Building mental models through a kanban board
Posted 1 year, 2 months ago at 11:35 am. 0 comments
Those that know me well know that I am always talking about the importance of mental models. Much of my research over the past two years has dealt with mental models including what they are and how they develop. I’ve looked at them in the context of a classroom, showing that better mental models lead to classroom performance on tests (the paper goes back out for review in July). I’ve also looked at gender and leadership and found that leadership characteristics that are more masculine tend to hang together more closely and the same goes for more feminine characteristics (this paper was presented at a conference in 2008). My hope is that my dissertation will also take a similar perspective looking at entrepreneur’s mental models.
I am taking these ideas in a more applied direction by talking about how a kanban board can help to develop mental models.
First off, mental models are one way that people can organize information. It helps the individual describe, predict, or explain behavior. They affect how we see the world and what details we pay attention to. If you have a psychology background, it can help to think about it as a schema. If you have more of an engineering or biology background, it can help to think of it like a neural network. Whatever the topic or context might be, information is organized around that in a network of related ideas. Activation of the main idea, for this example let’s say it is the workplace, activates other information that is closely related to that topic. It could be anything from how you go about doing a particular task to a simple feeling or mood as to whether you love or hate your job. Regardless, mental models are important because they differentiate novices from experts. Those who are experts have a deeper understanding of the connections between ideas, whereas novices focus more on superficial/surface features. Mental model organization becomes better over time and exposure to the topic or idea. (For the sake of length, I left out a lot of information from previous studies, so contact me if you want particular citations for this information).
Research on team mental models, which are shared understandings about key pieces of knowledge in the environment (Klimoski & Mohammed, 1994), has shown that the shared meanings underlying mental models are created through communication among members in a group.Team members may differ in their representations of information due to different levels of awareness, acceptance, or salience of the information based on time or context (Breakwell, 2001). This can be an issue because long-term success in an organization depends on the process that the organization uses to change mental models, including those of their employees. Having a shared mental model with others in your workplace or team can lead to better performance in an organization. An article by Lim and Klein (2006) showed that similarity among members of a team is important for team performance, and accuracy (as measured by similarity to an expert), is just as important for success.
The questions then are: How do we enhance communication among team members? How do we create a work environment where information is presented in a consistent way to all employees? What is the process by which we create similar mental models in our employees? I think by now you know that my answer is going to be to use a kanban board like Zen. The board is a clear representation of what is going on at a given time and should be in a place where everyone can have access to the information to see the status of a project at a glance. The kanban board helps team members think about completing each story in a similar way because the process is the same for all stories. The mental model for the process is set to be similar on some level because the value stream is mapped out before beginning work and there has to be some agreement and understanding of ideas like limiting work in progress. This shared idea about the status of a project and the process associated with completing stories helps to establish a shared mental model among employees which has been shown to lead to better performance.
