Seeing Is Believing
How Practicing the Art of Visualization Can Drastically Reduce Your Cognitive Load
Hey, my name is Tristan Hood and I love helping leaders and teams find new and better ways of managing work. I believe continual, organic change is far superior to large transformation, unless absolutely necessary of course. As such, I created this blog with the intent to share my experiences, wins, and losses. Today we discuss Kanban Practice 1 in our 6 part series to start the new year.
Happy New Year!
I trust you all had a wonderful 2022 and are primed to start 2023 off on the right foot. Most people start off a new year with talk of vision and goals, so it’s fitting that we are starting a new series with a discussion of practicing Visualization.
Imagine For a Moment
I remember as a kid the very first time I heard a teacher utter the phrase, “Imagine for a moment…” It captured my attention immediately and I have been curiously imagining things ever since.
One of the most important features we were created with is our ability to see. Visualization is central to everything from identifying friend from foe to admiring precious works of art. If you’ve ever admired a Van Gogh or the Statue of Liberty, you know what I mean. But visualization can help us do something else that is central to how we spend almost 50% of our lives: Managing work.
It’s story time!
A Man, His Team, and a Kanban Board
I was starting a new coaching engagement with a Learning & Development group and they had, admittedly, almost no concept of Agile or Kanban. They did, however, have the one thing that gave me hope: pain. The somewhat crass way they put it was, “Tristan, we want a way to know what the #$@! we are working on so we can make decisions and create some order.” I had just the antidote.
After hearing the key words of “know what we are working on…so we can make decisions,” it was clear this team wasn’t sure what work was in flight, who was working on it, and, as a result, how to decide what was valuable. We didn’t jump in and change the way they did everything. We used the first Principle of Kanban and just started where they were. We did that by practicing the art of Visualization.
Write it Down. Make it Plain.
While I was describing the practice of visualization, something powerful happened. One of the leaders, Dennis, spoke up and mentioned they had been using a Kanban board to visualize both their work and the way the work moved through their workflow.
That’s a perfect example of practicing visualization. Creating a simple way to understand what work is in flight so everyone has clarity. We will cover that more in just a minute. Back to the story.
We spent a few moments looking at Dennis’ creation and the rest of the leaders fell in love with what they saw. “This looks exactly like what we need! How hard was it to create?”
This was music to my ears.
Did you see that word they used? “This LOOKS…” It may be a bit meta, but this proved the power of visualizing something. They could see the power of what Dennis had started doing. What’s better, I didn’t have to try and convince them since they were seeing it for themselves. Now all they were worried about was how difficult it would be to start practicing visualization for themselves.
And that’s a key for all of you coaches out there.
Lower the barrier to entry.
Make the change or improvement so easy to perform they almost think it’s too easy. It’s one of the central themes of habit building and culture change and it works great for helping a team learn new ways to manage their work. James Clear talks about it in Atomic Habits, at which is a book I highly suggest you take a look.
With Dennis and the L&D leaders, the teams decided to create simple Kanban boards of their own. They didn’t spend hours and hours creating the perfect visual. In fact, they had them created less than an hour after our conversation. It was as simple as that. Their journey of practicing visualization was already well under way.
A Practical Tool
I want to close this tidbit with a simple way to start your own visualization journey. Below is an example of what is commonly referred to as a Kanban board. It’s just a simple visualization that allows a team to visualize their work in a way that intuitively adds clarity.
The steps to create your own Kanban board is as follows.
Draw a grid like you see above, with at least 3 columns as a start.
On the left most column, create a list of any work requested of your team. Don’t overthink. Just start listing any requests and stop when you have a list of about five to ten items. (You can add more at any time)
Moving from left to right, create a column labeled “Doing” or “In Progress” for any work that is currently underway. I don’t mean any work that has been requested. Just work that you or your team has started actually putting “hands on keyboards.” For example, a blog you’ve started writing or an app you’ve started designing.
To finish the process, create a column you can place things once they are done. This may seem silly but, trust me, once you start to see work piling up in the Done column you will know what it’s like to get excited about getting stuff done.
(You can also try an online tool like Trello or Kanbanize)
That’s it!
You may be thinking, “Tristan, this is just a simple task tracker.” Correct! It can start that way. But with some of the practices we will discuss in the coming weeks, you will learn how to use this “simple task tracker” as a powerful tool to understand how work moves through your team and, with a little intentionality, learn how to manage that flow like an expert.
Landing the plane
“Write down the vision. Make it plain.” Those were the words of a close friend of mine when we were discussing Vision. We humans are built for visualization. Our eyesight has been crafted to help us identify danger and, as a result, being able to properly discriminate friend from foe also turned into the ability to crave vision and direction for the work we do. Visualizing that work so we know where to find it can reduce the cranial capacity cognizant coaches know is necessary to juggle the increasing demand we all feel to stay busy. We talk about the unhealthy relationship we have with “busy” in a different article, but trust me when I say your goal should never be to be “busy.”
Just know that, when we can see the thing, we can start to understand it. When the thing is ethereal, like knowledge work, there is normally not a tangible widget or thing. That’s a recipe for disaster, as our brains have very real thresholds for how many tasks it’s capable of recalling and juggling. When we visualize the work, we essentially take the chainsaws our brains are juggling, freeze them in mid-air, and relax.
Imagine that for a moment.
The chainsaws are your work and you are juggling 10 chainsaws without the ability to put them down. Imagine the stress that would create. Then imagine you could freeze them all, walk away, and come back and grab one when you’re ready. That’s right, your brain no longer has to juggle. When you put your work on a visual tool, be it paper, a whiteboard, a spreadsheet, a digital to-do app, you can walk away and come back without the fear of forgetting a conversation. Everyone else can see the progress as well. And even better than that, when you start to visualize things…you can start to limit how many things are being done at once. We’ll cover that practice in the next Tidbit.
Until next time,
Keep on learning. Keep on growing.