Episode 134: Dynamic Work Design with Nelson P. Repenning

Speaker A: Welcome to the Workplace Podcast in association with Dynamic Partners. We've got an incredible guest today and we're really excited for the insights and ideas they'll be sharing. There are so many practical learnings from this conversation that will make a difference to you, your team or your organization. Whether you're navigating leadership challenges, building high performing teams or driving organizational changes, today's episode has something valuable for you. If your organization is interested in exploring this topic further or would benefit from a workshop, feel free to get in touch via our website dynamicpartners.ie. now let's start the conversation. This episode's guest is Nelson P. Reppening. Nelson is the School of Management's Distinguished professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He is currently the director of MIT's Leadership Centre and was recently recognized by poets and quants as one of the world's top executive MBA instructors. His scholarly work has appeared in Management Science, Organisation Science, Administrative Science Quarterly, the Academy of Management Review, Strategic Management Journal and Research in Organizational Behaviour. He is the co author of 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.

Speaker B: Welcome to the Workplace Podcast and today's topic is Dynamic Work Design. And joining me is Nelson Reppening to discuss his book There's Got to Be a Better Way. Nelson, welcome to the Workplace podcast.

Speaker C: Thank you so much for having me. Really looking forward to it.

Speaker B: Yeah. So let me start with praise for the book and as you can see I have lots of sticky notes here. Um, you're a fan of sticky notes? I have figured out by reading the book as well. So we'll come to that later on when towards uh, the end of the 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. Now why I like this book, Nelson is how it's structured. It gives you lessons that you have learned throughout your, your careers with your co author Donald. I really like the examples he used from Harley Davidson, Toyota, uh, and maybe we might talk about the paper mill factory as well. And the way the book is structured then as part one is all about the obstacles. So what's getting in the way then you have the principles and finally then is taking into action. So that's where the sticky notes comes in. What I liked about it then is a lot of managers and leaders will identify with like the firefighting trap. Heights is seductive. You talk about fire arsonists. So I love that trying to fix everything all at once. The giving up those foggy glasses. And I love that one, Lou. Late, expensive, long Arang. Ah, should I say. And the survival, uh, methodology. So this book really allows people to focus on a way to design the workplace that is dynamic and constantly learning. So I often say to my clients, a dynamic organization is a learning organization. And, uh, with that point of premise in mind, you start the book by saying most organizations are static. Tell us more.

Speaker C: Yeah, so the way I always say this is, I think, at least in the work I've done, that I have the puzzle pieces before. The whole puzzle fits together often in this case years before. And so, you know, Don and I had been working together and we're building lots of techniques that, you know, I think helped make organizations work better here and there. Uh, and we'll probably talk about those in a moment. But, uh, it took a long time for, I think the whole picture to really snap together so that we could see how these little tools and frameworks kind of fit together. And I think the big insight was, exactly as you said, that most of the tools that we use to manage large organizations are, to use the academic jargon, static. And all that means in this context is they tend to be premised on the belief that we can predict the future and our impact on it with some degree of accuracy. Right. So if you go through budgeting and strategy planning and HR planning and capital planning and all those kind of planning related methodologies which are, uh, the, the core of most large organizations, they all have hidden in them somewhere this idea that we can predict the future. Right. Um, and I also think this is a little bit ironic because of course we all know we can't. And you know, every article in most business journals now starts with the sentence, the world is changing faster than it ever has before. Um, you know, which is true, but I think kind of cliche at this point. Um, and so I think that really the big idea of the book and the thing that unites all the techniques together that sort of pulled the puzzle piece together, you know, into focus is if we accept the fact that we can't predict the future perfectly, we might design some of our core processes differently. And to go back to what you were saying, I think, you know, a corollary to that is, you know, rather than exclusively planning our way into success, we probably also have to learn our way into success in the sense that, um, you know, there's things that are going to happen that we can't predict and we got to be ready to Adapt. And there's a bunch of different metaphors for this, but, you know, if you want one for now, and this is a little bit US centric, but, you know, if I were going to drive from here to Chicago today, I could plan that route out probably almost to the minute, right. You know, unless there's weather, right. I know I'm going to go, I'm not going to stop and get gas and so on and so forth. You know, if we were to do that 300 years ago, right, we have no idea what we're going to confront, you know, in that thousand miles of, um, you know, unimproved land between here and there. And so we're going to have to learn a lot of new stuff and discover. And I think the world that most managers face is a lot like the latter example rather than the former, even though we treat it as such. And so I think the big idea here is let's accept the fact that particularly if you're in a fast moving industry, you're not going to know everything that's going to be coming. And then let's organize appropriately. And I think our experience is that when you do that, you uncover a surprisingly large number of opportunities to make your organizations work better. That static mindset holds us back in ways that I'm not sure Don and I even fully appreciated when we got started.

