What's Your Biggest Weakness? Kanban as a Cognitive Immune System

Right now I’m looking for my next career opportunity, so that means a lot of conversations and interviews. All job seekers dread that one inevitable question for which there’s no good answer. It’s legitimate and relevant, and unavoidable. You’d better have a good response prepared because you’ll look foolish—or worse—if you stumble. Only the Sphinx herself posed a query more diabolical, and with greater consequences for muffing the answer. It’s only four words long, and it strikes fear into every applicant’s heart:

What’s your biggest weakness?

This question baffled and terrified me as much as anyone else—until now, that is. Kanban gave me an unexpected route to answer this question once and for all, without waffling or dodging. 

Before I tell you about that, let's look at what doesn't work so well. 

The two common strategies you've heard about didn't satisfy me. They’re probably good enough for you to squeak past the question during an interview, but neither will build your case in the eyes of a hiring manager. Let’s dissect both of them and diagnose their ills:

Strategy #1: Describe a weakness that’s not particularly relevant to the job.

This is a cop-out, plain and simple—It’s a denial of any relevant weakness, which is just silly. A tough interviewer will see right through this and press you to name a relevant weakness anyway. After some fidgeting on your part, whatever you come up with is an opportunity for your interviewer to pounce, taking the conversation in a bad direction. Your diminished influence over the flow of the interview will put you one step closer to losing your confidence—and a job offer. 

On the other hand, imagine your minor ruse actually worked as intended: The interviewer glossed over your non-response and moved on to the next question—But what are they thinking? You can’t be sure it didn’t count against you. At the very least, you didn’t impress them with your answer. Yes, you dodged the bullet, but lost an opportunity to take the conversation in a favorable direction. And don't forget you also burned up a couple minutes of valuable time in the bargain.

That’s why some people go with the other popular option:

Strategy #2: Describe a minor job-related weakness that you recently fixed

If you have a good story to tell, it’s better than the first option. You’ve demonstrated an ability to fix a single performance-related problem—but only one. As long as it was minor but meaningful, you deserve some credit. But now suppose your interviewer follows up by asking you how you became aware of the problem. Did you spot it yourself while it was small, or did it grow to affect co-workers? Worse still, did you learn about the problem from your supervisor? In that case, was it during an annual performance review—which is way too late to fix it in time? If you didn’t spot the problem yourself right away—and fix it—you’ve tacitly admitted a second weakness: lack of self-awareness. That’s another opportunity for the interviewer to pounce, and again the conversation takes a wrong turn.

The wider picture

Regardless of which strategy you choose, there’s a bigger problem. In either case, you’re allowing the conversation to proceed within an unfriendly framework. At its core, it assumes that: 1) You have weaknesses; 2) Weaknesses are always bad; 3) You must be prompted to admit your weaknesses; 4) Therefore you're not such a stellar worker after all. That's hardly the message you want to send a potential employer! You can’t help but be in a “damage control” mode, forced to portray yourself as a fragile teacup just waiting to crack or shatter under the least stress. Under these conditions, the best you’ll ever manage is to have some super glue handy for when the inevitable happens. 

Both strategies burn up valuable time while doing little or nothing to advance your case, and both leave you vulnerable to uncomfortable follow-up questions. Must we confine ourselves to choosing the lesser of these two evils? It would seem that the only other choice is a counterattack: Just imagine how well it would turn out if you demanded your interviewer admit their weaknesses too! Not smart. 

Instead, you want a response that will reframe the question and allow you to drive the conversation along a more favorable avenue. Furthermore, your response should show that you don't have to rely on a mixture of luck and paranoia to head off problems before they become full-blown disasters. 

To help shed some light on this problem with our minds, let’s shift gears for a moment to talk about our bodies.

Systems for a healthy body & a healthy mind

Did you know that one of your immune system’s jobs is to keep cancer in check? The emerging field of immuno-oncology has been the focus of my own research for the last couple years. Like it or not, most of us have cancerous cells lurking somewhere in our bodies. That’s normal—the body can’t completely prevent cancer from forming, but it does a great job keeping it suppressed. In fact, full-blown cancer can be viewed partly as a failure of the immune system to nip small, inevitable problems in the bud. And unlike traditional chemotherapy, many modern treatments for cancer rally the immune system to get back on the job, eradicating tumors while leaving the rest of the body untouched.

