Kanban in a World Moving Faster than Kanban with Jim Benson
Details
Kanban in a world moving faster than Kanban.
We made Kanban because Agile iterations were no longer fast enough. Kanban was the supercharger. Now, business and life are moving faster than Kanban. We still do Agile, we still do Kanban, but what are our new superchargers?
I (Jim Benson) am running four bodies of work that share almost nothing on the surface: an AI product in live development for an insurance-tech client, a science fiction trilogy, a state government training rollout delivered with a partner in real time, and my own daily management. Each one has its own visual management system, built to the shape of that work. The software project runs a dynamic kanban that plans only half of developer capacity, because the other half belongs to work nobody has thought of yet. The novels live in an atlas of characters, places, and canon spanning three books. The government engagement runs on a shared delivery board both parties watch move. The daily practice opens every morning with a stand up from a personal dashboard.
This session is a tour of those four rooms and the thinking underneath them: why each got its own shape rather than one tool stretched across everything, what obeya practice becomes now that AI lets you build a bespoke one in days, and how WIP limits, pull, and visible work survive the translation. Underneath all four sits the same question: we have a pool of capacity and a pool of desires. How do we balance them?
About the Speaker
A pioneer in applying Lean and Kanban to knowledge work, Jim is the creator of Personal Kanban and co-author of Personal Kanban: Mapping Work | Navigating Life, winner of the Shingo Research and Publication Award. His other books include Why Plans Fail, Why Limit WIP, and Beyond Agile. He is the CEO of Modus Cooperandi, and co-founder of Modus Institute. For the past two decades Jim has worked at uncovering ways for individuals and groups to communicate, collaborate, and find clarity in unpredictable and amorphous environments.