Personal Kanban & Some Goodies About Your Brain

Simple Personal Kanban

Sharing some thoughts around my weekly homework from my neuroscience studies

Knowledge work is all about attention. Unfortunately that is a scarce resource, easily high jacked by any distraction. Multitasking, i.e. using focused attention on two different targets basically does not exist. What you are able to do is to do a lot of things on autopilot (i.e. walking, breathing, looking) while your executive network (incl. working memory) is doing something else (i.e. discussing). When you think you are multitasking you are actually attention switching, with a high cost in performance. For this you will allocate attention toward or away from interference, maintain relevant memory in mind, and reactivate representations if the maintenance of what you are doing is disrupted (Clapp et al, 2010). So when you are working with a need for cognitive logical thinking, minimizing any distractions is a great preventive method.Kanban is a method for managing knowledge work with an emphasis on just-in-time delivery while not overloading the team members. The core mechanisms in Kanban is to start where you are at, work in an evolutionary and incremental way to develop the system, limit the work in progress, and finish one thing before starting another. (Wikipedia, Kanban, 29.10.2014).While Kanban is used on a team/organizational level and longer time spans, the same logic applies on personal level and short time spans, too. From a neuroscience perspective, Kanban is too interesting to fit in a 300 words homework.

A couple of Kanban-insights from the neuroscience perspective

• Limiting the number of similar things you work on will lessen the cost of attention switching and thus positively impact performance on the task at hand. (a no brainer) (Clapp et al, 2010).

• Focused attention means you are using your long-term learning mechanisms (Medial temporal areas) to encode the experience. This makes the knowledge accessible by conscious thought later on (vs. using striatal habit learning, creating more unconscious and automatic learning). (Forde et al, 2006)

• A “healthy” backlog is genius from a neuroscience perspective. Attending to an issue (backlog item) then leaving it with the knowledge of that you will return to it, seems to activate your unconscious processing. So while you are consciously focused on your work in progress (WIP), your unconscious works on items, which you know you will attend to later. (Backlog) (Ritter & Dijksterhuis, 2014)

Kanban definitely requires more in-depth analyzing from the neuroscience perspective. My hunch is that Kanban fits many of our biological & neuronal requirements, so I will definitely be dissecting Kanban some more in my studies.Where’s the scalpel?/Riina

References

1. Clapp, W.C, Rubens, M.T., Gazzaley A. ,(2010),  Mechanisms of Working Memory Disruption by External Interference, Cerebral Cortex, April, 20:859-872

2. Foerde, K. , Knowlton, B. J., Poldrack, R.A.(2006), Modulation of competing memory systems by distraction. PNAS, August 1, 2006, vol. 103, 31, p 11778-11783.

3. Ritter, S.M., DIjksterhuis, A., (2014), Creativity – the unconscious foundations of the incubation period, Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, April, Vol 8:215, p.1-10.

Picture: Photo credit: o.tacke / Foter / CC BY

Take the RealWIP Test

Write Down Your WIP

If you are already using Personal Kanban or another kanban system, you are likely at least thinking about limiting your work-in-progress (WIP). You are likely finding that challenging.We know that the more work we take on, the more our brains' resources are taxed. That tax limits our ability to focus, to process, and to complete quality work. We want to limit our work-in-progress so that we can finish quickly and with quality.One thing to remember is that if it were easy to limit WIP, we’d all be doing it already. Limiting WIP is challenging in a world filled with demands and distractions. Often we’ll be watching our Personal Kanban and, as long as there’s three things in DOING, we’ll feel pretty good about ourselves.Then, one day, we’ll catch ourselves working on something that isn’t in DOING and we’ll realize … oh no, I have hidden WIP.Hidden WIP is that work you do all the time that you don’t tell your board about.So it’s helpful once a week to sit down and write down your WIP.  Simply write down everything you are really doing right now. Write down everything you are currently working on or is making you think. (You may be starting tasks before you pull them). See what that real load is. If you work with a team or manage them, sit down and do this with the team.You’ll be surprised at how much work you are actually taking on.I can’t stress how important this is even for experienced kanban users. I visit teams and counsel individuals regularly who are overloaded with work and have very nice WIP-limited Personal Kanban boards. Their hidden WIP is killing them.So, sit down, write down your real WIP and do something about it.

HOW TO: Limit WIP #7: Understand Your Customers

In this series, we’ve been discussing the psychology of your work, the sized of tasks, how we complete certain types of tasks, and who / what might interrupt us.Perhaps it’s time to understand the consumers of our tasks: our customers. When we do something, even if it is simply relaxing, there is a potential beneficiary of that task.We do things. Those things we loosely call “work”. “Work” has a “work product”. “Work products” should have some value for somebody. That somebody is the customer.Customers can include:

• those paying money for the work (the traditional customer)

• our bosses (corporate hierarchy)

• colleagues, coworkers, partners (corporate culture)

• regulators or agents of an authority (bureaucracy)

• family (family)

• friends and neighbors (society)

• ourselves (ourselves)

And there are likely other customers and subdivisions of these customers.If you are doing things that have no value to anyone … why are you doing them?To limit our WIP, we need to make sure we are doing the right thing.But even if we know it's the right task, are we doing the thing right? To learn this, we must ask ourselves:

• What does our customer want?

