The Kaizen Resolution

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If you are a typical New Year’s resolver, you’ve just taken on a large, daunting, personal transformation project. You want to lose weight or be nicer or play for the Celtics. Good for you!But if you are also typical you (a) haven’t been too successful at this resolution in the past and have recycled it (b) have good intentions but no plan and (c) are doing this entirely alone.We mentioned my 10,000 steps rule. I have lost track of it after a few years of doing really well, some years of going pretty good, and lately a few years of saying “Oh today I actually did it”. During the years I did really well, I was using an on-line tool called Walker Tracker and, together with my friends like Ed Vielmetti and Prentiss Riddle I walked the equivalent of Seattle to Phoenix by way of San Diego.When we all drifted away from the tool, I lost the community and, therefore, focus.This year, I am resolving the more amorphous “be healthier.” This involves three things: eat better, exercise more, and see friends. These are also amorphous. I cannot treat these like projects, but I can treat them as the focus of my Kaizen events. None of these things require undue coordination, but they do require focus.What is Kaizen? Kaizen, in its essence, is continuous improvement. It is an internal drive to constantly be making things better. I want to do okay this week, a little better next week, a little better the week after that.What I don’t want is to over-commit to something far outside my routine. Business does this all the time. They call it a “re-org” - meaning they are radically reorganizing the processes, structure, and culture of the company. They usually fail.Why? Because they’ve done so much change at once they shocked the system. In 1998, after a decade of being a vegetarian, I decided to start eating meat again. How did I do this? Well, I ate half a chicken. It was delicious. It nearly destroyed me - rather than introducing small amounts of meat into my system, I shocked it with a large amount of change it literally could not digest.Don’t do that.With Kaizen we want to make small incremental changes. In this case, we want to pick up new habits that benefit our New Year’s goals. For this, we can use our Personal Kanban. Let’s say that for these habits, we do two things:1. Remind ourselves of the habits2. Invent small, obtainable projects to get you there.So, we have a habits swim lane. Note that we’ve identified a bunch of habits we’d like to achieve this year in the ready column, but right now we’re just working on a few. While those blue habits are “in progress”, we have blue actions in our working kanban.So we see that we have in our swimlane “exercise more”. (Fitting that it’s in a swim lane). So here’s where life gets interesting. Our first task is to find an exercise buddy - someone with whom we can create some social pressure and some support to actually do this exercising. We find Jill, who's totally ready to exercise - but we find that she’s into hot yoga and not treadmills at the gym.After some discussion, we agree to go with her to hot yoga.If you had pre-decided that the only way for you to lose weight was with treadmills at the gym, you would have bought a lot of new clothes and shoes and a gym membership. Now, you are looking at the best yoga studio. You had patience, and looked for the best options.Remember, your New Year’s Resolution is a goal. It is an end state you would like to achieve. There are many paths to your end-state. If you over-commit to one particular path, you greatly reduce your chances of success. Flexibility - especially in something as fuzzy as a New Year’s Resolution - is vital.Set yourself up for success. Build habits naturally. Don’t force change, but embrace it.

Two Personal Kanban Resolution Ideas

Happy 2013!Most people I know don’t even make New Year’s Resolutions anymore, and when they do - they are perfunctory and amorphous. I will lose weight, I will exercise more, I will grow wings and fly like a bat.But these are all as unlikely as they are amorphous, and they are unlikely because they are amorphous. I, for example, have had a long standing goal to walk 10,000 steps. This can sometimes (or quite often) be a challenge in Seattle when it’s often drizzly and cold. In July, I crush my goal! But I can’t have a yearly goal in one month.When we make resolutions that are difficult to achieve, we do really well at them for a while and then something happens - the weather changes or we get sick or we go on a trip. That breaks the flow of the resolution and we stop doing it. We try to do it from time to time, but that’s not quite the same.I’ve seen people be very successful at small New Year’s Resolutions like “this year I will clean the garage” because these resolutions are easy to grasp, schedule for, and complete.We can only complete our New Year’s goals if they are (a) a small project that we can focus on and complete or (b) a new habit we can intelligently weave into our daily lives. So here at Personal Kanban we have two recommendations we’ll talk about today, one is the Kaizen Resolution, the other is Small New Years Projects.And if you are wondering, I waited until after the first to write this because I figured that about now people would be like ... well, I made the resolution .. now what?

