Last year this time I wrote about not feeling any need to make New Year’s resolutions since embracing the power of continuous improvement in my life. That has not changed. In fact, I feel even stronger about that this year, looking back at the numerous small changes that have combined to help our family build a better and happier life on many fronts. But with all the resolution talk going around again, I started pondering why New Year’s resolutions fail so many.

Is it because people are simply not disciplined enough to follow through and stick to their good intentions? There is something in that, I believe. We humans, for all our noble endeavours to improve ourselves, are not very consistent in acting on our dreams and plans.

Fundamentally, however, I believe New Year’s resolutions set us up for disappointment by trying to force change in an unnatural and unsustainable way. They are inherently flawed in that they often reflect an idealized reality – goals set far beyond the realities of now. They are often made in a split second, with no clear course of action tied to them to help us achieve these remarkable goals we set ourselves.

But that is not how you create lasting change in your life. Change comes slowly, creeping –  the way dusk gently settles at the end of the day to suddenly cloak the world in darkness, surprising everyone that the light has gone. Change is the product of a series of conscious and principled decisions and actions over time. Some changes take weeks, some months and others yet take many years to play out fully in our lives.

So instead of setting yourself unattainable goals for the coming year, why not commit to one thing only? Commit to seeking and embracing change in those areas of your life where you think it’s needed. Commit to learning from every action and decision in your life, and to applying that learning to positive growth in yourself, your family and the world around you.  And although change may not come as fast as human impatience insists it should – it will come.

As surely as the sun will set tonight, change will come.

With our household settling down happily after Christmas Eve dinner, I’ve taken some time out to share with you how we’ve stayed sane in the run-up to this year’s festivities, using Personal Kanban in both hi-tech and lo-tech ways.

Keeping Track of Gifts

Inspired by this lovely example of kids creating  a prioritized Santa Backlog, we decided to do the same this year, incorporating a variety of our existing Personal Kanban tools and practices.

Gift backlog, with blank stickies for new requests

Step 1: Creating the Backlog

On the first weekend of December, we hit the major toy shops with the kids. They had a ball roaming around, handling and pointing out items to add to their lists. Dad and I trailed along, iPad in hand. For each new request, the kids helped me create a card (different colours for each child) in an iKanban project. Cards were ordered by priority, and moved up and down as reconnaissance continued.

At home that evening, I converted their gift backlog to a physical backlog with stickies. Over the next week, they could review and move items around, or add new items.  By the end of that week, they had to be sure of their priorities so we could write Santa and mail the letters on time.

Step 3: Communicating the Sprint Backlog

Communicated Sprint backlog

On the following weekend, the boys wrote their Santa Letters, running up the stairs every so often to check their gift backlog on the upstairs landing. Writing these wish lists had never been this easy. Each of them knew exactly what they wanted and we were done in no time. We popped their letters in their tree stockings, ready to be mailed the next time we passed the Santa mailbox at the local toy shop.

We are now patiently tracking Santa to monitor final delivery. We have it on good authority that the elves wrapped up their part of the work almost two weeks before Christmas.

Preparing for Christmas Weekend

I enjoy the trappings of Christmas, especially cooking and baking up a storm. Nothing spells home comfort to me quite like the smell of cinnamon wafting through the house.

But with us celebrating on our own, without the extended family, I was to be chief cook and bottle washer this year. And  since I was still working until the 23rd of December, I had to plan carefully to make sure that everything got done on time.  This was one project where the deadline was rather firm and could not slip!

One Week: Breaking Down the Work

To help me manage the various value streams, I relied on iKan. It was the first Kanban app I ever installed and I still prefer it when I need multiple ad hoc projects that require quick and easy setup and simple prioritization.

With Christmas Eve 7 days away, I created three projects to track the Christmas Baking I planned to do each evening, additional Christmas Goodies to buy and the Christmas Menu I was planning.

This approach worked like a charm. By Thursday evening, I deleted the Christmas Goodies project, since there were no outstanding items to buy to support the other two projects. By Friday evening it was clear that I had planned to do too much Christmas Baking. There were two more items on the backlog, but the cake tins were  full. I guess they didn’t make it into this Christmas edition.

Kitchen Kanban on a Tray - Compact and Mobile

One Day: Getting to Done

On Christmas Eve morning, I converted the items from the Christmas Menu project to a physical kanban that the whole family could see and participate in. I wanted to keep it in the kitchen – the hub of the remaining cooking activities – but I couldn’t spare any workspace.  A small melamine tray turned out to be the answer, since we could move it around as needed.