Speaker B: And there's lots of common obstacles then that happen in organizations. And, uh, one of them was this permanent temporary workaround. And I genuinely love the analogy of the traffic analogy. So I have seen this in so many organizations where everybody's getting a workaround. So where you have it is like where, if you can explain the analogy, where people see a lane free and then they're, they're actually causing more traffic, isn't it?

Speaker C: Yeah, uh, I'll just. So the analogy you described, which I think is a good starter, is, you know, imagine you're getting off at an exit at a busy, you know, it's during rush hour, busy afternoon, and we're all lined up and the cars are waiting and it's a pain in the ass and, you know, I want to get home just like everybody else. And of course there's the odd person that doesn't want to wait, right? So they pass everyone and they try to nudge their way in right at the exit. But of course that, although it may speed it up for them, makes it worse for everyone. Because if it's you and me, we got to negotiate and it's delay and there's congestion and the cars are trying to get around each other. Ah. And pretty soon it's not an orderly line. It's just a big mess, and it's slower for everyone. And I think the analogy is, in organizations is that because of this static nature, we come across things that we're not ready for. And then rather than surfacing it, we just try to work around the issue. I often use the metaphor of duct tape and safety pins and chewing gum and whatever, um, but we basically try to make it look like we're following that static plan, when, in fact, the world has changed and we no longer can. And every practicing manager who listens to your show, you know, has a huge toolkit of these things, so they wouldn't be in their jobs. You know, it can be as simple as pulling sales forward. It can be skimping on a test. It can be, you know, expediting a piece of work. And all of these may help that task get done in the short run. Uh, but they create all that congestion and chaos that makes things worse in the long run. So if you go back to my example from the previous question, uh, one of the questions that I often ask when I talk to audiences is, in your company, how long is budget season? Meaning from the day the budget goes into effect, how many weeks or months do you start negotiating and horse trading in advance? And the average answer I get is typically three to six months. Uh, and it gets longer for the bigger companies. Uh, and then I ask them, the second question is, okay, once that budget goes into effect, typically, how long are the assumptions in that budget relevant enough that they can be a good guide for action? And most people say the budget survives about one quarter, and then the world changes. So what do you do the rest of the nine months? And the answer, of course, is you basically work around the system to make it look like you're meeting the targets in that budget, when, in fact, the budget is no longer an accurate depiction of what's going on. Um, and again, that's where we pull sales forward and we expedite and we do all these things. It's just like that congestion on the highway, um, that I think, in the long run, makes things worse rather than better. And I think the sort of sad part about this is that most of us, myself included, have become so habituated to living in that kind of chaotic firefighting mode, um, that we just assume that that's how things are. Uh, and that really was the gist of the title. There's Gotta be a Better Way. Um, there really is a better way in many cases to do this stuff. But I think if you've lived in that chaos mode for long enough, you just kind of assume that that's how work is messy. That's what it's like.

Speaker B: That's an. I'm going to put you under a bit of a pressure nowhere. Okay? I'm going to push back, and every single listener here is going to say, this is how we get sh. Done. All right? It's like Nelson, there's no other way.

Speaker C: Yeah. So I think I have two answers to that question. Um, which is, you know, throughout the book, we have lots of examples. In fact, there is a better way. And again, I would go back to if you've lived doing something long enough, it's very hard to believe that there is an alternative. Um, you may be familiar with some of these stories, but when us, um, managers in the 1980s from the auto industry first went over to Japan to see Toyota and Honda and so on and so forth, and they saw these factories that had no inventory and they had low cycle times and high quality, they came back and they thought that the factory they had been had been essentially fabricated to fool them. Right. That it wasn't real. Right. Nobody could make cars that fast or that efficiently. Well, of course, the history of that is that toad, in fact, really was doing it. So I think our own experience really puts blinders on us. Um, and so, yes, I get that pushback all the time. I believe the facts are contrary to that. But the other way I would answer that, which I think gives us a little more hope, is I think most people actually do suspect there's a better way. Because one of the things that Don and I have noticed over and over and over again is you can take the most screwed up organization, put them in a good crisis, and temporarily they get their act together. Uh, and if you ask people, I've done this anecdotally, what was the most satisfying moment in your career? Almost always it will be, we had this major crisis and then all the political BS disappeared and we had clear targets and we were focused on just a few things, and, wow, did we get a lot done. And it was really satisfying. So, yes, I think that pushback is there. And yet I think everybody secretly suspects there's an alternative, because I think most people have experienced it in these fleeting moments. But the interesting thing about the crisis thing is organizations go into crisis, they're remarkably functional. I think their designs get much better. But then when the crisis over, it's like they have Failed to learn. I think the real lesson that that crisis should have taught them and they go back to the same stupid stuff that they've done before. And I shouldn't say stupid, because I think once you understand the dynamics, there's pretty predictable reasons why people, uh, decline into that, but they don't often, at least for my way of thinking, sort of learn the right lesson there.

