Blood Tech

When the literal loss of human life becomes your metric

My hands are shaking as I type this. Because I don’t believe I have to.

For nearly two decades I've watched Kanban evolve into a way to *truly* see and acknowledge each other's burdens. To drag once invisible overwhelm out into the open, and to make work humane enough that we can actually care for one another at work instead of being crushed by it.

This morning I was greeted by a weapon’s platform using a kanban board as the last steps in a kill chain, turning visual flow and prioritization into a dashboard for deciding who gets to live and who gets to die ”more efficiently.” And I feel so physically sick and disgusted that something I’ve believed in, promoted, and used every day with every student and every client to help protect them from dehumanizing systems is now being used to perfect one. This isn’t some abstract concern for me - I know the impact of war first hand. At age 22 I sent my fiancé to one, and I've lived with what that does to a human body and the human spirit ever since, which is exactly why watching kanban wired into killing will never ever feel like a neutral “innovation” to me.

Jim Benson and I have always said that the kanban is a place to depersonalize issues, and when you do that you essentially re-personalize people. You move blame, anxiety, and moral judgment off the human and onto the work so the person is never reduced to a card to be moved, fixed, or removed.

Tomorrow I have the honor of interviewing an 11-year old who has been using kanban for a fair part of his extraordinary little life. For him, this practice is exactly what it has always been at its best: a way for one small human to see his world more clearly, choose his next right action, and grow into someone who refuses to treat other people's lives as items on board. If kanban has any future worth fighting for, it's in the hands of kids like him, not in the hands of systems that turn human lives into workflow. That isn’t progress, it’s complicity.

And if this is what counts as innovation right now, then our moral imagination is broken along with our humanity.