Unlocking Flow: A High-Level Overview of STATIK and Its Benefits
8/25/2025 • Dave White
Don’t copy someone else’s kanban system. Build one that reflects your reality.
— STATIK Principle
In today’s fast-paced, ever-evolving work environments, teams need more than tools—they need clarity. Tools that support teams that are constantly searching for ways to improve delivery, reduce friction, and respond more effectively to customer needs. The Kanban Method offers a set of powerful principles and practices for managing work through kanban systems — but implementing it well requires more than just building a board and putting sticky notes and swimlanes on it. That’s where STATIK comes in.
STATIK (Systems Thinking Approach to Introducing (or Improving) Kanban) is a structured, collaborative method for designing kanban systems that are tailored to the unique context of a team or service. Rather than imposing a one-size-fits-all solution, STATIK guides teams through a series of exercises that uncover how work flows, where it gets stuck, and what truly matters to customers, team members, and stakeholders. The result? A kanban system that reflects reality, supports continuous improvement, and delivers real value.
What is STATIK?
STATIK is a step-by-step approach that helps teams understand their current situation by:
- Identify Sources of Dissatisfaction
- Analyze Demand
- Analyze Capability
- Building a useful map of their workflow
- Define Classes of Service
- Design a kanban system tailored to their context
A STATIK Workshop will guide us in exploring the six steps listed above. Let’s explore the core benefits of STATIK—and how each workshop exercise contributes to achieving them.
1. Grounding change in real dissatisfaction
Once we all understood what people were unhappy about when working with and for our team, we were able to create meaningful, targeted improvement activities that we were really motivated to work on.
— STATIK workshop attendee
Exercise: Sources of Dissatisfaction
Every meaningful change starts with a reason. The first STATIK exercise invites participants (team members and managers) to surface frustrations, bottlenecks, challenges, and unmet expectations. By capturing both internal (team-expressed) and external (people external to the delivery team) sources of dissatisfaction, participants build a shared understanding of what’s not working—and why it matters.
Benefit:
This step creates critically important emotional buy-in. It ensures that improvements are motivated by real pain points, not abstract theories. It also helps teams prioritize changes that will have the most impact first, and address problems incrementally.
2. Understanding what customers actually want
We used to talk about PBIs in our status meeting and we always had to do a mental translation to understand what we were actually talking about. That doesn’t happen anymore.
— STATIK workshop attendee
Exercise: Analyze Demand (and Capability)
Before designing a system to manage work, teams need to understand the nature of that work. The Analyze Demand exercise helps teams identify customer-recognizable work item types, arrival patterns, and sources of requests. Customer-recognizability is an important principle to take away from this exercise. Customers don’t ask for work items; they use their language to convey what they want, and this shared understanding allows teams to develop a stronger sense of customer orientation!
Teams eventually will develop (and discuss) an understanding of what they are able to deliver in customer-recognizable terms, and when they do, they will be able to contrast what customers expect and what the team is able to deliver.
Benefit:
This clarity enables teams to align their workflows with customer expectations, reduce misunderstandings, and avoid managing irrelevant or low-value tasks.
3. Seeing the flow, not just the tasks
We used to track work based on who was working on it, and that created a lot of back and forth on our kanban board. Now we track work moving through important activities where individuals collaborate.
— STATIK workshop attendee
Exercise: Map the Workflow
Rather than modeling individual hand-offs, STATIK encourages teams to map dominant activities— collaborative steps that move work forward. This produces a clean, understandable workflow model, rather than a messy one riddled with handoffs, backward flows, and annoying dead ends that may require significant manual management.
Benefit:
The goal is to create a useful and easy-to-use work management system, and mapping dominant activities is a key enabler for teams trying to achieve just that. Teams gain visibility into how work progresses towards the customer, where delays occur, and how different roles interact. This sets the stage for designing a kanban system that reflects actual service delivery.
4. Prioritizing work with purpose
Everything was an Expedite before we gave our customer other options to pick from! What a change those simple, explicit policies had!
— STATIK workshop attendee
Exercise: Classes of Service
Not all work is created equal. Some requests are urgent, others are predictable, and some can be deferred. By defining Classes of Service, teams establish explicit policies for how different types of work should be treated. Explicit policies are powerful collaboration enhancers. When we all have a shared understanding of these prioritization policies and their effects, customers can utilize them, and team members can react predictably when these policies are invoked by a customer.
Benefit:
These explicit policies enable better prioritization, reduced chaos, and ensure that critical work gets the attention it deserves—without overwhelming the system.
5. Designing a system that supports flow and learning
We had a kanban board before, but it wasn’t focused on the right things, and it was overly complicated and hard to manage work on. Now, our board is visualizing a good kanban system and helping us make better decisions every day.
— STATIK workshop attendee
Exercise: Designing the Kanban System
With insights from previous exercises, teams collaboratively design a fit-for-purpose kanban system that includes visual boards, WIP limits, commitment points, and feedback loops. The system is built to evolve, not remain static.
Benefit:
The kanban system becomes a living model of the team’s work, enabling continuous improvement, better decision-making, and a shared understanding of delivery capability.
6. Evolving the system over time
It was great to revisit our sources of dissatisfaction and see how they had changed! Some disappeared, which was very rewarding. Some new ones appeared, and this allowed us to refocus on what we needed to work on next.
— STATIK workshop attendee
Exercise: Subsequent Workshops
While not an explicit part of the STATIK steps, we should acknowledge that a STATIK Workshop shouldn’t be a one-time event. They are described as being an activity worth repeating. Follow-up workshops enable teams to revisit exercises, refine their systems, and address new challenges or opportunities.
Benefit:
This iterative approach ensures that the kanban system remains relevant, effective, and aligned with the team’s evolving context.
Why STATIK works
STATIK succeeds because it respects the complexity of real work and real teams. It doesn’t prescribe; it reveals. By guiding teams through a thoughtful and collaborative exploration of their service, STATIK helps them build kanban systems that are not only functional but also transformative. Whether you're launching Kanban for the first time or refining an existing system, STATIK offers a proven path to clarity, flow, and customer satisfaction. And the best part? Every step is grounded in your team’s lived experience.
Ready to unlock the full potential of Kanban? Start with STATIK—and let your system tell its own story.