Social engineering with in for kanban

Copyright Lean Kanban Inc.dja@leankanban.com @lki_dja
Social
Engineering
With / In / For
Kanban
David J. Anderson
Lean Kanban North America
San Diego
May 2016

Sociology
is the innovation in Agile development methods
Agile assumes a high trust environment
Elements of high trust include
 Tacit knowledge, collaboration, transparency
 Lack of negotiation, contracts, audit, arbitration &
reconciliation
 Flat, simple org structures
 Broad, loosely defined job titles and roles
 Empowerment, leadership, tolerance of failure

Tribes
Great Boss, Dead Boss -- Ray Immelman
In 2005 this book
changed how I see
the world and how
I understood the
world of work

All warm-blooded vertebrate animals form social
groups for survival and mutual advantage
Flocks… Herds… packs… tribes.
We are inherently social
and cannot get away from it.
The social nature of our species
governs our behavior.

A need to belong
ranks 3rd
in
Mazlov’s hierarchy of needs
after physiological and safety concerns.
We inherently want to belong
to social groups.

The need to belong and conform often
overrides logic or the values and beliefs
of the individual.
Individuals often behave against their
better judgment for fear of
repercussions for their social status…

This can lead to
group think errors
riots
ethnic cleansing
war crimes
and generally
acts out of character
for the individual
such as
criminal behavior
vandalism
petty crime
drug taking and substance abuse

Social behavior is governed by our limbic brain
What Daniel Kahneman called
“System 1”
Our amygdala – in evolutionary
terms a very old part of our
brains
Most importantly its function
cannot be switched off or over-
ridden by logical argument

Logical behavior is governed by our frontal cortex
System 2
our logical inference engine
– our frontal cortex
incapable of overcoming
the instinct of the limbic
system
in any cognitive dissonance
or disagreement between
the older and newer
systems in our brain

Immelman’s great insight is that we should
recognized people in the workplace behave
in an inherently tribal manner
Once we recognize this, it is
something we can potentially
harness and control
(or at least manipulate in a
positive manner)

Social group cohesion
Strong/tight
Clear definition of in and out
clear and strict social hierarchy
formalized membership
formalized progress up the social hierarchy
loyalty
strong sense of belonging
drive for conformity
lack of innovation
leadership only from the top
excommunication for transgressing social norms and conventions
intolerance
conservative
lack of risk taking
New members welcomed only if they conform and follow the set path
to membership.

Social group cohesion
Weak/Loose
fuzzy definition of in and out
ambiguous social hierarchy even if one or more leaders are clearly recognized
informal membership
social status determined by peers with no set evaluation criteria
…and no formal path to achieving increased status
lack of loyalty
weaker sense of belonging
tolerance of experimentation
innovation
liberal
risk taking
failure tolerant
leadership from any level
New members readily accepted even with
unconventional ideas, beliefs or behaviors.

Highly cohesive social groups can represent
attractive homes for the lost,
e.g. cults.
Highly cohesive social groups tend to be
brittle and lack resilience and robustness in
the face or environmental change

Why did the Greenland Norse “Collapse”

So if Agile requires a high trust culture,
does a high level of social capital
predict Agile adoption?

LiberalConservative
LowTrustHighTrust
Scandinavia
Coastal
USA
United
Kingdom
India
China
Netherlands
Belgium
Germany
France
Latin
America
Rest of
USA
Early Agile Adoption
Japan
Early Kanban
Adoption

The key to Agile adoption lies in the social
cohesion of society, not its social capital.
Liberal societies
are more likely
to adopt it.
Early Agile Adoption

Liberal societies exhibit
"anti-fragility"
as they are tolerant of innovation,
and more likely to
adopt, adapt or exapt
a concept from outside
when placed under stress.

Kanban's
start with what you do now approach
made it appealing to a much wider audience.
Conservative, low trust cultures can still use
Kanban by simply
making current policies explicit.
The act of making policies explicit and
providing transparency through visualization
automatically moves the culture up and to
the right

or the inherent
empowerment
provided by
making policies
explicit.
Early Kanban
Adoption
Some Kanban adoptions fail because the
culture is resistant to transparency

A truly Agile society is both
highly trusting and very liberal

Review:
Definition of the
Kanban Method

Agreement
Balance
Collaboration
Customer Focus
Flow
Leadership
Respect
Transparency
Understanding
The Kanban Values

The Kanban Method
Service Delivery Principles
1. Understand and focus on your customers’ needs
and expectations
2. Manage the work, allow your people self-organize
around it
3. Your organization is an ecosystem of
interdependent services steered by its policies,
reflect regularly on their effectives and improve
them

The Kanban Method
Change Management Principles
1. Start with what you do now
 Understanding current processes, as actually practiced
 Respecting existing roles, responsibilities & job titles
2. Gain agreement to pursue improvement through
evolutionary change
3. Encourage acts of leadership at all levels

Kanban Method uses…
… uses kanban boards to visualize invisible work,
workflow & business risks together with kanban
systems which limit work-in-progress
Kanban Method delivers…
… faster, more predictable service delivery and an
adaptive capability that enables you to respond
effectively to changes customer demand or your
business environment

