Chapter 2: A Retrospective
Wait a minute — we’re one chapter into this book and already we’re having a retrospective? Seems a little premature, doesn’t it?
Bear with me.
When I said before that completing your “Build Kanban Board” task was a small accomplishment, I was lying. You have actually accomplished a great deal.
First, you have conceived, implemented, and tested a Minimum Viable Product1. That is, you have created a simple thing of value that you can actually use right now to accomplish your work. Oh it is going to get better — a lot better actually — but you’ve built something: A good start.
Equally important, you’ve learned something from the act of building (and from the act of using) your creation. You are now a little bit smarter, a little more experienced. Everything from here forward will be improvement.
Second, you have made your workflow visible. Granted, what you have on your wall right now is a crude approximation of your workflow, but the basic structure is there. We’ll tease out some more detail shortly (maybe a lot of detail eventually). Even this simplistic level of workflow visibility, however, will begin to unlock the incredible power of the Kanban Method.
You have also made your work visible. Well, one task is visible for now. But you saw it! An actual, tangible task that you took from conception to completion through your workflow.
As lawyers, especially modern computer-oriented lawyers, our work is largely invisible. We do lots of things every day, possibly every hour, but we don’t really see most of them. A contract reviewed, a motion drafted, some research done — all of the progress typically lives in our heads, or at most in the ones and zeros of our devices and the ephemeral glow of our displays. We may print off something on occasion, but we quickly send it away to somewhere else. Our work is hard to see.
As humans, this is foreign. We evolved while doing physical, tangible things. If we needed to gather food, we went out into the physical world and plucked edibles until we couldn’t carry any more or it was time to eat. If we needed greater capacity, we wove physical baskets that started with nothing but a pile of reeds and, through a process, finished with something significantly more valuable.
This series of events — identifying a need, inventing some methodology for meeting that need, and then refining the methodology to satisfy the need more effectively — is the baseline for all human progress. It is what distinguishes human progress from evolutionary progress, where a random mutation renders an individual slightly more or less fit to succeed in its particular environment (and, if all goes well, successful mutations are passed along to the next generation).
There’s the thing: Evolution requires generations to progress, but Humans can conceive, build, test, and improve much more quickly. Think about that.
Conceive.
Build.
Test.
Improve.
Just pondering those steps feels like progress.
My point is that we are much better at interacting with the physical world than the virtual one. If you disagree, then ask why our virtual devices are constantly becoming smaller, more portable; from ENIAC to desktop to laptop to mobile to wearable. I tend to think it is because most people want our devices to accompany us into the world at large where they compliment, not supplant, our physical experience.
Kanban gives all of your invisible, virtual work a visible, physical analog. It isn’t quite the same as doing actual physical work, but it is enough to trick your lizard brain into experiencing the work in a more familiar way. This, in turn, allows your brain to start doing what it does best: recognize patterns, categorize items, perceive threats and dismiss trivialities. Once you can actually see your work in a Kanban board, you will experience a sense of order and control that has probably been missing from your work-life for some time.
The third thing you have accomplished (or the fourth, it isn’t important) is that you’ve experienced the power of working on one thing at a time, and of working on it until it is done. In manufacturing this is called Single Piece Flow. There is decades of evidence showing that Single Piece Flow — as opposed to the alternatives: multitasking and batch flow — is the best way to get lots of things done in a fixed amount of time. There is other, more recent, evidence that we humans are really lousy multitaskers (texting and driving is a familiar example), and don’t get me started on batch flow; a false idol of misperceived efficiency if there ever was one. But we’ll dive into the concept of Flow very soon.
Finally (for now), you are about to complete a Retrospective. This should become as familiar a part of your personal cadence as brushing your teeth. This first Retrospective isn’t actually a great example; I’ve been a little long-winded and we haven’t followed much of a structure. But we can fix that now.
As you develop a habit of retrospection2, I find it helpful to ask the following three questions:
- What went well that we should keep doing?
