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Alberto Brandolini's avatar

Hi Jurgen, you got me thinking on this one. Here is my 2 cents.

The eternal fight between fuzzy and procedural modelling styles existed long before AI. Content, as you pointed out, is a perfect example, with exploratory steps, feedback loops, and so on before entering a more predictable publishing and distribution phase. AI stressed the current visualisation because it's reshaping virtually every product delivery process.

Hoping to keep the exact board representation for a product with a new (still exploratory) process is a losing battle. The friction of using the old board should prompt the building of a new one or maybe adding a different swimlane during the transition phase.

One recurring pattern when dealing with creative, non-linear processes is to stop modelling the flow altogether: it's not linear, and feedback loops won't bring much clarity to the representation. Focusing on the termination condition usually helps, like in "I have no idea what the creation process is, but I can say when one product is finished." But I've seen many teams digging rabbit holes under the assumption of linear processes.

Digital tools don't help. Physical Kanban boards were more flexible and versatile than most digital counterparts. Put another way, a digital Kanban board offers just a subset of the visualisation possibilities of physical ones (I could envision multiple swimlanes after a "Ready for Publishing" state). It often constrains the board modelling towards linear processes.

So, is the AI-driven process reshaping, forcing us to drop board representation? It's clearly forcing us to redesign our boards and maybe even take a "go back to the roots" approach if we need more flexibility. However, saving the board is not the ultimate purpose: a board is just a tool to manage the flow, with enough accuracy to be a good model (like "constraints in the board will reflect in behaviours in the real world"). Still, a pipeline-driven board, no matter how precise, can be useless if the key constraint is a single person, being a distributed bottleneck on many different steps.

In short, I think the Kanban theory still holds, but practice requires revision, especially if we settled on habits, or if we let ourselves be driven by tools.

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Stefan Girard's avatar

This was a great read. I think I’m on board with the shift you’re describing—flowcharts make way more sense than rigid boards in a nonlinear world.

That said, I’m curious how teams actually operate inside a system like this. Are there tools today that support modular, dynamic workflows beyond just visualizing them? You can use something like Miro to sketch it out, sure, but execution is the hard part. Diagrams don’t do the work.

Maybe that’s your point though: remove the human from workflow management altogether and let the tools handle the flow themselves.

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