How Smarter Work Design Beats Firefighting And Quick Fixes

In a business world flooded with dashboards and performance metrics, Nelson P. Repenning and Donald C. Kieffer offer a refreshingly practical alternative: fix the work itself. Their book, There’s Got to Be a Better Way, is a guide for leaders who want to eliminate organizational clutter and restore clarity to how things actually get done.

“Real work keeps products and services moving,” says Kieffer. “Writing code, negotiating a contract, generating data, making a decision, solving a problem. Be on the lookout for a few particularly expensive versions of organizational clutter including fixings things that could have been done right the first time, constant switching among multiple tasks because priorities are shifting, and providing reports and going to meetings to demonstrate that you’re working hard and that everything is under control (even when it’s not).”

Repenning adds: “To paraphrase a famous definition of Puritanism, leaders are often guided by the haunting fear that someone, somewhere might not be busy. However, keeping everyone busy does not ensure system productivity. By trying to keep people working, leaders overload their organizations and then are surprised when everything grinds to a halt in a Friday afternoon traffic jam of competing priorities and endless firefighting.”

The authors argue that complexity isn’t the enemy—misplaced complexity is. “Designing a novel product or treating a complex medical case require lots of free flowing, face-to-face communication,” Repenning explains. “When organizations try to overly structure this kind of work, the result is usually declining productivity and an ever-growing thicket of rules, reports, and meetings. In contrast, when new structure is added to stabilize routine work and keep it moving, complexity can add value.”

They also challenge the default assumption that people are the problem. “We tend to blame the person closest to a problem,” Kieffer says. “But most issues are caused by poor work design. When Samsung released a cell phone that occasionally caught on fire, nobody blamed the users, but leaders do something similar to their employees every day. Change your approach by assuming that people are doing their best in a poorly designed system. Find and fix the issues the employee must deal with to get their work done.”

Repenning offers a simple but powerful intervention: “Rank the top five projects in order of importance. Create the expectation that if you are working on project #5 when you could be helping on project #2, you should stop working on #5 and focus on #2. Don’t ask about projects not on the list. This creates organizational level priorities and automatically moves pet projects to the backburner. You will find you get more things done and done much faster.”

Kieffer emphasizes the need to front-load decision-making. “Move the fighting over priorities and resources up front and force the managers to settle any disputes before work gets started,” he says. “Only start work that is fully resourced and let it move uninterrupted. Once work starts, don’t adjust priorities. Managers should keep their hands off unless needed to solve a problem.”

Repenning explains why broken systems persist: “The slide into organizational chaos stems from how humans learn and what, consequently, organizations reward. We learn easily when we get rapid feedback—you quit touching hot stoves after one painful trial—but when the action and reaction are separated in time, it’s more difficult. We reward heroic people who solve this year’s crisis, even when they do so by stealing resources from next year’s projects.”

Kieffer identifies three common traps:

• “When something goes wrong, we tend to blame people rather than the design.”
• “We assume pushing more work into the system means more work will get done.”
• “We assume that a big problem requires a big solution.”

Repenning warns against glorifying quick fixes: “Quick fixes are great as long as you’re solving the problems and building a more robust, stable system. ‘Quick fixes’ get organizations in trouble when, rather than improving the system, they just work around it and leave more chaos in their wake.”

Kieffer offers a practical first step: “Pick a small piece of an important problem. Put on your walking shoes and go see what people have to do to get the work through the system. If you aren’t embarrassed by what you find, then you probably didn’t look closely enough. Start fixing the problems you find. Output and productivity will increase immediately, and morale will quickly follow.”