential...is staggering. There is no predictability right now. And there are people who are trying very hard to make sure that remains the case.
So when someone in your next planning meeting has an emotional response that doesn’t fit your model of them — when someone on your team hits a trigger you didn’t see coming — please try to have the space to ask where did that come from? instead of that was weird.
The crew’s refusal to stay predictable isn’t them acting out, it’s just them growing and responding to the system they are in. And that’s been the most beautiful thing to see while writing this book.
It was an annoying form of self-humiliation, watching the characters in the book act like real people. Their plans didn’t survive contact with reality because the plan was bad, it was because people are alive. They learn. They change. In the face of complexity and variation, they change. And that is a very good thing. It’s what makes us all human. It’s what makes value stream mapping and Personal Kanban work.
So. Two very Modus things.
One. If you’re someone who works with teams (an agile coach, a project manager, an organizational designer, someone who stares at value streams and wonders why they never quite do what they’re supposed to) this book is for you. It’s a novel about systems thinking and human messiness and what happens when you lock a bunch of smart, broken, funny people in a tin can and send them to Saturn’s largest moon. It’s funny. It has a lot of coffee in it. And the AI has opinions.
Go to titanauts.com and help me launch it.
Two. When you’re working with people in any context, in any room, on any project, try to have the space to recognize that they are encountering what you’re encountering in a different way. Their responses, even when they’re inconvenient, can be incredibly helpful to making sure you do the right thing at the right time with the right people.
That’s the real value stream. The human one. It’s why we do what we do.
Jim Benson is the creator of Personal Kanban and the author of The Social Life of Small Enclosed Spaces. He’s been a process guy, a psychology guy, an urban planning guy, a design engineer guy, and now a fiction author guy. All of those things collide in this book.
Modus Institute × HOMEGA
