Metacognitive Tool: Element #8 of the Kanban

double loop learning

METACOGNITIVE TOOL is one nice chunk of jargon.Metacognition is “learning about learning.” When we have a tool for it, that tool teaches us about how we learn. When we have some understanding about that, we can start to look for new ways to use the tool to learn more effectively.This is where something called “double-loop learning” comes in.When we use the kanban in our daily work we are employing several real-time techniques and strategies to get work done. “I’m going to make my tasks so they’ll take less than a few hours to complete.” “Today I’m going to work entirely on the City of Pelentagagagua proposal.” “I will do the work for my lawyer after I get this thing out of the way for my boss.”But while we are working, we are basing those decisions on a variety of assumptions. The kanban shows us, in real-time, the impacts of our assumptions. If we begin with an assumption that our office work is more important than getting things done for the family, after a while we’ll end up with a lot of aging family tickets and a DONE column filled with work tasks.When we see this, we’ll see that there is a cost to that assumption. That cost is a lot of pent up work for the house and likely an angry spouse.Other assumptions we might be making is that one client is more important than another, that if we do large tasks first we’ll get more done, or that if we deliver product at two-week intervals we’ll have a more predictable delivery schedule.We can use the real results from the kanban to question these basic assumptions, then alter our assumptions and see the results of that.As we do this, we learn:

• the results of our actions (single-loop);

• the effects of our basic assumptions (double-loop); and

• how that understanding impacts how we work, how we create experiments, and how we react to change (metacognition).

Grounding Object-Element #7 of the Kanban

We discussed the Planning Fallacy in Number Five, but that’s just the tip of the cognitive bias iceberg. The fact is that we are subject to well over a hundred named cognitive biases  like:

• Fundamental Attribution Error

• Distinction Bias

• Sunk Cost Fallacy / Loss Aversion

• Group Think

• Belief Bias

• Anchoring

• Availability Heuristic

So, you can follow the links to get to definitions and evidence for those biases. These biases alter our decision making in sometimes subtle and sometimes gross ways. Largely this is due to us using what Daniel Kahneman calls System 1 thinking.If you’re eating an ice cream cone and the ball of ice cream starts to shift, you will see that, quickly understand with your ice cream expertise that your ice cream is in danger of falling to the ground, and turn the cone to gently nudge it back into place by licking.System 1 is our rapid-processing brain. We tend to make snap judgments based on limited evidence and act immediately. Most of the time, this serves us well. As we move through life, we gain experience and that turns into the basis for future fast thinking.If we had no experience, we would have panicked, grabbing the ice cream with our hands and trying to replace it as it melted and shifted around. Then it would have fallen on the ground. Total ice cream rookie mistake.But system 1 has its dark side. We also tend to make decisions rapidly when its not warranted. We see something has gone wrong and blame the first person we see. We don’t stop a policy long after it’s outlived its usefulness. We see bad things on television before work and are pessimistic the rest of the day. We interpret all data in ways that support our ideas.In this case, our system 1 thinking is processing things too quickly. It is actively ignoring vital information that would lead to much better decisions. This is when we should be engaging system 2, which is our more thoughtful, methodical brain. The problem is system 2 needs to be “turned on”. It’s like a laptop in our heads that requires booting before it will do anything.We live most of our lives in system 1, so much so that we neglect system 2 - often to our detriment.Therefore, we require something to force us to wake up and … well … think. We need triggers that will engage system 2. This is what I would called “grounding.” Something that brings us down, launches our thoughtfulness, and promotes good decision making.Kanban and Personal Kanban, through the context discussed in number six can help ground us - to let us know when we need to question our decisions. Visual cues that come from patterns in work flow, bottlenecks, changes in work item types, changes in the mood of participants, and anything else we can see, helps.It also helps that the kanban is shared and public. While this can lead to group think or other group blindnesses, you still stand a greater chance that someone’s system 2 thinking will be engaged and they will speak up.This doesn’t end our battle with cognitive bias, unfortunately nothing will do that, but it does help mitigate their impacts.This is #7 in a 13 part series on the elements of kanban.

