← Undo – How history's outliers got stuff done
Undo – How history's outliers got stuff done
How to build a car or plan a wedding using Kanban
00:20:09
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- [00:00]
Mark Stedman
Oh, hey, if you're seeing this episode again, but you've already listened to it, my apologies. I made a technical error today that caused a bunch of episodes to show up twice. So sorry for the inconvenience. If you've heard this episode, feel free to move on. But if you haven't, I hope you like it. Table three, two salmon, one duck, one veggie lasagna. Table nine. Two chicken, one duck, one fish and chips. No peas. Table five. One chicken stir fry, one veggie lasagna. No nut allergy, no peanut oil in the stir fry. Can I get a yes, Chef?
- [00:30]
Sous Chef
Yes, Chef.
- [00:31]
Mark Stedman
You're the sous chef at a fancy restaurant. You're in charge of keeping the trains running, making sure food gets to the pass on time so that a guest isn't waiting on their meal while their date tucks into theirs. Sure, you can try and keep it all in your head, but then you end up having an aneurysm or being played by someone small and wiry in a streaming miniseries, or both. Whether you're a cook on their own in the back of a pub or a line cook in a burger bar, there's an element of the assembly line to what you're doing. And if for some reason you're not even in the food service industry, we can learn a lot from the world of manufacture and bring it in to the work that we do. I'm Mark Stedman, and this is undo. Thinly slicing a hunk of productivity advice, barely letting it shake hands with a hot pan and calling it rare, just like a mama used to make. You don't have to call yourself a project manager to have managed some kind of project. If you've had to move house, plan a birthday party, or travel for a holiday, you've managed a project. A project is nothing more than a series of tasks. Some of them are connected, some take longer than others. Some are binary in that they're done or not done, while others involve other people and thus are the worst to do. Lists are useful, as are methods like David Allen's Getting Things Done. But systems like that treat every task as either done or not done, which just isn't realistic. I have people in my life who are very dear to me who manage all of this stuff in their heads. I don't know how, but somehow they manage. Actually, I do know how. They simply don't sleep. Not because they're permanently running around doing stuff, but because their brains are constantly trying to run complex project management software when they should be asleep. So how do you manage a complex project with lots of moving parts? Well, first you have to build an aeroplane. After the Nazis bombed the factories making Spitfires in Southampton during the Second World War, Brits began building them in secret, hiding them in sheds, back gardens, hotels, and even a bus depot. The Allies needed as many as they could get, so efficiency was of the utmost importance at the time. A lot of factories adhered to the Henry Ford method of manufacture, which meant that parts were supplied based on anticipated demand. So a standard fork wrench might be made by affixing two rotary girdles to a stanchion tusk. But if the pimhole goes out of sync with the elbow nut, your hinkle press gets jammed, and then you have to hold production of stanchion tusks. Meanwhile, on the other side of the factory, you're still merrily making rotary girdles that'll just pile up. With no thork wrenches to affix them to. This naturally creates waste, not to mention the build up of excess fluid on the girt strain. But if you had a couple of bins at the end of the production line for each part, you could ensure you only made as much as you needed and maybe even adapt the machine to make different sorts of parts if demand for the other one slowed. And this is precisely what those plucky Brits did. Instead of making all the parts all the time, they'd make enough parts to fill two bins. Factory workers who needed, let's say, a drangle would take it from bin A. They'd keep going until bin A was empty, at which point the drangleman would pour the contents of bin B into bin A and start making new drangles. Bin A was the buffer bin, which, apart from being immensely satisfying to say, meant parts makers weren't having to estimate demand. They just made enough to fill the bin. In the late 1940s, an industrial engineer from Japan called Taiichi Ono took this idea to Toyota.
- [04:27]
Akio Toyoda
So successful was this program that in 1973, at the height of the gas crisis, the government of Japan sent investigators to our factories to determine why we were still able to make a profit while others were not. They discovered that the secret of our success truly was our lean manufacturing approach.
