Imagine there's a system and nobody showed up

Over the course of the past weeks I've participated in many discussions about how to create a positive work environment, about how to lead successful software development projects, run a business profitably or just about how to find great employees - or deal with the ones present. Usually, when I'm asked to take a guess where the problem resides, I answer that it's most likely caused by the system. Recently though, I noticed that many of the conversation partners became quite angry with my reply - they clearly expected something else. So, I started to dig deeper - and then it hit me: I wasn't taken seriously because they felt I was ignoring the aspect that was most important to them: people.

The four cultures

In the book The Reengineering Alternative, William E. Schneider explains that each company can be categorized into one of four predominant cultures. Control, Collaboration, Cultivation and Competence. These cultures can be displayed in a diagram using the personal (People oriented) vs. impersonal (Company oriented) focus of the company as X axis and the actuality (Reality oriented) vs. possibility focus as Y axis. In theory, all of these four cultures have their own advantages and disadvantages and none of them are better than others. Through talking to people I noticed that the perception they had was vastly different, though.

W. Schneider Culture model

When asked about what people thought the predominant culture of their environment was like, a pattern emerged. Those that were happy with their environments saw their department or company predominantly in the left half of the diagram, illustrated with yellow color. On the other hand, the unhappy workers found the environment to be hostile to them, limited and mainly dominated by a control culture, painted in cyan. To summarize, collaboration and cultivation cultures are seen as where the fun is, where people want to be. Control culture is seen as the enemy, the evil side, limits, restrictions, commands that take away the fun. And to many, it is seen as a synonym to what they refer to as the System.

A system without people?

Now that I understood that many people thought of a system as nothing more than the set of rules and instructions that were designed to limit them, I suddenly became aware why they reacted to my suggestions in such a hostile way. They saw something gone wrong inside their perceived culture - something that had to do with people - and I was seen as suggesting to fix it with some tweaking of rules or even introducing more of them? What good could ever come of that? Nevertheless, this approach is flawed. A system is not just a collection of rules but one has to think using a big picture. All interactions between customers and company, between departments, between workers and management, all procedures, even if they are not defined but common practice, it all counts towards the system; and the more people there are involved, the more complex the system (usually) becomes. If you were to paint the area defined by the system in the diagram above, it would contain all the four cultures at the same rate.

Only 5% people but 95% system

According to Dr.Deming, 95% of an organization's performance are to be found within the system, leaving only 5% to people. This leads to a big misunderstanding. Many hear these numbers when confronted with Systems Thinking and are shocked, as they perceive the 95% / 5% ratio to be mutually exclusive: if 5% have to do with people, the other 95% must be something completely different; and they can't agree with it. As a result, they resort to trying to fix any occurring problem by dealing with people directly, through coaching, counseling, fines, motivational techniques and much more. Unfortunately, if you take a group of great employees and put them into a disastrous system, in all likelihood the results will be very poor - and no amount of coaching for them will fix that. So, if you want to care about people: deal with the flaws in the system. It's not some abstract thing that stands alone for itself - and if you fix it, 19 out of 20 issues you might think have to do with people might be fixed by that as well.

Metrics and Weights in Personal Kanban

Retrospectives and reassessing the work we've done is an important part of Personal Kanban. By viewing back to what tasks we've accomplished, what problems we've faced (but also to what went well) we gather the required data to base decisions on. Often enough this data contradicts our assumptions massively.

For instance, when I started with Personal Kanban and reviewed my processed tasks of the past month for the first time, I noticed that I had spent considerably more time on one kind of task than my gut feeling told me. I explained this as a one-off, surely the data couldn't be right. The next month, the data showed the same and so did the month after that.

I had to admit that my gut feeling was simply wrong and unconsciously I had lied to myself about it all the time. So, I sat down and asked myself how it could be and what I could do about it until I understood that a big portion of the time was lost because of procrastination. Wasted time that I didn't keep track of in my mind ("but it only takes me 30 minutes to do that!") but that was clearly made visible by my Personal Kanban (well, it did take me a total of 2 hours on average until I was done with it, the truth can be shocking).

Metrics
There are a variety of metrics and charts that one can use, for example the Cumulative Flow Diagram (CFD). What many of these metrics have in common though is that they require some counting of items. Counting a large number of post-its can be a tedious task if you want to create a new type of chart and need the raw data, so here's a shortcut that might save both time and nerves.

