Shadow Boards

Mike Wroblewski has an interseting posting here about creating shadow boards. It reminded me about how much people underestimate the power of visual management and cues to change behaviour, and then how people often forget that many of the best Lean Tools are distinctly 'Blue Peter' in their application:

A couple of sheets of MDF and some paint will give you more or less instant results that the whole team can contribute to. This is much better than one person huddling in front of a PC to pretty everything up!

This is also why your Value Stream maps and process maps (brown papers) should be hand-made.

Anyway, back to shadow boards. Here are a couple of photos of shadow boards that I think have been really well done - they were in my daughter's nursery class, as a means to get 20 3-4 year-olds to clear up the mess they'd make in their class. You can bet that this saved the nursery teacher literally hours of time, not to mention the monetry value of items which could otherwise easily be lost.