The Workplace Productivity Trap - Dynamic Work Design wirth Nelson Repenning MIT OrgDev Episode 99

Why do so many organisations struggle to improve productivity - even when they invest heavily in strategy, transformation and new ways of working?

Nelson Repenning, co-author of There’s Got to Be a Better Way, describes the hidden systems that shape how work actually gets done. Drawing on decades of research at MIT and real-world organisational transformation, Nelson unpacks why well-intentioned improvements often fail - and what leaders can do differently.

We explore the core ideas behind work design, the structural causes of inefficiency, and why fixing productivity isn’t about working harder, but redesigning how work flows across teams and systems. This conversation gets underneath the surface of strategy execution, operational performance, and organisational effectiveness - offering practical insight for leaders, HR, and OD practitioners trying to make change stick.

If you’re dealing with slow execution, overloaded teams, or initiatives that never quite land, this episode will help you see the system differently - and act on it

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About Us

We’re Dani and Garin – Organisation Development (OD) practitioners who help leaders and people professionals tackle the messiness of organisational life. We focus on building leadership capability, strengthening team effectiveness, and designing practical, systemic development programmes that help you deliver on your team and organisational goals. We also offer coaching to support individual growth and change.

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Transcript

(00:00) Hi and welcome to the org dev podcast. So overloaded systems, ambiguous roles, poor visibility of work, broken flows, unclear decision rights, all of these explain poor performance far more than motivation, capability or effort. But why do we point the finger at people when the real problems sit in the way the work is designed? We're absolutely honored to be joined by Professor Nelson Repening today.

(00:26) He has dedicated a huge amount of research to understanding how work really happens inside organizations and not how leaders imagine it happens as well. Professor Nelson is a school of management distinguished professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management and he's also director of MIT's leadership center.

(00:43) His work has been recognized externally extensively as well being recognized as one of the world's top executive MBA instructors and his scholarly work has appeared in top management journals and publications. In fact, some of his research has included things like Why do so many management tools fail in practice? Which is a fascinating area.

(00:59) He's a co-author along with Donald Kefir of There's Got to Be a Better Way, which is possibly the best titled book we've read this year. How to deliver results and get rid of the stuff that gets in the way of real work published this year. And Danny and I have been talking about this book for the last six weeks, is it Danny? >> We have. Yes. Yes.

(01:14) >> Constantly. It's a brilliant audio book and the link to the both versions will be in the show notes today. But most of all, we want to say a huge thank you to Nelson for joining us. We're absolutely honored to have and we're reading forward with the great conversation you today. >> Just to kick us off, just tell us a bit more about the book.

(01:43) What was the inspiration behind it? >> Yeah, I think it's easiest to proceed chronologically. I always tell people I've been at MIT my whole adult life and I've really only worked on one problem which you alluded to in the intro which is basically why don't organizations use the tools and processes that we all agree are good things to do and I would characterize the probably first 10 or 15 years of that research a little bit tongue and cheek as gloating over the stupid things that organizations do because you know we can go into more on

(02:08) this in a moment but you know I had just endless examples of where the right tool or process was right in front of the organization and they couldn't seem to use it on a regular bas is and were at the very least leaving money on the table. In some cases, you know, led to really tragic outcomes.

(02:24) Uh but at some point I found myself writing that same gloating paper over and over again and I thought that I should rather, you know, work on the solution rather than just document the problem in more excruciating detail. And um that's sort of where my collaboration with Don, my co-author, really sort of um you know, started to pick up some speed.

(02:42) Um, and I think the way I would sort of phrase where the book came from is one of the experiences I've had in my professional life is I often have many of the puzzle pieces before I can see the picture that they snap together. And so Don and I started working together. We started teaching together and we had a lot of little puzzle pieces that could really help people solve problems that they were facing in their organizations and were generating good results.

(03:02) And Don's a practitioner so he had really a lifetime of track record of making organizations work better. And I think 10 years ago we decided, you know, we should really write this stuff down. And I have actually chapters on my hard drive from 2013 or 2014 and they're terrible. I mean they're unreadable and they wander all around and and so we decided 10 years ago we weren't quite ready and we wrote a few papers and then I think you know probably five or six years ago we thought okay I think now like the puzzle is clear enough that we

(03:28) could put it together and then the real origin of the book in all cander is in January of 2021 I got co and at least the MIT rules at the time were you couldn't be on campus for 10 days so I was stuck at home with nothing to do and I thought you if I don't start this now it's never gonna it's never going to get going and I that really the goal was to take all the things that we had done and the tips and tricks that we had learned about how to make organizations work better and put them into a cohesive hopefully easily

(03:55) accessible format and so that really was the goal of the book and you know you'll have to tell me whether it delivers on that. So >> it definitely does and the kind of concept of the book is all about dynamic work design. So for people who haven't read your book or don't know what that means can you define that for us? >> Yeah, I think this was the last piece of the puzzle to really snap together.

(04:14) It's kind of funny. So I'm in the system dynamics group here at MIT. So thinking about organizational dynamics has been you know my life and I think the big insight that pulled all the pieces and all the tools together uh and this came relatively late in the game was if you think about most of the tools that we have to guide large organizations so strategy and budgeting and capital planning and road maps and all those different elements they're all implicitly based on the idea that we can forecast the future with some degree of

(04:43) accuracy. Right? every budget and every strategy, you know, has an implicit presumption that we know what the world's going to be like 12 or 24 months from now or 5 years or whatever it might be. And we all know that's not true, right? Every article and every business publication starts with the sentence, the world's changing faster than it ever has before.

(05:00) And I don't know if that's true. I'm guessing in 1900 it felt like the world was changing pretty fast. But nonetheless, it is the world is a very dynamic place and the tools that most organizations use are just not consistent with that. And so the problem, and this goes back to my earliest work on why people don't use the tools, is you imagine you make a strategy or a budget and the world changes midway through the year.

(05:22) Now what do you do? Well, what most people do is they don't change the strategy or the budget because they're supposed to be accountable to, you know, those plans. And so what they do is they work around it. You know, I always joke they bring out their duct tape and safety pins and chewing gum and try to kind of cobble together a set of interventions that will help them deliver their targets.

(05:40) even though the assumptions in that original plan are no longer relevant. And that's really where the trouble starts because most of those changes tend to be under the waterline. They're surreptitious and they tend to emphasize the short run rather than the long run. And that can descend organizations into this really nasty firefighting cycle that we talked pretty extensively about the book.

(05:57) And so the core idea of the tools in the book and I think this is the piece that pulled everything together was if we accept the fact that we can't predict the future perfectly, we might design some of our core processes differently. And I think the experience we've had is that when you take that perspective, it can unlock some surprisingly large gains in terms of how organizations work.

(06:18) And I don't think strategy and budgets and all that things are going away, but if you could temper that a little bit with this more dynamic perspective, again, I think our experience has been there's really some big wins you can have in terms of organizational performance. >> And you talk about five kind of principles of dynamic work designs.

(06:34) >> So the first one is uh solve the right problem. And I think if I were to go back and redo that chapter, I would change the title to solve the right problem and then in parenthesis and solve the problem, right? You know, so never get anything quite perfect. Uh but the basic idea there is if we take this idea that the world is a dynamic place seriously, we're going to be constantly mismatched between what we're doing and what the world requires, right? That's sort of the definition of being a dynamic environment. And so the ability

(06:59) to recognize and close those mismatches quickly and to learn something in the process really is the first core skill that we think defines the more dynamic organization. And fortunately most organizations already have training in that. Most large organizations have done some training around structured problem solving.

