PK Power Up 2: Learning from Completion

Your done column isn't powerful unless it is actually used. Right now, "Done" for most people is an end-state. No learning, no reflection, no improvement.

Done DOES NOT MEAN YOU ARE FINISHED!

You need to learn from things that went well, things that went okay(ish), and things that were horrible.

There are different mechanisms to utilize for your DONE “column”. There are many ways to trigger learning, this video provides four of them.

As always, check out Modus Institute for the deep dives on visualizing and triggering learning.

Visualizing Interactions in Complicated Work

A construction team planning work openly and honestly.

When we look at a Personal Kanban, its simplicity belies its power. Visualizing our work as individuals and as teams and even as teams of teams creates trust, reliability, and understanding. When we want to co-ordinate work, these are serious prerequisites.

The image above is from a construction trailer, they are engaged in a Lean Construction exercise known as a "pull-plan". Each color is a different contractor, each diamond is a delivery or a milestone.  In this case we have five different contractors whose daily work relies on the completion of daily work done by the other contractors.To spell this out, their work directly relies on people in other companies--every day.Historically, this had led to predictable delays with different companies working at different speeds for different reasons. You might recognize this from different departments in your company or different people in your family. 

Our work often relies on other people who are often simply ignorant to our needs.Not surprisingly, when they are ignorant of our needs they don't give us what we need.

This makes it seem like they are "out to get us" because so often the work we receive is lacking. We attribute malice where the fact is those other busy people have different things to worry about every day and need to see their work in your context and vice-versa.The pull-plan concept takes this head-on by looking at the backlog of work (your options column) for the next six weeks and sees who needs to do what, when, and in what way in order for the schedule and budget to be met in a safe and quality way. 

The teams meet and on each ticket list each activity (option) they need to do to get their work done, the number of days the work requires, and then the trigger that makes that work happen (sometimes this is from another contractor, sometimes this is just their work progressing).

This allows each contractor to self-report how long they would like the work to take and then compare the total production time to the schedule and figure out what can be done the meet the customer's expectations. Often, very often in fact, this is simply having the contractors discuss with how they need the space prepared for a clean hand-off.

I've noticed almost all in-office conflicts and "culture problems" end up coming back to hand-offs, which basically means they come back to an understanding of what quality work really entails.  We need to ask some serious questions: Do I know how to provide you with work?  Do you know how to provide product to me? Are we talking to each other or past each other? Do we really understand how our individual work leads to a quality end-product?

Very simply, the image above has professionals come together, make visual what they need and when they need it, and then find the best path to mutual success. They learn quickly the challenges the other contractors have and get to inform them of their own. This makes many of those challenges lessen or outright disappear.

Consider, in your Personal Kanban or that of your team, that there might be opportunities for these kinds of conversations. Be open, be honest, and work things out.Remember: No one creates a quality product alone.   

Modus Institute

Design: The Status Column

The Problem: Sometimes we are waiting to hear the status of something. That status could come at any time and from any type of communication (email, phone, mention in the hallway, etc.). But we are waiting. If we wait too long, not knowing will cause us problems - but waiting isn't a task. We lose track of time and suddenly we are under the gun.The Solution: Build the Personal Kanban to specifically track status items and let us know when they require action.The Narrative: We've all been there. That day when someone says to us, "How's that thing going?" and we realize "Oh crap! I don't know!" Then we have to scramble to find out.Someone else or some group of "someone elses" are responsible to getting something done, but it directly impacts us. We can't call them every day and say, "Are you done yet?" because that's micromanaging. But we do need to have an idea of where they are at.At Modus, we've found specifically calling out items we are waiting for status on (things outside our group and therefore not on our Personal Kanban) allows us to treat them as potential tasks. If someone reports in on time, it simply moves to DONE and never required us to act. If it sits too long, then it becomes a task.

How Many Options Do You Have?

