Wednesday, October 12, 2011
Understanding the Process of Knowledge Discovery
Since 2007 when I first published on the Kanban Method as we recognize it today, I have struggled to articulate how to get started and describing the thing around which we hang a kanban (WIP limited pull) system. The first of the five core practices was described as “visualize workflow” in book. In some subsequent articles and online publications I and Janice Linden-Reed played around with alternatives. We tried borrowing the term “value stream” from Lean, and later got seduced by the intellectual objection that knowledge work isn’t a linear process and we should borrow Clayton Christensen’s term “value creation network.” The publication of that particular article on Kanban (which I refuse to link as I don’t want its search engine ranking improved) represented, perhaps, an all-time low in the struggle to articulate how to do Kanban. Recently, I attended Lean Kanban Benelux 2011 and was inspired by Michael Kennedy, an expert in Lean Product Development, to adopt his language of a “knowledge discovery process.”
