To my big surprise, a lot of managers completely misunderstand Kanban. Here are a few things that I’ve read in reputable blogs or heard people say, all while they were wearing very serious faces.

• Kanban is a system like Scrum, only there are no sprints
• Kanban introduces WIP limits so that the developers “don’t multitask” (i.e. to control developers’ behavior)
• Kanban is a board that.. (further content irrelevant)

So if not all these things, what is Kanban?

I like to use the following definition, perhaps you may find it useful too: Kanban is a visual signalling system to find and address process bottlenecks.

But what does “signalling” mean? How does this system find bottlenecks? To understand that, let’s take a look at an example.

A work incident occurs on a factory floor. As a consequence of this incident, a bottleneck is created. Let’s see how the teams at the factory floor can handle the incident using different methodologies.

A manager addresses the incident through micro-management

In the first scenario, there is no Kanban or any other system implemented, but there’s a manager on site.

In this scenario a lot of things depend on the manager. How soon will the manager notice an incident and decide to intervene? How efficient would the manager’s decisions be? How many managers are needed for a shop floor with one hundred work stations?

In this “traditional” setup decision-making is slow and inefficient.

The team addresses the incident ad-hoc

The second scenario shows a situation where there is no system and no manager.

Self-organization without any system or set of rules defined upfront is very difficult. The team can easily get lost and focus on the wrong things.

The incident is addressed by a Kanban system

And finally, the third scenario shows how Kanban system automatically finds the bottleneck and assigns the right people to help address it, all without a manager on site.

In this example, a simple system enables the team to make decisions quickly and efficiently. Note that the limit to “work-in-progress” is a signal – a signal that enables the left “grey hat” to detect a bottleneck further down the conveyor line, and react effectively. Adjusting the limit adjusts the sensitivity of the system to bottlenecks, helping you achieve the optimal balance between reacting too soon and too late.

Is there nothing more to Kanban?

Of course, this is very far from the full picture. First of all, Kanban is a little more nuanced than what you can see above. Also when applied to agile software development process (and this is probably why you are here), Kanban has its specific practices.

But to use it well, it’s very important to understand what the core philosophy of Kanban is, what it was designed for, what it can and cannot do.