Why I’m Excited About Lean Camp

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JUST LET ME LEARN!Hallway conversations are almost always what people peg as their favorite parts of conferences. Yet conferences rarely provide ample space and time for people to have these conversations. When we actually converse with our peers or with the speakers, we learn more and, more importantly, we retain more. We are actively engaged in the learning, rather than just being spoken to.When Jeremy Lightsmith and I sat down to plan a conference, we didn't spend any time on the format at all. We both knew we wanted conversation, learning, and community over talking heads, big names, and locations. The Open Space model was a logical fit for the Lean Camp we wanted to create.I am very excited about Seattle Lean Camp because it embodies some central ideas.

1. The Future of Work – In the last several years, science has uncovered some startling new truths about how we learn, how we collaborate, how we are motivated, and why we work. Through the intersection of Lean techniques, neurophysiology, and social economics, we are learning that humans respond better to respect than remuneration. Additionally, changes in the way we communicate and the cost of information storage and dissemination has had profound impacts on the workplace. As the workplace becomes more social and more humane, it also is becoming more innovative and less reliant on traditional top-down management.

2. Learning and Creation – Lean Camp is about value creation from the outset. While many attendees have been headliners at other conferences, at Lean Camp they are there to share their wisdom and learn from others – just like everyone else. The potential topics at Lean Camp are as varied as the participants. At Lean Camp we want to find new solutions to old problems in a dynamic, charged environment.

3. Cross-pollination - Conferences that are for one industry and attended by only people in that industry miss the opportunity to really learn from others. At Lean Camp, we already have attendees representing software design, government, manufacturing, medicine, academia, graphic design, engineering, and more.

4. Gender Balance – I have been pleasantly surprised to see something very near gender parity in the people signing up for Lean Camp. After years of putting on conferences in both software development and engineering, this is certainly a first for me. I'm looking forward to asking attendees what drew them to Lean Camp to find out why we are enjoying such remarkable attendance

5. The Fallacy of Work / Life Balance – Work life balance is more than personal and it is more than a choice. Whether we are employers or employees, we need to recognize and respect that “work” is part of life, not some opposing force we balance with life. Studies already show that companies with a strongly collaborative corporate culture have weathered the current economic downturn better. Pre-Lean Camp conversations have drawn focus on this fallacy and toward respect in the workplace.

6. Low Inventory – W. Edwards Deming warned us of keeping inventory in our companies decades ago. Inventory are those things that we create, believing they are value, but then need to maintain and mange those things. For manufacturing, inventory might be the parts you need to make your product, or the products themselves. We want to make just enough and at the right time. For a conference, inventory takes the shape of expensive speakers, venues, large elaborate dinners, and many sponsors with special needs. In creating Lean Camp, we've specifically kept our inventory low. Even though everyone who comes to Lean Camp will receive a free T-Shirt and free food from two of Seattle's premier gourmet food trucks, and will enjoy spending time at the University of Washington's beautiful Center for Urban Horticulture, Lean Camp is only $50.

7. Great Food – Those who know me, know when I’m around food can’t be far away. This year at Lean Camp we have two of Seattle’s premiere gourmet food trucks providing free lunches to all attendees. On Saturday we have Where Ya At Matt? with his awesome Cajun selection. On Sunday we have Pai’s with his highly acclaimed Hawai’ian and Thai works of art.

8. Clothing – Nordstrom’s Innovation Lab is making sure that everyone who attends also leaves warmer and happier with a beautiful Seattle Lean Camp T-Shirt.

9. Value Cascade – So what we have here is a beautiful setting, smart people, an open format in which to think, great food, and a stylin’ t-shirt. All for $50.

This year in Long Beach, California, the LSSC put on a conference that explored Lean and kanban in software development. We had a wonderful turnout and fantastic conversations that resulted. With Lean Camp, we are hoping to take those conversations and combine them with creative minds from other industries. We want to explore the personal, the teams, the governmental, and the corporate views of these emerging ideas.I am excited about Lean Camp's potential to unlock new ways of thinking about work, about life, and about the future. More than anything, I’m excited to see what community grows from this. We’ve built a strong community of practice for kanban and lean with Seattle Lean Coffee – what comes next?Thank you for all who have signed up thus far and looking forward to seeing the rest of you there as well.  (And I’m looking forward to the food ….)

There is No “We” in Bowling

...except for maybe Wii Bowling.