Let's assume that I want to create a pie chart showing the distribution of items per category. Each category has a different post-it colour, so distinguishing them is simple. Luckily, they are already presorted, but even the smallest stack of post-it notes looks like it's over a hundred - with some others being a multitude of that. Combined, there must be way over a thousand post-its, the result of over a year of using Personal Kanban. Counting them note by note definitely doesn't sound like fun - and the chance of messing it up is not small either.

The good thing is that post-its are standardized, they have the same measurements, the same thickness, and most importantly: they have the same weight. A pack of 450 notes weighs about 190 grams (depends on the brand of notes, so don't use that number blindly), so with the help of your kitchen scales and some basic mathematics it's an easy thing to calculate the amount of items per stack.

Here's what the weighing tells us:

Category	Weight
Household Chores	185g
Shopping	138g
Socialising	69g
Office	121g
Learning	148g

If 450 notes are 190 grams, it means that calculating 450 / 190 * 185 yields the number of items in the Household Chores stack - 438. For a pie chart I wouldn't even need the totals, but for completion's sake, there we go:

Category	Amount
Household Chores	438
Shopping	327
Socialising	163
Office	287
Learning	351

Sometimes, the result will be off by an item (if you are curious enough to check) but for a chart, the result is good enough.

Dealing with sudden context change

As we know, Personal Kanban has two fundamental rules.

1. Visualize your work
2. Limit your work in progress

The first rule is easy to follow if you're using Personal Kanban. The second one takes a bit more effort but should be also rather simple. After all, it is easy to only deal with a set number of work items (the defined WIP limit) at the same time. Or is it not?

When checking the board in the start of the day, things usually are quite clear. The context gets defined, based on that the tasks get prioritized and wander into the Ready or Today columns and so far, everything looks pretty good and straightforward. Unfortunately, life is messy, and over the course of the next hours, a series of phone calls, incoming emails or letters try to change it all. Certainly, if the new tasks are not that important or urgent, it's easy to write new sticky notes and to put them into the Backlog where they wait until their due time. Sometimes though, the new work items appear to be quite urgent. The boss might want you to write a report, a customer might need your assistance, or something's broken and needs fixing. Annoyingly, no matter what kind of system one uses, these happenings have the tendency to really get into the way of doing things. So, what possibilities to react to these circumstances are there?

1. Ignore the changed context because the WIP limit is reached
2. Exceed the WIP limit temporarily
3. Find a way to stay within the WIP limit but still deal with the new tasks

Well, all these three options can make sense on their own, it mainly depends on what kind of tasks they are and how long it's going to take to finish them.

1.) Ignore the changed context
Many tasks one faces during a normal day are not that big and can be finished in short time. If the newly arrived tasks don't need immediate attention, it's better to take the time to finish the tasks you're currently working on, take a quick breath and then get your hands dirty with the new situation. Thinking about the cost of delay of a task can be a good guide to decide whether it can wait for a short while or not. That cost can be everything, ranging from money to the dissatisfaction of a customer or boss. To use a simple example, let's assume that the current task in progress is having lunch. If the report needs to be done in three hours, finishing lunch without stress is possible; if a server crashed and the company is losing money and you're the person who has to fix it, then it's most likely not.

2.) Exceed the WIP Limit temporarily
So, either the cost of delay is too high or the task you're currently working on would take too long, either way, something has to be done. In this case, it's a good idea to hit the pause button and put the current tasks on hold temporarily. For a short while - think of it as an emergency - the rules in place are suspended as well, so you can deal with the situation. For example, you could mark the emergency tasks with red colour and not count these to your WIP limit. As soon as these tasks are done, business as usual takes over again. Be warned though, if you use this approach, over time, more and more situations tend to be treated as emergencies and your organisation will make way to chaos.

3.) Find a way to deal with it
If the new tasks are not only very important but also are going to take a long time to deal with, postponing the things you were working on until now won't be a good idea for several reasons. For example, the task might become obsolete until the time you get back to working on it, or you can't even meaningfully resume it for one reason or another. In these cases, it's best to simply abandon these tasks.

Abandoning can mean simply deciding that you can live without doing it and cancelling it (and accepting the time worked on it as sunk cost). Alternatively, you could put it back into the backlog and restart it some other day. Some of the work you've already done might even still be used then so you'd have a head start in the second try. A third option would be to delegate the task, and get assistance from family members, team members or even external ressources. There are many good reasons though to not increase your work-in-progress for a longer period of time.

