Anxiety or Boredom Driven Process Improvement?

At the SPA conference recently, Joseph Pelrine talked about “Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience” by Mihalyi Czikszentmihalyi. The ideas behind this struck a chord with me as a way of describing something I originally said when discussing whether kanban is only suitable for mature teams. That is that rather than focusing on being Agile which may (and should) lead to being successful, Kanban focuses on becoming successful, which may lead to being Agile.

Mihalyi Czikszentmihalyi describes the state of Flow as having a balance between ability, and the skills required for a piece of work. If some work requires more skill than a person has ability, then they are in a state of Anxiety. If a person has more ability than the skills required for a some work then they are in a state of Boredom. Applying this to Process Improvement, we want to move teams up the Flow Zone so that skills required and ability increase equally.

Flow1

Increasing Skills and Ability equally at the same time is unlikely, so in practice there are two routes to move up the Flow Zone. The first is what I am dubbing “Anxiety Driven Process Improvement”. Move a team into a state of Anxiety such that they need to improve their skills to cope. I assert that this is the approach that makes time-box based method so effective. Time-boxing forces teams into a place where they need to improve their skills in order to deliver working software every few weeks. Many teams push back, and a common approach to this is to make the time-box shorter to emphasis the point! The other route is to do “Boredom Driven Process Improvement”.  Highlight to the teams where they need to improve their ability, and allow and support them in doing so such that they are able to taken on work requiring more skill. I further assert that this is the approach that kanban systems take. Visualising queues and work in progress in order expose the bottleneck where the ability needs improving.

Flow2

This might sound like I am suggesting the time-boxing and kanban are mutually exclusive approaches. That isn’t the case – I have already said that! Instead, I just find it an interesting angle to look at a different dynamic between two approaches.