- [04:55]
Mark Stedman
That's Akio Toyoda, whose grandfather, Kiichiro founded the Toyota Loom Company, which would later become the famous car manufacturer. And yes, he spelled his name Toyoda with a D. I haven't just started doing a voice. Toichi Ohno implemented the two bins approach and a few other ideas and essentially created the Toyota Production System, a renowned method of manufacture that reduced waste and overburden while also staying flexible. But the system has lots more to offer than just making widgets.
- [05:28]
Akio Toyoda
In honor of Onosan, we also create a special division called the Toyota Production Systems Support center to help organizations such as hospitals, food banks, and even COVID testing sites to become more efficient. Through the application of tps.
- [05:51]
Mark Stedman
Along with implementing a new method of manufacturing that reduced waste, Ohno created 10 precepts that helped Toyota become a dominating force. Now, he was pretty hardcore when it came to efficiency, but not for the sort of reasons we are for him. Wasted time is wasted money for the company, where for us, time theft is just our way of making sure we can regain a little sanity during our workday, whether that means taking an extra long Wii to finish the New York Times Mini crossword or fitting in a few minutes of TikTok in between meetings. Your boss might call that inefficient. I call it ensuring you don't go stir crazy and snap your keyboard in half. That said, there are a few precepts Ohno got right first, say I can do it and try before everything. At some point, I'd love to bend your ear about audacity. I think there's something to be said for creative people who have the audacity to go. I reckon I could have a go at that without any prior experience. That's how I interpret this precept. Anyway, before pre deciding that you can't do something for whatever reason, why not just give it a go first? Treat it like an experiment and see what happens. Once you start something, persevere with it. Do not give up until you finish it. I know we've talked about sticking with something when it gets hard or it stops being novel, and I really like this precept. But I do think it's harder than it seems for some of us. A way to reframe this, especially if you're someone who has a story about themselves that says they never finish anything, is to decide what an ending looks like. Ending an experiment because it didn't have the outcome you intended is perfectly valid. But just letting an experiment linger without a result, well, that isn't really an experiment. That's more of a laboratory accident. Valueless motions are equal to shortening one's life the amount of times I would have loved to have said that when my boss proposed another meeting. My interpretation of this will probably differ from Ono's, but to me this says decide on the things that need to be done, that bring value and eliminate everything else. And of course, you know what we're about here. You know, that includes rest, relaxation, fun and aimless activity. That's part of the deal of being human. And it's the 20% necessary for you to work at your best. At the heart of the Toyota production system, as created by Ono, is a Japanese word you might have already come across. Kanban. And in case you've heard an American friend pronounce it as kanban because they think they're being culturally sensitive, you can tell them to settle down. It's. It's just kanban. To illustrate what it is and how useful it can be, let's get out of the factory and into a church. Let's say you're getting married. It's 2025, so you probably can't afford the napkins, let alone a wedding planner. So you elect to plan the thing yourself. You've picked your theme and drawn up your guest list. Now you've got to book a venue, hire a photographer, let your other half find the band or the dj, because that'll keep them busy. Shop for an outfit, make a seating chart, choose party favors. Figure out transportation. Schedule the rehearsal. You've basically given yourself a whole extra job. And the worst part of it is you have to pay through the nose to do it anyway. You've got all these tasks to worry about. Some you can knock out in one session, while others could take weeks of back and forth. If you invite Janet from Accounts Receivable to the reception, do you sit her next to the hobbit from it? Or would the free wine on the table set off a chain of events that would culminate in an HR violation and an act of public indecency? Keeping all of this in your head is like brilliant writing a check to a couples counsellor before you've even tied the knot. So let's take everything out of your head and put it on a board. The Japanese word kanban literally translates to signboard. The method has changed over the years since its introduction at Toyota, but it works like this. Imagine a notice board hung up on your kitchen wall. Now divide that board into three columns. Take that fancy label maker