“We have a team of 24 customer service professionals.”That was how it started, innocently enough. This “team” had heart, heroes, and a whole lotta backlog it needed to work through. So they established what would seem to be the most logical metric: number of individual tickets processed per day, per person. People would then be able to compare their numbers; laggards would be identified, heroes could be lauded. This, they felt, would spur support staff to process more tickets and ultimately, shrink the backlog.To their dismay a month later, their backlog was larger. A second month went by and its growth showed no sign of slowing down. Epic Fail.So what happened? The “team” was indeed raising its rate of production.They were working harder, much harder in fact. Everything was working according to plan. But things were getting worse.They were functioning as a team. But what kind of team were they functioning as?Teams tend to fall into one of two categories: they are either structured like a bowling team, or a football team. In this case, the team’s structure resembled a bowling team.On a bowling team, individuals combine their scores to create a composite. The team members approach the line one-at-a-time and aim for a strike. If one bowler gets a strike, it in no way impacts his teammates’ individual scores. On a bowling team, other than camaraderie, there is no combined effort; there is no bonus for playing well together.With a football team, 11 players convene on a field, and from that point on can achieve absolutely nothing alone. Either they perform as a coordinated unit, or they get annihilated. The same is true for all football - rugby, soccer, whatever.Does winning require a competent coach? To some extent, yes. But even the best coach is limited by the capability of his athletes and their ability to work as a team. Each player is optimized not only to their position, but also to the situation. They read the field, they make changes on-the-fly, they optimize for effectiveness at that precise moment.The team we were working with was a bowling team on a football field.And man were they getting hammered.Part of the problem with the bowling team approach is that individuals optimize for themselves and assume that in the end, the group will benefit. This team needed a re-orientation. Cumbersome and overburdened, they relied extensively on “heroes,” putting flexibility and long-term effectiveness at risk. So we put into place some game-changers. Taking into account complexity theory, we recomposed the unwieldy, 24 person team into four smaller, interdisciplinary teams to optimize the department’s capabilities and help focus the teams’ resources. We introduced a visual control  - a kanban - to give team members transparency into what their colleagues were working on and where their strengths lie. We set up daily stand-ups to encourage and reward knowledge sharing/cross-training, collaboration, and continuous improvement. And when those kaizen moments occurred, we ensured those improvements were implemented immediately.Most important, was that we re-invisioned the backlog: no longer was it a pile of distinct tasks for the individual to process and remove serially but instead was now a large, coherent team target of which we began to ask a series of questions:

• Are there tasks that are no longer relevant?

• Are there tasks that can be consolidated?

• Are there tasks being ignored due to personality issues?

• Are there tasks stalled waiting for internal expertise?

By viewing the backlog from various perspectives, the newly-formed smaller teams could combine their talents and solve problems quicker. True teamwork not only increased the rate at which tickets were processed, it helped focus on the right tickets to process: work was quickly directed to the team member(s) most capable of handling that specific work type. Information dissemination and cross-training became a by-product of day-to-day teamwork.The result: their backlog shrunk approximately 50%.Examine your teams. Ask yourself if they are more akin to a bowling team or a football team. When problems arise, do they focus on their tasks, or do they swarm to find a resolution to the team’s most pressing problem? Is the team structure inhibiting their situational awareness?What can you do to make a situation more collaborative?

Lean Meetings 2: Semper Gumby!

Personal Kanban and Meetings

Point of Order! I make a motion to rescind Roberts Rules of Order in their entirety and free us from the inflexible, outmoded, ungainly, and utterly dehumanizing parliamentary procedure!

Conversations are contextual. They meander, move in unintended directions, and give way to discovery. For this to happen, flexibility is key. Control, agendas, and procedures impeded conversation, focusing on the structure of the meeting rather than the topics at hand. If you want people to engage in and feel they’ve derived value from your meeting, make them feel respected, not restricted.

“Only those who respect the personality of others can be of real use to them” ~ Albert Schweitzer

The truly “Lean” meeting is democratized. The agenda is replaced with a backlog. Attendees choose both the topics and the order in which they will be discussed. The meeting isn’t confined to previously established topics. Attendees can introduce new topics into the backlog at any time, and the group can prioritize or re-prioritize them on the fly. Quite often, new topics will spontaneously emerge as the conversation evolves. When this happens, it's perfectly okay for someone to notice that a new topic has entered the flow and to add it to the DOING column.