The Kanban Method
General Practices
1. Visualize (with a kanban board 看板)
2. Limit work-in-progress (with kanban かんばん)
3. Manage flow
4. Make policies explicit
5. Implement feedback loops
6. Improve collaboratively, evolve experimentally
(using models & the scientific method)

The Kanban Lens
Learn to view what you do now as a set of services
(that can be improved):
 What to look for…
• Creative work is service-oriented
• Service delivery involves workflow
• Workflow involves a series of knowledge discovery
activities
 What to do…
• Map the knowledge discovery workflow
• Pay attention to how & why work arrives
• Track work flowing through the service

Implementing Service Delivery Kanban
Specific Practices
1. Visualize service delivery workflows
2. Implement virtual kanban systems
3. Manage flow within & across workflows
4. Make your decision framework, risk management
policies & boundaries of empowerment explicit
5. Implement the Kanban Cadences
6. Improve collaboratively, evolve experimentally
(using fitness criteria metrics, and model-driven improvements based upon an understanding
of risks, variability, constraints, sources of delay, queuing theory, real option theory, transaction
& coordination costs)

Strategy
Review
Risk
Review
Monthly
Service
Delivery
Review
Bi-WeeklyQuarterly
Kanban
Meeting
Daily
Operations
Review
Monthly
Replenishment/
Commitment
Meeting
Weekly
Delivery
Planning
Meeting
Per delivery cadence
change change
change
change
change
change
change change
change
info
info
info
info
info
info
info
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change info
Kanban Cadences

Are we doing Kanban or not?
It isn’t a question of evaluating practice usage but
rather a question of intent …
Do you intend to use visualization & kanban systems to drive
a focus on sustained fitness for purpose?
Do you view your organization as a network of services and
seek to improve the balance of capability against demand &
customer expectations?

Kanban Litmus Test
1. Have managers changed their behavior?
2. Has the customer interface changed?
3. Has the customer contract changed?
4. Has the service delivery business model changed?
If you can’t answer yes to at least 2 of these questions
it is unlikely you’ve switched to Kanban yet! You may
have the intent to adopt it through a series of
evolutionary steps initially adopting proto-Kanban

STATIK
(Systems Thinking Approach to Introducing Kanban)
1. Understand what makes the service “fit for
purpose”
2. Understand sources of dissatisfaction
regarding current delivery
3. Analyze sources of and nature of demand
4. Analyze current delivery capability
5. Model the service delivery workflow
6. Identify & define classes of service
7. Design the kanban system
8. Socialize design & negotiate implementation
This process
tends to be
iterative
Identify Services. For each service…

Examples of social engineering
WITH
Kanban

- 1 -
WIP limit smaller than team, forcing
collaboration or transparent idleness

- 2 -
Aggregated team servicing multiple customers,
forcing collaboration in various ways:
Agreed capacity
allocation
Democratic voting
Consensus selection
Level of trust
rises with each
style of
collaboration

- 3 -
Use of avatars for multi-skilled workers,
specialists and narrowly skilled on specific
rows

- 4 -
Manage the work,
allow your people to self-organize around it
Manage the work, allow your people to self-organize
around it
Map workflow as states of the work based on
activities to generate new knowledge
No value stream mapping, describing handoffs
between individuals. No “Gemba Walks”
Recognition that virtual, intangible environments are
different from physical environments

IN (the design of)
The Kanban Method

Start with what you do now
No one gets a new role or job title
Deliberately chosen to avoid psychological and
sociological effects of identity change

Kanban should be like water!
Avoid the "rocks" of
emotional, psychological and social resistance

Kanban daily meeting is social
System 1 engagement –
visual, social, tactile, narrative

Strategy
Review
Risk
Review
Monthly
Service
Delivery
Review
Bi-WeeklyQuarterly
Kanban
Meeting
Daily
Operations
Review
Monthly
Replenishment/
Commitment
Meeting
Weekly
Delivery
Planning
Meeting
Per delivery cadence
change change
change
change
change
change
change change
change
info
info
info
info
info
info
info
info
info
change info
Replenishment meetings are social
Replenishment meetings force
social collaboration from multiple
stakeholders who have to agree on
selections or agree a democratic
voting system or a capacity
allocation system

Transparency Balance Collaboration
Customer
Focus
Flow Leadership
Understanding Agreement Respect
Kanban Values are inherently social
Customer focus helps bind
teams in a common goal!
Leadership (at all levels)
indicates a preference for a
loosely cohesive social
structure
Understanding, agreement,
collaboration & respect are all
inherently social values
Transparency indicates
a preference for a high
social capital, high
trust culture with a
flatter social hierarchy
and greater social
mobility

For (the development of)
Kanban (as a social group)

- 1 -
No Kanbanistas
Stamped out before it got much traction
Too strong of an identity leads to dogma

- 2 -
No roles
Again, deliberately weakening the sense of identity

- 3 -
No Kanban-but or Kanban-butts
Weakening the boundary between in and out
Lowering the barrier to entry