The immune system looks for leading indicators of trouble by sending white blood cells around to “interrogate” the other cells, looking for bad omens. It can’t peer inside the cell, so it looks for indicators of trouble that are visible from the outside. Normal, healthy cells display certain proteins on their surface indicate everything is running smoothly. When those indicators disappear or don’t look right, it’s a sign that something inside is badly amiss. The ailing cell is tagged for destruction, but not before the immune system extracts as much information as possible to help find other sickly cells with the same problem.

Of course our immune system protects only your body—What about your mind? A healthy body without a healthy mind isn’t much good: The world’s healthiest dunce may be tumor-free but is condemned to one screw-up after another. None of us are that dunder-headed, but luck and paranoia won't cut it. What if we had something that does for our minds what the immune system does for our bodies? I suggest to you that Personal Kanban is just such a thing. It’s a cognitive immune system. Like your body’s immune system, your kanban board will give you leading indicators of trouble. Not only will you spot problems while they’re small and manageable, kanban gives you an opportunity to take advantage of inevitable stumbles to help you adapt and become stronger. It’s a system that evolves to meet life’s ongoing challenges and changes. The two simple rules of Personal Kanban (visualize your work and limit work-in-process) are all you need to get started. But you’ll gain more superpowers when you periodically reflect on completed work. You’ll become as incisive as Professor X while healing damage as fast as the Wolverine! Because you spotted them in time, you’ll be getting smarter because you made mistakes. No longer do you fear failure—you’ve become resilient, even antifragile.

A better answer

Now, back to your job interview and the stomach-churning “What’s your greatest weakness?” question. If you’re using Personal Kanban—your cognitive immune system—now’s your chance to take full advantage of the situation.  Don’t opt for a sheepish response! Take the bull by the horns—Describe how your own board helped you quickly spot mistakes, fix them, and learn from them. Get bonus points for explaining how you overcame your fear of embarrassment to share your insights with others. In short, you can turn everyone’s most feared question about weaknesses into an exciting opportunity to highlight your strengths.

Echinacea, green tea, and chicken soup boost your body’s immune system. Whiteboards, markers, and sticky notes do the same for your cognitive immune system. Whether you’re in the job market or not, it makes good sense to start building your own Personal Kanban board before the next problem gets out of hand. 

Stay out of court and save millions with WIP limits!

Last time, I wrote about the concept of technical debt for scientific work. The most important example of this is poor lab notebook practices—It’s the Mother of All Technical Debt. Cutting corners on notebook keeping is easy, saves time, and doesn’t cause immediate problems. What’s not to like? For starters, how about any of the following:

• Your work won’t be repeatable by others. That could be a company employee you’ll never meet, but it could also be your future self.
• There's a risk of having the company’s patent invalided in the event of a court challenge. If that happens, millions in profits go out the window — along with your job!
• Being unable to write an adequate patent or journal publication because key experimental details are unclear or missing.
• Opportunities for learning and synergy with colleagues past, present, and future simply vanish because the SECI knowledge spiral is interrupted.

Here’s a pithy restatement of that from Adam Savage of Mythbusters fame: “Remember kids, the only difference between science and screwing around is writing it down.”

Clearly there’s much more downside risk than upside gain. But if that’s true, why do so many otherwise stellar researchers perpetually struggle with this issue?

A Slippery Problem

There’s two main reasons for this perpetual bugbear. First, keeping a good lab notebook (LNB) really is a nuisance. Most of the notebook’s utility is for other people in the murky future. There’s little short term benefit to the researcher despite all those huge downside risks in the long term. Under these circumstances, it’s human nature to cut a few corners. We tend to discount the impact of future events, no matter how negative. Today’s work seems much more important because it’s in front of us right now. The inhabitants of a distant future won’t help you get things done today.

Secondly, there’s always pressure to be as productive as possible. Filling your fume hood with as many reactions as it can hold seems like a good way to do this—until it comes time to finish those experiments and write them up. Take a look at the figure below. The balls at the top represent our work in progress, and the balls at the bottom are finished tasks. It’s easy to see that our capacity to start tasks easily outstrips our ability to finish them.

This is why we say stop starting and start finishing. You can become more productive by widening the spout at the end of the funnel, but that's pretty difficult. Cramming more items into the top is much easier, but it still isn’t the way to go. That creates excessive multitasking which hobbles productivity and diverts attention from what really matters.

