"Discovering Kanban: The Evolutionary Path to Enterprise Agility" (2023) is Anderson's retrospective account of how the kanban-method was developed — the origin story told from the vantage point of more than fifteen years of subsequent practice, refinement, and community development.
Origin narrative
The book traces how concepts from physical industries — Toyota's pull system, taiichi-ohno's kanban cards, lean manufacturing's waste identification — were adapted for knowledge work. Anderson describes the intellectual work of translation: what it meant to apply a tool designed for physical production scheduling to the management of invisible, variable, cognitively demanding knowledge work tasks.
This translation problem is the book's central theme. A kanban card in a Toyota factory represents a physical part that must be produced; in a software team, "work in progress" is not physical and the notion of a "kanban signal" must be reinterpreted. Anderson describes how the corbis-kanban-experiment (with dragos-dumitriu and rick-garber) was the laboratory in which this translation was worked out empirically — and how wip-limits and visualize-workflow emerged as the key mechanisms that made the translation viable.
Retrospective significance
Where lessons-in-agile-management documented Anderson's journey in near-real-time through blog posts, "Discovering Kanban" is explicitly retrospective — written after the Kanban Method had matured, the kanban-maturity-model had been developed, and kanban-university had been established. This gives the book a different character: it can situate the early work within a larger intellectual trajectory that was not visible to Anderson at the time.
The book also engages with the maturity-and-enterprise-era question of what enterprise agility means and how the Kanban Method's evolutionary approach addresses the challenges that more prescriptive frameworks (Scrum, SAFe) have struggled with at enterprise scale.
Relationship to earlier accounts
"Discovering Kanban" should be read alongside lessons-in-agile-management (which documents the same period from primary sources) and the corbis-kanban-presentation (the first public account of the Kanban Method). Together, these three works provide the most complete account available of how the Kanban Method was developed — from the empirical work at Corbis through the intellectual synthesis in the kanban-book to the retrospective narrative of "Discovering Kanban."