An excursion to Field theory
Jim Benson and Tonianne DeMaria Barry already explained in their book Personal Kanban what negative consequences dealing with too many things at the same time can have. With too many things cluttering the mind, it becomes harder to stay clear and focused, more time gets wasted with what is called context-switching and even if a task is currently on hold, it comes back to the mind all the time. This is what is mentioned in the book as the Zeigarnik effect, named after the Russian student Bluma Zeigarnik, who described this effect in her thesis work under the supervision of Kurt Lewin.

Unfortunately, the suspense of remembering these open tasks is not all of the story. One year afterwards, another one of Lewin's staff, Maria Ovsiankina, discovered that we not only tend to remember unfinished business but also want to deal with it. The brain simply wants to get rid of the suspense and to work on these tasks. This so called Ovsiankina effect means that while you are working on one thing, you actually end up wanting to work on the other thing and vice versa. It quickly becomes apparent that this situation does not lead to joy or efficiency. Interestingly, Ovsiankina found out that this need to work on unfinished things arises even if there's no immediate reward connected to it. Ovsiankina's studies are available as PDF download (in German language).

Predict the future
I mentioned three approaches above how to deal with the situation if it arises. The best way to deal with it though is to keep it from happening. There will always be emergencies that can't be predicted but if there are things that tend to pop up as emergencies more than once, it is a wise idea to try and understand why it happened and if there's a way to know or act in advance. For example, this could be a good starting point for a retrospective or possible improvement of the way you organize things. If it's autumn, don't let the first snow surprise you (and cause the panic of trying to get an appointment to change to winter tyres) - the snow is going to come anyway, so get this done early enough - and save yourself the hassle.

Visualizing my reading flow

The Book-Kanban
Last week, Jabe Bloom (@cyetain) came up with an interesting implementation of using Personal Kanban to visualize his reading tasks to avoid losing track of what books, magazines and newspaper articles he reads or has to read. When I told Sven, a friend of mine, who I had introduced to Personal Kanban to help mapping his study tasks, I was quite surprised when he explained that he had already been using a small Kanban for his reading tasks for quite a while. Naturally, I asked Sven about it and after some insisting he finally caved in and took a picture of his Book-Kanban (I don't really like the term BookBan, getting all the wrong associations there).

Sven's Book-Kanban is based on two swimlanes with each swimlane being represented by one column. Therefore, his WIP-Limit regarding reading is 2. The Ready column also contains the date when the respective item was started. From Ready, the item flows through Today, Reading, Done for Today until it arrives in Finished. 

Picture of Sven's Book-Kanban

Visualizing my own reading status
Usually, I let my habits and environment limit my reading WIP. I usually have a book lying around at my office, I use my Kindle on public transport, I have a book on the window sill next to my bed and I have some books and magazines around my couch table. And yes, I am usually simply too lazy to walk around and transport the book I want to read to the place I am, so whatever's accessible is up next.

So, mapping the books I'm currently reading was quite easy but a quick glance at the pile of books I had already purchased and not started reading yet, all the notes and lists with articles, blogs and more books to order from Amazon quickly told me that having in the same bucket of backlog would not portray correctly the items from which I'd pull next. In my mind, there was already a certain preselection taking place, so I put these things I want to read next into a Ready column and denoted a huge area for the Backlog and everything that would pop up during my reading, from references to other books or the urge to read more by the same author.

I also noticed that while reading, I would sometimes stop and make notes for things I'd have to look up, ask someone about or check for validity. For these tasks I created a Gather Information column, limiting it though, to make sure I'd not lose myself in the jungle of references. After finishing, the books would go into the Done Reading column, although for me, they'd not be completely done by then. Usually, after reading a book, it takes me an unspecified amount of time that can range from a few days up to one or two months to think about what I've read, to slowly digest it, and to understand its meaning or importance. When I finally experienced the "aha!" of sudden understanding, the book goes into the final column, Understood.

Illustration of my personal Book Kanban, Post-It graphics by Disk Depot

Will I keep using it?
Frankly, I don't think so. Of course, visualizing my work is important to me, and a Book Kanban would certainly fulfill that requirement. What I'd be missing though is flow. With my current reading speed and the fact that my reading time per day is quite limited it becomes clear that there will be only a movement on the board about once every week. I'd even predict that most of the movement would be more additions to the Backlog / Spin-Offs and the ever growing amount of books and things I really, really want to read. Maybe I could increase the flow by introducing separate chapters although my gut feeling tells me that this would produce significant overhead that is not worth it. Nevertheless, I also learnt a big lesson from this experiment (and after all, isn't this what we're here for?) - I absolutely needed to consolidate the places where I'd put down reading-related notes, so they wouldn't get lost in the chaos.