Only Human

In their book Switch, Chip and Dan Heath relate a story from W. Edwards Demming about a company plagued by a rash of small fires in its factory. Most of them didn't cause much damage, but eventually one surely would. The company president's solution was to send an all-hands letter urging employees to please set fewer fires. I’m guessing it didn’t help. Nobody actually wants to set fires in their workplace, so the real problem was not with the people, but their environment. Change the environment and behavior will follow. 
Poor LNB practices are just like those fires. Most of them are small and cause minimal damage. While the chances are very low that any random fire will grow out of control, it's only a matter of time before one of them will. For lab notebooks, that means a conflagration of liability, headache, and lost time. Just like wearing your seat belt, it’s not the odds but the stakes that matter.

Unfortunately, what’s the usual approach used to prod scientists into keeping a better notebook? More of the same: Send an all-hands email asking everyone to please keep a better notebook. It’s not effective because the real problem was overlooked. Begging and pleading won’t change human nature. Neither will a carrot and stick approach. But what about the researchers’ work environment? Could something be influencing them to neglect their notebooks? Could it be tweaked for the better?

Change your WIP, change your life

Limiting your work in progress (WIP) is a pillar of Agile practices, but in the absence of an Agile mindset, most people operate as if WIP limits don’t exist. Like it or not, we all have one even if we're not aware of it. If we exceed our natural WIP limit, we get less work done because costs of task switching strangle our time and attention. It leads to a downward spiral of time scarcity and poor decision making. See Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir’s excellent Scarcity for further reading. But how do WIP limits encourage better notebook keeping practices? The answer is that they don’t work directly on the problem, but rather on the environment. Appropriate WIP limits reduce the sense of overwhelm and time scarcity, encouraging researchers to focus on important but not urgent tasks like good LNB practices.

Appropriate WIP limit acts like a flow regulator for your work. Now our funnel looks like this:

As C. S. Lewis said, “It’s not the load that breaks you down. It’s the way you carry it.” Because of this, it’s ironic that productivity tends to increase under these conditions. In time, the scientists discover the biggest winners are themselves. Their own well-written notebook entries from the past help them with current work, including composition of journal articles that boost their reputation and career. These benefits don’t just add up over time — they compound! Researchers truly own the solution and become enthusiastic about it. No longer is keeping a good notebook a nuisance to be avoided. Not when they have proof that it’s a sound investment in themselves. And don’t forget about the company itself. Executives and the legal department can breathe a sigh of relief too.

Conclusion

Technical debt will always be a problem, but it makes sense to go after the biggest items first. Good notebooks are the cornerstone of good science. The risks are too great to ignore, but we can’t ignore human nature in our search for an effective solution. It’s tempting to conclude that there’s a trade-off between productivity and quality, but good WIP limits are a tweak to our work environment that lets us have both. Try it out for yourself and you won’t be disappointed!

Technical Debt in Drug Discovery

Almost every resource on Agile practices such as scrum and kanban is aimed at software developers. There are good reasons for that, but there’s no reason why those practices can’t be used for other types of knowledge work like drug discovery. Knowledge work is knowledge work, regardless of the substrate. It’s an iterative cycle of design-make-test-analyze. Software people write code at a computer and tinker with it until it’s a usable app; People like me make molecules in a lab and tinker with them until it’s a usable drug.

If you read through a book on managing software development projects, it’s remarkable what you can learn if you just swap of the names of individual roles (programmer, tester, project manager, etc.) for other names (associate scientist, principal investigator, group leader, etc.). Aside from unfamiliar titles and roles, there are other unfamiliar terms. Some are specific to the software industry, but some are more general. One term in particular describes the shortcuts and uncorrected errors that come back to haunt you later. That’s called technical debt. For software people, that’s usually sloppy, undocumented, non-standardized code. It's hard to follow. It’s bloated, irregular, and buggy. Sure, it’s faster to write bad code, and if it works well enough you can deploy it to your customers. But it’s risky because it introduces unnecessary fragility that can cause enormous headaches later on should something go wrong.

Since the process of knowledge work is very similar across many industries, I started to think about what technical debt means to medicinal chemists like me. Just like in software development, medchem technical debt is invisible and silent, a booby trap of our own making waiting to be sprung. And just like software development, accruing technical can speed along the initial stages of a project, but months or years later the awful truth inevitably surfaces. The necessary re-work could be minor, but perhaps the entire project is put in jeopardy. There could even be billions of dollars at stake!

Below is my partial list of medchem technical debt items sorted into broad categories. Note that these apply to traditional small molecule projects and not necessarily new modalities such as stapled peptides, millamolecular compounds, or antibody-drug conjugates. Note also that many of these items are interrelated. For example, over-reliance on a small subset of synthetic tools can lead to long, inelegant, unscaleable synthetic routes. Another example is how the over-optimization of selected properties can lead to flagrant violations of good drug design principles, especially molecular weight, hydrogen bond donor/acceptor count, and solubility.

