In November, 2010, Jim Benson spoke at the Oredev conference in Malmo, Sweden on Energizing the Individual Coder and the Psychology of Kanban.Clarity Means Completion: The Psychology of Kanban - Jim Benson from Øredev on Vimeo..
How We Interact with Kanban (Video)
In November, 2010, Jim Benson spoke at the Oredev conference in Malmo, Sweden on Energizing the Individual Coder and the Psychology of Kanban.Personal Kanban: Optimizing the Individual Coder - Jim Benson from Øredev on Vimeo.
The Iron Chef Paradox
You have one hour. Just sixty minutes to prepare a meal for four, five courses of the highest possible quality, and with conspicuous creativity. The key ingredient comprising the meal is kept a secret until the last possible minute. While you’re used to working in a kitchen you control, surrounded by people who are trained to ensure your success, you and your team are preparing this meal in an unfamiliar location. Relatively speaking you are a novice, while the individual you are competing against is a celebrity chef of international renown for whom this type of challenge is second nature. And if these conditions aren’t stressful enough, once your meal is complete, every chef on earth will know what you’ve created, how you’ve created it, and what the judges thought. Oh, as will millions of viewers worldwide.Your reputation hangs in the balance. Failure is not an option.
How can a chef create five dishes all at the same time with this much existential overhead? Is five not a WIP-busting number?It’s the Iron Chef Paradox.
In the book
, Malcom Gladwell invokes the “10,000 hour rule,” based upon the research of sociologist Anders Ericcson that suggests if you do something for 10,000 hours you become an expert. But what does it mean to be an expert?Our brains are pattern recognition devices. The more we practice something, the more we’re able to process its intricacies efficiently and effectively. Whether it’s golf, cooking, or even empathy, practice creates proficiency.So-called “Iron Chefs” do not see five dishes in progress. They do not see a WIP-busting workload. They see one meal for one group. The meal for them is a pattern.They can see patterns foremost in the food itself. Chefs know what the current level of completeness is by sight. The food - for them - is a visual control. Simply looking at a fillet of sea bass on a grill from across the kitchen is sufficient. As it transforms from translucent to milky-white, the chef knows how close it is to done. This is known as prototype matching. As we work through those 10,000 hours, we build up a library of pattern prototypes to recognize.Understanding prototypes allows Iron Chefs to effectively prioritize under extreme duress. You put your rack of lamb on long before you plate your ice cream. Without understanding both the time and sequence of the patterns, effective prioritization is highly unlikely.Patterns are all around us, we just need to sensitize ourselves to them. We need to be aware of what we are practicing and do it purposefully. With Personal Kanban, we have a visual control and can actually practice living. In the past, we just worked. Even though we‘ve all had a lifetime of starting and (sometimes) completing tasks, we’re often oblivious to the patterns and unaware of the prototypes of our work. Without recognizing these, without understanding how our choices impact our future, our WIP limits have been strained sending our stress levels through the roof.Chefs like Bobby Flay understand the patterns and prototypes of cooking so well, they can create dessert out of tuna.What can we accomplish on a Saturday with a mixed backlog? What can we create with our colleagues at the office in a week? What patterns are there to help us recognize pitfalls and find success?
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Would You, Could You on a Plane?
As a matter of fact, yes.I boarded the first leg of my flight from Seattle to Hanoi. I had 19 hours of flying ahead of me. I also had a backlog, and no wifi. Agile Zen was not going to be useful for me. So, I opened Open Office Writer and made a quick table.I had a series of things to do, but with a few constraints. The first was that I was likely to fall asleep at some point, so I wanted to knock out the most important task first. The second was that I had a list of commitments I'd made over the week and needed to make good on them. Fortunately, I have a 17 hour battery and a 4 hour battery as backup, so I had enough juice to cover me.In no particular order I wrote down my work. I had 14 papers to read for Hanoi, so I began with those. I knew that not finishing them first would mean I'd read them when I was too tired to retain anything. Then I went to work on the feature sets for the new software projects. Finally I ended with blog posts (of which this is one).In the end, I had a full accounting of what I'd done - so I could make sure that the files and work completed in-flight made it to the appropriate people and after-action steps were taken.I want to point out again, you don't need special hardware or software, you just need to visualize your work, limit your WIP, and prioritize.
Complex Lives Pt 1: Jessica’s Future In Progress
Ready –> Doing –> DoneLife presents us with opportunities, and so we've no choice but to take on concurrent projects. Unfortunately they don’t always conform to that simple Ready –> Doing –> Done value stream.Last month I was in San Francisco giving lectures on Personal Kanban at Stanford and Keller. My host for the trip was my good friend Jessica. Jessica is a single mom. She has two jobs on opposite ends of the Bay. She is studying for her financial advisor certification. She is training for a triathlon.Jessica has a lot to keep track of.As a mathematician and an expert in intangible assets, it was not a big leap for Jessica to recognize: (1) she had so much on her plate that busting her WIP limit was guaranteed, and (2) making money was only one asset out of many she had to devote time to.So on a sunny Sunday morning at a coffee shop, the simple question “Do you want to talk a little about your Personal Kanban” quickly turned into a 2.5 hour conversation. We discussed what she valued, what her goals were.It soon became clear that Jessica is not simply goal-oriented, she's a goal-collector. So we needed to get that under control. Goals are awesome, but when they start generating more tasks than we can handle – they need to be tamed.We agreed she needed more than a WIP Limit – she needed a FIP limit. Future In Progress. She had the triathlon, the certification, a book she wanted to write, and more. It made sense to pick two and (no pun intended) run with them. The triathlon enforced health and working out, so we couldn’t say no to that. The certification was immediately necessary for her job and short-term. So that too was obvious. The others, went into the FIP queue.Jessica now had a FIP limit of two.