“Nothing is softer or more flexible than water, yet nothing can resist it” ~ Lao Tzu

Flexibility is strength. Rigid structures topple and collapse in an earthquake, so structural engineers design skyscrapers and bridges that are flexible enough to withstand seismic shock and move without collapsing. Conversation is the same way. Suppose you’re in a meeting about developing new markets, and there’s a set agenda involving direct sales to Asia. Ten minutes in, your affiliate program becomes relevant. While it is certainly germane to the discussion and an easy transition to make, technically it's not in the meeting’s agenda and so you’re forced to put off discussing it until a future meeting.In a democratized and lean meeting, the introduction of this new albeit relevant topic to the queue would be seamless, and the conversation would continue.This acknowledges the natural, unimpeded progression of the conversation and gives participants the opportunity to continue with the original discussion, adapt to the new topic, or table the new topic for a future meeting. The meeting participants have the freedom and the flexibility to discuss and innovate. The meeting and its direction are now creative and interactive.*Photo by

Tonianne

Democratize Meetings with Personal Kanban

Agendas are so 20th Century.

Personal kanban and meetings

Los Angeles’ Hollywood Hills are known for their exclusive neighborhoods, sprawling estates, and the people who inhabit them. They aren’t (but should be) known for their perilous and serpentine roadways. Among the most treacherous is Laurel Canyon Boulevard. Those familiar with the area don’t seem to give the twisting roads a second thought. They maneuver down snug stretches of this automotive obstacle course at 60 mph, because it’s become second nature to them. In contrast, newcomers to the area - sweat beading up on their temples - cautiously crawl along at a snail’s pace, at once in awe at the glorious homes around them and terrified they’ll veer off the road and through a gilded gate at the very next bend.When you are familiar with something, you take it for granted. You aren’t critical of it and so you tend to blast right through it. Just consider what happens when we call a meeting. Are we looking for what we are already familiar with? Are we basing the meeting on our assumptions and expectations that come from past experiences? Are we just going to “blast through it?” Or are we taking it slow - as a learning opportunity - in an attempt to expose hidden insights that can actually help us achieve our goals?

“The most dangerous kind of waste is the waste we do not recognize.”- Shigeo Shingo (Toyota)

When you set an agenda, you control the conversation. In essence, you define your own road. When you control the agenda, you control the lessons learned. Since we enter a meeting with only our assumptions to guide us, agendas follow our assumptions. Our assumptions are based on what we already know. But what about the things we don’t know? Quite often, it’s the conversations we don’t plan on that give us the most insight. Why not instead run our meetings to learn or to discover?About a year ago, Jeremy Lightsmith and I discussed starting a professional organization around Lean management. We figured that if we controlled the agenda, we'd control the thought. If we controlled the thought, we'd never get beyond our own thinking. Jeremy and I wanted to grow a community - starting in Seattle - but we also wanted to grow as individuals.So we set up Lean Coffee. This popular, agenda-less weekly meeting has taken us in directions we never anticipated. Held in a local coffee shop, and with a totally open format, we begin each gathering by setting up a table-top Personal Kanban. Participants vary from week to week, but whoever shows up is free to grab some sticky notes, and populate the backlog with items they’d like to discuss.  Everyone gets two votes for which topics they want to discuss first. This builds the prioritization. The agenda and the order are both popularly devised.

It's that simple. A kanban for a Lean Coffee might look like this:

Lean Coffee has spawned an active community in Seattle and increasingly in other cities like Stockholm, Toronto and San Francisco. More are coming. The best thing about Lean Coffee is that it has already outgrown its founders. Since we never set the agenda in the first place, Jeremy and I could start the ball rolling and step back.Lean Coffee takes place every week at 8:30 am in Seattle whether we are there or not. It is now truly an open forum for learning.

Learning from a Meeting

"Time waste differs from material waste in that there can be no salvage.  The easiest of all wastes and the hardest to correct is the waste of time, because wasted time does not litter the floor like wasted material."  ~Henry Ford

