Kaizen Camp: Seattle–What We Did at Camp

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This year’s Seattle Kaizen Camp was awesome.I loved the range and diversity of the attendees, with people from health care, education, government, software development, and a host of other occupations. We had attendees from college students to C-Level management. We were once again very close to gender parity. And we had people from across the US, as well as Europe and Asia.All this to discuss our experiences with continuous improvement, Personal Kanban, and lean.The weather co-operated, so most of our 75+ sessions were held outdoors in the beautiful Seattle summer. Just warm enough to be comfortable.Sessions included:

• Kanban at Home

• Failing Well

• Lean Contracts

• The Cynefin Framework

• Accelerating Innovation

• Metaphors to Convince Others of Lean Principles

• Resilience with Kanban

• Extreme Self-Organization

• Personal Kanban Experiences

and more .. about 70 more.What was most important for Tonianne and me as organizers was the speed at which people created topics and the depth of conversations.All the topics and conversations were conceived of, led, and participated in by the attendees themselves. There were no official speakers, no lengthy powerpoint presentations, no middle-of-the-day sugar crashes in dark rooms. Kaizen Camp: Seattle was people practicing Lean, Personal Kanban, and Continuous Improvement talking about what they did and how they did it.We are looking forward to Seattle’s event next year, but in the interim we have several planning across the US.Coming up later this year (announcements for each will be made soon):

• Kaizen Camp: Boulder

• Kaizen Camp: SoCal

• Kaizen Camp: NYC

Please come to one near you!   Several of the Photos and notes have been posted here.

Kaizen Camp: Seattle 2012

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Following last year’s excellent “Seattle Lean Camp,” we are now nearing Kaizen Camp:  Seattle 2012. (We did have a name change, so as not to confuse us with another set of camps with the same name.)Kaizen Camp is July 24-25, again at the beautiful Center for Urban Horticulture. Yet again, we have award-winning food trucks catering the event (both with vegetarian options), so no boring food! Already the event is nearly half full, with attendees from software, government, health care, manufacturing, education, and more.The diversity of voices and ideas is unparalleled – which is exactly what we were aiming for. Lean ideals and principles will be discussed. People sharing their success stories as well as their challenges. Different disciplines working together to create new ideas and explore continuous improvement.Last year we were blessed with great conversation, learning, food, and near gender parity. Judging by the buzz so far, this year promises to be even better.What to expect:

1. Great sessions

2. Conversations with other smart people

3. Learning about what is working

4. Strategizing about sticky problems

5. Exploring ways to create better working environments, systems, processes, and policies

What you will be spared:

1. Dull speakers

2. Bad boxed lunches

3. Canned presentations

4. Being silent while others talk at you

5. Sales pitches from consultants pretending to be speakers

Cost and SponsorsKaizen Camp: Seattle is $79 early bird and $99 late bird. With all this learning, two awesome meals, a full day of snacks, and a T-shirt from Nordstrom, that’s a steal. We couldn’t do this without our sponsors:

• Nordstrom Innovation Labs

• Modus Cooperandi

• University of Washington

• University of Washington – Bothell

• LeanKit Kanban

See you there!

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.

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 ….)

Rapture – Training Your Mind for Completion

Don’t strain your brain, paint a trainYou’ll be singing' in the rain…- Blondie

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Your brain is a muscle. As we repeat certain actions, our “muscle memory” becomes comfortable with those actions, and programs itself to anticipate them. As it trains itself to anticipate them, it optimizes for them. This is the basis of kaizen, continuous improvement. Your brain gets used to your workflow, it becomes an subconscious process, and so it looks for ways to do things better.Smoother.Faster.You get sensitized to completion. Sensitized to waste.So using Personal Kanban on a regular basis, through its visual and tactile interactions, sensitizes you to the building blocks of success.

Tell me and I forget. Show me and I remember.Let me do and I understand.- Confucius

Simply put: your brain responds very well to doing. The active nature of Personal Kanban is what your brain wants. Confucius figured this out 1700 years ago.Managing your workload with static lists, while they can help you organize, doesn’t have the same brain-training impact as having a visual tool like Personal Kanban. Lists don’t involve motor skills or elements of flow.Lists merely “tell you.”Personal Kanban both shows you, and lets you do.Image by Rob Web