And with everybody now happily off to bed, I can turn out the lights to signal Santa that we’re ready for Sprint Review. Let me just  move the “cookies and milk” sticky on the tray …

Until a couple of months ago, I hadn’t thought too much about the Kanban concept of policies in the context of our use of  Personal Kanban at home. Policies seemed like such a formal concept that has little place in a family context.  This seems especially true if you read the Business Dictionary definition of policies:

A set of policies are principles, rules, and guidelines formulated or adopted by an organization to reach its long-term goals and typically published in a booklet or other form that is widely accessible.

Just reading this definition conjures images of long, convoluted policy documents that you’d rather use to stack under your computer monitor than actually digest and apply. But policies in Kanban are defined very simply as the mechanisms, rules or processes that govern how a system works. By making these policies explicit, it becomes easy for others observing the system to understand it, and for those inside it to continually evaluate and improve the current mechanisms where necessary.

Here’s a typical example of a policy for a software development team using Kanban taken from this article by David Anderson:

Anybody studying this team’s board will immediately understand why there are 6 high priority items, and 6 items of a lesser priority.  Over time the team can assess whether this policy adequately addresses their operational needs or not, and change it to better fit the current circumstances.

More importantly, the moment someone in the team tries to pull a 7th high priority item, the team will be able to say “No! We already have 6 high priority items on the board.”  without having to think about and discuss the pros and cons of taking on a 7th item.

Taking the pain out of decisions

For me, this is the fundamental underlying importance of policies:

• Policies reduce the mental energy required to make snap decisions.
• Policies reduce the likelihood of giving in to a special request under duress.

By encapsulating recurring decisions in explicit policies, you spend the energy once on defining the acceptable outcomes for a given situation, effectively removing the stress of  spot decisions (so-called decision fatigue) and eliminating delays in getting work done efficiently.

Sticking to the rules sets you free 

But where does this fit in with families and life in general, you ask? Families don’t publish booklets with principles, rules and guidelines.

No, but every well-functioning family I know has a set of house rules that govern family behaviour and interaction. And everybody in the family clearly knows what they are and what the consequences are for breaking them, where applicable. Some families even have their rules written up in a visible spot in the house.  In fact, the more explicit and understood the house rules, the less energy the family spends in fighting the same battles, time and again, leaving them more space to get on with the simple joy of living.

And once you start looking around you, you realize how much of our lives is in fact built on explicit policies or rules. From the Ten Commandments that underpin ethical and moral decision-making if you’re a Christian, to simple rules for healthy living and parenting such as “don’t eat anything within 2 hours of going to sleep” or “bedtime on school nights is strictly 8 pm” – they’re all examples of explicit policies in action in our daily lives.

And without them, being human would be an even tougher challenge than it already is, sometimes.

What about you? Does your family have explicit policies or rules?  How do they make your live simpler? How did you arrive at them? Please share your thoughts in the Comments section.

Staying Connected

One of the major challenges in our nuclear family’s life is staying in touch with our extended family.  This is because my husband and I chose to relocate away from our respective families when we got married. I mean, who can resist the allure of Cape Town compared to Johannesburg or Bloemfontein?

As we started raising our own family, and the pressures of life, work and parenting started mounting up, we found it’s all too easy for a week or two (or three …)  to go by without a phone call or an e-mail to granny or grandpa. This has increasingly led to our feeling disconnected from the rest of the family and our boys knowing shockingly little about the rest of the family.

After the umpteenth recrimination from my mother, I decided to do something about this not-so-little problem.

Enter  … The Family Tree Kanban

Our Family Tree Kanban

As you can see, it’s still a work in progress, but I wanted to share this as an example of an alternative (fun!) way of visualizing recurring personal tasks, rather than the typical linear Personal Kanban board.

The idea is to add pictures of  each family member we want to stay in touch with regularly, with lines showing the relationship between them. I plan to make a mini-project of this with the boys, e.g. getting them to help me choose the pictures, and figure out the lines to use. Perhaps different color wool for different types of relationships – parent-child, sibling?

The second part, is to find a way to show when last we had contact with this particular family member. As with my small horizon exercise kanban, I simply want to see the last time we interacted with the particular family member, in a way that will trigger an action (the fundamental purpose of a “kanban” in the Toyota Production System) for us to contact them right now.

I’m mulling over a few options for this “interaction trigger”, but I’m not really sold on any of them yet. So if you have some bright ideas to share, please do so in the comments below!

Also, do you think this kind of playful, non-linear family Kanban could work for your family, or even for a school or work project you’re working on? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

This year has been one of significant personal change for me. After pulling the line and acknowledging that I had allowed my work in progress to spiral out of control, I have continued along a path of introspection and reinvention, both at work and at home. In the past, I have often documented intensive personal growth phases through journalling.