Speaker B: So why is that trap then of firefighting so seductive? Because it's like, okay, we've got an emergency here and we're all aligned in that crisis. Like, why is that firefighting so seductive?

Speaker C: So I think there's probably two or three things that drive it. I think the first one is, um, if you study how human beings learn, one of the most basic findings is we tend to be very good learners when there's a short time delay between action and outcome. So touch a hot stove, I burn myself. I learn really quickly to quit touching hot things. In contrast, when there's a long time delay between action and outcome, it's just much harder to learn, particularly at the habitual level that those two things are connected. And this is why we all struggle to go to the gym and don't eat too much and drink skim milk and stuff like that. If I do healthy things, I typically don't get the benefits right away. There's that long time delay. So I think that's number one, which is, as you point out, that firefighting in the workarounds, in the short run, they work. That's why we do them. I get the product at the door or I meet my sales targets and get my holiday bonus. Um, but I don't really fully account for the chaos and the trouble that I'm sort of, uh, making in the long run. So I think that's number one. And then I think the other thing that happens, which maybe we'll talk about a little more as well, is the fastest way to kind of get yourself into that firefighting and the chaos and is to put more work in the system than you really have resources to do. And we talk a lot about overload in the book. Um, and I think the reason for that actually is most organizations are staffed by smart, competent people who have a lot of good ideas. Um, and unless you have a really well worked out system for deciding which things you're going to work on and which things you're not going to work on, most organizations tend to overload, again, I think with the best of intentions, because they're trying to take advantage of all the human capital that they have, um, but they just take on too much stuff. And that again, is kind of an express lane into that firefighting mode. So I think you take the combination of a little bit of the asymmetry and how human beings learn in complex systems and combine that with the overload propensity. That's a sadly toxic recipe. Um, but the good news is, um, when you get on top of it, the gains you get are really quite substantial. Don is the practitioner of our tech team. I'm m. The academic. And when we first started working on this stuff, you know, I'd be kind of scratching my head, like, is this really real? Like, you know, because sometimes we see three and four fold improvements. Um, and then I think I've seen it have enough time, times that I am actually pretty confident that those gains are there. So it's a nasty mess. Um, but boy, when you fix it, your organization can work a lot, a

Speaker B: lot better, uh, just on the firefighting and add to chaos then. Is that what you mean by the. The firefighting arsonist, where you're actually creating more work from yourself by constantly going back into that vicious cycle, isn't it?

Speaker C: Yeah. So I think it's worth going through that label because I think it really helps explain the dynamic. And I will say I did not come up with that wonderful term. Um, whoever at Harley Davidson first sort of coined that phrase, I fear is lost to history. Uh, but the basic idea was, um, when I first started working with them and Don did, um, their product development process was very chaotic. Uh, you know, as they would get closer to the day when they were launching products, there was just this huge frenzy of activity. And you know, the cartoon that they always talked about is that engineers would be hopping planes with duffel bags full of parts and flying out to the factories to bolt them on motorcycles to try to get the, you know, the production line up to speed. It was just a huge message. Um, but it turned out there were some project managers that were much better at negotiating that mess than others. And they were known as the firefighters. And at the time, it was really. It, uh, was a compliment. Right. If you were one of the firefighters, that meant that, you know, you were kind of one of those hard asses that didn't matter how messy that year's product launch was, your stuff got done. Um, and so we did a little research, my students and I, about what is it that made a good firefighter? Right. Why are some people better at this than others? And long story short, um, what it really turned out is that what made a good firefighter is they had a better social network to the scarce resources you needed to get your project done. And typically were just kind of more charismatic and had sort of stronger personalities. So they might come up to you, William, and say, hey, you would be running the test lab. And I might say, well, William, I know my project's not the highest priority, but I'm a little behind and I don't want to miss my dates. And can't you just run this test really quick? It'll just take a couple hours. Um, and they'd go around to the rest of the organization. Right. And basically moving their projects sort of the top of the queue for the scarce resources that they needed. And where the firefighting arsonist terminology came in is that as we studied this, it became really clear that in kind of pulling all the resources towards their projects, what they were doing was completely destabilizing the organization. So they were kind of setting the fire for next year. Because if I get you to move my product to the fore in terms of testing, well, that means someone else's project's not getting tested. And maybe that's a project from next year, or maybe someone's doing that early phase work that would prevent that chaos next year. And so again, I don't think they knew they were doing this. And so, um, the label was not meant to be really a criticism as much as, um, to realize that in these well intended efforts to get their projects out the door, um, they were basically setting the fires for next year. And I think that's a very general dynamic. I mean, you see this in sales organizations all the time. You know, I pull a big order from next year, great, make my holiday bonus, get the done end of the year. But now when I start next year's sales, I'm even further behind. And then I got to pull it forward. And it's just this vicious cycle that could descend you into a big mess if you're not careful.

