Clarity Means Completion: The Psychology of Kanban – Jim Benson from Øredev on Vimeo.

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Personal Kanban: Optimizing the Individual Coder – Jim Benson from Øredev on Vimeo.

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 Outliers, 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?

Joe edited the conversation into two parts which can be found below:

Part 1

Part 2

Inventory Makes Work

Lean talks a lot about inventory. A major tenet of Lean is to reduce inventory. Companies that stock up on too much stuff have to maintain that stuff, manage it, and then deal with it when it is no longer useful. This is why companies end up having huge sales at the end of the year – they’ve amassed warehouses of stock (or their suppliers have) and now that merchandise needs to be sold fast.

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

Overload is Overhead

Existential Overhead – the cost in distraction and stress of uncompleted tasks.

A few years back I started shopping around the concept of existential overhead. The concept is fairly straightforward.  There simply is no such thing as out of sight, out of mind. When you have a workload, you are always thinking about the individual elements of that workload. In the back of your mind, you know what you haven’t done.

When your backlog is an amorphous bunch of tasks, all things are psychically equal. Cleaning the cat box and saving for retirement and getting married all have the same weight. The lack of definition is like waiting for news from someone and they don’t call, people start to fill in the blanks with their fears.

Your brain not only thinks about this undifferentiated backlog, it hates it. It wants it to go away. Hate is heavy and negative.

What’s the best way around this? Understanding.

Microsoft’s Bing ads are selling Bing as a filter for “search overload”.  We have so much information flying at us, search engines need to get better and better at filtering the information so we get what we need. We get the information of value.

Kanban is similar, kanban is a visual filter for the work we have taken on. Kanban helps tame our workload and thus make it cognitively manageable.  When we have more understanding of the work we need to do, its impact on our time, and where value lies – our existential overhead diminishes.  We have less negative or fear-based thoughts of work and replace that with positive and understanding-based thoughts.

Kanban is a metacognitive tool. Your tasks themselves are pieces of understanding about actions you need to take. The kanban takes those bits of uncoordinated understanding and puts them in a framework of systemic understanding.  To the human brain, this is the best chocolate soufflé in history.  Your brain eats this stuff up.

A few posts back I talked about how kanban helped your train your brain. This is the training. Kanban’s visual nature gives work a logical flow and a set of evolving, flexible and powerful rules under which to operate.  As your understanding of your work evolves, your kanban grows with it.  As you understand more, you filter better.

As you filter better, your overhead diminishes.  Overhead is where most waste lies.  So if your existential overhead diminishes the time you spend consciously or subconsciously thinking about your undone work dissipates – freeing your brain to think, to do, to learn, or to simply take a break.