posted 8th January 2023
There is a song that Marti Pello famously sang, Love is all around us, (You remember, the one in Notting Hill where Julia Roberts and High Grant fall for each other). Well, I have this tune jump into my head quite often. Although I end up switching one of the key words, to "Kanban is all around us" in our everyday life. So where do we see these and how so? Let's dive in!
Where do we see these examples?
Practice 1 - Visualisation: On a recent trip back to the Welsh valleys I went to visit a friend along with his brother in tow to see his garage as I wanted to get my car checked over before heading back to Scotland and see his business in person. He's built a great service there. The garage was busy and this made Al, the owner very happy. I managed to catch up with him in his office and I congratulated him on his achievement of building a fantastic business. It was then I noticed something. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed that he had a system that allowed him to visualise all of his work, the capacity by bay, work in progress, as well as his backlog for the week. Amazing! I quizzed him about it and he said, "It was crazy before we implemented this. Now we know who is on what, what to pick up next, and who is free. We've since then automated the billing and the ability to alert the customers to pick their vehicles up saving us so much more time." What a great system enabling everyone to be on the same page, knowing where to be, what to do, when someone is free, and who to go and help. This example also serves to highlight Change Management Principle 1 - Start with what you do now as nothing had changed when they implemented this but by visualising the work, they could then start to think about what changes they may make going forward now they can see the wait times, capacity utilisation and work flowing through the system.
I loved catching up with Big Al as I always do but this was even better as I was seeing Kanban really benefit a friend even though he never set out to adopt Kanban via a business transformation. Superb!
Practice 2 - Limit the Work in Progress: The FIFA World Cup has the top 32 nations competing for the ultimate prize in football. To ensure we have the best teams on display every 4 years the FIFA tournament arrange qualifying groups and stages (you may look at this as refinement) in the years ahead so when it comes to show time the best of the best come up against each other with a fair representation of all of the world competing in a window of approximately 30 days. These games are then scheduled so we can see these days in such a way that there is a limited number of games each day, each week (some might even say value slicing), for the month. By limiting the amount of work in progress, FIFA can deliver a product that is fit for our purpose and deliver to our expectations (especially if you are from Argentina this time around!).
Practice 3 - Manage Flow: A great example of this is represented in the Kanban Blue Book by David Anderson, in fact, this is one of the key moments that he saw which gave him the spark to formulate the Kanban Method. David was in the Royal Gardens in Tokyo and as he approached to enter, he was given a white token. He took it and thought not much else of it. As he walked around the gardens, he admired the beauty and realised how good the experience was as, whilst there were people around it was not overloaded with people which would have detracted from the experience. After a while and seeing the blossom trees in bloom David decided to leave. As he did, he was asked to return his token. That is when he realised, that token was a way to manage the flow of people in the gardens so to not overcrowd the space and give everyone a great experience.
We see flow managed in so many ways in our everyday life, yet in the workplace, we are often keen to multi-task and make sure we are all 100% utilised. The Kanban Method teaches us that managing flow is a key principle to focus on to enable sustainability and predictability. Without it, we just have unpredictable chaos & log jams. Service Management Principle 1 - Understand and Focus on Customer Needs & Expectations: is another one on display here as the staff have definitely taken this into consideration to ensure the experience fits customer desire.
Practice 4 - Make Policies Explicit: How often do you see someone come up and order a bunch of Americanos, Lattes, Mochachocafrapacinos, and Lord knows what else (I am not a coffee buff as you can tell) and then be stuck behind them and I think, "Oh no, I only want a bottle of water" and wait for ages! There must be a better way. There is.
In Hospitals, we see multiple people arrive in various states of distress. There will be people with life-threatening injuries, some with severe injuries but not life-threatening (broken arm perhaps), and others with severe discomfort but less urgent. The Staff in the hospital have a clear prioritisation that they can apply via triage. If you have just had a heart attack you definitely want to be seen ahead of the person with the broken arm just like if you have a broken arm, you want to be looked at ahead of the person with the rash that has been bothering them for a few days. The triage process gives them a chance to prioritise and they can do that, even whilst under the greatest pressures, via the policies that they have and know.
Practice 5 - Implement Feedback Loops: I have just returned from a (well-earned in my eyes) break in the sun over the festive period and needless to say I have put exercise on the backburner in recent weeks. After getting back and dealing with the unpacking calamity and getting back into work mode, I jumped on the weighing scales. It won't be a shock to those familiar that it was not a great result. However, that feedback loop has given a message to the system (namely me), that we need to implement a change. We are all familiar with feedback loops of this type. Maybe your trousers shrank in the wash (doubt it, but we've all used it)? Maybe we struggled to run to catch a bus? Either way, this is feedback from the system that it is not operating at a satisfactory level. Now, where is my gym kit????
Practice 6 - Improve collaboratively, evolve experimentally: Going back to our emergency services, a great evolution we have seen is where we have the Ambulance Service and the Police collaborate to arrive on the scene together having both a Police Officer and a Paramedic in one vehicle. This way, they can resolve situations faster and reduce wait times. A great way to keep us safer I'd like to think.