Speaker B: So what I liked about the book. Right. As well is you have the graphs with the actual performance where it's better before worse situation and worse before better situation. Um, and over time. Can you just talk us through that? Because what I liked about that is that it's that short termism that you were just talking about that happens there. So a lot of people don't want to take a hit on performance to change things. And I think that's one of the biggest obstacles, isn't it, Nelson?

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker C: So I think you're exactly right. And the way to think about it is if I engage in a workaround or firefighting or, you know, any variant, you know that if you were to draw a picture of how the performance, over time, you've got it exactly right, which is, you know, the first thing that happens is things get better, right? I get my project out the door, I meet my sales target, I satisfy the customer or whatever, so you get this nice little bump. But because I have destabilized everything, in the long run, the overall performance will be degraded. And if you want a sort of another simple example of this, if I decided today, yeah, I don't want to take my car in to get it serviced and get the oil change, in short run, my life is better, right? That's a couple hours that, you know, I don't have to take out of my day to go to the shop or whatever. But if I never maintain my car again, right, in the long run, it's going to be ruined. Um, and that's again, sort of the learning dynamic that sucks us into that firefighting trap.

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Speaker C: On the flip side, you're exactly right, is if you're in the mess and you decide, well, okay, I want to fix it, so we're going to start investing in some of those upfront capabilities. We're not going to firefight, we're not going to do those things that destabilize it. We're not going to pull sales forward. In the short run, right? Things are probably going to get worse. And then in the long run, right? Hopefully, as those benefits start to run through, things will get better. And again, if you want a personal analogy, right, if I start going to the gym this afternoon, an hour a day, right? That's an hour a day I don't have for other things. And it's a little bit uncomfortable. Um, but hopefully in the long run, I'll be fitter and happier and healthier and have more capacity and so on and so forth. And I think what happens in organizations all the time is they often try to adopt new tools, new techniques or whatever it might be with the best of intentions again, but they don't fully appreciate that often things are going to get worse before they get better. And then when they get into the trough, into the worst part. They think, well, oh, this doesn't work or this isn't useful and they tend to downshift back to they were before. And again, I think this is one of those situations where we kind of intuitively know the right answer, but we don't apply it. Every time I get a new phone or new computer, my productivity goes in the dump for a couple of days because I got to learn how to connect it and I got to ask my kids how it works and so on and so forth. And then once I kind of get the hang of it now, hopefully my phone or computer is newer and faster. But imagine that at organization wide scale, that worst part I think can be pretty deep. And worse than that, I think organizations often make that dynamic even more difficult because it's often hard to sell change in an organization. But then once you do, people have this strong tendency to want to do it everywhere all at once. Because now we're an agile organization or you're seeing this most. I think with AI right now, every CEO needs an AI strategy and we're going to use AI everywhere. And if they really fully appreciated the size of the worst that they were signing up for, I don't think they would think that way. But I don't think people really appreciate that. So we're very big in dynamic work design of don't try to change everything at once. Take small bite sized pieces so that you can kind of slowly work your way out of that trap and you don't have to basically eat the elephant in one very uncomfortable meal.

Speaker B: In that context, uh, an important thing that I often see in workshops I facilitate is, uh, and I've highlighted this in the book, right. And I circled around it. Nobody ever gets credit for a defect that never happened. And it's the same thing as like the engineer who took the time to do the process out or do the right thing. People are not getting rewarded for that. So it's a cultural issue as well then, isn't it? From senior leaders kind of going, is that kind of the hero? Oh, you rescued the day. That's what we value versus are we valuing the long term? What was the right thing for the organization?

