Finding Our Own Value - Growing By Understanding

Tracking Learning, Creating, and Health

There are those days where your Personal Kanban is on fire. You are in a state of flow and tickets are just moving right along. The days go by and you look at your DONE column … it’s full. Really really full. The DONE tickets seem to swim. There are so many of them. You’ve been productive, but what might all that work actually mean?A few weeks ago I started a side experiment. By hand, each day, I wanted to see what the actual impact of my work was … on me.What was I getting from the work I was doing? What was I learning? How was I making sure I was becoming healthier? Was I stuck in the productivity trap and not growing ... not being truly effective?Each day I gathered my Inputs, Outputs, and Maintenance, which is an overly technical way of saying:

• What did I learn today?

• What did I create today?

• What did I do to make sure I stayed healthy.

Reading List in Personal Kanban

LEARN: In the first four days we see here, we see both talking to clients and reading made up the bulk of inputs. Almost immediately this section paid off. I noticed that I specifically set aside time to start reading Humble Inquiry, simply so I’d have something to put in the block. Since starting this, my reading radically shot up, due to this one simple adjustment.CREATE: Creation was anything for work or otherwise, so we have writing proposals, recommendation letters and even sous vide ribs. The question wasn’t necessarily what made me money, but what did I create that kept me … well … creative. MAINTENANCE: Since starting this, I was taken down by a nastylittle bit of pneumonia, but we can see here that from the outset I started walking (a peak of 13.2k steps and 81 floors that week), that I’m talking to friends, and that I’m scheduling needed doctors visits (hard to get time to do when you travel a lot).RESULTS: Immediately, visualizing the very loose goals of simply learning, creating, and maintaining created tickets on my Personal Kanban board, changed the way I organized my day (to allow for frequent short walks), and got me to focus each day on a balance of learning, creating, and being a whole human being.  Shortly after putting the books I was reading on our board, Tonianne added the book column on the right to our shared board.Why is that important? Because my starting to do this was due to her putting, out of the blue, reading time into her Personal Kanban.  She had simply put that she was reading Deep Work on the board. That got me to thinking about what I was reading and one thing led to another. She made a little improvement, I ran a little experiment, she made another little improvement.Meta-Lesson: When we visualize for ourselves or others, new information is created. When we expose ourselves or others to new information, improvement opportunities are exposed.

Complete Meaningful Tasks

The MusingOur work should provide value to someone or something, otherwise why do it?When we build our Personal Kanban, we are building a board that drives us toward completing our work. But is that work worth doing?val·uenoun

1. the regard that something is held to deserve; the importance, worth, or usefulness of something.

2. person's principles or standards of behavior; one's judgment of what is important in life.

verb

1. estimate the monetary worth of (something).

2. consider (someone or something) to be important or beneficial; have a high opinion of.

Application

Tasks

Visualizing a goal

Visualizing Clear Goals

The words we use to describe value (regard, importance, usefulness, standards, beneficial) indicate that value is not merely based on cash, but also on how it makes us feel, how we respond to it.  So when we say we want to understand the value of our work it means a great deal to us, to our colleagues, to our companies, and to society. You figure out in your own Ayn Rand to Che Guevara scale where your own value equilibrium lies.But … understand it and work towards it.The Practical ApplicationLet’s take a look at a simple case to see what this means practically.Over the Christmas break I quickly assessed how secure my internet holdings were. The answer was rather frightening. I, like most people, was extremely susceptible to hackers getting ahold of emails and passwords and running amok with my accounts.I downloaded Dashlane and began working with it to set strong and constantly changing passwords for all my accounts.My first ticket read “Update Dashlane”. I knew what Dashlane was and why I was updating it, so that seemed to make sense and tell me why I was doing the work.The problem: I had no idea what updating Dashlane meant to me. I knew I wanted to get done by the end of the week, but updating all your passwords and making sure you are letting others impacted by those changes know what’s changed leaves “Update Dashlane” as an open ended task.