The Options Triangle

The other day I was driving down Point Brown Road in Ocean Shores, Washington. Ocean Shores is a small town with almost no economic base. If you live there you are likely a retiree or work in one of the restaurants or hotels that serve the tourists. The Internet in Ocean Shores is anemic, but it does exist. Yet, when I drove by the McDonalds in the center of town, the sign said, “Now hiring, apply on-line.”There is an assumption that everyone, now, in the United States has access to the Internet.With the Internet, we can reach millions of people in an instant. We can research anything in milliseconds. We can find opportunities.We live in a world of options.Options of growth, options to waste our time, options to be informed, options to be misinformed. We can get a degree. We can write a book. We can work at McDonalds.This is good and this can be overwhelming.  We can now build a wide-range of things to do simply through the electronic slabs in our homes.Further, we have all the expectations placed on us by co-workers, bosses, clients, family, friends, the government, and ourselves. They want us to do things. We want us to do things. All those things are more options.We all have tons of options.When you are creating your first Personal Kanban, your first goal is to simply understand all you could be doing right now or that is expected of you.Here’s how you might start out.

1. Write down all the expectations people have of you.

2. Write down all the things you would like to do (not just work, you want to go to Bali and sit on the beach … write it down.)

3. In your options column make a triangle like the one below

4. Use this to organize your current supply of options by placing the options in the portion of the triangle that best described the mix of obligation, desire, and growth.

5. Ask yourself … what does this mean?

With this quick tool, your work will begin to take shape. Is your work merely obligation? Do you want to do the work on your plate? Is this work building your skills or challenging your intellect? Ideally, we’d like to see tasks working into the middle to middle -right of the triangle. We want to engage in options that allow growth and that we enjoy.This helps us see the context of the options we have amassed. A vacation in Bali will likely be high in desire and even growth.  Moving to Bali and sitting on the beach for eternity might be a good escape, but might not be so high on the growth side.One other thing about this triangle. It’s not the magic triangle – there is no magic triangle.  There is no magic anything except magic erasers for everything else, you have to work.You can swap out any of the words in the triangle at-will. If you want to collaborate more, swap out “growth” for “collaboration”. Your context is your own.  Another triangle might measure risks like “resources” “complexity” and “time”. Make your own, improve on it. Make a better one, but please examine your options carefully and choose wisely.

Finding Our Own Value - Growing By Understanding

Tracking Learning, Creating, and Health

There are those days where your Personal Kanban is on fire. You are in a state of flow and tickets are just moving right along. The days go by and you look at your DONE column … it’s full. Really really full. The DONE tickets seem to swim. There are so many of them. You’ve been productive, but what might all that work actually mean?A few weeks ago I started a side experiment. By hand, each day, I wanted to see what the actual impact of my work was … on me.What was I getting from the work I was doing? What was I learning? How was I making sure I was becoming healthier? Was I stuck in the productivity trap and not growing ... not being truly effective?Each day I gathered my Inputs, Outputs, and Maintenance, which is an overly technical way of saying:

• What did I learn today?

• What did I create today?

• What did I do to make sure I stayed healthy.

Reading List in Personal Kanban

LEARN: In the first four days we see here, we see both talking to clients and reading made up the bulk of inputs. Almost immediately this section paid off. I noticed that I specifically set aside time to start reading Humble Inquiry, simply so I’d have something to put in the block. Since starting this, my reading radically shot up, due to this one simple adjustment.CREATE: Creation was anything for work or otherwise, so we have writing proposals, recommendation letters and even sous vide ribs. The question wasn’t necessarily what made me money, but what did I create that kept me … well … creative. MAINTENANCE: Since starting this, I was taken down by a nastylittle bit of pneumonia, but we can see here that from the outset I started walking (a peak of 13.2k steps and 81 floors that week), that I’m talking to friends, and that I’m scheduling needed doctors visits (hard to get time to do when you travel a lot).RESULTS: Immediately, visualizing the very loose goals of simply learning, creating, and maintaining created tickets on my Personal Kanban board, changed the way I organized my day (to allow for frequent short walks), and got me to focus each day on a balance of learning, creating, and being a whole human being.  Shortly after putting the books I was reading on our board, Tonianne added the book column on the right to our shared board.Why is that important? Because my starting to do this was due to her putting, out of the blue, reading time into her Personal Kanban.  She had simply put that she was reading Deep Work on the board. That got me to thinking about what I was reading and one thing led to another. She made a little improvement, I ran a little experiment, she made another little improvement.Meta-Lesson: When we visualize for ourselves or others, new information is created. When we expose ourselves or others to new information, improvement opportunities are exposed.