Don’t strain your brain, paint a train
You’ll be singing’ in the rain…

- Blondie

Action over Words

Your brain is a muscle. As we repeat certain actions, our “muscle memory” becomes comfortable with those actions, and programs itself to anticipate them. As it trains itself to anticipate them, it optimizes for them. This is the basis of kaizen, continuous improvement. Your brain gets used to your workflow, it becomes an subconscious process, and so it looks for ways to do things better.

Smoother.

Faster.

You get sensitized to completion. Sensitized to waste.

So using Personal Kanban on a regular basis, through its visual and tactile interactions, sensitizes you to the building blocks of success.

Tell me and I forget.
Show me and I remember.
Let me do and I understand.

- Confucius

Simply put: your brain responds very well to doing. The active nature of Personal Kanban is what your brain wants. Confucius figured this out 1700 years ago.

Managing your workload with static lists, while they can help you organize, doesn’t have the same brain-training impact as having a visual tool like Personal Kanban. Lists don’t involve motor skills or elements of flow.

Lists merely “tell you.”

Personal Kanban both shows you, and lets you do.

Image by Rob Web

That is why we are canonizing her as our Personal Kanban saint.

Yesterday I had the good fortune to spend some time at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History contemplating her kitchen.  Where Martha Stewart’s kitchen is the epitome of OCD tidiness, Julia Child’s kitchen looks as if the instruments of her craft were shaped only slightly differently than if she’d be making furniture or refitting a 1952 Studebaker.

That’s because Julia Child’s kitchen was her workshop.

Julia Child could have had the most cutting-edge kitchen in the world, and most likely she could have had it for free. Surely any appliance company would have paid handsomely to say they custom-fit her kitchen with their latest product line.

But instead she chose to used the same range for 40 years.

Her arsenal of cutlery was mismatched, “unsexy” by today’s standard. Her pans hung from every available surface – from walls, doors, wherever they would fit. Each knife, each pan had its place, fitting perfectly within a designated spot or outline. It wasn’t a mess, but it wasn’t streamlined, either.

Julia Child said things like,

“I am a knife freak.”

and

“Life itself is the proper binge.”

and

“Everything in moderation, including moderation.”

Her demeanor and her actions seamlessly integrated her passion for food with everything else in life. She understood her work and as such, it ceased to be work.

It became life.

She was organized without being compulsive. She was meticulous but retained her humor. She had little to prove, but everything to share.

To the right we see, unsurprisingly, Julia Child’s Wine Kanban. Every bottle, as it ages, is tracked to the point of drinking.

We have pots and pans on a visual control, knives on a visual control, wine on a visual control. For Julia, her stuff didn’t just go places, it was a marker for the nature of her work. If a 6 quart sauté pan was missing from its place on the wall, it meant it was in use.

Her tools told her story.

Her tools represented her creation of value.

The take-away here is that visual controls are always graphic markers of how we work. The more seamlessly we can integrate visual controls into how we actually work and live, the less time they take to maintain.  Especially for specific projects, where we are already focused and updating, a literal kanban may take more time than is necessary – creating elegant visual controls that stem from the actual activity can really help give the task an internal coherence and make it easier.

Take a page from Julia’s cookbook and examine your work. What might your tools be saying to you?

Julia's Knives

Personal Kanban

Marc Bless has a great post about his personal scrum board evolving into a personal kanban. His personal retrospectives showed him a need to limit WIP, so he created a special section for WIP, while not losing track of his tasks awaiting the actions of others.

Marc Says:

After a while I recognized the repeating problem of too many thing in progress.

After a short personal retrospective I decided to improve my focus on the “in progress” lane. It seemed obvious to limit the number of things to work on in parallel. I splitted the “in progress” lane in two parts:

a) an “on hold / wait” part for all the things that have been started but need external help

b) a “working on” part with focus on all the things in progress. This part now is a Kanban box with a limit of two tasks.

One cannot choose wisely for a life unless he dares to listen to himself, his own self, at each moment of his life.
- Maslow, The Farther Reaches of Human Nature

Okay, so we’ve gone through several ways kanban can look, be used, and operate. We’ve discussed ways to prioritize work. But we have yet to address how to measure (gulp) performance. But what exactly is “performance,” and why do we care?

Toyota’s Taiichi Ohno is credited with the initial deployment of kanban, and the creation of Lean and Just-in-Time management concepts. His goal was to make Toyota the world’s leader in automobile production, so he needed some metrics. Ohno understood that simple numbers did not drive performance, but that Toyota’s staff and its suppliers needed the will to work better.

Along the way, physicist Eli Goldratt came up with the Theory of Constraints (TOC). (You can hear Goldratt say he needs 4 days to define TOC in this video.) His glowing gem of wisdom is that we conceptually overcomplicate problem solving by identifying way too many constraints to arrive at a solution. When we want to get to a goal, we tend to lose the goal from all the little issues that surround it. But, usually there are one or two big constraints that, if solved, will both provide huge results and often solve a lot of the little constraints or make them irrelevant.

The beauty of both these messages is that small changes make big differences – if they are the right small changes. What do you need to identify the right small changes to increase the will to work better? Awareness.

Personal kanban helps give us that awareness, enabling us to begin to listen to ourselves. A few posts back I discussed retrospectives, how they were vital at the beginning and became less so as we incorporated self-improvement into our normal actions. As you focus less on that massive pile of little nuisance constraints that surround you, and move instead to the high-payoff constraints, you move to what Ohno calls a “kaizen” state. You begin to continuously look for ways to improve your quality of life.

Please notice, I’m not telling you how to improve your life or even suggesting what improvement looks like. That’s totally up to you. If you want to work towards helping to save the rainforests, that’s fine. If your goal is smoking 10 cartons of cigarettes a day while watching cage fighting…well, I guess someone has to do it.  Our goals are our own. They’re not for retirement, they are for living. If you want wifi and code, you design your life to allow wifi and code.

If we can clear the big things that Goldratt calls constraints or Ohno calls waste from our plate, what’s left is a clear and open space to do some real living.

Musicians must make music, artists must paint, poets must write if they are to be ultimately at peace with themselves. What human beings can be, they must be. They must be true to their own nature. This need we may call self-actualization.

- Maslow, Maslow on Management

In upcoming posts, I will cover a few ways – some absurdly simple, others a little more complicated – for how your personal kanban can tell you some pretty amazing things about how you work. Hidden in those post-its is some pretty awesome insight.

Image: The Programmer’s Hierarchy of Needs

cc. David Flanders