The Options Engine-Element #6 of the Kanban

There is a tension in business between market forces and our freedom of choice. Customers (be they people who buy our products at work or be they people like our families) are people who have needs and we must fulfill them in one way or another in order to be successful. But, we are also our customer, with our own needs to fulfill. Thus, our backlog is filled with options. Things we can do for any number of people, including ourselves, to provide them (and us) with value.When we look at our backlog we find ourselves floating in a sea of potential value. We can do them all, but … which ones SHOULD we do first? In a busy world, what do I do next has become an existential question.We have options.So, a few things about options:1. They have potential - each item in your backlog should have some potential value that will only be realized if the task is completed2. They are relative - each item in your backlog has value relative to the other items in your backlog.3. They expire - each item in your backlog has value and that value expires at some point. My “buy mom a Christmas present” sticky that I place in my backlog on September 1st will expire on the 25th of December. Buying a present on the 26th, after Christmas has passed, is worthless.4. They have context - potential, relative value, and expiry are all contextual. If I get chest pains in right after finishing a task, I won’t be sitting around working on the “Write Memo on Timesheet Policy” sticky. I’m going to head to the hospital. Whether that particular task is the one your team is waiting for or that your wife is excited about or that your customer won’t pay you until they receive - that’s all context.5. Many options = many possibilities - One thing we try to do when making a plan is limit our options. We start off by coming up with a plan that represents the least-cost, highest value path to a successful completion. But context rears its head. Often after starting a project we learn important things that may well change those well-laid plans. Therefore, it behooves us at the start of a project to keep as many options open. This might mean that we explore two or three different options for the same solution, ultimately settling on the one that yields the best results.So all those things in the READY column are options. We have a choice to do them or not to do them. We examine their context, their expiration, their potential, and we relate them to each other - then we make a decision. Then... we exercise an option.When we understand our options, we understand our own potential, our own context. We understand that sometimes we are exercising our free will, and sometimes we are realizing someone else’s. Sometimes we will do those things for our spouse or our colleagues or our client when we’d rather be doing something else.Kanban and Personal Kanban are our options engine - it shows us what the options are, how they relate to each other, their contexts, and their expirations.This is post #6 in a 13 part series on the elements of kanban, if you'd like to really understand what makes kanban tick, check the rest of them out.

The Estimate Refinery–Element #5 of the Kanban

In our book Why Plans Fail, we discuss something called the Planning Fallacy and, as is pretty apparent by its name, how it mucks with our ability to plan. It turns out that we’re quite unskilled at planning. As a former urban planning and large project manager, this was both a relief and demoralizing … and even frightening.Much of our lives are based on judgment calls - on making spot estimates about everything. So, let’s take a look at some estimates we might make:1. “I estimate that car three blocks away will not hit me if I cross the street now.”2. “I estimate these eggs have 2 more minutes.”3. “I estimate that this massive 15 million dollar project will be done in exactly 12 months and take exactly 300 people and will require exactly these tasks to be done in exactly this order each taking exactly this much time.”Which of these three stand the least chance of being correct?If you guessed 1 or 2, then you’re just trying to be wrong. It’s pretty apparent that #3 is a very large thing with many moving parts and a huge helping of unknowns. Yet we frequently estimate work for ourselves or others and then are disappointed when we are wrong.We are wrong for a variety of reasons:

1. We don’t understand the role of variation in our work

2. We are estimating before we’ve started the project and are simply underinformed

3. We are trying to meet a deadline that is shorter than the time it would take to create a quality product

4. We are trying to come in as a least-cost bid

5. We are trying to get work done while understaffed

6. During the project is snows, rains, tornadoes, floods, earthquakes, locust plagues, or other bizarre thing that seems to happen during every project

7. We don’t want to look “slow”

8. We don’t have time to do a thorough review

9. It is politically inadvisable to say what the real estimate is, so we give a lower one and hope to find efficiencies to make up the time

10. We think about “ideal” hours and estimate based on how long we think we could personally do the work if we were totally focused and never interrupted

This list could seriously go on for days.Personal Kanban is helpful here because we can begin to track the amount of time it takes to actually complete our work. There are two metrics here: Lead Time and Cycle Time.Lead time is the amount of time it takes to get a ticket from its creation to its completion. Cycle time is the amount of time it takes to get work from the start of actual work to completion.Key here is how we manage our backlog. In most of the Personal Kanban writing, we assume that the backlog is an open repository for all demands. If that’s the case, then it has no limit and we really can’t measure anything against it.However, if we set up something like the system below:Here we have a “backlog” which holds all our prospective tasks forever. So every project we might want to do, goals, whims, it’s all in there. In our “ready” column, however, we have a 7 ticket limit. That limit means that when something enters ready it is probably going to be moved to doing very soon.With this limit we can begin to gather planning-level metrics. So:Lead Time = [Date / time ticket moved into DONE] - [Date / time ticket moved into READY]This says, from the moment something hits my ready column, it takes Lead Time to be completed.Cycle Time = [Date / time ticket moved into DOING] - [Date / Time ticket moved into DONE]This tells us that when we start working on something, it takes Cycle Time to complete.With these numbers we start to see variation in our work. We will see it in a variety of ways.