But this time around, I continually find myself drawn to Personal Kanban as a vehicle – and quite a creative one at that –  to express this journey visually to myself and – more importantly – to my family.

Sharing yourself with your family

I can’t count the number of times I’ve read (or said myself) how important it is for families to communicate. But that doesn’t just mean talking about chores and tasks. That’s just operational stuff that has to get done. All too often, we neglect to talk to our families about things that really matter to us – things like who we are and where we’re going as individuals and as families. We dream and plan and think, but we don’t share what’s in our heads with the people around us. And then we’re surprised or frustrated when they don’t understand where we’re coming from when we do eventually share the outcome of months of silent growth.

Keeping yourself accountable

A comment by leansimulations a few months ago on my “Dealing with a Line Stop” post came to mind when I started writing this section:

I think one reason personal kanban is hard, is because kanban is primarily a communication tool. But when you communicate to yourself, you are only accountable to yourself. And we know how that ends up.

This is such a fundamental truth of human nature, that it’s easy to just nod and keep reading.  But it really hits at the core of agile and lean practices and why they work. Through transparency and visibility of information everybody in the system is held accountable by everybody else.

Even if you’re an individual using Personal Kanban, you’re still using Personal Kanban within a group context, whether that group is your family or your team at work. If you’re keeping your Kanban visible only to yourself, then you’re missing out on a huge part of the value in Personal Kanban.  By keeping your kanban visible to the whole group, you’re inviting conversation and triggering shared learning that would otherwise not happen. You’re also holding yourself more accountable because you’re not only communicating to yourself anymore, but to others.

Leading through example

Off and on, I have felt that our Kidzban experiments were getting too much and that I was forcing my views of managing life on my family. At about the same time, my need to visualize the changes in my own life became so strong, that I found myself focusing more on creating visual indicators for myself, rather than for them.  Soon after, I realized that I could achieve more as a parent by inspiring my children to adopt change, rather than trying to manage the change actively in their lives.  Do as I do, and not as I say, right?

This is another one of those fundamental truths of change in organizations. Trying to actively change behaviour as part of a 10-point plan is usually doomed to failure. Allowing people to discover the benefits of a particular change by observing it in practise and then adopting it themselves has a much more sustainable long-term impact than forcing people to switch to a new way of doing things.

Practical Example – Creating a family dream board

Dream Board - just getting started!

I have started a family Dream Board where every member of the family is encouraged (not forced!) to stick pictures of a particular dream they want to achieve. Dream boards (or vision boards, as they’re also called) fit in very well with Personal Kanban. They are information radiators and a great way to trigger family conversations about shared values and dreams.

We’re just getting started with ours, and it’s still quite bare. But I’m very excited about the possibilities it holds for our family to talk and share more deeply about our plans for the future and what we need to do to get there.  A possible challenge I see here, though, is how to enforce having regular conversations about the board, without it feeling like a family meeting. All suggestions welcome!

Practical Example – Keeping track of reading habits

I love reading, and I read a lot. But over the years I’ve fallen in to a pattern of reading more for learning about work and parenting than reading for pure enjoyment. I’ve felt the joy of reading starting to slip away as the list of books I felt I “have to read” piled up.  As part of rebalancing my life, I created a new kanban for myself to keep track of the kinds of books I’m reading so that I could see when I was short-changing myself.

My Bookban

The board on the right represents the backlog of books waiting to be read, with the books in the arrow representing Work In Progress. The colours represent different categories of books (Work, Inspiration, Parenting, Literature and Fun)  The cloud on the left represents books that I’ve completed since starting to use the new Bookban.

I don’t have explicit limits for how much of each category I should read. That would be insanely prescriptive and defeat the purpose of putting more joy back into my life!  But the shape of the arrow does provide a natural WIP limit, preventing me from trying to read too many books at once. The colours help me to see when I’m reading too much or too little of a specific category so that I can choose which book to finish next from my WIP – without feeling guilty about my choices!

Now I don’t except my family to get too involved in my Bookban on a daily basis, but it’s up where my kids can see it, and I’ve already answered questions about what the colours mean and how the cloud represents my brain and how what I read becomes part of me.  These simple questions have already made it possible to share more of myself with my children. And, who knows, it may sow a seed of something that will emerge later in their own consciousness.

Powerful change, not just organization

For me, Personal Kanban has become a powerful tool to inspire meaningful, value-based change in myself and in my family, not just another organizational tool that helps us get stuff done.  Has Personal Kanban done the same for you? How are you using visualization and limiting work in progress to achieve your personal goals?