you bought during lockdown and label the first column and backlog the second column in progress and the third. Done. Now get a bunch of post it notes and write each task on a new note. Stick all your notes to the board, keeping them in the backlog column whenever you decide to get organized. This part of the process can be both relieving and really scary. It's great to finally release that mental constipation, but seeing a mountain of things to do can feel somewhat daunting. So go gentle with yourself and remember, you've got time. You have got time, right? Haven't you? Don't tell me the big day's next week. If you've divided up the labor so your partner has more to do than book the band and the booze, you could use colored sticky notes to help you keep track of who's doing what job. Now, as you start working on a task, you move the corresponding sticky note to the in progress column. If it's something like sending an email or making a phone call, you can move it to done and breathe a sigh of relief. Other jobs might of course take longer, but an important thing, which we're again going to borrow from getting Things Done is to make each post it note count for the smallest atomic unit of a task. For example, buy wedding cake might sound like a simple activity, but this is a wedding, so of course it's not. You've got to research the bakery, discuss options with the baker, try different things fillings, and then make a final decision. In a sense, buying the cake for a wedding is actually its own project, as it's a single outcome made up of multiple tasks. Now it's at this point where you're probably going to run out of kitchen walls, so maybe it's time to go digital. If you've ever used the Trello app, you'll already be familiar with the Kanban approach notion. The info management app also lets you view data in a Kanban state style, and it's part of management workflows beloved by software companies, game studios and scrappy startups alike. Mapping the process out visually helps you get a sense of the pipeline. At a glance, you can see what you're working on, what's still to be done, and what you've already accomplished. This is exactly what Ed Catmull, former president of Pixar, implemented within his animation studio. The Kanban method meant colleagues could see where projects were in the pipeline and where things were getting stuck.
- [12:14]
Sous Chef
You see what he's doing, right? He's trying to get us to compete so we work faster. He thinks this Wall of Psych 101 MBA mind control bullshit is going to motivate us. Fine, don't compete. Do them at whatever speed you like. But why are you tapping faster? I'm not. Maybe my leisurely pace is just a little faster than yours, huh? Booyah guys.
- [12:41]
Mark Stedman
Have you been out front yet?
- [12:43]
Sous Chef
I'm good. Fuck off. We're working.
- [12:46]
Mark Stedman
This way of working was profiled briefly in an early episode of the amazing sitcom Silicon Valley. They were implementing a particular style of working called Scrum, which is similar to the style Spotify implemented back in 2010. The then head of operations, Matthias Johnson, implemented a simple Kanban board made up of three columns to do, doing and done. To keep track of the work of the then seven person operations team, they appointed a sort of goalie, not unlike our sous chef from the top of the episode, to catch jobs as they came in. If a job could be done quickly, it was done there and then. Otherwise it made its way onto the board. Now, one of the things Kanban can't help you with is what to do with your growing backlog. If you've used Kanban for a particular project and it's just you, placing every atomic unit of action in a single column is just gonna feel daunting. The trick is to not start breaking it down until necessary. If we go back to our wedding scenario, if you're 12 months out from your wedding, you can safely put Buy Wedding Cake on your board as a single action. Later down the line, the this will become what Scrum managers like to call an epic. Scrum is the method Jared introduced in the Silicon Valley sitcom, and epic is basically their word for a project or a large span of work that'll take you more than a couple of weeks to finish. If you're trying to plan your wedding on a kitchen notice board, you might find it tricky to juggle multiple projects at the same time. Also, Kanban is really just a simple visual metaphor. It can't help you keep track of time or remind you to do something, or help protect you from forgetting a about it. That's where tools like Trello can be really helpful. You create cards and arrange them in columns, just like you would with a physical notice board. But cards can have lots of things attached to them, like dates, tags, even to do lists. And if you need to turn Buy Wedding Cake into a project, you can create a new board and link your single wedding cake card to that new board. That way, you end up with a board that shows the whole