It struck me throughout a current training class to make a little, however crucial modification to my Understanding Discovery Process diagram.

Please describe this old, popular post from 2 and a half years back– Comprehending Your Process as Collective Understanding Discovery– for the background and summary of the understanding discovery procedure principle we utilize in the workflow visualization practice of the Kanban technique.

As a really quick summary of this principle, we attempt to envision the procedure by paying specific attention to info arrival and discovery. The procedure starts from a reasonably bad state of understanding that enhances as we approach the downstream shipment point (for this reason the German translation: Bereicherungsprozess). We see this build-up of understanding as a series of dominant activities stressed by shifts in activity or cooperation pattern.

What’s the issue? The horizontal axis label was “time” in my initial understanding discovery procedure diagram since I could not think about anything much better. (Really, the “initial” drawing enhanced and changed the S-curve visualization that I utilized for 2 and a half years prior to that while looking for much better methods to interact the principle aesthetically.) When teaching the principle, I constantly made sure to discuss that the horizontal axis is not direct, that is, equivalent horizontal sections on the chart do not imply equivalent time periods. There was likewise no presumption that the activities take equivalent, similar or deterministic times. I was likewise conscious that utilizing calendar time on the horizontal axis was an excellent method to conceal lines at the same time (this is the deadly defect of Gantt charts– among the insights from Don Reinertsen’s Lean Item Advancement second Generation workshop).

Then it struck me throughout a current training class that I can just relabel the horizontal axis as “development.” This training class followed my reading of Walter Isaacson’s bio of Benjamin Franklin where the title of among the chapters was “ A Pilgrim’s Development“

This resolves the issue. Points left wing still take place in time prior to the points on the right, however the chart does not state anything else on how the development connects to the time scale. No tip of linearity or determinism.

The upgraded understanding discovery procedure diagram now appears like this.