Planning

• Inadequate literature searches lead to missed opportunities to find easier synthetic routes and head off potential intellectual property issues
• Long, inelegant, unscaleable synthetic routes are often the result of the above point, and create further problems
• Compounds with known structural liabilities such as PAINS, PrATs, and other problematic functional groups
• Chemotypes known to be problematic within your company or research group
• Flagrant violations of good drug design principles such as cLogP, molecular weight, polar surface area, hydrogen bond donor/acceptor count
• Over-reliance on a small subset of synthetic reactions is addressed in many journal articles. For an example, see this reference.

Synthesis

• Poor laboratory notebook keeping practices are potentially the most costly in terms of lost time and frustration. In the worst case, it could cost billions in sales if when a blockbuster drug's patents are challenged in court.

• Poor lab technique gives a false negative result on synthetic viability
• Purification issues leave open the possibility of impurities that skew assay results

Testing & Analysis

• Unrecognized assay drift will lead you to believe things about your compounds that just aren’t true
• Ignoring the error limits of assays gives the false impression that one compound is better or worse than another when in reality they’re not distinguishable from one another
• Over-optimization of selected properties (e.g., potency and selectivity) at the expense of everything else is a parochial viewpoint that ignores the complex interconnectedness of the drug discovery process
• Check out Garrett Hardin’s Filters Against Folly and Henry Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson for the same message in other areas of research

There are many more that aren’t in this list. You can probably come up with a bunch yourself. If you’re not a medicinal chemist yourself, try thinking of examples of technical debt in your particular area of knowledge work. If you are a medicinal chemist, you can go deeper down the rabbit hole by reading this Drug Discovery Today article from scientists at AstraZeneca.

Of course there’s always a balance to be struck between speed and quality. Research is complex, messy, and uncertain. Although some technical debt items are non-negotiable, others have some ‘wiggle room’ as long as you’re aware of the possible consequences and have a plan to fix it later (assuming the problems are fixable to begin with). Edmond Lau makes the same point in his new book The Effective Engineer, another guide on software development that transfers easily to drug discovery.

So there you have it. If you’re taking some time off over the holidays, why not read through a software development book or two? I think you’ll find many striking parallels that transfer easily to your own work.

Seneca on Kanban

Marcus Aurelius
(source: wikipedia.org)

You’ve probably noticed a resurgence of interest in Stoic philosophers such as Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius. Their timeless wisdom is fit for any era, and today’s age of complexity and uncertainty is no exception. You won’t be disappointed to read the classics from these authors. What surprised me is how much one of them in particular has to say about kanban, albeit indirectly. As Personal Kanban co-author Jim Benson writes, it’s not enough to be productive. You need to be effective. Living a vigorous and effective life is what Stoicism is all about.

On the Shortness of Life is one of Seneca’s most famous letters. Four Hour Workweek author Tim Ferriss has the full text of it on his blog. Far from decrying the brevity of our lives, Seneca argues that we’re all given more than enough time to make a meaningful impact. As Seneca writes:

“It is not that we have a short space of time, but that we waste much of it.”

“So it is—the life we receive is not short, but we make it so, nor do we have any lack of it, but are wasteful of it.”

Had Seneca lived in 20th century Japan, he would’ve said much of our lives is muda, or waste. Waiting and underutilized human potential are two of its biggest forms. It’s easier to see this waste if we view our working lives more as a factory or process. We’re working for the world’s worst boss, and we have nobody to blame but ourselves.

Although time is our most precious resource, it’s intangible. Because of this, we fall prey to the illusion that it isn’t that valuable. Possessions can be earned and lost, but time comes to us moment by moment and once passed is gone forever. Seneca argues that our priorities are precisely backward:

“Men do not suffer anyone to seize their estates, and they rush to stones and arms if there is even the slightest dispute about the limit of their lands, yet they allow others to trespass upon their life—nay, they themselves even lead in those who will eventually possess it. No one is to be found who is willing to distribute his money, yet among how many does each one of us distribute his life! In guarding their fortune men are often closefisted, yet, when it comes to the matter of wasting time, in the case of the one thing in which it is right to be miserly, they show themselves most prodigal.”

