The Genesis on the Factory Floor
Long before user stories, sprints and swimlanes, Taiichi Ohno looked at a supermarket and said, "なるほど".
In the late 1940s and 1950s, Toyota was struggling to compete with American automotive giants. While visiting the United States, Ohno noticed American supermarkets operated on a pull system: shelves were only restocked with what customers actually bought, rather than pushing massive batches of goods into a warehouse hoping someone would eventually want them.
He brought that concept back to the manufacturing line at Toyota and named it "Kanban" (看板) - literally translating to "signboard" or "visual card."
The core premise was radically simple: stop starting work, start finishing work. Physical cards tracked inventory and workflow bottlenecks in real-time, ensuring that a part was only manufactured when downstream stations actually needed it. It was transparent, it eliminated waste, and it was designed to prevent human cognitive overload by visualising the exact flow of a process. One look at the board shows exactly what is done, what needs to be done, and often who is currently doing it.
It was one of the greatest process-engineering breakthroughs of the 20th century—born right here in Japan. And I, for one, am grateful.
The tech industry adopted it, digitised it, and turned it into the bedrock of modern agile development. A simple, user-friendly system that makes tracking work and tasks phenomenally simple.
Which makes what happened next so deeply, agonisingly ironic.
The Unconquerable Spreadsheet
To understand why a Kanban board stands zero chance against a Japanese office, you first have to understand the sheer, gravitational pull of Microsoft Excel.
In many traditional Japanese workplaces, Excel isn't just a spreadsheet application; it’s the universal operating system. It is a word processor, a database, a project management tool, an invoicing system, and an art canvas (seriously, there's a whole Excel AutoShape art subculture out there. Look it up!).
Why? Because Excel offers the ultimate corporate safety blanket: total, unstructured freedom.
A Kanban board forces you into a workflow. It demands that a task have a state, an owner, and a movement from left to right. It has rules.
Excel has no rules. You can cram a meeting schedule into cell A1, paste a low-res product screenshot over columns B through Z, merge fifty cells because it "looks cleaner," and use cell background colours as an ad-hoc priority matrix. It is the ultimate digital manifestation of chaos, which makes it strangely comforting. Nobody can tell you your layout is "wrong" because the canvas is infinite.
So, when an engineer walks in with a sleek, opinionated software system designed to bring order to the madness, they aren't just fighting a tool. They are trying to tear down a cultural institution.
And I learned this the hard way at an English school I worked at years ago.
The Database That Wasn't Wanted
At an English school I worked at years ago, the primary source of knowledge on students and staff was a huge, bloated Excel file. They used Excel to track everything. Student details, billing, schedules. Most of it was in just one sheet. As the school grew, the spreadsheet began to buckle under its own weight. Their cheap laptops couldn't handle the amount of data.
Seeing the friction, I spent some quiet time writing a Python script to cleanly parse all that messy data and migrate it into a proper Access database since the office already had the full Microsoft Office suite installed. On top of that, I threw together a fast, clean little set of UIs for them to manage students: easy search, adding, and billing management.
I sat them down, gave a polite demonstration of how easy it was, and showed them how it completely solved their performance and maintenance nightmares. It was simple. It was fast.
A week later, I walked past reception...
They weren’t using the database. They were still using the exact same sluggish spreadsheet. But to solve the speed problem, they had officially assigned someone to manually copy and paste chunks of old, unsubscribed student data into a brand-new file just to keep the main file from lagging.
They chose manual, soul-crushing copy-pasting over a working piece of software, purely because the spreadsheet felt like home.
And the worst part? Well, I could have knocked up a Python script to do that migration too in a fraction of the time.
The Brief Era of the Digital Kanban Board
Fast forward to a later role at a video production agency, where I was brought in as the sole engineer and IT member to build interactive content alongside their design work. With decades of experience managing software teams, they even asked me to suggest ways to fix their terrible workflow problems.
So, I did what any reasonable engineer would do: I introduced a clean, remarkably simple Kanban project board to help the team organise their pipeline.
Miraculously, they actually tried it. But within a short time, the complaints rolled in: the "tickets" looked too much like physical sticky notes, and they desperately missed the comforting vertical structure of a list. Never fear though, this particular board had a magic feature: a single button at the top that instantly toggled the exact same information into a clean list view.
"Wow," they said. "Great!". Smiles all round.
And for a staggering two whole projects, the system was successfully used. It worked. It brought flow, transparency, and order. Everyone knew what was required to finish each project, who was doing what and what had been completed.
Then, quietly, inevitably, the agency drifted back to the motherland. They abandoned the board, ditched the list view, and slinked right back to an endless Excel spreadsheet. No talking, no announcement. Just a new project with a link to the Excel sheet.
The Casio Calculator Doorstop
At the end of the day, Japanese businesses don't just use Excel; they adore it. They use it for everything and anything. Not just project planning and backend databases, but document formatting, layout design, and even drafting flyers.
It’s the corporate equivalent of using a vintage Casio scientific calculator as a doorstop. Sure, it has mass, it’s heavy, and technically it keeps the door from blowing shut. But it’s not what it was designed for.
Japanese workplaces love lists, tables, and the comfort of a grid. They love the absolute sovereignty of the cell. And as I've learned the hard way twice over, don't waste your time trying to give them a better, more efficient alternative. They won't thank you for it, and by next week, someone will have assigned an intern to copy-paste the whole thing back into a spreadsheet anyway.
