Practices and Principles: Guiding Your Journey

In this post, I want to delve into the relationship between practices and principles, as it is a topic that often arises in my classes. While practices are inherently actionable, principles provide abstract guidance when making decisions. They act as filters that help us navigate the complex world of organizational challenges. In fact, if we consider the Agile Manifesto, we can view its four lines as principles or decision filters, rather than simply values.

It’s important to keep principles in mind as they can assist us in steering our decision-making process. However, an extensive list of principles can be difficult to remember, as cognitive limits come into play. George Miller’s “magical number 7 (±2),” which suggests that our cognitive capacity is limited, serves as a reminder of the challenges associated with retaining a long list of principles. This realization led to the evolution of Kanban principles from a single list a decade ago to the current 4 sets.

Let’s now explore these principles in more detail:

Kanban Service Delivery Principles:

1. Understand and focus on the customer’s needs and expectations
2. Manage the work; let workers self-organize around it
3. Your organization is a network of interdependent services with policies that determine its behavior. Regularly review the network and its policies to improve outcomes.

Kanban Change Management Principles:

1. Start with what you do now
2. Gain agreement to pursue improvement through evolutionary change
3. Encourage acts of leadership at all levels

Kanban Scaling Principles:

1. Scale your Kanban implementation incrementally, one service at a time.
2. Approach the design of each Kanban system from first principles, employing STATIK methodology. Avoid attempting to devise a grand enterprise-scale solution.
3. Utilize Kanban Cadences as a management system that fosters balance, leading to improved service delivery across the enterprise.

Kanban Coaching Principles:

1. Understand your context. Act grounded.
2. Think in systems
3. Be like water! Avoid the rocks. Reorganize last
4. Guide them along their own way
5. Lead with values, with outcomes in mind
6. Sociology over psychology

I invite you to share your experience and insights in the comments, specifically regarding which of these principles have proven valuable in your own journey.