During the early 2000s, people discovered how great pomegranate juice is. It’s filled with antioxidants that help us avoid colds and other maladies. Well, no one likes to be sick, so people started buying the juice by the case. Sure enough, they felt healthier. So they drank more and more until they started getting ulcers because they were repeatedly filling their stomachs with acid.

This is an “anti-pattern.” A byproduct of a beneficial act that corrupts that act into something harmful. It doesn’t mean that pomegranate juice is evil. It means you can use it for better and for worse.

This series discusses some personal kanban anti-patterns I’ve been seeing evolve throughout the last few years.

During the last few months, I’ve run into several situations where people have uttered variations on a disturbing statement: “We don’t do planning because we have a kanban.” This is our first anti-pattern.

Some teams, weary of lengthy planning meetings in the past, have misinterpreted flow-based systems as systems that, in essence, are self-planning. A flow-based system is not self-anything—except perhaps self-reporting.

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