I need a Victory Condition.So I created this ticket. “Update five sites in Dashlane.” Okay, great. That had a clear victory condition.The problem: I had no idea what I was working toward or where I was in the process. Or what I was working toward. What was my goal? I wanted to be more secure. Dashlane gives me a metric about security.I wanted to become more secure, not just update sites. Who cares if I update 100 sites and am still dismally unsecure?So, I changed the ticket yet again. This time to give myself a specific goal that was measured by Dashlane. I want to get to 80% by Friday. So 50% today, 60% tomorrow, 70% Thursday and 80% Friday. Four tickets, clear goal, all with demonstrated value.This was today’s card, it’s surrounded by other “Dones” which say what I am doing and the value provided. Note the card next to the 50% card tells me not just to reply to my colleague in Oregon, but also what resolution to get out of that reply.Sage AdviceWhen you create a card, ask yourself what the goal or the value of that work is. That not only gives you the task to complete, but the way to know when you have completed it. Quality and value are hard to determine without a definition. Let yourself know when you’ve achieved victory.And do yourself a favor … if you can’t come up with a goal or a value statement for your work, strongly question why you are doing it in the first place.

The Shared Story - Element #1 of the Kanban

In the Wizard of Oz, the Wicked Witch of the West was recognized as irrepressibly evil. For decades, people were very comfortable in her conviction and ultimate death sentence. However, in the book Wicked, Gregory Maguire gave her a backstory that completely transformed how we thought about her.  Maguire saw that she and her evilness might have a bit of context.In a story, context is everything. If people only get one view of your work, their view is likely to be stilted, lacking in context, and filed with assumptions. If you don’t have enough information about your co-workers, you will suffer the same fate. If we lack this information, we do not have a clear story about our work – which means that we and our colleagues are all making decisions with different interpretations of how work is actually done.When other people view your Personal Kanban, or you share one with a team, you all see many variables simultaneously, through the same visual mechanism, and in context. That sounds hard, but it’s as easy as reading a comic strip or looking at a map.We see tasks not yet done, tasks in progress, tasks completed. We see the steps we really took to complete those tasks. We see the workload in all its glory. We see our stated and our unstated policies in action. We see the results of politics, procrastination, and passivity.And we construct a shared story. Before we had this shared story, we were dealing with our individual stories, which conflicted in small ways. Sometimes the conflicts were large, but usually they were so small we dismissed them or didn’t even consciously notice them. The problem was, when work went a way that didn’t jibe with someone’s individual story (how they thought the team worked), they would become upset. Often not quite knowing why.There was a disconnect between how things were “supposed” to work, and how they were actually working. Somewhere in that story - that the individuals had in their heads - there were variations that caused frustration.The shared story comes out of the Personal Kanban by the simultaneous structure (common work types, limiting WIP, value stream, etc.) and anti-structure (elements of flow or presentation that don’t look quite “right” to the viewer and prompt questions.)That’s a wordy way of saying that two people can look at a kanban and share a more common interpretation.

Customers, Respect & Value: Lean Muppets Post 9

Respect is a fundamental value in Lean

Profit in business comes from repeat customers;customers that boast about your product and service,and that bring friends with them.~ W. Edwards Deming

Everyone has been in this position before.  You’re doing business with someone – your only goal is to give them money for their services – and they make the simplest request onerous. In this case, the customer has ordered a bowl of soup and it is, apparently, defective.  We can feel his dread of calling support when he notices the fly. He knows frustration is just around the corner.

But, he’s not getting value for money and he calls Grover over. Grover goes through several emotional phases before confronting the problem.

