Protect the Signal: Your Board Is a Sense-Making Device
How I helped two teams avoid creating confusion and simplify their Kanban board
All improvement starts with telling the truth.
Your board should tell the truth.
Not a filtered truth. Not an approximate truth.
The actual state of your work: who’s doing what, where things are stuck, and what matters most right now.
That’s what makes it a sense-making device.
It takes the swirl of chaos and transforms it into a clear, shared understanding of what’s really going on. It doesn’t just show tasks, it helps people make sense of the flow of work.
But when that signal gets fuzzy, things fall apart. I've worked with teams who didn’t mean to distort the signal — but did anyway, often with the best of intentions. Let me tell you how. 👇
The Problem With “Helpful” Adjustments
One team wanted the ability to change the details in the “reporter” field on cards.
They said, “Our contractors created these, but we want to change the reporter to the leader of the team.”
At first glance, it sounds harmless. Logical, even.
But here’s the catch: the reporter is simply the person who entered the card into the system. That’s it. It’s a digital fingerprint, not a badge of ownership or a sign of who’s responsible. Changing that field doesn’t clarify anything and, instead, confuses the audit trail.
We already had a field for requestor — the person who asked for the work.
But because they didn’t trust the existing signal, they tried to retrofit another field to mean something else. That’s how the board stops being a sense-making device and starts becoming a semantic battleground. ⚔️
The Myth of “Additional Assignees”
Another team came to me with this one:
“Can we get a custom field for an ‘Additional Assignee’? We have lots of people working on these requests.”
It’s a classic symptom of a deeper issue: unclear ownership.
Let me be clear: We don’t use a Kanban board to manage people. We use it to manage work.
Trying to track every single person who touched a task might feel helpful, but it blurs the signal. It shifts the board from being a tool for flow to being a tool for effort-tracking. And that’s not what it’s for. 😵💫
Kanban is about shipping value — not cataloging contributors.
One owner per card. Always. ✅
This doesn’t mean only one person does the work. It means one person owns the next move. If a task is stuck, we know who to talk to. If progress stalls, we don’t need a meeting, we just look at the card.
When multiple people are assigned to the same task, the board stops being a decision tool and becomes a parking lot for ambiguity. It may look like collaboration, but it’s really diffusion of responsibility in disguise, at best, and people management at worst.
If others are helping, awesome. Let them. But that doesn’t mean we need to represent every contributor on the board. We're not building a credit reel. We're trying to finish something.
We are trying to FINISH something.
Visibility Is the Leadership Move
Boards aren’t just for the team — they’re for everyone who needs to make sense of the work. And here’s what makes a great board powerful: it’s visible.
A real information radiator doesn’t hide behind five clicks or a report generator. It’s out in the open, immediately visible — like a dashboard warning light that catches your eye and says, “Pay attention to this.” 🚨
That’s why some of the best boards are still physical. Whiteboards in team spaces. TVs with live dashboards. Sticky notes in swim lanes.
If your board isn’t always visible, it’s not radiating — it’s lurking.
And you can’t lead from a dark corner.
You Build the Board to Read the Signal
If you want to know how to actually build a board that gives off a clean signal, I covered that in Seeing is Believing. That post walks through the foundational pieces: clear statuses, one assignee, visible blockers, and clean lanes. 🧼
But building a board is only half the battle.
Protecting it… that’s the real leadership move.
A good board is a shared sense-making device that reduces uncertainty and increases clarity. It becomes the place the team looks when they don’t know what to do next. It should speak so clearly that it eliminates the need for explanation. Does your Kanban board do that?
If your board doesn’t help your team make decisions faster and with more confidence, it’s not a board, it’s a decoration. It’s a checkbox. It’s agile theater.
Landing the Plane
You don’t need more fields. You don’t need extra dashboards. You don’t need to track everyone who breathed near a ticket. You need a board that tells the truth — clearly, consistently, and visually.
A board that functions as a sense-making device. A board that radiates signal, not noise. A board you don’t have to explain…because the work already did. 👀
So take ownership. Guard the clarity. And when someone asks, “What’s going on with that work?” - just smile, point at the board, and say: “Look.”
👉 If you want to see how I help teams actually build a board that tells the truth, check out Seeing is Believing. It’s the prequel to this post — all about creating boards that radiate clarity instead of chaos. 🧭