This is a blogpost based on a short speech I gave at “Lean Kanban Central Europe” this November.

20 by 20 with Pawel Brodzinski, Chet Richards, Nadja Schnetzler, Karl Scotland and Dominica DeGrandis at LKCE15 from Lean Kanban Central Europe on Vimeo.

The “Kitchen Kanban” starts at 27 minutes.

You may use text and picture as long as you refer to www.word-and-deed, Nadja Schnetzler and www.clickcklick.ch (photos)

Thank you for participating in this session, Emanuel, Mauro, Milena, Anna, Anna, Alenka, Laurent, Jan. You are all amazing friends!

My friend Emanuel is in love with food and a member of the slow food movement. If you meet him, every conversation will turn into a talk about food. As I am in love with kanban and talk about that a lot, it was unavoidable that one day we were exploring a way to combine the two things. Why don’t we create an introduction to kanban in the kitchen? It will help teams understand the idea of kanban without having to talk about their own work yet, which often creates counter-reactions like “this will not work here”.

Our first kitchen kanban client was “EMMI” – they make dairy products like this Caffe Latte. I work with their IT department. With the Emmi people, we prepared brunch in three teams, using kanbanboards as communication and visualisation tool.

That fun event made them want to get started with kanban in their departments. The seed was planted for them to understand kanban and to embrace it for their everyday work. And the nice thing: We could always go back to that first experience and talk about how that felt and how the team solved certain challenges there and how they could translate to their work.

The pictures used in this blogpost from a “kitchen kanban” evening with friends, as I do not have client event pictures I can or want to share. This circle of friends agreed to participate in a kitchen kanban experience with 8 people.

Given the right kitchen, time and budget, kitchen kanban can be scaled to a group of 60 people. The ideal group size, though, for me, would be three times 6-8 people, so a maximum of 24. This evening with friends happened in the kitchen of Emanuel, who lives in a large co-op with a well equipped kitchen fit for 8-10 people.

The usual “Kitchen kanban” event starts with an empty kanban board. I first explain a few basics about the board: What is it, where does it come from, how will we use it today? Nothing much in detail, just the basics, most importantly that the team will self-organize around the board and take decisions together. 

Then, we talk about the purpose. Without purpose, we cannot do anything. What do we want to achieve together? (We are all the clients of this product, so this better be good!) 

This team decided to set the following purpose: “Create healthy, seasonal food porn paired with the matching drinks and have some good conversations”.

As food is something that has to be enjoyed together, the team set a time for dinner and that created the timebox in which we had to be able to pull the whole thing off. It was 5.45pm when we started, and dinner time was set for 8.45pm. (I realise that this makes the session more like an agile/kanban combo, but that is fine as I work using the motto “whatever works”)

As the event organizer, I provided a budget, wich was set at 200 Swiss Francs (roughly 200 dollars).

While everyone put on their “kitchen kanban” aprons, I explained the different topics for the evening: shopping and logistics, food prep, gastronomic expertise and of course entertainment. There is also Anna, a cookbook author who takes over the role as “Food Expert”, helping the team take better decisions about the food they want to prepare.

The aim of this is to ensure a balanced portfolio from the start, something that will come up in kanban training later if the team decides to get started with kanban at work.

The portfolio also helps setting a clear focus with three people, who take the content lead for the respective stream. It is also made clear that while they think hard about their stream and make sure that there are enough tasks on the board for that topic, anyone can create tasks for a stream and anyone can pull tasks from any topic at any time.

From a teaching standpoint, introducing different roles (expert, facilitator, lead for a topic) will also help navigating discussions about roles and expertise later in the everyday work.

The team was lost for a few minutes until they understood that they have to populate the board with tasks themselves. What are the first few things that need to be done to reach our goal and to respect our purpose? What topic do they belong to? Are there double tasks? Once that is clear stickies start to flow in and the team is able to get started with their activities.

The recipe discussions were very focused because the purpose was clear. We had a lot of vegetarians on the team, so we settle for a vegetarian dinner with three courses. This also helps with the budget, which was not too generous, and more is left for the “matching drinks”.

Now that the menu was clear, everyone was anxious to start. There are a few on the team who panicked if we will make it on time. As facilitator, I explained that the clearer the tasks are described and the less specialised they are, the more everyone will be able to contribute. If there are more people who could pick one tasks, the likelihood that it will get picked raises. If a task is tailored to one specific person only this specific person will be able to pick it. Again, an interesting lesson for later, when we discuss specialisation and interdisciplinarity at work.