(07:18) Whether it's the six sigma method or the lean method, we're largely agnostic about that. But the first principle is really if you take dynamics seriously, you need to raise your game about your ability to spot problems and solve them effectively. And the first principle is about that effective problem solving. Second principle is what we call structure for discovery.

(07:33) And that really speaks to how do we see when there's a mismatch. And you know, one of the big insights there is if you get down and look at the work, I'm sure we'll come back to this idea a couple different times. Most jobs have been designed in ways that people doing those jobs often learn exactly the wrong lessons as to how to do their job effectively.

(07:55) And so the second principle is all about how do we design the work so the person doing it learns the right lessons about how to get better and you can spot places where your organization is mismatched with what the environment requires. Third principle is what we call connect the human chain. And the basic idea there is once we've spotted a problem, let's make sure it gets to the person who's best positioned to solving it.

(08:16) I was just looking at the LinkedIn today and Adam Grant who many of your listeners probably know had just posted this little thing that said this cultural norm that many organizations have of don't bring me problems bring me solutions might be my vote for the most damaging idea that you could have in an organization I could go on about that for hours but the idea behind the connect the human chain is don't think that way the moment we spot a problem let's make sure the organization is wired together so it gets quickly to the person best positioned to solve it

(08:43) Number four is called regulate for flow. Basic idea there is most organizations have way too much work in them. Um in studies of R&D it's not unusual to have three to four times as many projects as you have resources to do which would seem disconnected to dynamism except that when you take on too much work your organization resembles a highway on Friday afternoon in the summertime, right? It's completely gridlocked with cars and gridlock is not a dynamic flexible system, right? We can't do anything. And so being able to regulate

(09:12) the amount of work you have in the system so that you match supply and demand actually turns out to be really key in terms of maintaining that ability and uh adaptability. Uh and then the last one is what we call visualize the work and the big insight there is this is one of the things that again came out a little bit late in our research is in retrospect if you look at most of the major work design innovations out there most of them have come in physical work and in particularly in factories.

(09:35) six sigma lean and six sigma and all those things. And I think the reason for that is that physical work is easier to design because it tends to give you clear signals when something's gone wrong, right? If I have Don used to run the engine plant at Harley-Davidson, you know, moving assembly line, you can see the engine's chunk down.

(09:50) When the assembly line breaks, the work stops, right? And if you're the plant manager, you're probably going to walk over to the point where it stopped and hey, what's going on? Can I help? Knowledge work gives us none of those signals, right? So, while people are listening to this podcast, probably someone that works for you is getting stuck at this very moment, but when are you going to find out about it? Well, maybe they'll text you, maybe they'll send you an email, but you're fighting the psychology here a little bit in the

(10:12) sense that no one really wants to tell their boss. Remember, you know, bring me solutions, not problems. And so, every knowledge worker will resonate with the idea that often really important pieces of information about problems only show up very, very late. And so the visualize the work idea is if we can create a kind of radar screen so that you can see the work move through your organization that tends to surface problems much sooner.

(10:35) It makes the system much easier to manage. And to give you a little metaphor um you know imagine if air traffic controllers had to do their work using Excel spreadsheets. I think we would all be enormously hesitant to fly in that context. But you know thank god they don't do that right. They have a radar screen.

(10:50) They can see the planes move around and they can make smart choices. And so that last principle is really about what's the radar screen you use to see how the work is moving or not in your organization. >> There's so many things we'd love to get stuck into and I think that's been one of the big sources of conversation that we've had.

(11:04) But um I think one of the things that really stood out for me is that they're called principles. They're not steps. They're not like steps 1 2 3 through to five. How what is it about those principles and how do you apply them in an organization? >> So such a great question. I'm really glad you picked up on that. The the choice of the word principle is very deliberate.

(11:22) Uh and the reason for that is if you think about it, you all know this better than me is so much of the management world thought leader management world is about best practices, right? So we go see what Google does or Tesla or I don't know who you Nvidia might be the hot organization we're all looking at now. I don't know. And then whatever they're doing, if they're a high performance organization, we should do that too.

(11:41) But if you look at the research, um that strategy really doesn't work that often. And I think for expost a fairly obvious reason which is even if you are in the same industry and across the street from each other every organization's a little bit different right they have different norms they have different languages and so on and so it's very difficult to take a practice from one place and just plop it down in the other and have it be successful and I've done a lot of work in the energy industry and at least in the US a lot of the energy industry is

(12:10) literally on one freeway in Houston Texas and I've seen cases where you take a practice literally across the street like from one company to the next and the receiving company struggles because they do things a little bit differently than their otherwise very similar competitor on the other side of the road.

(12:26) And so the practical upshot of that is that anytime a manager or leader tries to do something new, they're going to have to adapt that practice to the sort of local culture in their organization. What we the reason we chose the word principles is if you know a little bit why that practice works, right? what's the sort of behavioral principle about how it is that humans engage with work.

(12:46) Then hopefully you're going to be in a better position to adapt that tool or that practice to the work. And so what I want from the book and the reason we call them principles is people to understand why these things work. I mean you don't need to understand all the science and the Greek letters and the statistics behind it, but I want intuitively to know why this is a good thing to do when humans engage with work.

(13:06) So that as you're adapting it to your local culture, you can make smart choices about that adaptation. And just to give you a very simple example, in the early days of Harley-Davidson long ago when they were adopting some of the lean production tools, one of the things they did is they took all the Japanese words and they replaced them with plain spoken American words.

(13:21) That was a good choice for them given that their major competitors were in Japan and their unionized workforce, you know, wasn't so enthusiastic about adopting practices that came from another part of the world. In many cases, the adaptation's a little bit more sophisticated than that. But I think it's a really important role for managers trying to do new things that I think in many cases are a little bit undervalued.

(13:39) >> I guess just you kind of sort of like making sure you're solving the right problem. Like what are some of the symptoms that might indicate that you need this kind of work? I guess one of the terms that really stood out from us from the book was firefighting arsonists, which is possibly the most colorful metaphor that we've seen in quite a while.

(13:56) So what what might be some of the simp you know this is this is where we need to look. >> So uh great question. I should say uh I was not the originaler of the firefighting arsonist label that came from um you know now a forgotten person at Harley-Davidson but the basic idea is of the firefighting and I think the symptoms is and it we try to capture this in a quote from one of our former students that's right in the first page of the book and the quote is is the person said you know I know my organization's in trouble when I show up in Monday morning I sit in my office I

(14:21) make a list of all the important things I want to do that week I work my ass off all week and then Friday afternoon I go back to my office I check my list and I've got nothing done and you The way I sometimes try to sort of summarize that is that in that situation the system is managing you rather than you are managing it right and if you have that feeling right that you don't control your day and you're constantly responding to what's happening your organization rather than making choices about strategy and capabilities and so

(14:47) on and so forth then I think this tool set is probably for you because it's what the source of that firefighting is and we alluded to this a little bit earlier is that you have an organization that just is not able to adapt to the changes in the world at least using its formal processes.

(15:04) And so that's when the workarounds and the surreptitious stuff come in. And the kind of cruel irony or paradox of all this is that those workarounds are done with the best of intentions, but they tend to make the organization in the long run more rigid rather than more flexible because what you get is this kind of amalgam of all these little pieces of chewing gum sort of mushed together that doesn't add up to the results that anybody wants.

(15:27) So, if you feel like you're out of control, if you feel like you have too many meetings, if you feel like you're just reacting to things that happen during the day, that you go to boring meetings all day and then the most important stuff happens in your email inbox at night or, you know, on Slack messages on your phone or whatever, you know, then I think this is probably a useful useful exercise just to give a little color to the firefighting arsonist.