- What didn’t go well that we should stop doing?
- What should we try next time that is different?
This chapter so far has focused on the first question. Although you may not fully understand all of the whys yet, many things went well when you used Kanban for the first time. We won’t always go into such detail, but acknowledging and appreciating success helps to reinforce it. Early success, no matter how small, establishes a foundation for progress.
As for the second question, I’ll leave that mostly up to you. Perhaps you didn’t choose the best section of wall, or your writing was hard to read, or you ran out of room on your stickys, or who knows what else. For me, I’ll admit again that this first retrospective is taking too long.
This isn’t the time to beat yourself up. The shortcomings aren’t nearly as important as the successes, for they can always can be fixed. This also isn’t the time to do the fixing; it is a time for thinking. More diagnosis, less prescription.
Spending time just thinking may be harder than you suspect since our culture predisposes us to want to take action. To everything there is a season, however, and the season for reflection is every bit as important to your cycle as the season for doing.
The third question also requires some discipline, especially in the early stages of Kanban. Already your mind may be racing through different ideas about how you can improve your board, define your tasks, or maybe get other members of your team up there. These are great, and we’ll want to consider them all, but not immediately. For each idea you have, write it on a sticky note and put it on the wall to the left of your To Do column.
Wait… To the left of “To Do?” That sounds like we need to add a column to our Kanban board. Let’s start there.
A Word about Kanban Board Software
When I wrote the first edition of this book, software-powered kanban boards were a new and somewhat rare thing. There were a few standalone tools like Trello that used a kanban interface as their primary view into work. There were some more traditional project management / personal productivity tools like Asana or Monday that offered a kanban interface as a supplement to assignment-list-style management. And there were some high-powered tools designed primarily for technology teams, like Jira, that used a kanban system specifically to manage those teams’ use of the Scrum method (more on Scrum later).
Today, kanban boards are everywhere; including in many legal technology tools. Several market-leading companies like Clio, Lawmatics, and NetDocuments have incorporated some form of kanban view into their interface; a few even make kanban the only option for managing certain tasks. There are at least three specific “kanban for lawyers” software products that are built around a cards-and-columns interface.
For most of my career I’ve adopted a software-agnostic approach to kanban boards. To the extent I espoused a point of view, it was strongly in favor of starting your kanban journey with a the sort of tangible, on the wall kanban board that I am describing in the first part of this book.
I still believe that the best way to learn the kanban method is to spend at least some time working with a physical board. Sticky notes have zero learning curve and are easy to re-arrange as you prototype different ways to visualize your work. What’s more, for knowledge workers who have grown accustomed to digital interactions, there is something satisfying in the act of bodily interacting with a physical representation of your work. Especailly when you move that work all the way to “Done.” 3
In the first edition of this book I (paternalistically, in retrospect) cautioned readers not to submit to the siren-call of slickly marketed software based kanban, taking several paragraphs to extol the virtues of physical kanban that I described in just a few sentences above.
My current approach: Use what you’ve got.
If you have a kanban interface in your existing software, give it a try. If you subscribe to a golbal megacorp’s software-as-a-service service and that subscription includes access to a rudimentary product that uses cards and columns to arrange work, give it a try.
I’m less agnostic about software these days because some tools just work better than others. Specifically, I draw a distinction between tools that use cards-and-columns and those that truly support the Kanban Method discussed in Part 2 of this book. If you must know what software I prefer, you’ll find my recommended tools in the “Resources” section of AgileAttorney.com.
But you don’t need the perfect tool to get started. Migrating your kanban board from one tool to another is relatively easy, and you won’t know what kind of tool you really need until you better understand what your needs will be. There’s nothing like building that working prototype to improve that understanding, and I’d far rather you spend your limited time and attention building a board than noodling around the internet looking for the ultimate magical software (which, of course, doesn’t really exist, despite what the marketers tell you).