- 4 -
Long resistance to certifications. No role-based
certification
Weakens the boundary between in and out
Weakens the sense of identity for the group
Weakens the formalization of the social structure

- 5 -
Social behavior across market adoption lifecycle
Enthusiasts Early
Adopters
Early
Majority
Late
Majority
Laggards
Rate
Of
Market
Adoption
time
Moore’s
Chasm
Little
Chasm
I want to
join your tribe.
The earlier I join,
the more social
status I expect
I have no interest in
joining your tribe.
I want to use your tool
Early market
is about
building
community.
Everyone is a
leader
Need separation
of events:
leadership
retreats for
early market;
LeanKanban
conferences for
majority market

Actions all taken
to deliberately position
the Kanban community
as a loosely cohesive social group

Not without consequences...
Lack of loyalty
 members of the community tend to come and go
Reduced demand to get involved amongst enthusiast
and early adopter market segments
Lost sheep often don't find a strong enough home in
Kanbanland
Need to replenish the community with new blood
 expensive to keep generating new members and leaders as
others drift off

Developing and maintaining a
loosely cohesive social group
is more expensive
in time, energy and money,
than developing a highly cohesive group.
So Why Do it?...

Advantage #1: Develops New Leaders
Klaus Leopold
Mike Burrows
Karl Scotland
Patrick Steyaert
Alexei Zheglov
Dimitar Bakardzhiev
Rodrigo Yoshima
every winner and nominee of/for the Brickell Key Award…
a long list of new leaders have emerged from Kanbanland
In Scandinavia,
Mattias Skarin, Christoph Achouiantz, Hakan Forss,
Marcus Hammerberg & Joakim Sunden
have all provided leadership in the Kanban community

Advantage #2: Continual Innovation
In 10 years Kanban has evolved, expanded and been
refined.
It takes over an hour on stage to list the innovations and
developments in Kanban since 2005.
The latest significant changes include
Enterprise Services Planning (ESP) and Discovery Kanban
Lean Kanban conferences continue to hold a reputation for
consistently innovative content and participants who are
experimental and push boundaries and tackle new
challenges

Advantage #3: Thoughtfulness
There isn't any dogma in a community trained to think
and develop its ideas from first principles and values.
The key was in defining membership through alignment
with explicitly espoused values and explicitly defined
principles
and showing tolerance of new ideas and practices so long
as they are shown to be aligned with values and
principles.
Examples such as Hakan Forss challenging the depth of
kanban assessment demonstrate a willingness from the
community to eat its own sacred cows

Rejections & Resignations
Where the Kanban community has rejected
individuals and their ideas
– and some of these have been quite public and the
individuals made a terrible fuss about it –
there has been a clearly demonstrable lack of
alignment with Kanban values and principles

Disadvantages #1: People like, want and
need highly cohesive social groups
They need that sense of belonging.
They want a clearly defined social
structure and path to climb it.
So growing the Kanban community
is challenging

Disadvantage #2: Retards the Training Market
Individuals often drive the training market by selecting
training with a personal, emotional, psychological and
social benefit for themselves.
Training related to membership and status within a
highly cohesive social group is therefore more
attractive

Disadvantage #3: Avoiding Dogma is Costly
Dogma – the following of socially normal practices
without thought or hindrance to the utility of
application, ethnics or morals of their use
…is actually easy, lazy behavior.
Thinking uses energy and acting on thoughts may
require courage.
People prefer to join groups and hide behind the
excuse of social conformity

Conclusions

We are inherently social!
Our tendency to let social behavior override
our better judgment
or ability to think logically
is a human trait
that managers must accept and adapt for

Social Engineering with/in/for Kanban
Kanban has broad applicability
to social groups with different traits and behaviors

Kanban can be used as a social engineering tool
within an organization

An understanding that we as a species
are inherently social has been used explicitly
to define the Kanban Method
– a “humane approach to change”

The same understanding was used strategically for
almost a decade
to lead, shape and steer the development
of the Kanban community as a
loosely cohesive social group
accepting both the benefits and consequences of that
decision

2012 Lessons in Agile Management
The heavily under-rated book
that underpins the Kanban
Coaching Masterclass and most
of the theory behind the
Kanban Method

Thank you!

About
David Anderson is an innovator in
management of 21st Century
businesses that employ creative
people who “think for a living” . He
leads a training, consulting,
publishing and event planning
business dedicated to developing,
promoting and implementing new
management thinking & methods…
He has 30+ years experience in the high technology industry
starting with computer games in the early 1980’s. He has
led software organizations delivering superior productivity
and quality using innovative methods at large companies such
as Sprint and Motorola.
David defined Enterprise Services Planning and originated
Kanban Method an adaptive approach to improved service
delivery. His latest book, published in June 2012, is, Lessons
in Agile Management – On the Road to Kanban.
David is Chairman & CEO of Lean Kanban Inc., a business
operating globally, dedicated to providing quality training &
events to bring Kanban and Enterprise Services Planning to
businesses who employ those who must “think for a living.”

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