There's Got to Be a Better Way: How to Deliver Results and Get Rid of the Stuff That Gets in the Way of Real Work

by Nelson P. Repenning

Because dynamic work design is based on principles and discovery, not rules and rituals, it can be applied in almost any type of organization.

usual thicket of overlapping priorities, competing interests, and near-constant firefighting.

At every moment, a dynamic structure helps everyone know both the current priorities and the pressing problems.

When managers use dynamic work design, they often feel, for the first time, that they are managing their organization rather than that their organization is managing them. The workday is transformed. The tasks of goal setting, planning, and budgeting no longer involve lengthy annual or quarterly negotiations, the results of which must then be worked around. Instead, planning and goal setting become part of an ongoing process of identifying problems and sensing new opportunities. Dysfunctional hierarchical reporting relationships and painful review meetings take a back seat to providing guidance, delivering critical resources, and communicating about what is really happening. The question “Who is responsible?” is replaced by “How can we help?” Instead of pushing long lists of tasks that are all ranked “high priority,” the tough decisions are made up front.

Fannie Mae used thirty dollars of string and laundry clips to create a visual representation called the Close Line and cut the time required to close its books by almost 80 percent. A simple technique but a stunning result.

Despite the difficulty of creating the plan, it never lasted more than a few hours.

When used sparingly, expediting can be a useful response to a changing world, but the team’s almost exclusive reliance on it sent the facility into a tailspin, creating an increasingly slow and unresponsive work system.

People frequently do not get all the inputs they need to do their work correctly. Similarly, most people have only a vague sense of who receives the output of that work or what that person needs to do his or her job.

All work systems need a method to regulate for flow, meaning that new tasks only enter the system when there is available capacity, thereby ensuring that work is always moving. Regulating for flow both increases productivity (often dramatically) and, when it doesn’t, makes the next problem visible, creating a system for revealing the next opportunity for improvement.

Most of the day was focused on getting the next sample out the door, not on figuring out why there was so much instability.

You can’t reverse a vicious cycle in one move. The only path to real transformation is through incremental, directed problem-solving.

What is the problem you are trying to solve?”

Mr. Oba’s question reminded him of his early experience on the shop floor: go to where the problem is happening; understand what is really going on and why; run quick experiments to get things moving; verify you have a working solution; and then make it more robust and permanent. Working this way had been satisfying—and good for Don’s career.

Combining a careful look at the work as it was happening with asking better questions seemed to offer a path to more improvement.

So how do you put biased automatic processing on hold so you can take a fresh look? You need what Mr. Oba was trying to teach Don. You need a discovery mindset.

“There are few ways to waste money faster than automating a process you don’t understand.”

The essence of designing an effective management chain starts with a simple question: What do managers do to move work forward? The simple answer is that they make decisions and solve problems.

Much as with the work chain, the trick is to get people collaborating in discovery mode at the right moments to leverage the power of face-to-face communication.

Distinguishing between two types of huddles—planned meetings initiated by a schedule and immediate meetings initiated by a specific condition (which we call a trigger)—will help get managers and leaders actively engaged in the flow of work at the right places and at the right times.

A disconnect between the frequency of meeting and the speed with which the work generates things that require discussion is, as we will see, a sure sign of poor work design.

big disconnect in the timing between generating test information and the meetings to discuss it.

Looking at how a specific piece of work or a specific project is moving (or not) can often immediately reveal major opportunities for improving the productivity of the system.

He clarified the purpose of the meeting and its key output—update the management group on the results of the testing so they can give the measurement team guidance on what to do next—and asked the team to meet briefly each day (rather than every two weeks). A quick daily check-in with the full team allowed the engineers to iterate more quickly (daily rather than every two weeks) and eliminated the waste of building up and breaking down the test bed.

Words like oversight and review are too abstract to help participants move work forward.

Asking people to explain shortfalls in the metrics puts them in storytelling mode rather than spurring an examination of the work itself to find the cause.

Clarifying a meeting’s role in examining the status of the work, moving it forward, and matching the frequency to the underlying cadence of the work is a critical feature of several productivity innovations.

How do you know if you are meeting too frequently or not frequently enough? If you find yourself flooded with problems that you learned about through email and instant messaging, then you likely are not meeting frequently enough to keep up with the speed at which the work is generating new information. Conversely, if regular meetings devolve to tedious status reports that don’t contain a lot of new information and there isn’t a lot of back-and-forth, then you are meeting too often.

The other side of the coin is trying to put things into meetings that don’t belong there. As a simple rule of thumb, use two questions to evaluate your meetings: How many decisions were made and how many problems were solved? If the answer to each question compared to the time invested tells you that the meeting was much longer than it needed to be, either fix the meeting or just drop it.

If life in the modern organization feels fundamentally misguided, you are correct. Many studies have shown that taking on too much work—a phenomenon called overload—hurts both individual and organizational performance.

taking on more projects than they can handle causes people to regularly switch from one task to the next depending on which project is currently getting the most pressure or is facing an imminent deadline. Though its impact can be hard to detect, task switching degrades productivity and leads to error.

Being overloaded changes how people manage their work, creating inefficiency and frustration due to constantly changing priorities and task switching. Eliminating these inefficiencies improves productivity to the point that capacity is often no longer a problem.

This behavior is called local, or bottom-up, reprioritization: each person in the work chain imposes their own priorities on their work.

Local prioritization feels sensible in the moment. However, when different people with different agendas change priorities at every step, the workflow is unpredictable.

The second problem, the top-down version of reprioritization, happens when more-senior managers, frustrated with a slow, unpredictable process, intervene in the hope of making sure critical work gets completed. It shows up as “hot lists” and people tasked with expediting work through multiple steps of the process.

To see expediting in action, consider again your own behavior. What do you do when you have an important task that requires another person’s input and you don’t want to risk it being lost in his inbox? You try to get that person’s attention. You send a text, make a phone call, or stop by his office. Though you feel proactive, efforts to expedite your work risk degrading the overall health of the process. An extra text, phone call, or visit both takes your time and reduces the recipient’s productivity by forcing him to switch attention from whatever they are working on to what you want them to do.

no one would ever ask a cardiac surgeon to stop an operation midstream because something supposedly more important popped up—we know this is a bad idea—yet we ask knowledge workers to do something similar multiple times a day because the immediate impact doesn’t seem onerous.

fighting fires by working around the system (and not addressing the underlying causes of the fires) quickly becomes the only way things ever get done; it becomes the process.

Everything is a rush job, so you often don’t have time to review your work or step away from it for a night or two to get a fresh perspective. Defects—ranging from typos to software bugs to medical errors—are the norm and when discovered require even more expediting.

let’s reflect on one final cost of the overload/expediting trap: it limits an organization’s ability to execute its strategy.

the company routinely pushed more product development projects into the system than it had the resources to complete.

(even with the highest priority, Don’s engine project was completed two years later than the original schedule),

Now consider the alternative. What if, to appeal to their high rollers, airlines were willing to bring planes off the taxiway when a frequent flyer showed up late?

It’s making sure that there’s a structure for problem-solving, setting targets, and tracking progress, connecting humans, optimally managing the flow so there’s the right amount of work in the system, and making it all visible.