Our mission is to make a world of work that is practical, humane, and rewarding.

If we are going to make work rewarding and improve relationships—that is hard and real work. The classes here at Modus Institute will help you immediately improve, and that will feel good, but then comes the real work…
building that right environment for you and your peers.

We look forward to working with you.

Our Founders

Award winning pioneers in individual, team, and corporate work, Jim and Toni have worked with hundreds of companies world wide, creating collaborative, humane, and highly performing teams that enjoy going to work.
A pioneer in applying Lean and Kanban to knowledge work, Jim is the creator of Personal Kanban and co-author four books. He co-author of Personal Kanban: Mapping Work | Navigating Life, winner of the Shingo Research and Publication Award. He is the CEO of Modus Cooperandi, and co-founder of Modus Institute. For the past three decades Jim has worked with teams worldwide, helping them uncover ways for individuals and groups to communicate, collaborate, and find clarity in unpredictable and amorphous environments.

Jim Benson

Tonianne is a partner & principal consultant at Modus Cooperandi, co-author of the Shingo Research and Publication Award-winning Personal Kanban: Mapping Work | Navigating Life, and co-founder of Kaizen Camp™ and Modus Institute. Toni explores the relationship between performance, motivation, and neuroscience. She is passionate about the roles collaboration, value-creation, and happiness play in the ways people work together and practically finish quality product.

Tonianne DeMaria

The Modus Institute Faculty

Non-Profit Leader

Genevieve
Getman-Sowa

Genevieve is the owner of GGS Consulting where she works closely with nonprofit organizations to provide them with visual management strategies, capacity development, and communications services to support them in achieving their missions.
Genevieve is a founding and current member of N.I.C.E. Consultants (Nonprofit Impact Consulting Ensemble) and continues to serve as Board Secretary for the Community Association for Preschool Education.
“Govie” & GIS Expert

Tim Nolan

Tim has been a local govie most of his adulthood. Public service has been his life-long passion. He has more than 30 years of experience as a leader, speaker, and Lean and Agile practitioner. Texas is home for Tim. He enjoys sharing the success stories of his teams in collaborative and professional management frameworks. GIS was his first love, and Lean Agile Visual Management (#LAVM) is his new love.
Distributed Team Builder

Mark Kilby

With over two decades of experience in agile principles and practices, Mark Kilby has cultivated more distributed and dispersed teams than collocated teams. He has consulted with organizations across many industries and coached teams, leaders, and organizations internally.
Mark shares this experience in his latest book with Johanna Rothman - From Chaos to Successful Distributed Agile Teams: Collaborate to Deliver. 
PMP, PMI-ACP, CSM, CSPO, CSP, CST

Dave Prior

Dave Prior has been leading technology projects and helping individuals and teams find better ways to manage their work for over 20 years. He has managed projects, programs, PMOs, and portfolios and has focused on Agile since 1999.
Dave has been podcasting about Agile and Project Management since 2008. He currently produces LeadingAgile’s SoundNotes and drunkenPM Radio’s Reluctant Agilist.

The podcasts cover Agile basics, best practices for transitioning from waterfall to Agile, as well as guidance and advice on how to address more advanced Agile topics.

Dave works for LeadingAgile and leads Certified Scrum Master and Certified Scrum Product Owner classes throughout the United States and online. He is also a member of the Scrum Alliance TAC. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.
Infrastructure & Operations in Higher Ed.

Thushyanthan Amirthalingam

Thushyanthan is a service and operations improvement expert with 15 years of experience in the Higher Education industry. He is focused on transparency and visual communication using agile methodologies (kanban/scrum) for continuous improvement.

He specializes in technical training and coaching; teamwork and cross-functional communication; systems architecture and operations; service improvement; and Lean thinking and Agile processes.

Thushyanthan lives in Vancouver, BC.

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