(15:47) Where that came from is Harley had these problems extremely acutely and really struggled to get projects out the door and every year the month or two before product launch was just this non-stop chaos of people flying from the R&D center to the factory and carrying parts and duffel bags. It was just a huge mess.

(16:03) But it turned out that there were some project managers that were much better at that than others. Uh and so that raised this really interesting question that my students at the time sort of dug into which is why is it that a few people are so good at running this gauntlet of all this chaos compared to you know their colleagues.

(16:21) And at the time those project managers was known as the firefighters and that was a compliment at the time like you know if your project's important make sure it's managed by one of these people. And so we did a little kind of informal research about where uh what made them good firefighters. And in retrospect the answer was pretty clear u although I'm not sure we knew it ahead of time which was the firefighters had better social network to the scarce resources required to get their project done. Right.

(16:44) And Harley's a relationship based company at least at the time. the employees spend a lot of time socializing outside of work. And so, you know, I might go to you, Garren, and say, you know, you might be in charge of the test lab, but, you know, my project's not number one on the list, but I just need this test.

(16:56) Couldn't you just run, you know, move me to the top and get it done, get my data, and hey, I'll see you this weekend at the bowling league or a motorcycle ride or whatever. And and so what the firefighters would do is they would go around to all the scarce resources and basically use their social network to pull resources towards their projects.

(17:11) Um and so you know what was happening of course and the reason for the firefighting arsonist terminology is yes they were getting their projects done but they were leaving this wake of chaos behind them because you know the less charismatic project manager was not getting his test results as quickly and had to wait longer and it you know and it just the the mess kind of reinforced reinforced itself and we see versions of this in almost every organization we visit that you know the place is a mess but smart talented people figure out how

(17:38) to get their work done. problem is that the methods that they sometimes choose don't add up to the results that the organization necessarily wants. >> As you were talking, I was just thinking, how do we convince people? Because when people are stuck in that firefighting mode and they're just constantly reacting, how do you convince them there is a way out of it and it's not just this is just the way things are, there's no way out.

(17:58) >> It's addictive. >> Because it is addict. Yeah. >> Yeah. It's another fabulous question. Uh and um I remember once at Harley sitting at a meeting with the then chief executive officer who was a very smart guy. He had been an engineering professor at a major university. I mean, really very intelligent.

(18:14) And he looked Don and I right in the face and just said, "Product development's messy. Nothing you can do about it." Exactly what you said, Danny. That that's just the way it is. And, you know, there's no point in trying to manage it. And, you know, this was probably in the mid 1990s. And, you know, the fact that there was a company called Honda that was, you know, developing products and half the time for half the money like somehow just didn't like register with him.

(18:37) And I don't think, you know, it's any lack of intelligence on his part. Quite the opposite. I just think he was so in the fishbowl of how they were doing stuff, it was very difficult to conceive an alternate reality even though they were compelling examples in other in other industries. So I think it is easy to learn the right the wrong lesson in these settings.

(18:53) You know, if you spend enough time in it, you start to just believe that's how the world works. Um and so in terms of how you get people sort of over the hump to change it, here's the thing not to do. You know, don't walk in and say, I heard this podcast from this guy at MIT or I read this book and they tell us we're doing everything wrong and we need to change everything at once.

(19:08) I promise you that won't work. The strategy that we've had the best luck with is to really proceed incrementally, which is to find the biggest piece of chaos. Formulate a clear problem statement. That's the principle one from our our format. Scope it down to an even smaller manifestation of it if you can and just solve one little problem.

(19:28) Get a couple points on the board. Make this work a little bit better. Because once people can see like, oh, like there actually is a better way. Sorry to connect to the title of the book. Then the momentum really starts to pick up. And so to give you an example, there's a case we talk about in the book. I had a former student that works at a big semiconductor manufacturer around here.

(19:43) And they were trying to reduce the product development time, which I think it was three or four years in total. But for his project, he scoped it down to just one piece, which is what they call first silicone characterization, which is basically when you have the first prototype chip, it's actually a fairly complicated process to measure the performance of, you know, because there's power and speed and heat and there's a whole bunch of different things.

(20:06) And that was a 4mon chunk of that overall four years. And so his initial project basically took that four months down to one month. Once he did that, everyone's like, "Oh, wait. We can make a difference now. We can move on to other pieces or other parts of the organization." But I think that kind of creeping incrementalism tends to work much much better.

(20:23) And I will say, particularly for the more senior leaders that are listening to the podcast, it will feel in the beginning like you're working below your pay grade, right? I think big leaders often think that I'm a big leader. I got a big span of control. I need to make big changes to solve our problems.

(20:39) And I think, you know, and the way that results, and I use this little cartoon all the time, is okay, we're going to have a big initiative. We're going to have t-shirts and coffee mugs and off-sites, and we're going to hire consultants, and we're all going to sign our name to the wall. You know, I mean, you all know these trappings as well as I do, but that just doesn't work very often and for a lot of reasons.

(20:54) And so, it will feel like you're working below your pay grade, but if you can kind of get over that, I think you'll learn a lot about how your organization actually works. And once you have succeeded in a small area, it becomes much easier to propagate it to the rest of the rest of the organization. >> And it's interesting, is it because I guess this you mentioned it earlier like the ability to expedite things.

(21:12) You can all see where cuz people's careers, some people's careers are actually based on the ability to expedite the system and it's kind of where organizations lose their way a little, isn't it? Where it's like the needs of the individual, it serves your career. Like expediting is good.

(21:28) Um, how do you start to sort of take that on as a challenge? And I guess that starting small means you've got an evidence base to point at to say it can improve things. >> Yeah. And I think so that just for a little background, you know, in the pre-lean world of manufacturing, expediting was actually a job class in factories.

(21:44) So there was a group of people, they were often your sort of most experienced hands that would show up in the morning, they'd find all the things that you were supposed to make that were going to be late and then they would hand carry them through the factory, right? It was exactly like the firefighters did in product development at Harley.

(21:56) and they would basically move them to the top of the queue in every sort of station throughout the factory and get them done. And I think the thing that people didn't understand at the time is that is un sadly a very self-fulfilling prophecy which is that if I expedite one project or job or whatever I've made everyone other others late and then next tomorrow those need to be expedited and pretty soon the only way anything gets in done is through expediting right it you know nothing ever gets done through the normal process and in the world of knowledge

(22:23) work you know we are all professional expediters myself included you know and one of the examples I use in class is how many times have you sent someone an and then picked up your phone and texted them, hey, just wanted to let you know I sent an email. Right? That is the knowledge work version of expediting, right? And then if they don't respond to your text, how many times have you then picked up the phone and said, >> "Hey, I don't know if you saw my email.

(22:44) " Right? You know, all of this is basically, you know, we're treating jobs or work or whatever it is as a special case. And it just gets worse and pretty soon the only way things get done is with this kind of all hands sort of expediting. I think once people see that, they tend to have a pretty intuitive understanding of how inefficient it is.

(23:04) But that's not the same thing as having the experience of doing it right. But the other sort of little rhetorical gambit that I think we sometimes use to kind of get this idea seared in people's heads is I think everyone's had the experience of when you've had a crisis and suddenly all the organizational BS and competing priorities sort of melt away and then people like, "Oh, wow. You're right.

(23:25) during that crisis, wow, we got a lot done and it was more fun, it was more satisfying. And I think if you can kind of tap into that experience, you know, I often say like, wouldn't it be nice if we could get that level of joy and functionality in our work without having to really screw something up first? People like, well, yeah, that would be great.

