This blog was first published on Medium
In this blog, I’d like to share my experience with using Obeya at a customer. This will include a brief introduction to what Obeya is, how I came across it many years ago, how I have experienced it without realizing it, how I re-discovered it, started to love it, had success with it, and how it eventually became Flowbeya.
If this sounds appealing to you, read on!
Obeya — a Definition
A physical and/or digital space where strategy meets execution. The Obeya approach builds alignment and ownership across diverse groups of stakeholders to solve complex problems, drive cultural change, and get work done. — Obeya Association
Speaking of complex problems: The Obeya approach was pioneered during the development of the Prius in the 1990s. Toyota’s Chief Engineer, Takeshi Uchiyamada, recognized the need for a more collaborative and transparent environment to manage the complexities and challenges of the Prius project. The word “Obeya” means “big room” in Japanese, and it reflects the physical and metaphorical space where cross-functional teams gather to synchronize their efforts and drive project success.
Toyota’s implementation of Obeya involved creating a dedicated room where team members from different departments could come together, share information, make decisions, and solve problems in real-time.
In my own words, I usually explain Obeya as a visual management system that makes information accessible to the people that need it. In addition, I usually get super excited talking about it.
My First Contact with Obeya
Good old times….
Do you know when you connect with a topic and then out of nowhere have this feeling of “Wait a second — I have heard this before”? This is how it went for me with Obeya when I came into contact with it this year. And while it took me some time to realize where I had heard of it before, now I know that it was in 2018 during the Global Scrum Gathering in London where Leonoor Koomen, in her talk about ING’s cultural transformation, mentioned how they introduced an Obeya room, with a change wall, a run wall, a performance wall, and an improvement wall. And how the Obeya room was their one place to build high alignment.
While I remember the talk being one of my favorites during the conference, other topics seemed more important to me at that time.
While going through memory lane, I made another stop. This time a year later and I thought to myself: Wait a second! You have experienced an Obeya before, you just didn’t realize it.
My First Experience with Obeya
It was during my time in Australia in 2019 — we were working in a pretty amazing team and as all of this was pre-covid, we were in the office five days a week. And because we were an amazing team, no one actually had to force us to do this. In addition, we also had a pretty cool office space where the entire team (approx. 25 people) could sit together and even have their own private meeting room. This meeting room was special, though, and was quite different from the rooms I knew back then.
It had:
A single big dry-erase table
Standing stools
Walls consisting of only whiteboards
Lots of space to move around
This allowed us to use it whenever a working session was necessary. Usually, people very quickly started visualizing their thoughts on the table, exchanging ideas, discussing better ways to solve a problem, and so on.
All this was supported by the information on the walls. The walls were divided like this:
Wall 1:
Product Strategy
Customer Journey
Current hypotheses we experiment with
Wall 2:
Current problems we address from a tech standpoint
Problems we will need to address
Any other ideas that were related to tech (drawings, etc. visible)
Wall 3:
Operational downtime
Any other metric that was important to us
Wall 4:
Everything that was related to improving the way we work
Action items from the Retrospective
Ideas on what to improve next
This is how the room looked like from one side…and you see our pretty cool screens on the outside and some colleagues who probably just had discussions about something they saw on the other walls.
I think it is fair to say that we were quite a visual team and used a lot of visual triggers to collaborate together. Only years later did I actually realize that we had been using an Obeya. I just can’t recall us ever using the term and knowing what we did. But in hindsight, I saw how it helped shape the team and turn us into a high-performing one. The room also served us as a “training camp” for every new joiner — they usually spent two days in the room at the start of their journey with us, understanding the concept of the team, the product, operations, and tech. And usually spent plenty of time in the room afterward having conversations with other people pointing at the walls.
Interestingly enough, the walls didn’t just serve the team, but also became regularly visited by other people in the company: Sales, C-Level, Marketing, or generally people who were interested in what we did.
We also had pretty cool digital screens in the office
My Re-discovery of Obeya
This is a rather easy one. I re-discovered Obeya while reading Jim Benson’s Collaboration Equation.
Obeya is mentioned a lot of times while Jim shares his amazing insights and gives examples of how it has helped groups to work together and use the Obeya as a Visual Management System.
The book inspired me to look more into it. What helped was that in most of my projects I was seeing a repeating pattern: Information was not being made available to the people who needed them.
Or if information was available, it took people a lot of time to find it, with information being buried somewhere in a Wiki.