Change Management Principle 2 - Improve through evolutionary change: Wimbledon delivers a male and female Champion on time every year. This is incredible when you think of the great British weather, length of match variation, and all other factors. However, they don't rest on their laurels to achieve this. Wimbledon evolves its policies quite regularly. Think of the new tie-break structure that no longer allows the silly 5 set matches that could go on forever in the 5th as you had to win by two clear games, some of which lasted days! I was there for the longest one, whilst it was a spectacle, the guy who won went out the next round as he never had time to recover from his two-day match.
From 2022 onwards, Wimbledon will now have play on the middle Sunday. This was previously a day of rest to allow the courts to recover but with the evolution of technology and groundskeeping, this is no longer necessary. This will not only improve the fan experience (getting tickets is not easy so having an extra day will allow more to experience the magic of Wimbledon) and ease the pressure on "Manic Monday". There are many other examples we could look at regarding Wimbledon and it's actually something we cover in the Kanban University Training on offer (take a look at the courses we have running here: Link Here) so if you are keen to hear more do get in touch. This example also highlights Service Management Principle 3 - Evolve Policies to Improve Outcomes: As the original policy was to take a break on the middle Sunday, this has now evolved to include the middle Sunday in the playing schedule.
Change Management Principle 3 - Acts of leadership at all levels: Let us look at another sport, rugby. How many times do you hear that the best teams in World Rugby over the past couple of decades have leaders all over the field? It's not always down to the coach to give that rousing halftime speech, sometimes that is too late. It can be a turnover at a time in the game when the momentum is against you, that big tackle that stops the opposition going forward, or the person who calls for the ball when the lineout is under pressure. This is a clear way for us to see acts of leadership from multiple people across the team and it's normally the great teams who have this. As much as it pains me to say it as a proud Welshman, think of the England Team from 2003 that won the world cup. Was it all Clive Woodward? He'd be the first to say no. It was Martin Johnson, Jonny Wilkinson, Jason Robinson, Will Greenwood, Mike Tindall, et al stepped up numerous times. We are also seeing Service Management Principle 2 - Manage the work and let people self-organise around it: as well as the team is set up to execute on the pitch, once that whistle goes, the coach can't control much now until half time at the earliest. OK substitutes I'll give you but the rest is in the team's hands now to self-organise and execute. Yes, they'll fall back on team policies and structure but it's in their hands now and the coach has created that space for them to thrive in as they are the experts now (pretty sure Jonny Wilkinson has a better boot than old Sir Clive).
What else are we seeing?
Whilst it is clear we are seeing Kanban in our everyday lives in seeing policies, limiting WiP, managing flow, and acts of leadership, additionally, we are also seeing classes of service (the hospital), capacity management (Tokyo Royal Gardens), risk management (think of the tennis at Wimbledon), and prioritisation (the hospital).
Another example we see at the hospital is blood donations. Blood has a "shelf life" of just 6 weeks so without blood donations and our blood banks being topped up, we could not carry out the number of operations that we'd like in the UK. However, would we prioritise blood donation over a cardiac arrest victim? Definitely not, but we need to factor blood donations into our capacity. We could use this as an example of addressing technical debt. Not something we focus on as an expedite (back to classes of service) but something we stay on top of (intangible) so it does not hurt us when we need it the most. In our everyday work, how often do we ignore the technical debt we have incurred from years of big change initiatives and migrations that then come back to bite us on the bum because we did not have time to deal with that due to the next big change we focussed on? I can think of more than one occasion I have seen massive outages in global organisations from this exact situation.
Why is it a mystery in some places of work?
I'm sure there's a plethora of reasons it could be. Possibly badly managed risk aversion processes that may have been necessary at one point but slowing you down now. Inertia towards improvement, it's just how we do things around here. Badly executed change may have left a bad taste in the mouth, especially big bang transformations. They rarely end in glory. But why? Well, we are human, and when we change at a pace that threatens our identity, our roles, and our understanding, it can be all a bit much to take. How often do we get to this time of year (January) and say, enough is enough, I am now living off smoothies, meditating every day, and hitting the gym hard? We may even do it for a while but we crash back to Netflix and pizza within a month or so. We hear it all the time, small sustainable changes are more likely to stick, and all the health gurus repeatedly share this with us. I guess here is another example we can tie back to Kanban, and improve through evolutionary change. I will more likely stick to eating a healthy breakfast 4 days per week rather than going vegan overnight. Not to say I could not do it, but what is more likely to happen long term when you stand back and examine yourself and your friend's past endeavors?
Conclusion
So why am I writing this? I felt it was good to highlight how we see this in everyday life but often I see teams, departments, and whole companies struggle with these concepts. How often do we hear, "Yeah that's all well and good mate but it won't work here...." Or "Yeah but in the real world" but this is the real world. It could not be more so than in the examples above. Whilst it could be true in your special setup that no one else understands, is it? I mean have you really challenged it? What is stopping you really? Is it just that what worked then has not been challenged in so long that inertia has slowly choaked the pace of evolution? I don't know, only you know your context but when was the last time you really challenged the status quo? Have you ever visualised where you are now to stand back and see what is really happening? When did you last run a small experiment to try and see what the art of possible maybe?
If you need help with it, you know where I am. Give me a call (Who you gonna call? Darn it, a new tune stuck in my head!).