Conventional wisdom suggests that businesses hold far too many meetings attendees deem a waste of their time. Among the most common complaints are how certain individuals hold the floor too long, that the information being disseminated is worthless, and more often than not, the meeting is held merely to satisfy egos or fulfill political requirements.To combat this, some call for meetings with rigid agendas. They want to know in advance exactly what they’ll get in exchange for their time, and so they assume that having a control in place will prevent the meeting from wandering off-track. That sounds like a pretty good idea.Or does it?Suppose for a second that there is more than one reason for a bad meeting. Certainly poor planning is an easy culprit, but perhaps the bigger issue is that we assume etched-in-stone agendas lead to better results. We assume we know what we need ahead of time, we also assume that we know what the attendees need ahead of time. What is more likely is that we know what we need to discuss, which is different than an agenda.An agenda is your personal, politicized reason for gathering people, while the discussion of a stated topic is a conversation. In fact, the entire reason we are calling the meeting is to have a conversation.Why then, if we feel it is inappropriate - rude, even - to dominate the conversation in every other aspect of our lives, would we codify dominating the conversation in a meeting?Perhaps the reason meetings go off track is that the agenda doesn’t actually address topics of concern to the attendees. People come to your meeting and - becoming bored or frustrated with the content or the direction the meeting takes, or feeling their input is not valued or that they can’t be fully engaged - they switch topics to something that interests them or initiate side conversations. Since there is no established mechanism for discussion in the meeting, a power struggle ensues between the person who called the meeting and the people in attendance. This is not good.If we want to learn from our meetings, we need to allow the conversation to be set by the very professionals we invited to the meeting in the first place. If they were worth inviting, they must be worth including. If they aren’t, your meeting should serve another purpose: to hand out pink slips.Allowing the group to have a say in setting the agenda gives them buy-in for the importance of the topics. This helps prevent people running on at the mouth or providing information that goes off topic. Everyone has a stake in an efficient meeting because they all have discussion topics in the backlog. Group ownership means the person who called the meeting no longer serves as the traffic cop directing the conversation.Instead, as the person who called the meeting, you can now direct the overall topic and even seed a few of the initial sticky notes. Yyou can even set a few “must discuss” stickies at the top of the board and prioritize them the highest. But the group must be able to discuss what their professional direction drives them towards.The steps for doing this are simple:

1. Framework: Draw a Personal Kanban

2. Personal Agendas: Invite all attendees to write their topics on sticky notes

3. Democratization: Invite all attendees to vote on the topics on the table (each person gets two votes)

4. Group Agenda: Prioritize the sticky notes

5. Discuss

And voila! We have brought democracy to meetings. No longer do we tolerate meeting despots and spontaneous rebellions through filibuster or hijacking. Before these were power plays between the meeting organizer and the person acting now. Now they are interruptions of the group. Let society sort it out.After the meeting, you can construct your meeting minutes outline by simply gathering up the topics in the order discussed.(Want more on Lean meetings? Tune in tomorrow for a discussion of flexibility and democratization.)

Undertow and Churn: Workflow isn’t Always Linear

Undertown and Churn

In Personal Kanban, our primary step is to define our workflow. Workflows tend to be linear, and often look like this:

Waiting -->Doing-->Done

or

Outline --> Pre-writing --> Draft --> Edit --> Final Draft

or

Backlog --> Coding --> Testing --> Integration --> Release

Unfortunately, life isn’t always that straightforward.  A few weeks ago on Twitter, I was asked if it is ever acceptable to move a card backwards along a value stream in a Personal Kanban.

My answer?  Absolutely!

If you write some code and turn it over to your testers and the testers hate it, of course it should come back to you for re-coding.

There are a few ways of dealing with work that splashes back, but first let’s define two ways this can happen, further exploring the water metaphor of value stream and workflow.

Undertow: The scenario above (where the code failed testing) generally suggests that something was pulled prematurely and needs to go back to an earlier stage in the value stream for additional work. Undertow is a hidden, submerged current of water flowing contrary to the flow of the stream. It is present in most rivers and in the ocean, and quite often in our work.

Just like undertow in nature, if we ignore it in our workflow it will pull us under and we will drown.  But if we recognize it as a natural part of the environment, we can compensate for it.

Churn: Water sometimes finds a point where it no longer flows linearly, but instead thrashes about.  Even in these violent moments, water can be beautiful, exciting, and self-purifying. In the end of a moment of churn, water resumes its flow.

Innovation often results from moments of such thrashing about – through collaborative processes that may happen while the creators are all together and focused (synchronously) or separately, when the individuals happen have time to touch that piece of work (asynchronously).  To further complicate things, asynchronous work can happen linearly (Bob edits, then Mary, then Yuri...) or at-will (Bob, Mary and Yuri each edit whenever they get time to do the work).

How to Deal With Undertow and Churn

Undertow

Backlog --> Conceptual Design --> Business Analysis --> Production -->

Stakeholder Feedback --> Final Production --> Done

Here we have a generic, linear workflow. It could be for new software, a clothing line, or a consulting offering. Work is pulled from one stage to the next, as it reaches completion in one phase and a worker is available in the next.  Each stage has its own Work in Progress (WIP) limits and work generally flows well with each stage at their limit.