(23:42) Um, and so I think if people can kind of get that in their head, then the next step is to, you know, let's find a small experiment where we're just going to work on a few things till they're done and then move on to the next ones and not expedite. And then once they experience it, then I think you're off to the races in terms of making things work better.

(23:56) >> Which is interesting because because even the most dysfunctional organization is able to do that in a crisis, isn't it? So it does show that there is that latent capability in an organization should it require. >> Yeah. I mean I think you know at MIT during the summer of 2020 when we were you know in lockdown from COVID you know we had one goal which was get the students back on campus in September safely.

(24:17) I think we got more done in those three or four months than maybe in the previous five years. you know, we built testing stations and card swipe terminals and a custom app and a ton of infrastructure. We had a super clear target. There were no competing priorities. A lot of the hierarchy and stuff, you know, kind of disappeared because we were all aligned with that target.

(24:35) And again, it wouldn't it be nice and I think this is one way to understand dynamic work design is if we could work that way, at least similar to it all the time rather than have to wait for a global pandemic or some other major calamity. So, >> and one of the things you talk about in the book which I thought was really interesting was the importance of obser observing the work.

(24:50) And we don't spend enough time, do we? Kind of really just watching what's going on rather than trying to fix. >> Yeah. So, this is a principle that we appropriated from Toyota. The Toyota production system has always been very big on what they call go to gamba and the word gambas that sort of loosely translates in Japanese to the the place where the work gets done.

(25:08) Um, and in our sort of problem solving process, step one is formulate the problem statement. Step two is go see the work happen. Um, and I think the easiest way to kind of give you a sense of how this really feels is we I teach a project class here to our executive MBA students. And so assignment one is pick a problem you're going to solve in your home organization.

(25:25) Then assignment two is go see the work. Um, and as they're walking out of class when I give them this assignment, we always give them the guidance of when you go do your go see and assess, if you're not embarrassed by what you find, you're just not looking closely enough. And the students look at me like, "Oh, this guy at MIT is in the ivory tower.

(25:41) he doesn't understand my organization. We're really good at what we do. I'm not going to find anything embarrassing. I'm like, "Okay, just try it." You know, I make the rules. You have to do it. And then when they come back a couple weeks later for the next class, you know, I always open class with, "Hey, anybody find anything embarrassing?" You know, then we spent 45 minutes sharing stories about the crazy stuff that people find.

(25:58) I think what's so interesting about that is that the crazy stuff that people find is not because you have bad people working for you. It's exactly the opposite, right? because of these static assumptions and the fact that we can't adapt processes to the changing world that pushes people into these workarounds.

(26:16) And so all these nutty things that people find when they go see the work are all the result of really well-intentioned efforts to get the work done in an impossible situation. Last year in the class, I had a student who was a kidney transplant surgeon and so his problem was to try to turn around the operating room faster so they could get more surgeries done.

(26:35) He's going to see the work and he's watching the nurses get the room set for the next surgery. And they have these plastic bags that have the instruments in them that they, you know, the scalpels and sort of various pieces. And the nurse is like ripping open a bag. She'd look at it and then she'd put it aside and she'd rip open another bag.

(26:51) And it turns out what's going on is she's looking at the instruments and some of them had what they euphemistically called bioden, uh, which was basically leftover stuff from the last surgery that hadn't been properly cleaned off. And she just kept ripping bags open. in one case, eight bags until she found a clean set of instruments.

(27:07) Okay, what's going on here? Well, he does a little follows the work and it turns out the instruments after surgery go to the cleaning room which has the autoclave. The people in the cleaning room have no idea why they're doing this. They're completely disconnected from the other activity. They don't know why it's important. The autoclave is old.

(27:22) They don't have performance standards. And so just in that little moment of looking at this piece, he discovers a whole supporting process that as a surgeon he'd never even really known was there that no one had ever thought about and came up with some really easy wins to make that stuff work better.

(27:38) So I think if you're going to fix the work because it's this amalgam of all these adaptations, you really need to go see it. And when you do that, you know, you'll typically discover a bunch of really easy to exercise improvement opportunities that you can often fix right away. And you know we one of my favorite examples that we talk about a little bit in the book is it's always a surprise at least astoning thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of work which seems insane in this electronically connected day and age but there's still a lot of printers

(28:07) out there. And in Don's own shop when he worked at Intermatic, right, this dot matrix printer was delaying tens of thousands of dollars worth of work each day because they couldn't print out the pick sheets that people would then get to go pull the things that were going to be shipped that day off the rack.

(28:21) So those are the kinds of things that you find. And so, you know, just to kind of wrap this up, make the time to go see the work and you will learn a lot about what happens in your organization. And that often can, you know, really be the catalyst to a whole new trajectory for making your organization work better.

(28:37) And just one followup question that just and it might seem like a dumb question. Um, and you talk about in the book is like one of the things about manufacturing is you can actually see the work moving around the factory, can't you? But like you sort of saying like with knowledge work, it can just go onto someone's daybook and it just doesn't move, does it? It just gets carried over.

(28:54) Like how do you observe knowledge work? Like what's um what's a good practice for that? I think you know in some cases you can watch it. You know it can be as simple as watching your software engineers or seeing the meetings or you know watching how often they sit at their desk and some days I think in many cases you have to sit down and talk to people and you know ask them well how do you do your work and one of the other techniques that we talk a little bit about in the book is we often get students to draw process maps but we recommend doing a little bit differently

(29:21) than I think the conventional ones which is we're not so worried about what an individual does for their work. we kind of assume that they know what they're doing, but just map how the work moves from person to person and we draw these really silly little stick figures and then arrows from one person to the next.

(29:36) But often if I get people to just say like, "Okay, Garren, when do you start your work?" Well, I get an email from Danny saying, "Hey, I read this book and I think it might be a good topic for the podcast." Okay, well, what happens next? you think about it a little bit and then maybe you email someone else or you email Danny back and like just that nuts and bolts mapping of how those ideas move back and forth really will reveal a lot and what you often find is the diagram has this kind of Jackson Pollock modern art flavor to it because the

(30:02) arrows are all over the place and it's because no one's ever thought about it right it's knowledge work and so it it doesn't have a clear routing or path like it would in the factory uh and in many cases again just drawing that little picture can lead to really simple >> which I guess leads on to one of your principles which visualize the work which um for me this whole book was chicken soup for the soul.

(30:23) It's just this is where we are all of the time and the fact that you just had such great research and insight. It was just it was a real joy to read and I think it was it was like the simplicity of it but the way that it's done so visualizing the work and get it up on the wall and you can actually see the speed at which work goes and it gets stuck as well.

(30:42) What what what led you to that sort of understanding of that way of working and how can that be applied? So we first learned an really first learned about this technique with some contact from folks that had worked in some of the major Japanese manufacturers like Toyota. So the Japanese version of this is called Obea which stands for big room.

(31:01) Uh and at the time when we first learned about it, it was a very manual process with whiteboards and post-its and markers and we'll come to the more modern version of that. Um but I think this is a case where they had learned this through experience and so there was a lot of ritual that went to the technique some of which was very helpful and some I think in retrospect wasn't helpful.

(31:22) Don experienced it in his factory and you know saw immediately that wow there's a lot of power here and so we started really experimenting with it and trying to figure out what was actually going on here and why did this work and why didn't it work and where could we adapt it um and I think you know back to the little analogy I gave you earlier right you know what we've come to believe is that and I don't think we appreciate this when we first saw it is that first physical work is easier because again it tends to give you clear signals about when it's going

(31:47) well and not going well knowledge work is much harder for all the reasons you decided And almost any visualization that you can create that shows the work move and then when it's not moving can help us sort of leverage all the visual system that we have as human beings to make better choices about how to allocate our scarce resources.

