A difficulty with knowledge work is making work visible. It is also one of the principles of lean management that we can only manage what we see, and making work visible is critical. Digital transformation is like a double edged sword. It might improve your alignment, but it might also hide the inefficiencies in our processes. This is why it is even more important we pay attention to them. How to make knowledge work visible? Math! Besides the obvious guidance like Kanban boards, process diagrams etc. I recommend not only to make things visible digitally, but also physically e.g. printing out emails. It's one thing to see a digital counter of emails adding up to a 1000, it is another thing entirely to see the physicall stack of papers this would produce on your desk. It is one of the hidden reasons why our teams, processes, companies, governments grow to such an unmanageable size and unmanageable complexity. Nobody is shocked anymore by raw volume of materials we need to go through, because they don't see them. We do not get this visceral, gut reaction - look at the size of this book... look at the size of this stack of papers... Thus we cannot get the instinct - this is unmanageable and has to change. Interestingly you don't even need to print out the emails to feel this. Just slow down and calculate how tall would your inbox be if I printed it out. To be conservative I will assume not every email requires a full A4 page, but only 25%. When calculated... Considering an avarage person receiving about ~100 emails per day in a professional setting, it would have been 25%x100x250 work days per year ~= 6250 pages per year. 12.5 rims of 500 A4 pages, just for the last year... and that was not counting the chat messages, just emails. How many books did you read last year? Considering an avarage book is 300 pages, an avarage knowledge worker would read an equivalent of 21 books just to manage your work. This of course does not account for any additional documents, presentations or other materials you produce and consume for work... #Minimalism #FlowCybernetics #Agile #Lean #Flow #Software #Programming #Business