5s in Personal Kanban

Introduction
Personal Kanban is a great tool to visualize your work, to limit your WIP and to take better control of your life, either alone or together with your significant other, your kids or even your team at the office. In contrast to industrial Kanban, in Personal Kanban, the items contained in the value stream are often less defined and more often than not even the outcome is not clear. A "go shopping for dinner" task might be clear enough but you could as well end up checking the shelves in the supermarket and decide you prefer to get a Chinese takeaway instead.

Nevertheless, if you have a Personal Kanban in place, customized to your own wishes and needs, suited for the way you like to work, things might or might not improve. After all, Kanban is only a tool, a method, and you still have to find the motivation inside you to make proper use of it. If you are so inclined, a simple Japanese philosophy might help you with this task.

5S
Like Lean and Kanban, 5S comes from Japan and is regarded as one of the fundaments for what literature named "Just-In-Time" production. It basically is a set of steps that streamline the way people work, eliminate waste and inefficiencies and help in reducing variation in the process. Of course, your daily schedule is not such a process but the basic idea of these five steps is still helpful. If you pay attention to them, your Personal Kanban will prove fruitful for you and you will reap the benefits. If you are reading this, chances are high that you already are, without knowing it.

Step 1 - Seiri
Seiri means as much as cleaning, throwing your junk away, and in a certain way, this is what you need to do when implementing your Personal Kanban. If you have used (or still use) different ways of keeping track of your tasks, get rid of them. No scribbles next to your keyboard, no sticky notes next to your phone, no random reminders in your mobile phone. Do a spring clean, if it's a task, put it in your Personal Kanban (the backlog, if it's for later on), if it's useless information, dump it. Make sure that there is only one place for you that contains all the information you need.

Step 2 - Seiton
Seiton means to bring things in order so you can use your Personal Kanban efficiently. It doesn't matter if you are using a big whiteboard, a table or your office door but whatever you use, you should have everything you need accessible. Stock up on post-it notes in different colours, have pens at hand, maybe even a filer so you can store your finished tasks for later. Whatever it is, you should not have to search for it when you want to work with your Personal Kanban, and the tools should neither be far away nor in an uncomfortable position. A corner in your room for example is a bad idea, as I guarantee that you'll lose your motivation if you constantly have to bend down to get a new post-it note.

Step 3 - Seiso
Seiso means to clean things or to shine them. This does not only mean that you should regularly take a cloth and scrub your whiteboard, if you have one, as noone likes dirt and dust. The bigger part of this means that you should keep your Personal Kanban tidy and in good shape. At the end of your workday, take a look at it, and ask yourself whether it is still a representation of your work. If tasks have become obsolete, then mark them as done. If you like to make notes to your tasks for later retrospectives, then now it's the time to do so. Rearrange what's left, reorder, make it look good. These minutes are not a lot of effort but if you start the next morning with a clean and up-to-date Kanban, you will feel better than if you had to start your day with cleaning things up first.

Step 4 - Seiketsu
Seiketsu is the task of standardizing things. Define for yourself a method for your Personal Kanban, and stick to it. If you use different colours or shapes for different kinds of things then be consistent with it. If you usually categorize doing your dishes as house chore, don't suddenly use a different category just because you couldn't find a post-it of the correct colour at hand. If you like to add deadlines to task items, make sure that each task with a deadline is marked accordingly. You want to be able to rely on the information your Personal Kanban gives you to make your decisions.

Step 5 - Shitsuke
Shitsuke means to sustain things and to be disciplined. Pay attention to the four steps above regularly. Use your Personal Kanban. Keep things clean and tidy, stick with the system you defined for yourself, restock on tools and whatever you need. And, above all: commit to what you are trying to achieve. Without discipline, your method will deteriorate over time and you'll gradually fall back into your way you worked before you introduced Personal Kanban. With discipline you will not only maintain but also over time improve your flow (through Kaizen), and you will have more often successful days when you see what you've done.

Conclusion
Most likely, all of the five steps mentioned above will sound obvious to you. For me, personally, they have formed a ritual and a mindset that help me maintain order and stability in my Personal Kanban, which leads to clarity and allow me to make the right decisions.