(32:05) And so to to give you a little cartoon of how this works often in R&D processes which tend to be very Byzantine and a lot of back and forth um the first thing we'll do is we'll take a team and say okay just draw a little picture of your process on the whiteboard or the wall or whatever. you know, we have an idea phase, we have an investigation phase, and then we coding or whatever it might be.

(32:24) Then step two is all right, here's a book of post-its. Just every project that you're working on right now, put it on a post-it and put it in the right space on the board. Yeah. First thing that happens is they immediately say like, I had no idea how much work we had going on. Right? So, this gets to the regulate the flow thing.

(32:42) Often there'll be two or three times as much work as they have resources to do. And more interesting at least for me is it's very rare that any single person in the organization even the nominal boss knows about every project that's underway. So these kind of product development funnels tend to be very porous where people have an idea they just start working on them.

(32:59) So that in and of itself is a really useful exercise uh like okay we need to set some priorities or learn to manage this better. Uh but then once they kind of get that a little bit rationalized, what we then ask people to do is on each post-it or digital card, you know, write down the date that this project is supposed to exit this particular phase.

(33:16) Fine. And then if it misses the date, put a contrasting color post-it, usually pink for us, on top of it. Now, when we see the board, you can see what's on schedule and what's late. Okay? Then when you meet in front of the board, like, okay, let's talk about the ones with the pink postits first, right? Cuz that's the place where the assembly line is broken.

(33:35) Maybe we have a problem to solve. Maybe we need some more resources. Maybe we have a competition or whatever it might, you know, a competition with another activity, whatever it might be. And suddenly the team can really use its scarce resources much more effectively to focus on the exceptions rather than just, you know, the tedious project reviews that we all have wasted years of our life in.

(33:52) You know, oh, everything's fine. Let's move on to the next one. That's not a useful time, right? We want to focus on the places where stuff is stuff is broken. And then the last little piece is, and um we've seen this a couple different places, is you may rationalize the portfolio, but if you're not careful, new projects will creep in and you'll be back into that overload state.

(34:12) And so if every project is late, uh and one of the groups we work with because they use the pink post-its, they call talk about their board going pink, right? If every postit has a pink post-it on top of it, that means you've now crept back into the overload situation. Now, we need to have another discussion about getting the right amount of right amount of work.

(34:30) So, we've had really good luck with this. People are a little bit suspicious of it at first and they'll say, "Well, my work can't be managed." And so on and so forth. But if people make the effort to do it, it becomes a really powerful tool. And and then, you know, the one other thing I should probably say is now in the postcoid world where work is so remote, you know, you're probably going to need a digital tool rather than the post-its and the whiteboards. Totally fine.

(34:52) There's a lot of good tools out there and and this is a space that's changing very rapidly. So I I suspect the tools will get better fast and they're already pretty good. But I think the correlary to that is the magic of the visual management at the end of the day is the quality of the conversation that you and your team have in front of the board, not the board itself.

(35:12) And I think the one risk of the digital tools is I might say like, hey, you know, I'm really busy. I can't make the meeting today. I promise I'll check the board when I get home tonight. The moment that happens, I think the magic is lost because it's the the human conversation in front of the board where you get to make smart choices as a team about what you work on that really matters.

(35:28) So, I have no problem with digitization. I think it's a reality that everybody faces and the digital boards do enable a lot of features that you don't get with the um with the postits, but keep the card and the horse in the right order. Right? If you're having a good quality conversation about resource allocation in front of the board, it's probably working for you.

(35:43) If people are obsessed with the colors and the shapes and integrating it with other systems, but you're not having good meetings, then I think you kind of missed the mark a little bit and probably need to reset. Hi, we're just pausing this interview for a moment. Have you ever finished an episode of the org dev podcast and wish you had a cheat sheet that summarizes all of the key points? Us too, so we made one.

(36:04) It's called from pod to practice. And each week in our newsletter, we'll share a two-page summary of the latest org dev episode. And it includes key takeaways, a reflection prompt, and one small action you can try. And it's all in a digital format with space at the end to add your own notes and reflections. And it's designed to help you take the learning from the podcast into your day-to-day work.

(36:25) So to get your copy, just sign up to our next step to better newsletter, the links in the show notes, or you can visit our website at www.distinction.live to get the latest from pod to practice in your inbox. And let us know what you think. We'd love to get your feedback. >> And you talk in the book about huddles and handoffs, don't you? The huddle being the the kind of conversation around a around that sort of board, but a handoff can be if something's quite standardized, then you can have maybe a checklist or something more structured

(36:48) and not to Yeah. >> use them in the wrong way at the wrong time. >> No, you got it exactly right. I think and this is sort of embedded in the connect the human chain principle which is if you think about work moving from person to person particularly knowledge work there's some work that because it's sufficiently well- definfined that you and I don't necessarily need to have a conversation right you know simple example I get my paycheck every two weeks it just shows up everything's been pre-negotiated that's what we call a

(37:16) handoff right that transfer is really clearly defined and you know it would be a huge waste of time to have a meeting every week to just like, hey, Nelson, here's your paycheck. Do you have any questions? Well, no. It's exactly the same as it was two weeks ago. But on the flip side, there's many things in the world of knowledge work where, you know, if I'm transferring the work to you, right, it can't be captured in a checklist because the work is really ambiguous and there's a lot of stuff that's going on. And so, that's a place

(37:40) where we probably want to leverage the value of facetoface communication to transfer that work. And so, we call that a huddle. And the reason I think this distinction is useful is once you think about it this way, particularly in knowledge work, you can see lots of places where we're using huddles when it should be a handoff and occasionally places where we're using handoffs that should be huddles.

(38:01) And so if you think the latter where, you know, maybe I email the work to Garen when in fact we should probably have a meeting. If it's ambiguous work, right, we are setting ourselves up for trouble because he doesn't know exactly what I was thinking. we didn't transfer with the conversation. And so, one of two things is going to happen, which is either I've introduced a defect because he's not clear on what I was going to do.

(38:21) I'm going to make an assumption. Or what I think happens more often is he's going to email me back. Hey, what about this? What about that? And before you know it, we've emailed back and forth 12 times to kind of get this ambigu ambiguity sorted. It would be infinitely more efficient for you and I just to have a five-minute conversation in that handoff, right? And you know, we all know that this is a problem intuitively because I think everyone's had a text message chain that has gone horribly off the rails because of some, you know,

(38:45) unsurfaced assumption like, "Oh, you meant we were going to meet on the west side of town at the hamburger place or whatever." Those conversations are much more effective face to face. So, thinking about these transfers about which one of these can be handoffs, which are very efficient, and which ones really need to be huddles again, can unlock some really big gains.

(39:03) And as a really practical guide, if you find any sort of transfer that requires zillions of emails and you have these long email chains or, you know, big long Slack threads, almost certainly you're missing a huddle in there, right? You know, and a 15-minute meeting can often take hundreds of emails a day out of your email system because you're using communication for what it's good for in those contexts.

(39:23) >> And you talk about an evaluation of a good meeting is how many uh decisions were made and how many problems were solved. Is is that a good metric? Is it? >> Yeah. So, you know, I I am probably guilty of just devolving into the scholarly version, right? If you read the communications research and so on and so forth.

(39:38) What is facetoface communication good for? It's for processing ambiguity, right? You know, when we're transferring uncertain information, you know, that probably sounds a little bit abstract. So, I think the practical version of that is exactly as you site, which is, you know, what's a meeting good for? Well, we should either be making decisions, right, which usually involves some kind of ambiguity processing, or solving problems, which for almost for sure has some kind of ambiguity embedded in it.