Avoidance – Grover puts him off. “Just a moment sir,” and “Not now sir.”Misdiagnosis – The customer tells Grover there is a fly in his soup. He’s been around soup enough and knows full well the scope and extent of the problem. Grover however, then goes through a set checklist of problem solving provided to him on his first day in customer support. First, the checklist tells him to look under the soup. The customer tells him it’s not under, but rather it is in the soup. Grover returns to his checklist and looks next to the soup. Again, the customer clearly tells him the fly is in the soup.Disbelief and Blame – “I will look in  the soup now, for this supposed fly.” Grover first insinuates that the customer is wrong, and then looks “on” the soup.At this point the customer loses his cookies and lays into Grover, to the point that the two almost come to blows.Admission – In the heat of this exchange, Grover asks, “Why did you order fly soup!?” It turns out that the system (his restaurant) specially serves bowls of fly soup. What was a feature for the restaurant is a defect in the eyes of the customer.Complete Communication Breakdown – To placate the customer, Grover then goes to get another bowl of soup. He returns and offers, “I think you will be very happy with this.” When the customer asks what it is, he replies “Cream of Mosquito.”While we could certainly  talk about failure demand, like we did in back in post two when Ernie painted Bert’s portrait, here we’ll talk about respect.Customers who have a choice will not continue to deal with companies that do not respect them. If you are in a business where you are lucky enough to enjoy a monopoly or near-monopoly you can treat your customers poorly or even regularly insult them. But if they have a choice, you may want to think twice.In general, people do not feel respected if they feel “processed.” So checklists, forms, and formalities do not set a stage for repeat customers.But let’s take Deming’s quote one level further. In business, you get profit from repeat customers. But our customers are not always people buying services from us. If our spouse asks us to take out the garbage, they become our “customer” for that task. (If you don’t believe me, dump the garbage on the floor and tell me if your spouse doesn’t act like Grover’s customer).Each day we engage in myriad transactions. Some of them are economic, but most are social. Consistently disrespecting people will eventually erode our social capital and leave us with no friends and distrusted by all. If we respect others, then we will have friends that boast about our product (ourselves) and bring more friends with them.

~

This is ninth in a series of Lean Muppet Posts. For a list of Lean Muppet posts and an explanation of why we did this, look here -> Lean Muppets Introduction

Every Task is Sacred

One of the primary goals of a kanban is to make value explicit. When you spend your time doing something, the reward should be observable. Even if the task is vegging out, the reward is relaxation. You should engage in no task that is valueless. When a task does not provide value, it is considered waste.

Kanban has two main states: a "station,” where value is created, and a “transition,” where the work item is moved from one station to the next. In the kanban below, we see the flow of work for my upcoming book, Instant Karma: 10 Principles of Social Media for Business. In the pre-writing phase, I am creating the initial text for a chapter. When that’s done, and my editor is ready to look at it, she pulls a completed section from my pre-writing section and places it in her “focus” state. There she and I edit and re-edit that chapter until we think it is ready to send off to the crowdsourcers. I was creating value in the pre-writing state, when that value was realized it then went on to the next state of focus, where it remains until that value is realized.

image

In the kanban above we see that what is moving is not tasks – but the actual chapter. In a work-flow kanban tasks are the mechanics that create value, not the value itself. The value is explicit in the work-flow. Thus, in a kanban, the work-flow is also called a value-stream.

image

Here we have a task based kanban where I have the task of “Call Bob.”  It’s going to run through my simplistic Backlog | Doing | Done kanban.  But, let’s think about this a bit.  Regardless of my feelings for Bob, does calling Bob ever give me actual value?  No. "Call Bob" is merely a task, a mechanical action that should create value.

Later, if I am going over completed tasks and trying to figure out what makes me successful and what does not, “Call Bob” is a lousy artifact for judgment. There simply isn’t enough information there to let me make a decision.

So why not make the value explicit?

image

Here my reason for calling Bob is made more explicit.It could be anything you want from “talk about football” to “catch up.” Remember: Kanban isn’t making value judgments of your actions, it's simply reporting the value of what you accomplished. If you really like Bob, and want to call him just to shoot the breeze, that’s value to you. It’s fine. What you want is to discover tasks that don’t provide value and eliminate them, so you have more time to do what makes your life better.

Images created in Agile Zen, which I am loving.