“There is no information on this.”
“Sure there is.”
“Where?”
“In our Wiki.”
*searches for 10 minutes…
“Here it is — you just have to enter xyz (add any search term that has little to do with what you are actually looking for), skip the outdated version of it, click another five links and you have the information you require.”
I have been part of many conversations like these.
Fact is, I’m only exaggerating slightly. In most companies nowadays, information is indeed available, but it is not being made available in an easy way and therefore, a lot of times, doesn’t reach the right audience. This goes both ways, by the way.
So here I was, with a real problem at hand and a potential solution to the problem.
Get Started
Now that you have a solid understanding of what got me here, it is time to share my experience with using Obeya.
Before I got started, I dug deeper into the topic of Obeya.
Checking out the content at the Obeya Association (highly recommend what they have on their page) and then thought to myself, why not just start?
Luckily for me, one of my customers was very open to the idea and considered the risk of trying it out as only very minimal.
A couple of considerations I had to make first:
The Obeya needed to work on a virtual Whiteboard as Miro is the go-to tool.
Several teams, specialized departments, and the managing line needed to be part of it.
Not everyone would fall in love with this approach right away, so I needed a way to inspire people to use the Obeya.
I had the challenge of multiple tools being used: Notion, Wiki, Jira, Miro.
Instead of trying to find a solution for all these challenges, I decided to start small. I created a first draft sketch on Miro of an Obeya and filled it out with some random data.
The very first sketch — moving from strategy to implementation
With this sketch, I set up various calls with people in the company.
Mostly people I considered open and interested in such an approach. I quickly explained the concept behind it, what they see, what the potential of this is, listened to their feedback, and asked them additionally what else could be useful to display here.
It turned out people liked the idea. The only worry they had was that it would take some effort to establish it.
After every conversation, I updated the Obeya.
And it started to look like this:
Once I finished the rounds with the people I considered interested, I tested the waters with those I considered less enthusiastic about a whiteboard.
So I had to up my game for this. I was considering how they could benefit from it, based on their roles and was adjusting the Obeya.
And I figured to go where it hurts. What kind of information was important to these people and their roles and which information is difficult for them to find.
Once I figured it out, I placed the information on the Obeya and started the round of conversations.
With a very surprising result: It turns out, people are really amazed if you can reduce their time of looking for information.
Let’s Try This Out
While having an Obeya was not on the roadmap for the engagement I was in, the decision-makers in the company decided to give this a go. It was relatively quick to set up a first version of an Obeya, given the feedback received.
The starting Obeya looked like this:
What you see here is a modified template available in the Miroverse.
At the bottom top left:
The strategic paper with its strategic capabilities, followed by measures of performance, tough problems and a Plan to Value timeline.
Cards on this timeline were explaining the delivered usable value.
Below you see 4 areas:
These are the Delivery Team areas. What is placed here is:
Topics for their daily huddle
ideas how to improve their work system
improvements in progress
a snapshot on the topics they currently work on
Constraints to completing their work
Data (more on this will follow)
Just right next to the Strategic delivery board, you’ll find the wall that captured ideas, improvements, requests or decisions that needed to be made in order to drive value and remove blockages/impediments.
And the last piece is the community piece:
This is where people outside of the delivery teams, were able to put their input in that in return helped the teams to communicate asynchronously with them.
And then suddenly Obeya became a thing in the company. How was it used?
It was used to see how the strategy of the company is being driven.
People started communicating asynchronously where necessary on the Obeya.
Questions, ideas, and challenges were raised in the boards of the teams or the communities.
Important notes from meetings were placed in the Obeya for others to see and be aware of.
Teams started to use the Obeya for their daily huddles as topics were placed there beforehand.
Generally, everyone was quite happy with how it started. It was an interesting position for me as an external consultant. I was not as much needed anymore, as a lot of communication and collaboration simply started to happen. All I saw were updates on the board and even though I was not involved in the day-to-day business, I was able to keep a good overview of what was going on in the organization. That was a good sign to me!
Without any guidance, people also started using icons to make sure that information that was important was immediately visible to others — see exclamation marks or orange-colored stickies.
The Birth of Flowbeya
Probably the most exciting development in my journey with Obeya was the evolution into Flowbeya. This transformation happened when I started integrating Flow Metrics and Monte Carlo simulations into the Obeya.