(40:00) Uh, and so if you're trying to assess whether we need this meeting, right, you know, just keep track on a piece of paper how many decisions we make or problems we solve, and I'm guessing for many people, they go to a lot of meetings where that number is pretty close to zero for each uh instance. That probably could have been a handoff rather than a huddle.

(40:18) Um, and then I I think another way to see this is just think about the cartoon of when your organization wants to do something new, right? You go to your 60 or 90 minute meeting, you watch a bunch of slides, there's one softball question at the end, right? It's been all one-way information transfer and then you walk out in the hallway and you look at your car like going, "Oh my gosh, what are we going to do? I'm going to have to change this. I'm going to have to change that.

(40:37) " And you're up all night on email trying to sort of sort out the ambiguity. That's almost exactly backwards as to what would be an efficient use of your time, right? you know, that proud point presentation probably could have been sent out as a pre-eread or you can do the Amazon thing and just have sit and read the memo for the first 15 or 20 minutes and then have a two-way conversation about what are we going to have to do differently as a consequence of this new direction for the organization because that face toface

(41:01) meeting is an ideal venue to sort out all the little adjustments that we're going to need to make like okay G I'm going to have to change the logo well don't change the logo you know like I mean because there's a lot of back and forth as we're trying to coordinate all this different different activity in the moment that devolves to the electronically mediated communication typically you're just wasting a lot of time a lot of time and energy >> and the other thing as I was reading this particular part of the book I was

(41:24) thinking about AI and kind of organizations introducing AI agents into their their work and what that might mean and yeah it was haven't got any answers but it made me think >> I think we're in the questions phase of AI >> yeah let's see we're at 10:30 so we've gone almost a half hour without saying AI so that's pretty good um I've been joking lately that you know as an MIT Hey, professor.

(41:45) I'm contractually obligated to say the words AI at least every 15 minutes. So, I think I violated the terms of my um employment a little bit, but I I do think this is AI is has so many opportunities for improved work design and I also think most organizations in the short run are going to screw it up pretty badly. Um, and there's an analogy that I've been using lately.

(42:08) It's kind of old, but I think it's illustrative, which is if you go way back in the wayback machine to the 1980s, um, there was a point in which I think the US auto manufacturers were really starting to realize that their Japanese competitors were quite formidable and that they were losing market share, so on and so forth. And so, at that time, GM in particular decided that the way they were going to compete was through robots.

(42:27) So, Jack Smith, who was the CEO at the time, made this enormous push. we're going to build these lights out fully robotic factories and this is going to get us back in the game. And you know, I went back and looked at this and the expense that they had at the time was somewhere between 50 and hundred billion dollars on robots, right? And this is 1980s, so this is like an enormous amount of money and it never worked.

(42:52) The robotic factories never had the same productivity as their more human- centered factories. You go back and read some of the case studies, you know, the robots were painting each other and they were welding car doors shut. I mean, it was just it was a disaster. And a former CFO of GM calculated that for the money they spent on robots, GM could have bought Toyota, right? Imagine how different that industry would be today if GM had just acquired Toyota. So, total disaster.

(43:18) Yet, fast forward today, 45 years, right? You go to any automobile factory or any factory really, right? There's automation robots everywhere, right? So they had the right answer, right? But the way they went about implementing it was clearly flawed. And if you contrast that with other manufacturers, they went in a much more incremental mindset like, okay, here's a job that is unsafe and people are getting injured because you have to lift something heavy.

(43:41) Okay, let's use a robot there. That's a really good choice. And then we'll learn a little bit about how the robots interact with our work and we'll grow kind of incrementally. Um, and I think that for me is a really cautionary tale about AI, which is, you know, AI in some sense is going to be the robots for knowledge work.

(43:58) It's not a perfect analogy, but it's close enough. Um, and I think what's happening right now is people are getting the cart and the horse in the wrong order again, which is, you know, we're going to we need to have an AI every CEO is getting pressure from their board to have an AI strategy right now. And so I think there's a strong tendency to we're just going to do AI everywhere.

(44:15) And I think that's going to be a big mistake, right? the AI agents are not going to get along with each other and so on and so forth. So I think the right strategy here is going to be exactly as we sort of you know evangelize more generally is the goal of processes is deliver value to the customers right none of them are perfect so find a problem where you think AI is a good solution use it there you're going to learn a little little bit about how AI interacts with the organization and build it incrementally and another way

(44:40) of saying this is I have a former student has this fabulous phrase that I utter all the time in this context which is he said there's few ways to lose money faster than trying to automate a process you understand or don't understand and and I think that's exactly what's happening now and so you're going to see this big backlash and then once that kind of goes through it then people will be a little bit more sensible like oh this is a great application this is a great application and then you know we will learn our way

(45:02) into it and I'm sure if we have this conversation 20 years from now AI will be ubiquitous but there will also have been a lot of wasted money when people have you know kind of gone about it I think in um an overly enthusiastic way maybe is the nicest way to say it >> one of the things I really wanted to ask because as I've been reading the book I've been obsessing about different chapters and I One of the ones that has just been I've been thinking about a lot is regulate for flow and the way it kind of sort of challenges some of the

(45:25) natural assumptions. It's almost like counterintuitive and you gave a particular example um of an ICU intensive care unit um and the fact the sort of the prevailing mindset was you know surgeons are really expensive. We need to fully fully utilize them at all times. But what it did it didn't meet the sort of the capacity in the chain.

(45:44) So could you just tell us a bit more about that and how that sort of challenges people's mindsets? This is probably the single most counterintuitive idea in the book which is that and I think the core of the regulate the flow is is that many people have the mental model that the more stuff I cram in the beginning of the process the more I get out the other side and that is just not true.

(46:04) Uh and it's not true for a variety of reasons that we could go into but when you overload a process um it tends to get people to be focused more on shortrun interventions rather than long run. Turns out there's a pretty substantial overhead just associated with task switching. Right? All right. So, if I have six projects I'm working on, I put one down, I have to move to the next.

(46:21) Okay, what are we working on? What, you know, so on so forth. Like, that's just expensive. People are more efficient when they can work on one or two things and not be interrupted. Uh, and then also overload systems are just very fragile to small interruptions. This is why you get traffic jams on Friday afternoon, which is there just more cars on the highway that it can handle and each little hiccup just basically causes the thing to grind grind to a halt.

(46:43) Um, also because because you give an example of like you wouldn't stop a pilot halfway through landing and say, "Would you mind just helping us with this other task?" >> Exactly. Right. >> That happens in organizations, doesn't it? >> Right. You know, or if you have a heart surgeon that's in the middle of, you know, some invasive procedure, right? You know, if another high, you know, value patient shows up, you're not going to be like, "Okay, stop.

(47:00) We'll come back to this later." Like, you know, that that's risky and dangerous on a whole bunch of different different levels. And so the basic idea behind regulate the flow is we need to figure out right what is the right amount of work to put in the system that maximizes the throughput. And you know it's interesting because lots of organizations think they do this but there's sort of two ways to do this which I call bottom up and top down.

(47:22) The bottomup strategy for doing this I think lots of organizations are pretty familiar with which is okay I look at this project I scope it out and it has about 50,000 hours of work in this and then I compare this to the organization and okay we have the resources to do this over 3 years or something like that and it there's usually really complicated spreadsheets or work planning management tools that go with that.

(47:43) That approach is notoriously unreliable because that 50,000 hour estimate is almost for sure too rosy. There's actually good scholarly evidence that when people make these plans, they almost always devolve to the best case scenario rather than the average scenario. And so what we preach at least as a complement to that is you really need to learn your way in to the right loading and not count entirely on that sort of bottom up approach.