When undertow occurs, work can move backwards through the system.  This can be moving back one step (Production doesn’t feel there is clear enough direction from Business Analysis) or multiple steps (Stakeholder Feedback is that this is the single most stupid idea in the history of ideas, and may send it back to Conceptual Design).

When work moves backwards, it can simply move into the active working column for the unlucky section.

Or, if the Personal Kanban is using “ready” columns, it can move to the ready column of that part of the stream.  If this happens with any frequency, the ready column is far superior to handling this type of event.

If the team rarely encounters undertow, then simply moving  task back and having the affected column momentarily bust its WIP limit is fine.  The discomfort, in fact, will make it patently clear that something has happened that may need to be scrutinized.

Churn Baby Churn

In Personal Kanban, we’re expect to deal with a lot of churn. Knowledge work is often highly iterative.  Making a linear kanban might be just plain crazy and may end up looking something like this:

Outline –> Pre-writing Jim –> Pre-Writing Tonianne –> Pre-Writing Paul –> Discussion –> Draft Jim –> Draft Tonianne –> Draft Paul –> Draft Jim –> Draft Tonianne –> Draft Paul –> Draft Jim –> Draft Tonianne –> Draft Paul –> Draft Jim –> Draft Tonianne –> Draft Paul –> Draft Jim –> Draft Tonianne –> Draft Paul –> Draft Jim –> Draft Tonianne –> Draft Paul –> Draft Jim –> Draft Tonianne –> Draft Paul –> Draft Jim –> Draft Tonianne –> Draft Paul –> Discussion –> Final Draft Jim –> Final Draft Tonianne –> Final Draft Paul –> Final Draft Jim –> Final Draft Tonianne –> Final Draft Paul –> Final Draft Jim –> Final Draft Tonianne –> Final Draft Paul –> Final Draft Jim –> Final Draft Tonianne –> Final Draft Paul –> Final Draft Jim –> Final Draft Tonianne –> Final Draft Paul –> Final Draft Jim –> Final Draft Tonianne –> Final Draft Paul –> Final Draft Jim –> Final Draft Tonianne –> Final Draft Paul –> Draft Production –> Crowdsourcing –> Discussion –> Release Draft Jim –> Release Draft Tonianne … etc.

Phew.

Add to this that during those big repetitive blocks, work isn’t necessarily done all at once.  Jim, Tonianne, and Paul are accessing a shared document, writing it and editing it over the course of several weeks.  But during those weeks, we want to be able to see who is doing what.  We don’t want to lose work in a black hole called “Churn” and have it turn out that Tonianne really wrote the chapter because Jim and Paul were just plain lazy.

Making the task “Churn” with no clear understanding of responsibility obscures who is actually doing the work, the amount of work it entails, and what - in this context - the definition of "done" is. This sends us back to our pre-Personal Kanban state of knowing there is a task, but not understanding its true nature.

Handoffs don’t work. Genericizing the group task doesn’t work. We need clarity.

To respond to this, I’ve created a few design patterns:

The Churn Chart

The Churn Chart – We created this pattern in response to a project at the World Bank. The Churn Chart lists elements in churn, the people responsible for them, their relative state of completion, and any issues they may be facing. If the group can meet regularly (or if an automated system can be developed) Churn Charts are useful for reporting how close to done the element is in that phase.

Routing Slip Ban

Routing-Slipban – This pattern pictured here is a circle but it can, of course, assume any shape you choose. Routing-Slipban owes its admittedly inelegant name to the now-antiquated paper trail tracker that used to accompany documents as they circulated throughout an office. People would read the material, take appropriate action, pass the envelope to the next person on the list and the process would repeat.

With Routing-Slipban, the attached sticky note includes a short routing slip showing who has and has not touched the task.  When an individual is done with a task, they move it into the backlog of whomever they feel should handle it next.  I would assume this pattern would be best used by small groups where the individual members had a very clear idea of whose attention was appropriate for this task next. (This pushes work and therefore can be dangerous).

Cycleban – Like Routing-Slipban, Cycleban notes on the sticky who has and has not worked on this specific item yet.  Here we take tasks completed by an individual and place them into a shared ready queue where they can be pulled again until the task is complete.  As more people complete them, the tasks become increasingly focused inching closer to completion.

This may be a visual cue that one item may be more important to pull than another.  The more boxes that are checked off, the more a task is prioritized because it can be completed and moved entirely off the board.

To Every Season, Churn, Churn, Churn

Undertow and churn are inherent to both knowledge and individual work.  Since the goal of Personal Kanban is to visualize the true nature of work, we cannot hide from these two forces. Embrace churn! Know your undertow!