Monte Carlo Simulations and Strategic Capabilities
Monte Carlo simulations allowed us to forecast delivery dates and visualize progress on the strategic walls of the Obeya. This transparency helped teams and stakeholders make more informed decisions based on data rather than guesswork.
The Obeya looked like this:
The black colored boxes below the value cards demonstrate the Monte Carlo Simulations. (All simulations were generated with the script provided here: https://github.com/LetPeopleWork/MonteCarloCSV)
Enhancing Conversations with Data
The data displayed in Flowbeya transformed how conversations happened in the organization. With clear visualizations of Flow Metrics and forecasted milestones, discussions became more focused and productive.
Teams could:
Prioritize Effectively: By seeing which initiatives were at risk of delay, teams could reprioritise to ensure critical projects stayed on track.
Identify Dependencies: Dependencies between teams were made visible, allowing for better coordination and collaborative problem-solving.
Drive Continuous Improvement: With transparent data on their performance, teams could identify areas for improvement and track their progress over time.
Facilitate Strategic Discussions: The leadership used the Obeya to align on strategic priorities and make data-informed decisions.
The transparency of the Flow Metrics (see ProKanban.org for more on Flow Metrics) of the different teams brought a different aspect to it. It allowed teams to communicate with each other about what they were doing differently in their work. Teams started to discuss how they were slicing their work so that it could fit into a cycle time of 10 days or less(85th percentile) and generally started to work more with each other and looking beyond their team boundaries. Dependencies were made visible, addressed by placing a sticky note in the space of a specific team and rather discussed ad-hoc instead of waiting for a meeting to happen.
The data of each team was visible at the bottom of each area.
Another thing that was introduced was the idea of focusing on continuous improvement and getting rid of scheduled improvement sessions (Looking at you, Retrospectives).
Teams were open to experiment using a more frequent cadence (2x a week for 30 minutes) and placing their challenges on the Obeya upfront and discussing them latest in the meeting that was called a hybrid of Obeya’s “Deliver Value/Act & Respond” meeting routine. This didn’t work for all the teams though — some returned to a different cadence.
For those that it worked for though, it helped them to action more of their improvements, get decisions faster than in the past and in one specific case, getting help from a part of the organization they didn’t expect (a managing director picking up an item on the board and supporting the team in getting access to what they needed).
The Obeya grew with time and there are areas that containted more information, exchanges and data (including a pretty cool integration of the companys ticket tracking tool), but due to confidentiality I’m not able to share any picture here.
Easy Peezy
While all of this sounds amazing, things are never perfect, especially not when humans are involved — is there a pattern, maybe?
It required a lot of effort to keep this thing going at the beginning. People get used quickly to have someone do everything for them, updating the data, keeping it clean, etc.
In hindsight, I would have started earlier to find people interested in taking over certain aspects of it.
Not everyone loved it. Which nowadays I consider normal. But instead of focusing too much on the ones who did not like the approach, I was trying to give my attention to those who saw a big opportunity in this and experienced how it made their day-to-day easier as Jim Benson’s quote came into full swing: “Give professionals information they need to be professionals.”
And one thing I had to learn as well was that a template is just a template. There is no one-size-fits-all Obeya that you can simply copy and paste, so the magic was really in taking the time to co-create the Obeya together with the people involved. Still it was very helpful to have access to templates on the Miroverse, this way I didn’t have to start from scratch.
Transparency is scary. With the Flowbeya aspect, something new was introduced into the company — data was made visible and accessible to all the people.
While this was scary at the beginning and I was even warned that this will be totally used against the teams, the worst nightmares did not come true.
The data was used in a very professional manner and no team was compared to the other, but rather the teams used it as a learning opportunity themselves and it brought departments and different levels within the organization closer together.
Situation Now
Even though my involvement is only minimal, the Obeya is still being used very actively. Things are being moved, removed and color-coding seems to be a habit in the organization now.
It’s especially exciting seeing how milestones have been delivered and how more and more people within the company got interested in the concept of Obeya.
How to Get Started Yourself?
My biggest suggestion would really be, to just start. Get yourself familiar with the concept of it — by visiting the mentioned resources in this article and find a way to test it. Maybe even just with your own team and asking the question: What kind of information is needed for us to act like professionals at work?
From the answers, you might already have a good starting point for your first Obeya version.
Iterate from there, share it with others, spread the successes and wait for others to approach you and ask you what this thing is you are doing there.
And expand as needed.
To find out more about Obeya, I can highly recommend to visit the website of the Obeya Assocation:
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