Agile Basics: Visualize More

If you visualize more you get more agile.

Tom Wujec had an excellent TED talk on 3 ways the brain creates meaning.

• Use images to clarify ideas
  Visual shapes, physical space, colors, motion help us create mental model, more understanding
  
• The act of engaging, being interactive enriches mental model
• Augment memory by creating persistent, evolving views
  

Let's say you have a task board for a software development team, either a physical one or a digital one shown on a screen as a dashboard. Let's say it's visible in an office so that everyone on and outside the team sees it several times a day.

• People in and around the team gain a shared mental model, a shared understanding.
  
• People interact with the board as things change, including upstream and downstream stakeholders. A visible task board creates more engaged stakeholders.
  
• A task board is persistent and evolving, and becomes a new visual, domain-specific language of sorts, where the domain is the reality of the development team.
  This language is a more abstract, high-level language, and enables much more effective thinking, communication, and collaboration.
  

A software development team communicate and collaborate much more effectively with a visible task board.