To make matters worse, so many of us take a cavalier attitude toward the attention and time of others. Thus the problem is compounded:

“I am often filled with wonder when I see some men demanding the time of others and those from whom they ask it most indulgent. Both of them fix their eyes on the object of the request for time, neither of them on the time itself; just as if what is asked were nothing, what is given, nothing. Men trifle with the most precious thing in the world; but they are blind to it because it is an incorporeal thing, because it does not come beneath the sight of the eyes, and for this reason it is counted a very cheap thing—nay, of almost no value at all.”

So how does kanban figure into any of this? Assuming you’re persuaded to agree with Seneca (and Bruce Lee), how does kanban help you make the best use of your time?

Seneca advises us to avoid “laborious dedication to useless tasks”. For our purposes, that means avoidance of racking your faulty memory or digging through notebooks and to-do lists. A kanban board keeps all of your tasks and projects in front of you at all times in a visual, rearrangeable, and socially accessible format. As Edmond Lau says in his new book, your brain should be used as a processor of information, not a storage device. Time and energy spent just trying to recall all of your tasks depletes your ability to decide which tasks to work on and when. You’re less likely to assign them their proper place in a wider context, and you’re more likely to work on low-impact, nonessential tasks. Kanban allows you to leverage your time and energy to the best possible use.

And what about others’ time? How much is squandered in meetings with your co-workers? Your boss? And your boss’s boss? How many opportunities for meaningful input and feedback were lost because nobody - including you - had a clear idea of what you’re working on and why? And don’t forget the power of compound interest. The advantages of those lost opportunities would’ve built upon themselves, further multiplying your impact. Like time, lost opportunities are discounted because they’re intangible. Nothing could be further from the truth!

You need a tool that can match the complexity of your work environment, and kanban fits the bill. We can muddle along without it, but we’ll spend more time getting less work done, with a smaller impact. Like time, lost potential is invisible, so we might not realize what we’re giving up. On top of that, many of us cling to a subtle version of the labor theory of value in which we equate busyness and hours worked with productivity and impact. What if we could work just as long and hard but with tools that unlock our full potential? How much more satisfaction would we gain? How much more engaged would we be? As Seneca advises, we must live our lives and not merely exist.

The Essentialist Kanban User

Over the past year, I've become a big fan of kanban. Maybe you can tell by the recent string of posts on this blog. But I would be remiss if I didn't also mention another idea that I came across at the same time. It's been as useful to me as kanban, in fact. 

That idea is Greg McKeown's Essentialism. His mantra is less but better. Find the critical few things with the biggest impact and concentrate your efforts there. Kind of reminds me of Erwin Rommel, come to think of it. But in a good way. 

At first I didn't see a direct connection between kanban and Essentialism . After stewing in my noggin for a few months, it dawned on me that both ideas are about the same thing, but from complementary directions. How's that, you ask? Read on.

All but the simplest kanban boards have swimlanes. That is, a horizontal division of the board that groups tasks into separate projects. Kanban's WIP limit addresses the vertical aspect of the board. The number of stickies in the 'doing' column can't exceed the WIP limit. Quite effective, but there's hidden weakness that can sabotage your work. 

What about the number of projects or swimlanes on the board? Kanban is silent on that. It's quite possible to spread out tasks among a gazillion projects and never exceed your WIP limit. Yes, you'd complete tasks, but you wouldn't complete projects. And completed projects are what count. A millimeter of progress in a thousand directions, as McKeown writes. 

Essentialism has the opposite set of strengths and weaknesses. The hard-core Essentialist focuses on one or two high impact projects. A laudable idea, but despite this there's no explicit warning not to take on too many tasks at once. There's no WIP limit. And again, projects aren't completed. 

While the idea of WIP limits comes from kanban, McKeown talks about keeping your Projects In Progress to a reasonable number. We'll call it PIP for short. 

We goes together like peas and carrots!

Kanban controls the vertical (WIP) aspect of the board, while Essentialism controls the horizontal (PIP) aspect. Each needs the other. You can think of Essentialism as fixing a hidden problem with kanban. Or you can think of kanban as a way of fixing a hidden problem in Essentialism. Either way, it's clear that both work better together than they do alone.

So go check out your board and count how many projects you're working on. Then go get a copy of Essentialism and make your work life even better!

Agile Pharma, Where Art Thou?

It's no secret that the heyday of Big Pharma research is a thing of the past. Thousands of workers lost their jobs, many of them never to practice science again. 

What's behind this trend? Did all the Big Pharmas down a whole bottle of crazy pills? Of course not. 