overview of your wedding plan, with linked boards to help you manage the finicky details. But you're not listening to this podcast because you have a wedding to plan. You're here presumably because you're a creative soul who'd maybe like to get as organized in their extracurricular work as they are at their day job. So let's say you're a hot sauce fanatic and you've started a new podcast where every week you interview a new small batch hot sauce supplier. You're going on holiday in a couple of months, so you're going to need a few episodes in your pocket to tide you over. So you plan to record a bunch of episodes in one week. You create a Trello board where the first column has a bunch of cards, one for each of the hot sauce brands you want to contact. As you invite each one onto the show, you move them from the inbox column into the contacted column. As each potential guest replies and you set a date and time to record each, you move that person's card to scheduled. Then once you've recorded with the guest, you move them on to recorded and so on all the way through to promoting the episode and releasing it. Tracking your podcast this way means you can juggle multiple episodes at the same time without having to try and remember where you were with each one of them. And you can even automate the process. So as soon as someone books in a recording time on your calendar, that card is moved to the next column. Now, an episode is a mini project within itself with lots of little subtasks. Rather than create a whole new Trello board for each episode, you can click the card and add a checklist straight out of episode eight. This is less of a to do list and more a way to keep track of the things that can go wrong or an expression of what done looks like. You can use this method to track any kind of repeated work like blogging or newsletter writing, YouTube or TikTok video making, even your Instagram calendar. Now, of course, there are some nuts that are just too small to be cracked by this particular hammer. You probably don't need a Kanban board to help you buy more dog food, but you could use one to help find her a new brother or sister. If you do end up with a big backlog and it starts to feel overwhelming, you might want to consider going all the way back to episode one and checking out the Eisenhower Matrix. As you might find, some of the stuff in that column just really isn't all that important. But I've seen people use Kanban boards to plan weddings and I've recommended them for home renovations. They're incredibly simple and they're foundational for lots of other project management methodologies. But at its heart is something very simple, very visual, and thus very tangible. And with that, I'm going to move this episode from your in progress Queue to to the done column. Undo is written and produced by me, Mark Stedman. You can find more resources at Undo FM Kanban and if you'd like to show your support, you can be like Anastasia, our latest supporter, and head to patreon.com undopodcast no update from the shed this week as I've kind of left it all out on the field as they say. But if you're a Patreon supporter, I'll drop into your your feed later in the week, you know, just to check in and see how things are getting on. Until next Monday. Sesan se nanti Nan sen Suda. That's my impression of the Acast ad noise and I'm glad to let you know that that is the last you'll be hearing of it, at least from this podcast. From now on, the only commercial messages you'll hear will come from my voice and and there won't be like five minutes of them per episode. If you know anyone who was listening to the show and who bailed because the ads got too annoying, please do let them know that we've righted the ship. As you can gather, writing a TED Talk every week takes its toll. And while I'm never going to guilt you about listening for free, some level of remuneration for the effort is always appreciated. So if you'd like to show your support for the show, you can do so@patreon.com undo podcast I don't have a team. I don't hand work off to an editor. Everything you hear is made by me in my home studio. So if you can support me via Patreon, that'd be amazing. And as your reward for making it all the way through to the end of the ads, here's a selection of my favourite screw ups from this week's recording. Meanwhile, on the other side of the factory, you're still merrily making. Not to mention the buildup of excess fluid on the Gert strain. But if you had a couple of I enjoyed that. That's Akio Toyoda. That's Akio Toyoda, whose grandfather, Kiichiro founded the Toyota Low. That's Akioi. That's Akio Toyo. Toyo. Toyoda. Toyoda. Toyoda. That's Akio Toyoda. I'm laughing now. You probably don't need a Kanban board to help you buy more dog food, but you could use one to help find him. But you could use one to help her find you can find more resources at Undo FM Kanban, and if you'd like to show and if.
- [20:08]
Sous Chef
You.