A Personal Kanban, perhaps more than anything, is an information radiator - a passive device that sits there and broadcasts, endlessly and without judgment, whatever information is on it. I am doing a good job, I am behind, my team is passionate, my team is melancholy, our quality is great, we have a quality problem, we're on time, we are late ... it's all there - radiating from the Personal Kanban. The visual control provides status information in real-time, allowing real conversations about work to happen based on real-time data.Normally, our status reports come from memos, graphics, or other snapshots that are out-of-date before they are distributed. They can also come from daily, weekly, or ad hoc status meetings, where people gather to report on the actions of themselves or others verbally. These mechanisms directly rely on people's individual interpretations of events, status, and impacts. They also rely on listeners who will hear above, beyond, or around the politics.Where does "politics" come from anyway? Why would we waste our time when things are so "obvious"?Well, it's because we humans build a definition of the world and then find ways to support that definition.There was a psychological study that had two rooms of participants. One room was filled with people who identified as Right-to-Life. The other room was filled with people who identified as pro-Choice. Researchers gave both rooms the exact same information about birth and abortion statistics from the prior year. Both groups interpreted that information as supporting their cause.The same data, completely different political interpretations. Things were quite "obvious" to the people in both rooms.Information always begins neutral. We humans like to get excited about things, so we interpret information accordingly.In this case researchers were looking for proof of something called 'Confirmation Bias" - an extremely common cognitive bias where we interpret incoming information in a way that confirms our world-view.We are under the influence of many such interpretive biases.The Personal Kanban seeks to be an amoral or a-rational actor. Not rational or irrational. Not subscribing to any particular morality. It is an impartial agent reporting the status of things.We then, as individuals or groups, can interpret that information together.
The Shared Story - Element #1 of the Kanban
In the Wizard of Oz, the Wicked Witch of the West was recognized as irrepressibly evil. For decades, people were very comfortable in her conviction and ultimate death sentence. However, in the book Wicked, Gregory Maguire gave her a backstory that completely transformed how we thought about her. Maguire saw that she and her evilness might have a bit of context.In a story, context is everything. If people only get one view of your work, their view is likely to be stilted, lacking in context, and filed with assumptions. If you don’t have enough information about your co-workers, you will suffer the same fate. If we lack this information, we do not have a clear story about our work – which means that we and our colleagues are all making decisions with different interpretations of how work is actually done.When other people view your Personal Kanban, or you share one with a team, you all see many variables simultaneously, through the same visual mechanism, and in context. That sounds hard, but it’s as easy as reading a comic strip or looking at a map.We see tasks not yet done, tasks in progress, tasks completed. We see the steps we really took to complete those tasks. We see the workload in all its glory. We see our stated and our unstated policies in action. We see the results of politics, procrastination, and passivity.And we construct a shared story. Before we had this shared story, we were dealing with our individual stories, which conflicted in small ways. Sometimes the conflicts were large, but usually they were so small we dismissed them or didn’t even consciously notice them. The problem was, when work went a way that didn’t jibe with someone’s individual story (how they thought the team worked), they would become upset. Often not quite knowing why.There was a disconnect between how things were “supposed” to work, and how they were actually working. Somewhere in that story - that the individuals had in their heads - there were variations that caused frustration.The shared story comes out of the Personal Kanban by the simultaneous structure (common work types, limiting WIP, value stream, etc.) and anti-structure (elements of flow or presentation that don’t look quite “right” to the viewer and prompt questions.)That’s a wordy way of saying that two people can look at a kanban and share a more common interpretation.
13 Elements Of Kanban
In the Personal Kanban book, we say that the book is “not your mom.” The book is not telling you what to do - it is focusing more on why. Your Personal Kanban (or your team kanban) is also not your mom, but it is a lot of other things (not that your mom is a thing....). The kanban tells you what, when, why, and even some how of your work.Over the next thirteen posts (which in China is a lucky number), we’ll cover how the board helps us define a narrative, understand status, see flow, measure progress, tell the truth, see potential, select better, thwart cognitive bias, be a learning aid, foster improvement, increase effectiveness, and illuminate hidden assumptions.Here is the Table of Contents for these posts (links will be made live as each one publishes):
13 ELEMENTS OF KANBAN:
Mapping Your Work with Personal Kanban
To Do Lists are Not a Map
Rewrite Your To Do List
For more on how this works, see the various posts in Personal Kanban 101.To-do lists are something that we’ve turned to time and again to manage our work and we’ve always been disappointed. They become daunting, lengthy, undifferentiated lists of things we have to do. It is hard to get perspective from a list.I’m often asked for the difference between to-do lists and Personal Kanban, and why Personal Kanban differs from to do lists. We cover this in depth in the book, but we can do a short form here.Think of it this way:Here is downtown Seattle. Right away you can tell where the freeways are, the surface streets, the water, and so forth. With maybe a little studying you can quickly find one way streets, ferry lines, and piers.Now, let’s think of this like a to-do list:
Yesler Way
James Street
Cherry Street
Columbia Street
Marion Street
Madison Street….