• What is the highest value they can get from my work?

• Do I have time to give them that value?

• How much value can I get done in the time I have?

• Will that level of value be sufficient?

We often find ourselves saying “no” to that last question, but continuing to do the work anyway.When we know our work is going to be of insufficient quality, we tend to become aggravated. We feel annoyance at the task, at those who asked us to do the task, an ourselves for getting stuck in a situation like this. This annoyance increases the chance that our work product will be of low quality – making the work even more insufficient.If we didn’t want to do a good job, this would not be a problem.Since we do, there are five quick actions we should take when we understand we have a customer:

• Be clear about what they want – Yes, this sounds obvious, but how many times have you had to rework something because of a simple initial lack of understanding?

• Be clear about what is on your plate – No, sorry Miss Customer, you are not the only thing I am doing right now. I wish you were, but life doesn’t work like that. Here’s what I can realistically do.

• Get their feedback early and often – How soon can you show them an interim product? How quickly can you compare expected and actual progress? Earlier feedback = earlier delivery.

• Understand minimum and optimal deliverables – Minimum and optimum deliverables give you a range of success to shoot for. If you are always aiming for the high point, you will usually underdeliver.

• Work is a relationship – All work is a relationship between the person doing the work and the person receiving it. Communication (again as early as possible) helps both cement the relationship and ensure an appreciated delivery.

It's simple, if we don't know who it is for, we don't know what we are doing. If we don't know what we are doing, how can we limit our work-in-progress?

HOW TO: Limit WIP #6: Count The Bosses–Show the Work

It’s hard to limit your work-in-progress when your boss count exceeds your WIP limit.If you have a WIP Limit of 3 and 12 bosses, you may as well have one card permanently in your Personal Kanban that says, “Negotiate with Bosses”.That sounds funny, but it is true. Your bosses will always require explanations about why you are working on tasks that are unrelated to their work.Tonianne and I play a game with people regularly called “Count The Bosses.” The rules are simple…. you count your bosses.If you need more than a few fingers to count them, you know that part of your job is not only satisfying their demands, but also choosing which one to be attentive to at any given point-in-time.Your bosses are people who directly give you work. In a few days, we’ll have a post #7 which deals with understanding your customers. For today, however, we simply want a number … how many people are giving you work?Then ask these questions:

1. Do these people consult with each other before giving me work?

2. Do I feel guilty when I’m working for one when another has needs?

3. Am I punished for doing work for one boss over another?

4. Am I in the middle of their disputes?

5. Will they let me complete tasks before giving me another?

6. Do they allow me to complete my work in a way that works for me, rather than working in ways they think I should?

What we would like is have answers that give them the right to give us work, but give us the ability to complete that work in the best way we see fit.If your answers are not in this direction, it is useful to show on a Personal Kanban what is really happening. Then discuss this with them around the board. Do not just go talk to them, because neither of you will have anything physical to talk about. The goal here is to use the board as a mediator. We want the board to reveal how there is too much work-in-progress and that the work load itself is hampering your ability to complete things on time.Have your bosses watch this strangely silent YouTube Video. Let them know you, too, have an optimal WIP limit.

Limit Your WIP

HOW TO: Limit WIP #5–Throughput Analysis

When we think about limiting Work-in-process, we have to confront that there are many types of work. Simply limiting work is not enough, we have to know what we are limiting. We have to see what we are really completing.A very real danger for us as people is that we limit our WIP and then say, “What’s the most important task to pull next” without understanding the weights of types of tasks.We have tasks that might:

• make us money

• satisfy someone else’s needs

• teach us something

• provide us pleasure / opportunity to relax

• gain us political favor / help avoid political disfavor

• satisfy bureaucratic requirements

• etc.

Depending on the situation, we will pick one of these over another. However, very often Tonianne and I see people favoring office demands over personal growth, emergencies over kaizen, and politics over family. This behavior creates new personal emergencies. If you ignore your spouse and your kids long enough, that has repercussions – the best of which would be that they feel ignored, the worst can be much worse.Back at the office, the emergency we are tending to right now is at the cost of other work on other project that, after it languishes for a while will also become an emergency. And the cycle continues.The sad truth is that quite often we create our own emergencies and, therefore, our own spiral into an emergency-centered life. When we reach this point, we say, “How can I possibly limit my WIP? Everything is an emergency!”

Emergencies Create Throughput Issues Create More Emergencies

In this video, we see the impacts of a workplace emergency. New emergencies are spawned at home and at work. The point here is not to say, “Don’t have emergencies,” but to understand how they can create an emergency cascade. If the person in the video would have hired a handyman at home and found even one person at the office to help him, his dilemma could have been avoided.The key here is balance. The tickets at the end of the week were all focused on the Desper Project, rather than on all of his goals. The more balanced the tasks are at the end of the week, the more balanced goal attainment will be. The visual cue of only red tasks let us know that new emergencies were brewing.When you are setting up your Personal Kanban, ask yourself what your goals are and make sure the stickies are designed to give you feedback on what you are and what you are not completing.