• Variation in the set - So we have a set of numbers now that show how long it takes us to complete tasks. Some of them it takes a long time to complete, others it takes a short time to complete. If we graph this, it shows the dispersion of task completion times we have had.

• Variation in “like” tasks - Let’s say you do the same thing repeatedly. Like checking up on one of your large clients. Usually it is as simple as calling and having a quick 5 minute phone call. But sometimes it doesn’t go right. They have an issue, or maybe they’re just chatty, and you find yourself talking to them for an hour and a half. The task “checkin with client” was the same, but the amount of time it takes to complete it can change. Instinctively, we know this happens, but we never account for it in our estimates.

• Unforeseen events - Let’s say you’ve designated on task to take 8 hours. You have a week before the deadline and all is good. The day before you’re going to complete it, there is a blizzard that keeps you from completing it for six days.

Most of the time, our estimates are wrong. Often it’s due to us simply not understanding our own work. We don’t understand how often we are interrupted, the role of variation in our work, or simply the work itself. With the kanban and Personal Kanban, we are able to see work as it happens, notice bottlenecks, and measure real completion time.As we see this, we are able to refine estimates on the fly.This is post #5 of the Elements of Kanban Series, click for the full list of 13.

A Leading Indicator–Element #4 of the Kanban

Bottleneck in packaging

overloaded team

smilee board

It seems we’re addicted to metrics. People believe that if you measure something over time, you'll see patterns in the data and act on them. The problem is that most metrics are lagging indicators. These are metrics that can tell you why something happened, but they rarely warn of things that are happening or are about to happen.

While lagging metrics are not necessarily bad, it should be fairly apparent that learning of problems after they've happened does little to help you avoid them in the first place.Kanban and Personal Kanban are real-time systems that provide real-time and leading metrics. The board tells you what is happening, as it is happening.

Patterns in real-time movements help you predict events in the future. While the board is more than capable of creating great lagging indicators like Cumulative Flow Diagrams (CFDs), its real strength lies in showing status in a way that helps avoid missteps and pitfalls.Let's take a look at a few design patterns that exemplify this:In this board we see a fairly standard bottleneck.

Work is flowing smoothly through verification, when we reach packaging we see a bottleneck made explicit by the backup of tickets. When we arrive at a situation like this, the group or groups doing the work have the opportunity to correct immediately. In this case, fabricators can help in verification or might take some time to improve the shop, we may bring in other verifiers, or whatever corrective action might be necessary.

This problem becomes explicit immediately - the moment it happens everyone knows there is a bottleneck that is impeding workflow. There is no need for detailed reports, meetings, or blame - the backup is simply there and  should be addressed.In this board we see a team with too much work.

Their WIP limit is five, and yet they have ten tasks in flight. We also see that people downstream have nothing to do. This is a classic knowledge work problem - workers upstream take on many tasks, cannot complete them all in a timely way, and workers downstream starve for work.

The logical result of this is that the workers upstream will finish all the tasks (somewhat sloppily) towards the end of the deadline, leaving downstream workers little time to do their work. Since the work was done somewhat sloppily, the effort required by downstream workers increases with very tight deadlines. That results in further corner-cutting, resulting in a still more shoddy product.However, our board is showing this up front.

Encouraging workers upstream to adhere to their WIP limits allows them to focus on quality, complete work earlier, and get product to downstream colleagues such that they also have time to do a quality job.Knowledge workers have only one critical piece of machinery, it's their brains. Since the 1950s, we've known that workers in a positive state of mind do a better job  - they work faster, the estimate more honestly, they innovate more.

We can use the kanban to track what psychologists call Subjective Well Being. SWB tends to be a remarkably good indicator of  people's emotional frame of mind. If people in a good mood really do tend to do better work, doesn't it make sense to track how they are feeling? Here we see a board where workers are tracking how they are feeling about particular tasks flowing through their kanban. In you come in and everyone looks happy, then things are probably going well. But if a team is all reporting angry faces, the team is angry RIGHT NOW. Right now their performance is likely impaired.

Do you really want to wait a few weeks and have a meeting about this?  No, the problem is there now, the performance is impaired now - the cost of nipping this problem in the bud is currently at an all-time low. It's not fun to fix this problem, but it is very necessary.

There are many other leading indicators you can get from your Personal Kanban, these are just a few. Use your board to see what’s happening in real time and fix problems in real time. Don’t wait for later. Usually waiting to solve a problem allows that problem to grow, making it more problematic, emotionally draining, and expensive to solve.This is post 4 of a 13 part series. See the full listing of 13 Kanban Elements posts here.*Boards 1 & 2 were made in Lean Kit KanbanBoard 3 was in Google Draw