A recent thread discussing the values behind kanban on the kanbandev mailing list inspired a couple of great blog posts by Mike Burrows on “Introducing Kanban Through Its Values” and “Kanban: Values Understanding And Purpose“, which have in turn inspired me make some updates to the Kanban Thinking model.
The key points for me in Mike’s second post are these. First,
We often say what the Kanban method is (an evolutionary approach to change) without saying what it is actually for! Change what? To what end?
and then,
The Kanban method is an evolutionary approach to building learning organisations.
Impact
I have a different take on the values discussion and how they help answer the question “to what end?” I’ve come to the view that articulating values is not a useful exercise because they often end up being things that anyone could espouse. One alternative is to use narratives and parables to describe the values in action. With Kanban Thinking, I prefer to talk about the desired impacts of a kanban system. Knowing what impact we want the kanban system to have, and how to measure that impact, will inform our system design decisions.
Thus, in answer to the question “to what end?”, Kanban Thinking suggests 3 impacts; improved flow (demonstrated in terms of productivity, predictability or responsiveness), increased value (demonstrated in terms of customer satisfaction, quality or productivity) and unleashed potential (demonstrated in terms of employee satisfaction, quality or responsiveness).
Heuristics
Mike suggests that the purpose of a kanban system is to learn, and in light of the above, that would be to learn how best to have maximum impact. Up until now, I have talked about five leverage points (or levers) on a kanban system, with Learn being one of those levers. As a result of the insights I had from Mike’s post I have switched to referring to those five elements as heuristics rather than levers, with the fifth heuristic changed from Learn to Explore.
This is one definition of heuristic:
involving or serving as an aid to learning, discovery, or problem-solving by experimental and especially trial-and-error methods.
and
of or relating to exploratory problem-solving techniques that utilize self-educating techniques (as the evaluation of feedback) to improve performance
Thus, the five (updated) heuristics of Study, Share, Limit, Sense and Explore help with the learning about a kanban system in order to have the desired impacts of improved Flow, increased Value and unleashed Potential.
Exploration is a more active description of what I originally intended by Learning as a then lever. Exploration requires curiosity (another value suggested by Mike) and experimentation to try things out, observe the results, and amplify or dampen accordingly.
That leaves the updated Kanban Thinking model looking like this:
Hi Karl, thanks for this. Couple of points:
I agree that we need to keep working on the “to what end?” question. I’m not completely sold on “impacts”‘ but certainly we need to identify and articulate benefits more concrete than “learning”.
> One alternative is to use narratives and parables to describe the values in action
Completely agree, “cautionary tales” also. I have plans to start capturing these – at LKNA13 (Chicago) if I get a long enough slot, and definitely at KLRAT13 (Mayrhofen). I can even imagine this as a classroom exercise.
Mike
[…] because it is a core concept behind kanban systems. That has made be uncomfortable with the third Kanban Thinking heuristic; “Limit …read […]