Speaker C: Well, and I'm so sad you said it. I'm so glad you said it was a cultural issue because I think that is right on. And the reason we have culture in organizations, or at least one reason there's probably a lot of them, is to make sure that we do things that don't come necessarily naturally because if you think about it, if you think about the story I've just been telling you, a lot of these things don't come naturally, um, because it's not something we would learn from experience. A classic example of this is I spent some time in my career working on safety and high hazard organizations. Take an oil refinery as an example. If I run a perfect safety program, nothing ever happens, right? And that turns out to be a really hard situation to learn the right lesson, because I spent all this money on safety and training and I'm out in the field and blah, blah, blah, and the result is nothing. Um, and that's a very difficult situation to learn in. And in fact, in the safety world, right, you see people all the time saying that they're going to cut the budget, that, you know, we're spending too much in safety, and, you know, we become too conservative and so on and so forth, and then they keep cutting and cutting and cutting until something really, really bad happens. Um, and again, that's just a very difficult situation for people to learn the right lessons. And so companies that do this well have a really strong culture around safety, right? It's just something we don't ever violate these principles. And the reason we have those cultural norms, again, is because I think it's not something that people would learn to do naturally. And then on the flip side, you're exactly right. If you haven't built those cultural norms and people aren't getting rewarded for doing the right stuff, then you're almost guaranteed to kind of descend into that firefighting, firefighting mode. And, you know, it's interesting, again, this is not a systematic study. It's just my anecdotal experience. But whenever I come across a manager that I think really gets this and has a really strong commitment to doing that upfront work and not firefighting, you know, I always kind of ask them, you know, how did you learn this? What happened in your career? And, uh, invariably, again, this is just my anecdotal experience. You know, they had some really nasty experience in their background where something went horribly wrong or almost went horribly wrong. And it taught them, like, I'm never going through this again. You know, whether it was an accident or a near miss or a project that went really sideways. And the really tricky part is it's very hard to transfer that lesson from someone who had that negative experience into the next generation of manager who maybe never has, never has had that. And, you know, I would hope we would get to the place where not everyone has to learn this through their Own difficult, difficult experience.

Speaker B: Unfortunately, that's an element you were talking about. How we learn is. It's when you were talking about the hot stove there. We have to learn by pain, and that's never going to happen again. And just on the culture things, when you were talking about safety culture, like, I have worked a lot with conflicting organizations and people who are proactive around that, so they said, we'll resolve this with psychological safety. Taking those approaches, then they have less turnover or nutrition, uh, and they're way more productive. And it's. It's a bit like what you promote is what you'll. You'll get, isn't it? Yeah. And then it leads us into that discovery mindset, because otherwise we're in that blaming or survival methodology there. So it's that dynamic focus then of. Of that little, you know, little piece. What, what are we going to. A small piece now that will. A bit like a pension, if we invest it now, will pay off in the future, isn't it?

Speaker C: Yeah. And I think that psychological safety and the more cultural elements and the design elements really kind of meet in the middle in this particular case. In my experience, every successful change initiative I've studied and been quite a few at this juncture, I think, always starts with a new level of candor about what's really going on. And I think one of the things that organizations really struggle with is it's just hard for them to be honest about their difficulties, particularly if I've been the CEO or the leader for a long period of time. Everything's great. We're doing wonderful, and it's just hard to do that. But if you and I can't talk about the stuff that's actually going wrong or we're constantly externalizing it, well, we got unlucky. But it's never going to happen again. Boy, it's going to be hard to fix those. Um, and so I think if you develop a culture where people are free to raise defects and you can have difficult conversations and I can say, hey, I think this went wrong without it being a huge dispute that you and I are then going to have, I think that really creates fertile ground for improvement. And then you get to the place, I think, as you were just describing, where rather than waiting until things get so bad that the market is telling us we have to change, and then you get these major reorganizations. If we can talk about it internally, then every time there's a problem, okay, that's a learning opportunity. Let's see if we can fix that and make Things a little better and you get into this kind of much more incremental, fast cycle improvement rather than what I think we see with a lot of big companies is, you know, they just kind of limp along until they have a major crisis. Then they, you know, fire the CEO and get a new one, have a major reorganization and then the cycle kind of repeats itself. I mean, I think another way of saying this is, at least in our view, we want organizations to think about change a little bit differently. I think in most big companies, they think of change as this kind of really painful episodic phenomenon that they do every 18 to 24 months. And I think in most cases they'd be a lot better off if they thought it was something that we do every day or every week or something like that. Again, you know, little bite sized pieces.

Speaker B: And we might talk about that later on if we've time. But that's those learning loops that you talked about. The one thing I would say from a learning point of view is the role of the observer. So this is where the forklift example in the paper mill, I think it was, paper mill is cardboard boxes or corrugated cardboard boxes.