While a shopping list for the 10 people who will be eating dinner was created, the remaining team members started to break down the recipes into small tasks, which proves to be the most demanding and “novel” part of this different way of preparing a meal for the team.

“Definition of done” and task size are clearly a challenge, but it is much easier to think about this for the first time in terms of food rather than with a work item. The cooking analogy, again, can later be used in everyday kanban. Some good discussions about what “done” means to different people ensue.

When the shopping team is back and puts their treasure on the table, the remaining team wants to start with the food preparation. But first, we have to inspect if we had everything we needed. The team is very proud that they were in budget and found all that was requested. Only the cider needed to be replaced by champagne – no complaints there! Oh, but there is a new task, someone notices: We have to change the menu boards to reflect that change. Well, write a stickie!

Time for a standup in front of the board! Wow, so much already done, but lots of stuff in the backlog. The “next” column (between backlog and “doing”) is a facilitator “trick” to set work in progress (WIP) limitations and priorities for the team.

Because they are novices, those two things are not important YET for the kanban experience. Also, I have noticed that for ad-hoc teams like the one I am working with this evening, such a facilitated approach is helpful because the team members do not know each other so well yet.

The food preparation starts. We have lots of people on the team who are not very skilled cooks. Making sure that all team members can contribute is an essential part of the experience and also one that the team mentions in the debriefing as a notable learning from this experience. Is a task “chop all vegetables” better or single tasks: “chop onions”, “make fennel cubes”, “peel and chop squash”? It becomes obvious that the smaller the task, the better, but on the other hand, for expert cooks, this seems almost silly.  

Here we can see Anna working the base for the bread pudding – and showing her comedian qualities. Having fun is an important part of a “kitchen kanban” evening. At the same time, the kanban board makes people extremely focused. So focused infact that sometimes there is a library kind of silence in the kitchen.

As the hectic in the kitchen grows, the team starts to ignore the board for the first time and to just work without creating tasks. Promptly, that creates confusion. In my role as facilitator, I explain that even if you want to pull the task yourself, you should write the task down on a sticky in the right color and put it on the board right the moment you think of the task. Once it’s time for you to pull that task, it might still be available or someone else will have taken it. This is a big a-ha moment for the two expert cooks on the team.  

Once the team understands that everyone can write tasks at any time and that tasks need to be pulled and put into the “doing” column we started to experience real flow. People were regularly returning to the board to move stickies and to pick the next task they wanted to tackle. Often, people also demanded to break down tasks into subtasks, which I did as facilitator for them or let them do it, depending on the situation.

For orientation, tasks receive a little index to see to which recipe they belong to. The different colors of stickies indicate the different streams of work: yellow for food prep, orange for shopping and logistics and red for entertainment tasks. This helps the visualization process.

The kitchen is starting to get really crowded and space is an issue. In the debriefing, the team states that they would prepare clearer working stations next time. But look at how relaxed this team looks! Our gastronomy expert said that this is very unusual for a kitchen staff. Still, as in every kitchen, not everything runs super-smooth until the end. There are a few conflicts and some tensions in this kitchen, too, but most of them can be solved with a conversation in front of the board. Bringing people back to the board is a challenging thing for me as facilitator, because the team is not yet used to come together in a certain cadence and the standup in front of the board seems to be “lost time” rather than valuable time to align everyone around purpose and ongoing tasks.

Time for dinner! Vietnamese rolls with seasonal autumn filling and a spicy dressing, vegetable couscous with yoghurt sauce and the infamous bread pudding with vanilla sauce. The team’s verdict was that the spring rolls and pudding definitely fulfilled the “food porn” criteria set in the purpose discussion.

Cleaning and washing the dishes is as much a part of a successful kitchen kanban evening as preparing and eating dinner is. Thanks to the “logistics” focus, these task are not forgotten and are also tackled by everyone rather than by “the usual suspects”.

After dinner, there is time for the debriefing and retrospective. How did we like the process? Did we work in line with the purpose? What did we learn? The team is happy with the result and decides that kanban is an interesting method both in the kitchen and in their work contexts. Mission accomplished.

The team spends a good amount of time reflecting on what they could improve next time they would do “kitchen kanban” together. They have a long and good retrospective, and, let’s be honest, that is also easier with a full stomach and a good glass champagne. A happy team says goodbye after a nice evening.