Personal Kanban is a Map of Your Work
See? I could list everything in downtown Seattle (which would take me quite a while) and in the end you’d have no idea how anything related to anything else.You’d have a list with no context.This is why people who counsel others on to-do lists tell them to rewrite the list daily. To-do lists quickly become stale and irrelevant.If we visualize the work, like we visualize a map, that re-writing is unnecessary.With a Personal Kanban we want to build a map of our work. We want to visualize the trade-offs, the options, the completion rate, even the relative joy in a particular task. We want to be able to see these dimensions to our work – not merely a list of it.Here we see the basic Personal Kanban. While a normal to-do list is only two dimensions (work by length), the Personal Kanban map is multidimensional.Dimensions:Dimension 1 - Topography (the layout of our work)The Value Stream – This is the steps you take to create your work. That can be any steps you really take. This simple example includes four steps: Ready, Doing, The Pen and Done.Ready – This is a graphical representation of the to-do list.Doing – What work is currently in-flight. In a to-do list there are only two states. Not completed and complete. This column clearly shows the completing of your work.The Pen – What work is currently blocked as we wait for others? This work is important to clearly see because it is both something that you cannot act on and yet still something you must keep track of.Done – Work that has really been completed. We don’t draw a line through it. We don’t kill it. We keep it, look at it, remember it.This topography shows us the landscape over which our work travels. We see where we are, where we are going, and where we’ve been. We even see some pitfalls along the way.Dimension 2 – Movement (how we do our work)Movement happens when something in one location ends up in another location. When we see movement, we can see how things actually live. In the Personal Kanban, we are seeing Pull, Constraints, Flow, Bottlenecks.Pull – We “pull” work in a Personal Kanban when we have capacity to actually complete it. This is as opposed to work being “pushed” on us by others and overloading us. When rivers have water pushed into them – that creates a flood with sometimes horrific results. When we have capacity, we can do work thoughtfully and get that work done.Constraints – We limit our work-in-progress to a few things at a time. Note the (3) in the Doing column. We can only have three things in-flight at a time. This constraint is our capacity. When we finish something we can now “pull” a new task. This creates Flow.Flow – As work is pulled and completed, we build a rhythm in our work called cadence. The flow of our work can have three effects.
Flow shows us how long it really takes us to complete our work.
Flow shows us cadence, letting us set a pattern to our work.
Flow actually feels good … when you get in the zone while working, that both calms our fears and excites our creativity.
Bottlenecks – When things don’t flow, they get stuck. (makes sense…) Whether they are stuck in the Pen or in your Doing column, they are visible and impede completion. Since you can see it, you can do something about it.Dimension 3 – Depth (what are we really doing?)Dimension 3 lets us know what our work really means. What options are we selecting? Where is our work coming from? Who are we collaborating with? What do we enjoy?The Work Itself – We see the tickets, each representing a task or other item of value.The type of work – different colored stickies can represent different types of work. Projects, urgency, clients, or areas of our lives (home, work, personal growth).The age of the ticket – some people place dots on tickets for each day they are in doing to keep track of how long they were stuck thereCycle time – some people record date / time started and date / time completed to get an idea of how long tasks actually take to complete.Options – When we pull, we are now moving a task into Doing – which is a limited space. We want to choose carefully what task we start next. This now means that we are carefully exercising an option to do work. The board shows us the options we’ve completed, the options we have, and the options we are doing. This helps us choose better options as we learn more about how we work.
Closing
There are many more elements to the map of our work, but this gives us a taste of how the to-do list’s single dimension view of life is reversed by Personal Kanban. For more on how this works, see the various posts in Personal Kanban 101.For more on how Lean works, see Lean Muppets.
Just Close It!
tabs
Recently I noticed that I have a bad habit.I will go through a Pomodoro which includes a lot of research or interacting with multiple web tools. These all end up becoming tabs in Chrome. After three or four Pomodori, I can’t find anything because I have too many tabs open. This causes frustration and creates multi-tasking situations, even when I’m focusing.The tabs actual create visual clutter despite my attempts to find clarity.So, today I instituted a rule … when I’m done with a tab – I close it.That’s it. It’s pretty much that simple.