The order of the day is decentralization. The old research model relied on a few massive campuses filled with thousands of scientists. It worked for decades, but started to break down about fifteen years ago. The problem was an over-reliance on a single business model. It didn't help that the model was prone to bloat and waste, either. Bureaucracy and silos were tolerable while the low hanging fruit was still on the tree. Not anymore. The model that aimed to produce multibillion dollar blockbusters has hit a few snags. 

So now there's a steady stream of deals and collaborations to go with the layoffs. Maybe all the pharma CEOs read Frans Johannson's The Click Moment. His advice is to make many small bets, then double down on what works. And that's exactly what we see. Big Pharma's new partners are VC-backed biotechs, nonprofits, academia, and more. 

The emerging consensus is that speed to market is just as important as having a great drug. A study from the Boston Consulting Group explains why. A new drug must be first or second to market, and be first or second-best in its class, and it can't be second in both categories. Don't bother with anything else. It's winner take all.

From: Schultze, U., Ringel, M. Nature Reviews Drug Discovery 2013, 12, 419-420.

A careless organization that's ahead of the competition can squander their opportunity through costly but avoidable mistakes. That's exactly what kaizen aims to fix. Companies need to get better at getting better. Maybe acceleration to market is a better term? 

Tools like kanban take the mystery and waste out of any kind of process, even drug discovery. And just like software developers, pharma researchers are knowledge workers. It isn't voodoo. It's science, and it follows an articulable process that's amenable to improvement. It's high time we turned our highly trained minds on ourselves. To echo Peter Drucker, we need to examine how we work just as much as we examine what we work on. 

Software developers borrowed kanban from the manufacturing industry. They adapted it to fit their needs and innovated new tools like scrum along the way. Likewise, the pharma industry can do the same. We don't have to reinvent the wheel. The tools have been there for decades, hiding in plain sight. 

Now is Big Pharma's time to embrace the concepts of Agile and kaizen all the way from discovery through post-marketing surveillance. Not just talk about it, but do it using specific tools like kanban. The first to do so will eat their competitor's lunch. Bet on it. 

How Kanban's 'Done' Column Prevents Tunneling

Success as a chemist often means persistence. There's always more than one way to approach the synthesis of a new molecule. If fact, there are more possibilities than you could ever hope to try. In the face of a challenging synthesis, when do you call it quits? There's no right answer. Those who quit too early don't fare well. They're the type who drops out of college or loses their job. Sure they're plenty smart enough, but what they lack is grit. But can there be too much of a good thing? That depends on the context. 

Not the best solution

In graduate school, chemistry students toil away to make a specific target molecule. If that means six weeks or six years, so be it. Just use a bigger hammer until you solve the problem. 

But the business world is more complex. The specific target is not so important as the question at hand. It's a means to an end, not an end in itself. If you can answer the question with a compound that's easier to synthesize, then go with the easier compound. Why beat your head against the wall? 

But how do you make that call? When do you move on to a more promising avenue of research? The balance between speed and determination rests on an ever-shifting fulcrum. 

The biggest obstacle to that decision often involves the curious phenomenon of tunneling. You can read about its evils in this fascinating new book. I also wrote about tunneling as it applies to music in this post on my other blog. To wit, it's easy to fall into a trap where we lose sight of the forest for the trees. That's exactly what I did too many times last year. It landed me in trouble with the boss, but it also drove me into the arms of kanban. In the bargain, I'm a better chemist than ever. Quite the antifragile solution, I must say. Nothing succeeds like failure!

Most of my kanban stickies look like this:

I draw the chemical structure of the target I'm working on along with a couple reference numbers I need. If a particular reaction doesn't work, it gets moved into the 'done' column after I write FAIL across it. Next I'll make a new sticky note with the same structure, but this time I'll use a different synthetic approach. 

Kanban is my anti-tunneling tool. When too many sticky notes with the same structure pile up in my 'done' column with FAIL written on them, I know I'm in trouble. 

Before kanban, it would be too easy for me to forget how many previous attempts had failed. With kanban, it's easy to see when I'm starting to succumb to tunneling. That's how I know to take a step back, ask for help, or talk to the boss. The best part is that I don't have to spend any extra cognitive effort to do this. It's impossible to ignore the story the board tells me. It's the truth and nothing but the truth. I don't have to wait until a month has passed with nothing to show for it. I don't have to explain to my supervisor why I spent so much time with so little progress. It's a lifesaver!

On the opposite end, the board also says when you haven't tried hard enough. One or two FAIL tickets isn't enough to give up. Rather, it should get you thinking. Curiosity and imagination should spur at least a couple more attempts. 

Science is a messy affair. Nature doesn't make it easy. But kanban makes it easier.