Kan ban worry / build confidence

Agile methods like Kanban are awesome.

Kanban can help with team planning, task management and delivery. Kanban is Japanese for ‘visual signal’ (among other things), and it certainly is.

Get your Post It notes and Sharpies ready. If you’re not already engaged in a battle for wall space, Scrum, Kanban and their agile variants are coming to a workplace near you.

Agile methods can help teams do some things that can be particularly difficult, including:

• identifying and staying focused on specific goals;
• breaking goals down into steps and ultimately very do-able (and much less intimidating) tasks;
• providing a sense of progress and achievement – as coloured Post-it notes (or digital cards) move across the board from ‘to do’, to ‘doing’ and then ‘done’; and
• providing a stronger sense of ownership and control.

Kids (and anyone really) can worry or feel unsure about how to go about achieving a goal or task, from a homework assignment to learning a new skill.  Kanban can help. Practical, visual and logical, Kanban might be just the thing to bring a goal into focus and help future robot bosses figure out how to get there.

Try this at home kids! 

Kanban with kids works really well. This article by Rafa Garcia for Productive! Magazine has some great tips.

Building a basic Kanban board is a great place to start.

• A whiteboard, chalkboard or few pieces of paper stuck together work just fine. Here are some examples.  It doesn’t need to be perfect, just three columns with the labels ‘to do’, ‘doing’ and ‘done’ and a section at the bottom somewhere for an ‘icebox’ (where you pop things that need to be done at some point, but don’t need to be tackled right away).

Then, next time your future robot boss is concerned about something or has an excellent idea for an age-appropriate entrepreneurial venture – try kanbaning it.

Start with the the goal or thing your future robot boss is working towards (for example – doing a great job on an upcoming class assignment – see picture). Write it down.  Be as specific as possible. Next, break down the goal into the steps needed to get there, writing each one a separate Post-it note.

Now it’s time to take action – specific, do-able and Post-it-noted actions – to reach that goal!

Good luck (and let us know how you go, we’d love to hear from you).

Post script – Here’s a great article from  the Harvard Business Review on the rational for breaking task down into smaller steps until it feels doable.