Goals and Kanban

Posted 2 months ago at 2:38 pm. 0 comments

Locke’s work on goal-setting theory has taught us many things about goals, the most important (in my opinion) is that goals should be difficult and specific. Goals help with performance because they help to focus our attention and effort where it needs to go. Attention is key to information processing because we are limited capacity processors (essentially we can only hold about 7 things in our memory at one time).

Kanban helps us with goals and to overcome issues of limited capacity in several ways:

1. The most obvious is that you can write down your tasks/goals/etc and not have to hold those ideas in your brain. This gives you a specific idea of what you have to do and eliminates wasted effort of holding items, checking, and rechecking that can often take place when trying to balance several ideas at once. This is one reason why limiting work in progress (a fundamental idea of kanban) can really help improve workflow.

2. The value stream map associated with kanban provides clarity as to the steps that must be accomplished for something to be complete. Visualizing the process is also a fundamental part of kanban that helps us know the next step without having to draw from our limited supply of cognitive resources.

3. When tasks are organized on a kanban board they are clearly defined because they are broken down in to action items that are specific. This not only helps to determine priority, but it increases commitment. Writing something down is a different level of commitment than simply thinking of doing something.

4. The kanban board can also be used to get to one of the important fundamentals of goal-setting: feedback. The visual display shows your progress, essentially giving feedback at a glance. Additional feedback can also be gathered from metrics like efficiency, cycle time, and lead time that are calculated in Zen.