(48:05) So I think of that as the top down. And the way that we recommend doing that is very similar to what we were talking about with visual management which is the basic rule should be the work needs to keep moving, right? And if the work starts to slow down and is stop and is stuck on your desk or someone's desk, that almost for sure means that uh you have too much in the process.

(48:25) And so this is where the visual tools can be enormously helpful because if a task is stuck in my inbox and it's not getting done, it means I'm overloaded. We need to sort of re reconfigure that. So to go back to the uh story which is I was talking about this in class and one of the things that we talk about in class is to get this point is we contrast pull versus push systems in manufacturing.

(48:46) So a push system is every time a new job just shows up I push it into the factory irrespective of whether it has capacity and the result is there's just inventory everywhere and everyone's sort of working like crazy to get stuff done. The essence of a poll system is we fix the amount of work that we have in the system and we only let a new task in when another one is completed.

(49:03) So we have a way of controlling that volume. So I was talking about this in the context of manufacturing and one of my students who was in class at Bil Mi was a cardiac surgeon and he said you know I realized that unbeknownst to me because I'm a doctor not a manufacturing guy we were running a push system in my hospital and what that meant was is that every morning doctors would come in at 7:30 and they would start to do heart surgery cases and then when you were done in the operating room you would be pushed to the intensive care unit which

(49:29) was the next step in the care chain. But when they started cases in the morning, they had no idea whether the ICU had capacity or not, right? And so what would happen is some days, you know, they'd have complications in the ICU and there wouldn't be capacity. And so patients literally out of heart surgery would have to sit in the hallway trying to get care until a bed opened up in the ICU.

(49:53) And this is really the big insight is it turns out that if you had to sit in the ICU in the hallway before getting the ICU, you were more likely to have complications because that was the hallway is not sort of designed for your care which meant you would stay in the ICU longer. So what ail did really clever project is he said well let's make this a more pull style system.

(50:12) Every morning we're going to count the number of beds that we think are going to be ready in the ICU and that's how many cases we're going to do. so that we're allowing the ICU to gate u the process and of course he gets a little push back from his cardiac surgeons because at least in the early days it might mean that you know I'm bringing my mother in for this you know very nerve-wracking heart procedure and the doc might say I'm sorry we can't do it today you're going to have to come back right that's not something any doctor

(50:37) wants to say but here's the sort of trick and I think this is really captures the counterintuitive part which is if you get people into the ICU faster you get them out faster and so once they put this system into place, the capacity actually went up because they had a smooth flow of work. And Ail actually wrote a really nice paper about this and analyzed the data pretty carefully, which he generously allowed me to attach my name to.

(51:01) Does not mean I'm a real doctor by any stretch of the imagination. Um, but they were to show that the average length of stay in the ICU fell by about 7/10en of a day, right? So they were getting people out almost a day faster because they got them in right away. And so once you get that workflow going more smoothly, you actually capacity goes up rather than down and you get a system that is more flexible.

(51:21) And again, just to kind of finish where I started, this is a super and counterintuitive idea I think for many leaders, which is that by starting less work, I feel like I'm giving up on flexibility. But in fact, because the cycle time falls so much, you actually get a system that is both more productive and more adaptable. um you know this is definitely a kind of I have to see it to believe it situation but in many of the applications we've seen the gains in productivity when you do this right are so big that as the academic I'm kind of scratching my head like is

(51:51) this really real but I've seen it happen enough times you we're talking three and fourfold improvements in some cases that I'm pretty confident that it actually is real in this context and I think the reason is because the way that we do it now with the overload just burns way more resources than we think because we've become so habituated so habituated to it >> it's a fairly big question but when you look back at your your career on your research what are some of the biggest lessons that you you've learned and you

(52:14) you forward >> so I have two I think at least um maybe three you know so I think the number one and this is a speech I give to my PhD students all the time which is you know when a PhD student comes in you know they're looking for a topic and they're reading the literature and I think you have this I had this too you have this myth that you know the senior faculty show up and they you know write a brilliant paper in a couple hours and they go out lunch and you know the PhD students are feel kind of lost and you

(52:43) know and what I always tell them is if you walk into any real organization and do your own go see and assess if you can take the blinders off just a little bit and and really think kind of carefully about how the work is actually done versus how we think it should be done there is a lifetime of research topics and I think you know the corary for that for people who are not going to research is don't take the status quo for granted a lot of the stuff that we do is kind kind of crazy and nutty and we do it today because we did it yesterday.

(53:11) Organizations tend to be very inertial inertial beast. So I think number one is and it's hard because again habituation is a very powerful psychological force. But don't be afraid to kind of question the dogma because I think there is this implicit assumption that what is is also what should be there and I just don't think that that's necessarily true all the time. So that's be number one.

(53:33) I think number two for me and I sort of alluded to this earlier is in my work it's always worked best just to get started right you know again I just kind of start focusing on those puzzle pieces and try to just count on the fact that if I keep working on it somehow this whole thing is going to come together and and the analogy that I often give my team right now is it's a little bit what I understand the process of being a stand-up comedian is right you know so you start out on Monday night at open mic night you write a few jokes and you

(53:58) see which people laugh to and then maybe you kind of work out your act and you move to Thursday or Friday and then, you know, only after 2 or 3 years do you do your HBO or Netflix special or whatever. And I think it just takes a lot of iteration for new ideas to really come together cleanly.

(54:14) And you know, and when you say the book is readable, that for me is the highest possible compliment I could get cuz we spent a lot of time and energy trying to get those um you know, get you know, Don and I fought with each other and went back and forth to to try to get what I think were fairly complicated ideas hopefully across in a fairly thing.

(54:31) And I think don't underestimate the work that that takes. I think there's a lot of iteration that goes into it. And um this was probably brought home for me most. I remember when I was a PhD student, my adviser here, who's still a colleague John Sturman, I would give him drafts of my papers, just cover them with red ink. And it was the most demoralizing process.

(54:48) I was like, I am never going to make it here. My work is terrible. And then one day I was traveling with him and we were in, you know, adjoining airplane seats and he pulls out a paper he's working on, you know, to work on on the flight and covered his own paper with red ink. And I was like, "Oh, >> I see." Right. This isn't that I suck. It's that, you know, there's just a level there's a whole level of performance here that I, you know, I don't think I fully appreciate it.

(55:09) Uh, and then I'd say the last thing for me is um, you know, I have gotten so much from my collaborations particularly with Don. You know, I'm a lifetime academic. Don's a lifetime um, you know, manager and leader in the real world. And I I think for us there have been so many gains from that relationship.

(55:26) But it doesn't mean we haven't had the occasional conflict because we definitely fought at different moments during the book process. But I think that ability to have a little bit of humility that maybe your particular profess profession or position doesn't have everything and collaborate has just been enormously useful for me.

(55:42) And I say this all the time, you know, in a perfect world, every class I teach would be joint with a skilled practitioner because I think for me when theory and practice are sort of equally present in my classroom, I think that's really when the magic the magic happens. Those would be the three off top of my head. >> Yeah.

(55:56) and and you you've been a very competitive cyclist as well. How's that shaped your practice? >> Uh so that's such a great question. I I think there's two answers to that question which is uh in my first foray into the sport when I was in my sort of teens and early 20s I was a chronic overtrainer and you know would always train more than I should and you know had very sort of spotty results as a consequence.