Speaker C: I think the. Well, yeah, there's actually two forklifts in the book, I suppose, but yeah, there's one from the box factory.

Speaker B: So do you mind just tell us that? Because it was the. Was the length of the roll of the paper, was it being damaged around the edges? That was it. And that was the role of the observ.

Speaker C: So you've got it exactly right. So the student was Mike Morales, who was a student in our executive MBA program several years ago. And at the time he was the CEO of a company that made corrugated boxes. And basically the way you make these boxes is these big rolls of brown paper come in one side, you put them on this machine called a corrugator that glues them together, you make corrugated cardboard and then you cut it and fold it and tape it and you get a box. Um, and the project that he worked on for my class was one of the side effects of this process is what they call paper losses, which is basically you're cutting and folding the paper and you get these little shards of brown paper that are too small to turn into a box. And then they would basically recycle them or just throw them away. It was just dead weight loss. It's stuff you're paying for on the way in and you're not turning into a saleable product. And so he goes to work on his project, um, and I tell the story in class all the time, because I really like it. Because in our class, one of the things we make people do is they have to go see the work. So once they decide the problem that they want to solve, you have to go watch the problem happen. Um, and Mike pushed back on this a little bit. He's like, I'm CEO. I got an operations manager. I'm a busy guy. Why do I have to go to the shop floor? Um, and I was like, well, it's my class. I make the rules, so you got to do it. Um, but, uh, exactly as you described. While he's on the shop floor doing his investigation, he discovers a bunch of interesting things. Um, it turns out the forklift that moved the rolls of brown paper around has the wrong jaws or clamps on it. So every time they would pick up a roll of paper, they would damage a couple of the sheets. Um, there were some bumps in the floor. So with a forklift with the wrong jaws would go over the bump, it would damage more paper. You know, they probably discovered a dozen really kind of silly little operations hiccups that were responsible for a lot of this paper loss. Uh, but I think the interesting twist here is that Mike was an operator. He had run the factory before, and his office was on the other side of the shop floor. So he had walked through there every day, probably for most of his tenure. And so what was it about my class that allowed him to see these things that he hadn't seen before? And it's not that I have any particular genius, it's just that when you get managers to really go watch the work and see what's happening and justify these decisions, I think it helps them see it with a fresh set of eyes. Because even though he'd walk through that every day, probably for the last couple of years, he was probably on his phone or thinking about his next call or whatever. Right. You know, he wasn't really paying attention to what's going on. And on top of that, habituation is a very strong psychological force. We just tend to get used to whatever we're, you know, whatever we see. Um, and so, yeah, I think that skill of, well, let's just actually go back and look at the nuts and bolts and see what is happening can be extremely revealing. And so we make all our students do this, and there's probably what we do with our students is when they leave to do their investigation, the piece of guidance I give them, which actually Don, my co author, is the one who came up with this, is we Always say, if you're not embarrassed by what you find, you're just not looking closely enough. This connects to what we were talking about earlier. It's because most processes are a mix of all these workarounds and the duct tape and the chewing gums that people have used to get their work done. But my favorite moment in class is when they're back on campus the next time. I always open, say, hey, anybody discover anything embarrassing? And their eyes are about this big because, like, I had no idea how we did stuff around here. And I think it's just really revealing that, you know, when you really pay attention, wow, you see a whole bunch of things that just, you know, you couldn't possibly believe that those actually existed. So it's a great skill, and I think I highly recommend it for all managers. And I know it's really hard to make time to go do it because everybody's very busy, but it, at least in our experience, pays huge dividends in terms of the gains and the opportunities you find.

Speaker B: There's something that reminded me of something that happened over 25 years ago, and I was part of this, and I'm nearly sure it's. It's in. It's from this book. And it reminded me so well about where there was a blame going on for something happened in shipping. And then when we did deep, we said, well, actually, that order didn't come through. And the order didn't come through from sales. And because the sales didn't come through, you know, something to do with finance, that's signing something off. And something that they were blaming on shipping actually happened in finance. And it was that thing of, you know, really figuring out what is the problem we're trying to solve here and just going back in that root cause analysis said, well, actually, you know, the problems that were shipping, it's actually a process problem in finances.

