Kanban & Agile Flow
Signature Course No. 181 — A Signature AI Socratic Coaching Course.
A New Kind of Learning
Socratic coaching, delivered by an agentic AI coach.
Not a course you watch. An AI coach you work with.
The Lighthouse Coach begins by discovering how you think about the subject, teaches what is missing, and gives you realistic practice before asking you to prove that you can use it. You may test out of concepts you already understand, while capstones turn the learning into a practical plan, decision, conversation, or other real-world result.
The curriculum is deliberately authored; the AI delivers it through coaching. It is not an AI randomly generating lessons.
A coach that teaches by asking — not by lecturing
The Lighthouse Coach is an AI Socratic coach built on Cognosco Learning's Kanban & Agile Flow course, in the Leadership & Management category. It does not play videos at you. It holds a conversation: it asks you a question, listens to your answer, names the misconception it hears, affirms what you got right, and asks the next question — the way a great coach works in the room.
This is the course for team leads and service managers who are accountable for delivery, operations and support managers whose teams drown in started-but-unfinished requests, product and project professionals working in flow-based teams, and coaches, facilitators, and improvers who help teams change how work moves. It works on one running team — the customer operations team at Vireo Support Services — whose board, queues, and flow numbers you will come to know in full.
First, Module 1 — See the Flow, Measure the Flow — work through Concepts 1–9, finishing with The Flow Diagnosis; then, Module 2 — Run the System, Improve the System — work through Concepts 10–18, finishing with The Operating Design. You can type your answers, or talk out loud: the Voice Coach speaks its questions and listens to your spoken replies, hands-free.
The course is self-paced and always on — roughly 30 minutes per concept, about 9 hours in full, taken in as many sittings as you like. Learners who already know the material can test out concept by concept.
Most knowledge work is invisible. A support request lives in someone's inbox, a review lives in someone's head, an approval lives in a hallway conversation — and because nobody can see the work, nobody can see that there is too much of it, or that it is all piled up in front of one overloaded stage. This course begins by making that work visible, then teaches you to run it as a flow system: pull instead of push, limits on work in progress, and a small set of honest numbers — how long work takes, how much of it finishes, how old the unfinished work is, and where it piles up.
Every figure in the course comes from the running team's own flow data, stated once and used throughout, so the arithmetic always ties and you can check any number yourself. The board you learn on can live on a wall, in a spreadsheet, or in any board product — the method does not depend on the surface you choose.
Both capstones produce real artifacts — a written flow diagnosis a lead can put in front of an executive, and a complete operating design with policies, classes of service, cadences, and an evidence-based forecast — not just ideas about flow.
This is the one hundred and eighty-first course in The Lighthouse Signature Series — the online counterpart to the one-day, in-person learning Cognosco Learning has delivered since 2002.
Course Facts
One full concept, coached end to end — free: verify your email and we’ll send you a link to start.
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Diagnose → Learn & Practice → Prove → Capstone
Every learner moves through the same discipline a Cognosco instructor would insist on in the room.
Diagnose
The Coach starts where the course starts: with your own team's work. Every concept opens with three questions that locate where you actually stand — how your team currently starts, queues, and finishes work, and where the common trap is waiting for you — and your answers shape how deeply the Coach works the concept with you. Everyone begins with Module 1 — no skipping the foundations you only think you have.
Learn & Practice
Work each concept in conversation with the Coach — spoken or written — then practice it against realistic situations until it holds up.
Prove
Every concept ends in proof: answer the check cold and demonstrate the skill. Know it already? Test out and take credit immediately.
Capstone
Finish with two capstones — The Flow Diagnosis for Module 1 and The Operating Design for Module 2 — that pull the whole course together, and earn the certificate.
What You'll Learn
Most knowledge work is invisible. A support request lives in someone's inbox, a review lives in someone's head, an approval lives in a hallway conversation — and because nobody can see the work, nobody can see that there is too much of it, that it has been waiting for nine days, or that it is all piled up in front of one overloaded stage.
Kanban begins by making that work visible on a board, and then it does something more important: it treats the board not as a status display but as a flow system — a system with an entry point, stages, queues, an exit, and measurable behavior. This course teaches you to run that system deliberately.
You will visualize the work honestly, replace push with pull, set and defend limits on work in progress, and manage the flow of items rather than the busyness of people. You will learn the four core flow measures — lead time, cycle time, throughput, and work-item age — and the arithmetic that connects them.
You will read cumulative flow, write explicit policies, set classes of service, run the replenishment and review cadences that keep a board honest, find bottlenecks, raise flow efficiency, forecast from evidence, slice work smaller, and improve the system by experiment rather than by decree.
What you will learn
- Visualize knowledge work as a flow system and design a board that tells the truth about it
- Replace push with pull, and set work-in-progress limits that shorten delivery instead of starving the team
- Measure flow with lead time, cycle time, throughput, and work-item age — and keep the arithmetic among them honest
- Read a cumulative flow diagram to spot queues, bottlenecks, and stalls before stakeholders do
- Make policies explicit, set classes of service, and run replenishment and review cadences that keep the system healthy
- Raise flow efficiency, forecast delivery from your own throughput record, and improve the system by small, measured experiments
Everything in the course
- All 18 concepts of Kanban & Agile Flow, in 2 modules
- A starting-point check first — the Coach finds where you actually stand before teaching
- Learn, Practice, Prove for every concept — no passive video watching
- A test-out on every concept: prove you know it and move on
- The Voice Coach: talk with the Coach out loud — it speaks, listens, and replies
- A personal Learner Record of your work across the course
- Two capstone exercises: The Flow Diagnosis and The Operating Design
- A printable session summary whenever you pause
- The Lighthouse Coach completion certificate (Signature Series)
- Your progress is saved as you go — stop anytime, resume where you left off
Built for the team whose work is invisible
Kanban & Agile Flow is for team leads and service managers who are accountable for delivery but find that asking people to work harder does not make work arrive sooner, operations and support managers whose teams drown in started-but-unfinished requests while stakeholders ask when things will be done, product and project professionals working in flow-based teams who need a forecasting language grounded in delivery evidence,
and coaches, facilitators, and improvers who help teams change how work moves and need a method that starts from the team's current process instead of replacing it overnight.
This course assumes you work with, or lead, a team whose work arrives as discrete items — requests, cases, tickets, documents, decisions — and leaves when someone downstream or a customer receives value. It assumes no prior Kanban experience and no particular software. If you can read a simple chart and multiply two numbers, you have everything this course requires to start.
Prefer to learn live and in person? The same material anchors Cognosco's one-day programs — browse the in-person catalog.
Start with The Flow Diagnosis
$195 — introductory price. One payment. No subscription, no password to manage.
Here is exactly what happens when you enroll:
- Pay securely with Stripe — you are taken straight into the course
- Create your learner profile and begin the Module 1 starting-point check
- Save the access key you are given — it restores your enrollment on any device
- Learn at your pace; your progress is stored in your browser on your device
For the full voice experience, use Chrome and allow the microphone when asked. Typing your answers works everywhere, all the time. Questions before you enroll? Email hello@cognoscolearning.com.
More Signature Courses are coming
Kanban & Agile Flow is Signature Course No. 181. Leave your email and we'll send you news of future Signature Courses and Lighthouse updates as they are announced — nothing else.