A brief history of Kanban

Kanban (看板), meaning "signboard" or "visual card" in Japanese, originated in Toyota's manufacturing system during the 1940s. Developed by industrial engineer Taiichi Ohno, it revolutionized production by creating a pull-based system that minimized inventory and overproduction. This became a key component of Toyota's Just-In-Time manufacturing approach. The system was inspired by American supermarkets, where shelves were restocked based on what customers took rather than through push-based forecasting. Ohno implemented this by using cards to signal when to produce more parts, ensuring production happened only when downstream demand existed.^[1]

In 2007, David J. Anderson adapted these principles to knowledge work and software development. He recognized that software teams faced similar challenges with work visualization, flow management, and matching capacity to demand. Anderson's adaptation preserved Kanban's emphasis on limiting work-in-progress and pulling work based on capacity, while modifying it for creative, non-repetitive knowledge work.^[2] Unlike many agile methods that required significant process changes, Kanban started with existing workflows and evolved them gradually. This made it accessible to teams resistant to dramatic shifts in how they worked.