Managing Sandy’s Aftermath: Emergency Response Personal Kanban

Hurricane Sandy Aftermath

Despite our best efforts, there are simply some instances where we cannot limit our work-in-progress. Forces beyond our control seem to conspire to control us. Natural disasters are unfortunately well-suited for this - they have little or no respect for our carefully controlled WIP.When we’re smack in the middle of an emergency like Hurricane Sandy, it seems all we can do is react to immediate needs: which windows to avoid crashing tree limbs, what doors to insulate against rising and rushing water, where to seek shelter should evacuation become imminent. Once the storm passes, we’re left to contend with a heretofore unimaginable trail of destruction - to our homes, to our businesses, to our mental well-being.It is at the most emotional of moments that we find ourselves forced to make vital decisions. What do I do first? Where do I begin? Will I ever get out from beneath this overwhelming physical and psychological debris?In the Personal Kanban book, we discuss a design pattern which doesn’t quite resemble a “typical” Personal Kanban. In the aftermath of an emergency, the “Emergency Response Approach” helps us:

• Visualize all the work needed to respond to the situation at hand;

• Understand the complexity of the situation;

• Track the states of completion for most important and intricate tasks;

• Compile notes during the completion of those tasks;

• Keep a written record of how we dealt with the emergency;

• Dynamically re-prioritize tasks based on shifts in need or context; and

• Understand our options.

As you can see here, we created this matrix-style kanban with the goal of seeing all our work and ensuring that when we are finished we’ve lost no information in the process. We chose to go extremely low-tech - just flipchart paper and pen - not only because an online kanban would require electricity, but also because with a sticky note-based Personal Kanban the stickies could easily become detached, causing vital information to become lost.In an emergency situation, this kanban becomes your war room.Your “value stream” - the steps it takes to complete a task - might look something like this:

Task → Begun → Assembling → Assembled → Active → Complete → Notes

Begun: If it’s been started (you’ve begun to work on the task).Assembling: If it’s being assembled (you’re gathering paperwork or other requirements).Assembled: If it’s been assembled (requirements are complete).Active: If it’s being processed (by you, or you’re waiting for someone else to act).Complete: If it’s complete.Use the Notes column for points of contact, policy numbers, additional resources etc.One of the major elements of this design pattern is its tolerance for beginning some tasks while allowing others to remain incomplete. Why would we advocate not limiting WIP when that is one of Personal Kanban’s fundamental rules?During an emergency, opportunities to begin tasks are actually valuable.Ordinarily, we want to limit our work-in-progress and complete each task before a new one begins. In this case, there are way too many complicated tasks to undertake, too many coordination points, and too many things to do.This is multitasking by necessity, but it’s controlled multitasking. With a to-do list, we’d have an accounting of the tasks, but we wouldn’t understand their state or be able to limit our WIP. The Emergency Response Approach includes includes a few helpful features that are designed to overcome the limitations of a to-do list.It works like this:

1. In the Task column, write down everything you need to do. For the moment, don’t worry what size the tasks are. Just get them out of your head and onto your kanban.

2. Look at your Taskcolumn and begin working on the highest priority task.

   1. Note that you’ve started by writing a check mark in the Assembling column.

   2. Assemble all the items you need to actually complete the task (insurance numbers, phone numbers, pictures of damage, etc)

   3. When you are done mark with a check mark that you’ve Assembled everything and can begin working on the task in earnest. This task is now Active.

   4. Once a task is Active, take notes directly on the kanban in the Notes field (it’s okay to spill out). Our goal here is after everything is done, your emergency kanban is a one-stop-shop for what happened, when it happened, and how it happened.

   5. When the task is Complete, mark it and move on.

It’s important to note:

• You’ll have many tasks in-flight at once;

• You’ll be interrupted by other tasks constantly;

• You’ll never finish them in priority order;

• There will be many more tasks than you initially expected;

• You’ll need to remember details later that don’t necessarily matter to you right now;

• You are doing heroic things right now. This tool is here to help you keep track of what happened; and

• There are things you will miss, and that’s okay.

Your goal right now is to get your life back to normal. We hope this tool helps you through this difficult time and invite you to feel free to ask questions in the comments.Image from Hurricane Sandy courtesy of Casual Capture  whom we hope is okay. 

5s in Personal Kanban

Introduction

Personal Kanban is a great tool to visualize your work, to limit your WIP and to take better control of your life, either alone or together with your significant other, your kids or even your team at the office. In contrast to industrial Kanban, in Personal Kanban, the items contained in the value stream are often less defined and more often than not even the outcome is not clear. A "go shopping for dinner" task might be clear enough but you could as well end up checking the shelves in the supermarket and decide you prefer to get a Chinese takeaway instead.Nevertheless, if you have a Personal Kanban in place, customized to your own wishes and needs, suited for the way you like to work, things might or might not improve. After all, Kanban is only a tool, a method, and you still have to find the motivation inside you to make proper use of it. If you are so inclined, a simple Japanese philosophy might help you with this task.

