If you’ve read any of my stuff before, particularly my work on Steal These Thoughts!, then you’ll know I have a somewhat obsession with human development and the exploration of meaning.
I’m of the opinion that having meaning in life is more important than happiness. Mainly because happiness is an emotional state, one that is fleeting and cannot be sustained. Whereas meaning is something that drives us, gives us a sense of being and will more likely provide the moments of happiness we seek.
This is a topic I’ve wanted to write about for sometime, it’s actually been in the works for nearly 8 months.
I’ve always been fascinated by human behaviour and exploring why we do the things we do. As a society, mental health issues have been on a scary increase over the last 10-15 years and particularly in my generation, the anointed ‘millennials’.
I’m a believer in the fact that all of us in some way are dealing with the mechanics of a path and way of engaging with the world that we did not choose when we were infants, being most likely thrust upon us by those who raised us. As I’ve grown older, it’s become pretty clear to me that many of us struggle daily, because some of the things we have been taught in the environment from our younger years don’t actually help us live a good life now.
This post is not me telling you what to do, rather it’s a bunch of thoughts and insights that I feel can help you find some understanding in why you operate the way you do, whether that’s in how you think, feel or behave. It’s ultimately about recognising that you have a choice in everything in life and we have the power to change anything.
Agile, scrum, lean and Kanban. Lots of fancy looking words, buzzwords to some, almost religious type processes to others but they all try to help the user to simplify their work.
Lots of people like to make Agile sound like a very complex algorithm that you need a quantum chip computer to demystify. But in my humble opinion it’s pretty damn simple at its core and we’ve all probably been doing it before someone decided to call it Agile.
This is my own straightforward take on agile and how I work.
I am no Agile expert, I have no accreditation and I don’t work in a software engineering team. But this does not mean I cannot adopt something like Kanban and bespoke it for something that fits my needs.
What I do have at my disposal is a little thing called Google and a hyper driven curious mind. A perfect combination to seek out a better way to organise myself, I hope you would agree.
Like the great Bruce Lee said “Adopt what is useful, discard what is not and add what is uniquely your own”
This is how I’ve approached my Kanban experience. Now the purists will probably hate this article and that’s cool. I’m just here to share something that has simplified my life and might just help others too.
(For full disclosure: I don’t work in a tech team and I’m not using the Kanban principles in what many will view as their traditional sense. I do however build lots of products. So, I need a way to easily visualise what is going on in my product lifecycle.)
A brief look at Kanban
I’m not going to go deep into what Kanban is or all the history behind it. Far smarter people have already done that, with the best examples of this being here, here and here.
Our good friends at Wikipedia describe Kanban as the following:
“Kanban (Japanese 看板, signboard or billboard) is a lean method to manage and improve work across human systems. This approach aims to manage work by balancing demands with available capacity, and by improving the handling of system-level bottlenecks.
Work items are visualized to give participants a view of progress and process, from start to finish—usually via a Kanban board. Work is pulled as capacity permits, rather than work being pushed into the process when requested.
For the context of this post, the above is all you need to know. I’m not here to add another ‘what is Kanban’ post to the digital world.
It’s key for me to highlight that Kanban itself is not the central point of this story. What I want to share is how I’ve adapted the use of Kanban boards into my workflow and not the full Kanban method.
I’m going to share how I’ve used Kanban boards to simplify my work and provide others with an easy status/progress overview of my work without speaking a word to them. In addition to controlling the chaos of what I need to do for my own sanity.
Before we crack into my experiences, let’s take a quick step back and clarify just what a Kanban board is:
The experts at Kanbanize (awesome name) describe them as:
A tool for workflow visualization and one of the key components of the Kanban method.
And why they are useful
Lack of efficiency is a widespread problem across different project teams. Most of the time, the issue lies in having no clear insight into what the team is doing and what exactly is dragging the productivity down.
Adopting a Kanban board can turn the tide around and help you become more efficient than you ever were by revealing where exactly the team needs to start improving.
Giving people (including me at times) clear insight into what I’m doing, the progress of my work and what stuff is causing me to have stoic moments of silent anger has been key to enable connection across my team.
At its core I had a simple mission:
Visualise what I was doing and where I am in the process in a way my monkey mind can look at daily and go “I got this”
Plus…
A method to easily share with my wider team on the macro pieces of work I’m focused on (aka the big stuff) and break down to a micro level (the projects themselves). With the outcome being that the method is so clear that little conversation if any at all is needed.
After what felt like an eternity of searching on Google (approximately 6 mins to be exact and I might have even gone to page 2 of my results, which is just unheard of in today’s world) I stumbled across a little known thing called a Kanban board. I tend not to over inflate things, but I felt like it was love at first sight.
I was looking for a way to simply show what I was working on. Where everything was in the L&D product lifecycle and what things were causing me to hold onto the happy place for dear life.
And Kanban boards ticked all those boxes for me pretty swiftly.
How I use this in my work
Here’s an example of a typical kanban board I put together to visualise my work in L&D.
You know what I love about it? The simplicity.
It’s 4 columns of so much of the obvious that my monkey mind cannot get enough of it.
Now as I’ve mentioned countless times in this piece. The above is not the traditional use of Kanban boards. Most teams will use it to break down an individual project and its components.
The method I’ve shared is a bespoke tool that enables me to have a daily visual of where I am in my L&D strategy workflow and for my wider team to see what’s going on in the production line for learning solutions too.
It has yielded many benefits for me personally and enabled simpler conversations with my team.
And for me that is the core principle of a Kanban board, to simplify and bring value.
I feel like we are in the middle of a secret societal crisis. A crisis so secret that it has disguised itself as cultural slang, a catchy hashtag and the operating behaviour for the digital world’s agony aunt column.
Yes my friends, I am referring to the world famous first world problem.
I don’t mean IOS, Android, Windows or any digital OS of choice.
I’m talking about the original OS. The thing that’s in all our heads, the thing that we can’t help but avoid any type of stillness with for more than 60 seconds.
