Kamishibai boards are great tools to help you manage day to day business activities. Whilst computerised task management tools are great, their lack of visibility to everyone away from the computer screen can make it difficult to understand what progress has been made. In their simplest form a Kamishibai board is a red and green ‘T’ card system where the red side of the card shows the task is incomplete and the green side of the card show that the task has been completed. The board always starts with all of the red sides visible and as tasks are completed the cards are turned around. If your management style includes ‘walking the floor’ to find out what is going on, then a Kamishibai board will make your working day a lot easier. As you walk past an area that has one of these boards then you should be able to see a wave of green cards forming. It’s very easy to see one of two things; either that the board is not being used (so you can give the people responsible a nudge), or that progress is being made. There is often a concern with managers that people will turn the cards over prematurely just to give the right impression. This can happen, but thankfully people who do this trip themselves up very easily. One case that is vivid in my memory is the manufacturing company who had a task related to the checking of oil at the start of every shift. The cards were turned over religiously and then the machine seized! It was very easy for the manager to work out who had been trying to fiddle the system… the system was adhered to from that point onwards! A Kamishibai board is simply a card form of your routines of working.
