How To Deliver Results And Get Rid Of The Stuff That Gets In The Way Of Real Work

 

“The chaos of everyday business forces people into an exhausting, ineffective, seemingly never-ending cycle of workarounds, firefighting, and Whac-a-Mole,” share the authors of the new book, There’s Got To Be A Better Way. 

And in their book, the authors, Nelson P. Repenning and Donald C. Kieffer, explain there is indeed a better way. 

They share the game-changing discipline of dynamic work design that improves productivity, reduces costs, and increases efficiency, ensuring that all parts of a company can work in concert. The discipline has been used in organizations around the world to close the gap between the results promised and results delivered.

 
The five principles of dynamic work design are: 

Solve the right problem – Structured problem-solving to break the biases that come with past success and help you find new levels of performance. Effective problem-solving is the engine of adaptation and agility.

Structure for discovery – A series of simple interventions that redirect the team’s natural learning processes toward more productive paths to yield significant gains. Creating work environments where everyone knows what they are doing, why they are doing it, and where and when they fall short of their targets.

Connect the human chain – Putting face-to-face communications in the right places—connecting the human chain. Getting rid of frustrating meetings and speed the flow of critical information.

Regulate for flow – Regulating the flow of work to avoid gridlock and balance short-run delivery against the long-run health of the process. 

Visualize the work – How to make the flow of work evident by creating shared dynamic visual representations, allowing everyone in the organization to see the state of the knowledge work system, not just their individual to-do list. 

“We show how you can change your workplace, step by step, to make it a truly dynamic organization,” say Repenning and Kieffer. 

Some of my favorite takeaways from the book, in the words of the authors, include: 

Whether leaders like it or not, humans are constantly learning, adapting, and trying to improve. You can’t turn it off. Therefore, leaders need to design effective and engaging work that requires thinking carefully about what people learn, not just in the training center but also on the job. 

Effective learning and improvement happen when those doing the work and those managing the work can, together, clearly see where they have advanced, where they have fallen short, and where they can make the next rounds of improvement. 

Finally, the authors share that, “Transforming your organization with dynamic work design requires everyone to manage and lead differently. The good news, however, is that you don’t have to adopt the dynamic work design elements all at once or instantly convert your colleagues. Instead, start small, resolve a few issues, calm the system, build a few new skills, and help others think about their work a life differently.” 

Repenning is the School of Management Distinguished Professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He is the director of MIT’s Leadership Center and Poets & Quants named him one of the world’s top executive MBA instructors. He lives in Cambridge, MA. 

Kieffer is a senior lecturer in operations management at the MIT Sloan School of Management and founder of ShiftGear Work Design. He was previously vice president of operational excellence for Harley-Davidson. 

Thank you to the book’s publisher for sending me an advance copy of the book.