In the late 1990s, a Harley-Davidson executive named Donald Kieffer became general manager of a company engine plant near Milwaukee. The iconic motorcycle maker had forged a celebrated comeback, and Kieffer, who learned manufacturing on the shop floor, had been part of it. Now Kieffer wanted to make his facility better. So he arranged for a noted Toyota executive, Hajime Oba, to pay a visit.
The meeting didn't go as Kieffer expected. Oba walked around the plant for 45 minutes, diagrammed the setup on a whiteboard, and suggested one modest change. As a high-ranking manager, Kieffer figured he had to make far-reaching upgrades. Instead, Oba asked him, "What is the problem you are trying to solve?"
Oba's point was subtle. Harley-Davidson had a good plant that could get better, but not by imposing grand, top-down plans. The key was to fix workflow issues the employees could identify. Even a small fix can have large effects, and, anyway, a modestly useful change is better than a big, formulaic makeover that derails things. So Kieffer took Oba's prompt and started making specific, useful changes.
"Organizations are dynamic places, and when we try to impose a strict, static structure on them, we drive all that dynamism underground," says MIT professor of management Nelson Repenning. "And the waste and chaos it creates is 100 times more expensive than people anticipate."
Now Kieffer and Repenning have written a book about flexible, sensible organizational improvement, "There's Got to Be a Better Way," published by PublicAffairs. They call their approach "dynamic work design," which aims to help firms refine their workflow - and to stop people from making it worse through overconfident, cookie-cutter prescriptions.
"So much of management theory presumes we can predict the future accurately, including our impact on it," Repenning says. "And everybody knows that's not true. Yet we go along with the fiction. The premise underlying dynamic work design is, if we accept that we can't predict the future perfectly, we might design the world differently."
Kieffer adds: "Our principles address how work is designed. Not how leaders have to act, but how you design human work, and drive changes."
One collaboration, five principles
This book is the product of a long collaboration: In 1996, Kieffer first met Repenning, who was then a new MIT faculty member, and they soon recognized they thought similarly about managing work. By 2008, Kieffer also became a lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management, where Repenning is now a distinguished professor of system dynamics and organization studies.
The duo began teaching executive education classes together at MIT Sloan, often working with firms tackling tough problems. In the 2010s, they worked extensively with BP executives after the Deepwater Horizon accident, finding ways to combine safety priorities with other operations.
Repenning is an expert on system dynamics, an MIT-developed field emphasizing how parts of a system interact. In a firm, making isolated changes may throw the system as a whole further off kilter. Instead, managers need to grasp the larger dynamics - and recognize that a firm's problems are not usually its people, since most employees perform similarly when burdened by a faulty system.
Whereas many have touted management systems prescribe set things in advance - like culling the bottom 10 percent of your employees annually - Repenning and Kieffer believe a firm should study itself empirically and develop improvements from there.
"Managers lose touch with how work actually gets done," Kieffer says. "We bring managers in touch with real-time work, to see the problems people have, to help them solve it and learn new ways to work."
Over time, Repenning and Kieffer have codified their ideas about work design into five principles:
- Solve the right problem: Use empiricism to develop a blame-free statement of issues to address;
- Structure for discovery: Allow workers to see how their work fits into the bigger picture, and to help improve things;
- Connect the human chain: Make sure the right information moves from one person to the next;
- Regulate for flow: New tasks should only enter a system when there is capacity for them to be handled; and
- Visualize the work: Create a visual method - think of a whiteboard with sticky notes - for mapping work operations.
No mugs, no t-shirts - just open your eyes
Applying dynamic work design to any given firm may sound simple, but Repenning and Kieffer note that many forces make it hard to implement. For instance, firm leaders may be tempted to opt for technology-based solutions when there are simpler, cheaper fixes available.
Indeed, "resorting to technology before fixing the underlying design risks wasting money and embedding the original problem even deeper in the organization," they write in the book.
Moreover, dynamic work design is not itself a solution, but a way of trying to find a specific solution.
"One thing that keeps Don and I up at night is a CEO reading our book and thinking, 'We're going to be a dynamic work design company,' and printing t-shirts and coffee mugs and holding two-day conferences where everyone signs the dynamic work design poster, and evaluating everyone every week on how dynamic they are,'" Repenning says. "Then you're being awfully static."
After all, firms change, and their needs change. Repenning and Kieffer want managers to keep studying their firm's workflow, so they can keep current with their needs. In fairness, a certain amount of managers do this.
"Most people have experienced fleeting moments of good work design," Repenning says. Building on that, he says, managers and employees can keep driving a process of improvement that is realistic and logical.
"Start small," he adds. "Pick one problem you can work on in a couple of weeks, and solve that. Most cases, with open eyes, there's low-hanging fruit. You find the places you can win, and change incrementally, rather than all at once. For senior executives, this is hard. They are used to doing big things. I tell our executive ed students, it's going to feel uncomfortable at the beginning, but this is a much more sustainable path to progress."
