Our travel planning Oobeya board

About 20 years ago, the boss came to me and said we needed a visibility room. I reserved a room and set up our first project room. We put all of our goals on one wall, all of our deadlines on another, all of our projects on one wall, and all the metrics showing how we were not performing to our goals on another wall. Lots of charts and graphs and a lot of using printers and plotters to make everything look skookum. Management loved it and said this is how we are going to run our business. I had a meeting to show how to use it and had everyone give me updated charts. Everybody was happy.

The next month, only half the people showed. The next month, they told me to cancel the status meetings because they could just go into the room and review the info whenever they wanted. I updated the room for several months but I realized nobody was looking at it. I stopped updating charts and nobody said anything. The next year, we get a new senior manager that says we need a visibility room. I updated all the charts again and the same cycle happens and I eventually stop updating and nobody notices.

Over the years, I moved to different locations and organizations but I always seemed to be involved with the visibility rooms but they eventually began calling them Oobeya rooms which is Japanese for “Big Room”. They were popularized by Toyota and brought to many manufacturing companies as part of a LEAN production system. I made a lot of Oobeya rooms and they always were great for a couple of months but eventually I realized I was the only one updating and reviewing them. At one time I was the project manager of 6 different groups so I had 6 different oobeya boards that I was taking care of. I was the King of Oobeya . But I never really liked them because I never could get teams to update their own info, or management to visit the rooms to make them useful.

Then we retired and my project management career was now focused on organizing our plan to travel 6-9 months per year. We needed a way to organize our short term plans, long term plans and bucket lists. We needed a travel Oobeya room and I am the King of Oobeya. But we moved to a 1500 sq. ft house, then our son and his partner moved back in with us for a bit, and I didn’t have any extra “big rooms” to create my dream of white boards, maps, and big travel calendars with post it notes all over it. We also plan to be on the road a lot, and I don’t want to be like those old managers that are “unable” to access the room. Luckily I am married to another project management professional, and she knew how to create our virtual Oobeya room that we can access all over the world. We just set ours up using free Miro software and it was really fun. Miro is essentially a virtual, endless whiteboard, with lots of cool templates. And accessible where-ever we happen to be. It’s pretty close to being in a project room with post-its, markers, and a lot of great ideas.

We first started with our bucket list of destinations, organized by continent, that we want to visit. These are places we haven’t visited or want to return to see again. This is list is going to be continually modified and added to….

We then started a list of when is the best time to visit a location. We know not to go to Southeast Asia in the hot rainy season of summer and we know not to go to Europe in the rainy winter. But there are countries like Costa Rica that have different climates depending on what coast your are on. We want to have a list of the preferred season for each destination which will greatly help us in our travel planning. We have a lot of work to still do on this….

I already had a 3 year plan in my mind so I needed to get in on our Oobeya board to see if it fit the 3 year plan she had in her mind. We are still working on this but at least we have something on “paper” to cooperatively work on. Here is our start of a 3 year schedule

The last step is a long term calendar that is a little more generic using virtual post it notes that are easy to move around. We have talked about returning to Africa but somehow it isn’t on our 3 year calendar yet. The longer term calendar will help us feel good about not leaving places off, knowing that we do have a very tentative plan to visit some day. We also have a lot of work to do on this…

The new goal is to actually use this so it becomes a useful tool. I should have learned something from 20 years of failed Oobeya boards on how to not fail. We are our own managers and we will be the ones owning the board, but also the ones updating and adding on to the board. We cannot fail and if we do… we only have ourselves to blame. We don’t have bosses anymore. Hopefully when you ask us to share this in a year or so…we will be even more proud of how it has helped us. Also, we think often about being “over-planners” with travel, vs more spontaneous. Maybe we’ll figure out a way to also use the Oobeya board for in-the-moment travel decisions if we’re traveling with less of an agenda, while still thinking about our bucket list.

Yes, we know we are dorks 😉