Speaker C: This is a story from Don's, uh, work when he was at one point the operations VP for a company called Intermatic that made, like, little electrical timers and switches and lights that you'd have in your garden and stuff like that. Um, and he'd been there, I don't know, six months. And he was really frustrated because he. He's a very accomplished manager and was just having a trouble moving the needle. And so finally he had this meeting where he pulled all his team together. He says, what are we supposed to ship today? And are we going to ship it? Well, I don't know, but. Well, you know, well, go find out and come back. Long story. Short. They do this every day for a while. And one day they miss an order. And he looks at the ops manager says, what's happening? He says, well, the lady on the shipping dock dropped the ball. Okay, great, let's go visit her. So they hop in Dunsky, go down to the plant, and exactly as you described. Uh, she said, well, I saw that order this morning, but we didn't have the right information. And so they go back to finance and they basically trace it through the organization. And it turns out that it wasn't her fault at all. It was some manager had written something on a post it, and the post it had gotten stuck to another piece of paper. The order basically got lost. And this revealed a whole, you know, kind of flaw in the way that they were doing ordering, that they were relying on markers and post its to, you know, keep track of orders. Um, you know, and as Don says, that that particular manager never blamed anything on the lady in the shipping dock anymore because, you know, it was maybe not the most pleasant process to like, have to walk through every step of the way, you know, with your boss and justify all the, all the decisions. But, uh, I think more generally we find over and over and over again that when you understand how the system is configured, it's behaving exactly as you should. Right? It's been designed, and I put designed in quotes because in most cases, people never really sat down on a sheet of paper to design it. Once you understand all the different pieces, it's not surprising that it produces defects or it's late, that it's slow or whatever. And so, um, often by doing that investigation, you begin to understand, like, oh, of course we get defects as a regular course because this is, you know, this is how the work is actually configured. And then again, you know, it often yields really simple fixes that could lead to some pretty big gains and big gains in performance.

Speaker B: And I've personally witnessed that as well, where what it was, was taken from a frame of a priest of inquiry. Allow me to understand there. And then there was no defense of there as a citizen. Hold up. This was from our end. That's okay. And what we went is, it was called the daily Operations management meeting. Okay. And I had to do metrics for this. So I was, I was actually a student, um, there at the time on placement. And I thought this was so insightful. And when I was there for the course of my, uh, internship there, I, I could see the changes that happened around that, uh, manufacturing process all the way through, uh, there. And what Happened was trust started to build. No, it, it did. It wasn't smooth at the start. I genuinely was rough and ready and I witnessed the whole journey there. We ended up getting them an award for that. But. And that was with Nortel Networks there. But I was just. It was brilliant to watch and that's why I really enjoyed reading this book. But another one that I really enjoyed reading as part of this book was the barbecue bus. There, there's one for people. And this is done in, in jest, isn't it? Or in a fun way.

Speaker C: Yeah. So I think that the, the big idea that underlies it and I'll get the technique in a second is. And I think this is a place where the kind of pop management discourse has really gone sideways, which is, and I've seen this in so many companies where people kind of implicitly presume that, you know, if I'm the boss, I sit in my office and I come up with the targets and then I hand them to you, William. And then if you have any questions, you know, be like, William, what part of 17% don't you understand? Right. You know, I give you the targets and it's your job to go figure them out. And so it's a very one way transaction. And I think the flaw in that is that no matter how complicated your scorecard is or how many targets you give, the intent behind those targets is never fully captured in the metrics themselves. Right. We want to build a great company. We want to change people's lives with this technology. I mean, I can measure that in lots of clever ways, but I think if you don't understand the manager's intent, it is very easy in a well intentioned effort to meet those metrics, but meet them in basically the wrong way. And I think everybody has examples of, well, yeah, you told me to increase sales and so I gave huge quantity discounts or I sold them crappy products or I pushed the wrong stuff on. I mean there's a million examples. Um, and so what we've discovered is that when that target setting becomes a little bit more of a two way transaction, so that I know what the boss wants, I know the intent that are behind some of those numerical measures, the results are typically a lot better. And so Barbecue the boss is a technique that we invented to improve that alignment of kind of bosses who are setting targets and the folks have to go after them. And it's a really simple idea which is you have the leader give a 10 or 15 minute presentation. You know, we usually limit it to just a couple slides, you know, and so they have to get the whole strategy for the company of the group down to like 10 minutes, which is hard, right. They got to think very clearly about what's going on. Um, then we hand out three Post its every member of the team, and they have to write three questions for the boss. Right? And, you know, if you can't think of a question, ask for Friday afternoon off. You're not going to get it. But at least hopefully you'll get your juices warmed up or whatever. Put the Post Its on the board, take a little break. We kind of, you know, put the Post Its in similar categories. And then the barbecue part is the boss just starts peeling off Post its and starts answering questions. And every time we've done this, it's been really powerful because I think, um, you know, it just turns out that people don't understand what the leadership wants nearly as much as the leadership thinks. And there's actually some interesting psychological research underlying this. This is an example of what psychologists call the curse of knowledge. And what the curse of knowledge is is that once you know something, it's very hard to put yourself in the shoes of someone who doesn't know that thing. Right. We all have this experience when we go to a country where we don't speak the language. Right. You know, what's it like to look at a roadside and have no idea what it says? Like, it's. It's very hard to fathom what that is like until you've experienced it. Um, and what happens, I think, in corporate settings is, you know, find the leader or the leadership team. You know, I might sit my office and scribble on the whiteboard for weeks to figure out our strategy. Right. I've spent hours thinking about what we're going to do and the idea that you could accumulate, that you could communicate all that richness, you know, in an hour of PowerPoint in one way, I mean, I think it's just kind of a fool's errand. So the barbecue, the boss of turning that into a conversation, I think is really, really helpful. And what we often find is once the boss has made his or her intent clear, people are like, you know, I know a better way to measure this, or I know an activity we could do that would go get this, right? There's a lot of creativity that bubbles up. And so, you know, maybe the way to kind of tie a bow on this is, you know, the typical strategy rollout meeting is 55 minutes of slides and then one softball question. At the end. And then all the question answering kind of happens in secret in the hallway. Like, can you believe he said that? And how are we going to do this? Um, try to turn that on its head. Spend five or ten minutes, outline the strategy, and then use the remaining time to have that conversation sort of live and up front rather than in secret. And I think you'll like the results a lot better. It's certainly been our experience.