(56:19) So one way to interpret the regulate the flow and all the research that I have done about overload and our propensity to take on too much is that's really just about me. It's me search rather than research. So um I think figuring out to regulate volume is something that just been a sort of core theme in my in my life. Uh and then I think the other thing is for me is you know I think through sports and I try to do this with my own children is you know they're just you have bad days right and that's not you know a definitive you know referendum on your whole career and

(56:48) you got to sometimes get through those troths in order to get to the the next level and I think having had the confidence or having had the experience of being through that once in sports made it much easier in academia you know and I remember when I first got to MIT um I was definitely behind my fellow graduate students, you know, probably because I majored in bike racing in college rather than math and all the smart stuff that they done.

(57:10) But I do think competitive sports was really useful in kind of having the confidence to sort of stay the course even when you had bad days because I think I excuse the offg language had my ass handed to me several times in different contexts and had knew that that was a survivable experience.

(57:27) Uh, and I think, you know, had I not had that, I think getting through graduate school and early junior faculty would have been a lot more difficult because, yeah, stuff just doesn't go well, particularly if you're trying to do work that's sort of at the cutting edge of what's what's possible. >> What do you do to keep learning and evolving in your field? Obviously, you've got your professorship and you get invited into lots of interesting research as well, but what particular practices or habits have you found particularly useful to sort of keep the

(57:50) keep the saw sharp for you? >> So, the number one for me is to go to the field. And it's funny, you know, every Sunday night when I've agreed to a trip and I'm packing and I got to go to the airport, I'm like, why did I do this? I don't have time. Travel's a pain in the ass. Uh, and I always come back, I'm like, I'm so happy I've gone.

(58:05) Because I think for me that contact with practitioners and with the real world and talking to people that had real problems has just been a sort of endless source of inspiration. And you know I I one of the things that happened is that the early part of my career in the early version of the firefighting stuff was a lot in R&D organizations and Harley and some car companies and stuff like that.

(58:24) And a little bit later I started working in the energy industry which was a new venue for me. And the thing that was really different is they just had a hazard profile that was so much higher like you know automobile assembly plants do not catch on fire and blow up very often and that does happen much more in chemical and oil refining plants.

(58:42) And so that was you know and what was so helpful about that is seeing the dynamics I had seen in one place in this new place but in a very different organization like really opened my eyes like oh this is actually a more universal set of things and I don't think dynamic work design would exist if I hadn't sort of seen these same dynamics in a couple different venues for so for me number one is definitely getting out of the office um no question >> and obviously we recommend everybody goes and buys your book um but are there

(59:08) any other kind of resources that you've you've read or listened to recently that you that have inspired you and you'd recommend that our audience go and >> uh you know it's interesting um a little bit under duress. Uh I recently read the Elon Musk biography because people kept saying that Walter Isacson book like you got to read this because Elon does some of the stuff you talk about.

(59:28) I I I will say like I do not agree with many of the things that he does. He's a very complicated character. We could probably do a whole other podcast on that. But I do think it is fascinating to sort of think, you know, to see how he works and his kind of laser focus on what's happening on the ground and his willing to get his hands dirty, I think is is pretty impressive.

(59:48) So I think if you can read things like that with a critical eye and, you know, not adopt it wholesale, but think carefully, I think all those tales from the field are very useful. You know, the other thing that I really sort of go back to over and over again is I think in the last 10 or 15 years, you know, the fact that psychologists have been writing more popular books, I think has been a huge bonus for the field.

(1:00:09) And Adam Grant and uh Jonathan hate and um some of the other folks. I I highly recommend all of those those works. I think they're really helpful. you know, the the mapping from what happens in the research lab to what happens in the real world is a little bit complicated. But I think that's stuff that's really inspirational because I think if you go way back to the birth of the modern corporate form and sort of the early 20th century, we just had such an impoverished view of how human beings work.

(1:00:36) And you know, as we learn more about the wonderfully flawed human animal, I think it just just enormously helpful in terms of figuring out how to design organizations that take advantage of the things we're good at and offset some of the things that we're not so good at. >> Brilliant. And then last question from us, what advice would you give if they've listened to this, they've read the book, and they're looking to take their sort of first steps into dynamic work design.

(1:00:58) What um advice would you give someone who's sort of considering sort of applying that in their organization? >> Yeah, so I would say find a problem to go work on. I think, you know, a really good choice is if you have a perennial issue that just happens over and over over again. Again, excuse slightly off-color language is a big pain in your ass. Uh that is a great place to start.

(1:01:14) Uh we talk a little bit in the book about how to formulate clear problem statements, but it's pretty straightforward. Do you have a target? You have an actual if you can see a gap between them and then go see the work. In the final chapter, we talk about this story about Don going to the shipping dock.

(1:01:28) You know, find the equivalent of the shipping dock in your organization and go watch the problem happen. And if you do those two things, you're already 50% of the way, I think, to solving that problem. And then the rest of the book will give you some guidance about how to think about that. But usually those two things are enough to get the momentum get the momentum rolling.

(1:01:45) >> Well, Nelson, want to say a huge thank you. Um, this is our last recording of the year and it's been just we couldn't have finished in more star than this. So, for us, it's been a really brilliant experience, but just sitting with your your your writing and your research has been a really wonderful experience.

(1:01:59) Danny, what are you taking away from today's conversation? >> Yeah, I've really enjoyed it. I thought you've done a really lovely job of bringing the the concepts to life and making them really accessible. So, so thank you for that. Um, I think there's a lot of the things that stick with me, but the idea of principles.

(1:02:12) So, kind of, you know, isolating the principles and really kind of adapting them to your context rather than taking them wholesale. I like what you say about creeping in incrementalization. So, that idea of, you know, start small and prove it works and then then grow out from there. And I love the the discussion about huddles and handoffs and making sure we're identifying where we just need to have a conversation.

(1:02:31) >> Awesome. Well, thank you. I mean, this is a lot of fun. So, thank you for having me. I really appreciate it. >> Brilliant. Yeah. And I think the things that stood out for me, there's so much, but I'd love um exped expediting is the enemy of efficiency. I think that's one of the things I'm taking away. Adrenaline isn't the only um option for optimal working.

(1:02:48) Um, and one of the things I really like as well is that the fact that very senior leaders, it will feel like you're working below your pay grade initially because start small and that's what starts the momentum as well. It's been it's been brilliant. If people want to follow your work, obviously we're we're highly recommending your book on um and it's on audio as well.

(1:03:04) How can people follow your work and and keep up to date? >> Yeah, so please feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn. Uh that's probably my main venue for new stuff. Um always happy to connect with people. Also, Don and I have a little consulting company on the side called Shiftgeear, which you can find at shiftgeear.com.

(1:03:17) All one work. Uh, all one word. Um, and that has, you know, both connections to some of the work we do, but a lot of the resources are YouTube channel and, um, stuff like that. Uh, and then also I have an MIT faculty page, which if you just type my name into whatever your favorite browser, that will come up. But I I actually I think LinkedIn is probably the most immediate place to kind of connect with the ongoing flow of what we're up to and love to connect with people. you.

(1:03:40) So, if if you are watching this and you're thinking you know someone that would really appreciate from um Nelson's writing and research as well, then please do share this. Um we always say this, but we're so impressed with the number of shares that people have. So, if you can see someone who's they're not they're not waving, they're drowning.

(1:03:56) So, um then please do share this with and also if you've really enjoyed it, we'd love it if you like it because the more likes we get, um the more subscriptions we get, the more ability we've got to invite brilliant guests like Nelson onto the onto the podcast as well. Uh but Nelson, above all, we just want to say a huge thank you. You're intensely busy.

(1:04:11) You've made time for us. You've answered all of our questions. Um and you've just been a joy to deal with as well. >> My pleasure. Thank you both. It was a lot of fun. I really appreciate it and thanks for your help getting the word out there. So, >> thank you. Heat. Heat.