Shadowboards Matter

Tolli and I visited Alcatraz during our California trip last year. The tour was excellent and provided a look at early 5S principles at work. Normally when we apply workplace organization methods we emphasize the importance of "a place for everything and everything in its place" because of efficiency. At Alcatraz, it was a matter of life and death.




Alcatraz inmates were considered the most dangerous of all prisoners and were held in cells most of the day. The exception was at meal time, when any prisoners who weren't in solitary confinement would eat together. There were prisoners who helped in the kitchen. The challenge for the guards was making sure this was done safely. Shadowboards enabled guards to account for every piece of cutlery.


Here you see an example of a shadowboard used in Alcatraz prison to alert guards when inmates had not returned knives.



It is hard to imagine in today's prisons that tools like these might be available to inmates, but at Alcatraz, they found a way to deal with them effectively, by employing a shadowboard.


While today's workplaces are much safer than the Alcatraz of the past, employing best practices, such as workplace organization -- including shadowboards -- sets apart top performing companies.

Envisioning Progress

I am experimenting with visualization techniques on many-eyes.com. Here are two examples of text clouds which demonstrate the relative frequency of word use. The top text cloud resulted from an exercise in determining how to overcome barriers to success for a non-profit group, the Ski-Hy Chapter of the American Business Women's Association here in Asheville. The second text cloud comes from the improvement plan.

I am also experimenting with using small multiples, as shown below. Here I have tracked key word usage from the beginning of the workshop, "what success means," through identifying success factors, barriers to success, overcoming barriers, combining success factors, and finally, the improvement plan. You can visualize how the session evolved using this image.

Comments welcome... what would be your preference? What other ideas are there to take words into the visual realm?