5S

Like Lean and Kanban, 5S comes from Japan and is regarded as one of the fundaments for what literature named "Just-In-Time" production. It basically is a set of steps that streamline the way people work, eliminate waste and inefficiencies and help in reducing variation in the process. Of course, your daily schedule is not such a process but the basic idea of these five steps is still helpful. If you pay attention to them, your Personal Kanban will prove fruitful for you and you will reap the benefits. If you are reading this, chances are high that you already are, without knowing it.

Step 1 - Seiri

Seiri means as much as cleaning, throwing your junk away, and in a certain way, this is what you need to do when implementing your Personal Kanban. If you have used (or still use) different ways of keeping track of your tasks, get rid of them. No scribbles next to your keyboard, no sticky notes next to your phone, no random reminders in your mobile phone. Do a spring clean, if it's a task, put it in your Personal Kanban (the backlog, if it's for later on), if it's useless information, dump it. Make sure that there is only one place for you that contains all the information you need.

Step 2 - Seiton

Seiton means to bring things in order so you can use your Personal Kanban efficiently. It doesn't matter if you are using a big whiteboard, a table or your office door but whatever you use, you should have everything you need accessible. Stock up on post-it notes in different colours, have pens at hand, maybe even a filer so you can store your finished tasks for later. Whatever it is, you should not have to search for it when you want to work with your Personal Kanban, and the tools should neither be far away nor in an uncomfortable position. A corner in your room for example is a bad idea, as I guarantee that you'll lose your motivation if you constantly have to bend down to get a new post-it note.

Step 3 - Seiso

Seiso means to clean things or to shine them. This does not only mean that you should regularly take a cloth and scrub your whiteboard, if you have one, as noone likes dirt and dust. The bigger part of this means that you should keep your Personal Kanban tidy and in good shape. At the end of your workday, take a look at it, and ask yourself whether it is still a representation of your work. If tasks have become obsolete, then mark them as done. If you like to make notes to your tasks for later retrospectives, then now it's the time to do so. Rearrange what's left, reorder, make it look good. These minutes are not a lot of effort but if you start the next morning with a clean and up-to-date Kanban, you will feel better than if you had to start your day with cleaning things up first.

Step 4 - Seiketsu

Seiketsu is the task of standardizing things. Define for yourself a method for your Personal Kanban, and stick to it. If you use different colours or shapes for different kinds of things then be consistent with it. If you usually categorize doing your dishes as house chore, don't suddenly use a different category just because you couldn't find a post-it of the correct colour at hand. If you like to add deadlines to task items, make sure that each task with a deadline is marked accordingly. You want to be able to rely on the information your Personal Kanban gives you to make your decisions.

Step 5 - Shitsuke

Shitsuke means to sustain things and to be disciplined. Pay attention to the four steps above regularly. Use your Personal Kanban. Keep things clean and tidy, stick with the system you defined for yourself, restock on tools and whatever you need. And, above all: commit to what you are trying to achieve. Without discipline, your method will deteriorate over time and you'll gradually fall back into your way you worked before you introduced Personal Kanban. With discipline you will not only maintain but also over time improve your flow (through Kaizen), and you will have more often successful days when you see what you've done.

Conclusion

Most likely, all of the five steps mentioned above will sound obvious to you. For me, personally, they have formed a ritual and a mindset that help me maintain order and stability in my Personal Kanban, which leads to clarity and allow me to make the right decisions.

Planning is Indispensable. Personal Kanban Anti-patterns Series 1

In the early 2000s, people discovered how great pomegranate juice is. It’s filled with antioxidants that help us avoid colds and other maladies. Well, no one likes to be sick, so people started buying the juice by the case. Sure enough, they felt healthier. So they drank more and more until they started getting ulcers because they were repeatedly filling their stomachs with acid.This is an “anti-pattern”. A by-product of a beneficial act that corrupts that act into something harmful. It doesn't mean that pomegranate juice is evil. It means you can use it for better and for worse.This series discusses some Personal Kanban anti-patterns I’ve been seeing evolve over the last few years.Over the last several months, I’ve run into several situations where people have uttered variations on a disturbing statement… “We don’t do planning because we have a kanban.” This is our first anti-pattern.Some teams, weary of lengthy planning meetings in the past, have misinterpreted flow-based systems as systems that – in essence – are self-planning.A flow-based system is not self-anything – except perhaps self-reporting.The whole point of having a Kanban is to be aware. It is dangerous to turn control of your life, your work, or your future to anything – especially a white board with sticky notes on it.You as a person or team using Personal Kanban need to be vigilant that you are making the right decisions at the right time. In order to do that, you need to understand what work is coming on the horizon, why it is there, and what is NOT being done while you are doing something else.If you are not planning as you go along, you are ignoring what is coming up. It is also highly likely you are missing opportunities to improve, complete, and find efficiencies.Personal Kanban does not preclude planning, it makes planning more enjoyable.