From Workarounds to Breakthroughs: Key Principles of Dynamic Work Design

Moderating a recent LinkedIn Live webinar with my MIT Sloan colleagues, Don Kieffer, senior lecturer in operations management at MIT Sloan, and Nelson Repenning, faculty director of the MIT Leadership Center, gave me the chance to revisit one of the most enduring insights from their work: organizational processes and initiatives. For example, big change initiatives rarely fail because they lack good ideas. They fail because their systems of work are not designed to let those ideas thrive.

Nelson and Don call their approach Dynamic Work Design, a set of practices they explore in detail in their new book, There’s Got to Be a Better Way: How to Deliver Results and Get Rid of the Stuff That Gets in the Way of Real Work. It is rooted in the recognition that the world is not static! Plans and budgets assume stability, but markets shift, technology evolves, and unexpected disruptions arise.

When formal processes break down, well-intentioned and committed employees often start to improvise. They create workarounds that may keep things afloat in the short term but quietly erode the organization in the long term.

Dynamic Work Design offers an alternative: principles for structuring work so that problems are surfaced, shared, and solved in ways that strengthen capability. During our discussion, Nelson and Don outlined five key principles.

1. Solve the right problem, the right way.

Organizations often solve problems hastily or misidentify the real issues. Dynamic Work Design insists on using structured methods to ensure that when we fix something, we fix the right thing, do it correctly, and that we learn from the experience.

2. Structure for discovery.

Day-to-day work teaches us lessons, but those lessons can be misleading if the work itself is poorly structured. By setting clear targets and defining activities carefully, leaders can help ensure that employees learn what is actually useful, rather than internalizing unproductive habits.

3. Connect the human chain.

Problems should be directed to the people best positioned to solve them. In knowledge work, unlike a traditional production line, clear pathways rarely exist. Establishing them prevents problems from languishing unseen or being hidden out of fear.

4. Regulate the flow.

By pacing the flow of work, leaders create the slack necessary for meaningful problem-solving and capability building rather than creating a culture of firefighting.

5. Visualize the work.

Make invisible knowledge work visible. Whether through whiteboards or digital tools, teams need a shared “radar screen” that shows where the work is moving, where it is stuck, and where attention is needed.

More than a toolkit

Together, these principles provide a way of thinking, encouraging leaders to see beyond hierarchical charts and static processes, and instead focus on the dynamic interactions that actually determine whether work flows smoothly or gets stuck.

What I found highly compelling was how Nelson and Don balance theory and practice. Nelson, an academic, frames these principles with decades of research across various industries, while Don, a practitioner, grounds them in his lived experience, from his early days of running machinery to his leadership at Harley-Davidson. That combination ensures the principles are both intellectually rigorous and operationally realistic.

Ready to dive deeper? Join their next session of Visual Management for Competitive Advantage: MIT’s Approach to Efficient and Agile Work and Business Process Design for Strategic Management. Learn more at executive.mit.edu/iis.