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Speaker B: You talked about optimal load earlier on. Now I thought this was brilliant, especially when you talk about the ICU flow and you talked about, ah, the cost of keeping everybody busy. So we designed the work to give everybody like maximum load there. And you're actually making the argument to go, well, actually, that's not actually very helpful.

Speaker C: Yeah. So I think that the fact that this starts with is most organizations, and I alluded to this earlier, just take on too much work. Um, you know, the data are probably best in the R and D world, where there's a couple studies out there that suggest that most organizations probably have three to five times as many projects in progress as they have resources to execute. Um, and we see this in other places, although I think it's a little harder to measure with a high degree of accuracy. But I think it's pretty close to an established fact that most places take on too much. And I think one of the reasons for that, as I said earlier, is I think a lot of organizations have a lot of good ideas and it's hard to say no to good ideas. But the consequence of this, I think is really damaging. And I think it's exacerbated by, I think the view that many managers have that the way that you maximize the productivity of your organization is just to make sure that everybody's busy all the time. Um, it just turns out that's just not true. Um, you don't maximize system performance by making sure that every element is busy. Again, this is a case where I think in other facets of our life, we understand this very well. Think about leaving a busy city on Friday afternoon in the summertime, like Boston is a perfect example. Where I live, everybody tries to get out of the city on Friday afternoon. If I put a car on every available piece of highway. What happens to the throughput of that highway system? It goes to zero. It's a huge traffic jam, and nobody can go anywhere. If we want to maximize the, um, throughput of the highway system, we don't have a. We don't fully load it because there's some slight variations in how fast the cars go and braking and so on and so forth. Um, and it turns out that the same is very much true in organizations, that the loading that maximizes the performance of the system will not keep everyone busy at every moment. And so we talk about this principle, regulate the flow, which basically boils down to every organization needs some kind of strategy for making sure they have about the right amount of work in the system. And I think what's a little tricky is it's not something that you can probably in most cases really calculate. You got to learn your way into it, meaning you got to experiment with a little bit more and a little bit less. But the basic rule is that if the work is not moving, moving from person to person, hitting dates and so on, so almost for sure you've got too much work in the system. And how that strategy will manifest in different places, we could talk about. Um, but the basic idea is that managers need some system for really assessing is the work moving? And if it is, okay, maybe I could safely add another project. If the work is not moving and there's long time delays, almost for sure I got too much in there, and I need to figure out a way to cut back a little bit.

Speaker B: There are CFOs listening in here, pulling their hair out. Where you basically give us the Goldilocks principles is, well, not too much, not too little. And a lot of people when they're doing budgeting, as you were saying before those cycles then. And if you need more resources there, tell me what you need those resources for. And if you're trying to create, we'll say 20% freedom to allow for changes and allow for learning. Because I think this is the big problem in organizations is that we haven't built in enough space in the system for learning to happen or for, um, real dialogue and communication to happen. And now we're all misaligned and we're focusing on the wrong thing. So what would you say to CFOs then? Because that's where a lot of the blocker is in an organization isn't, say, listen, we need another person on the team. You seem to be doing fine to me.

Speaker C: So it's interesting, uh, the overload thing is something I've worked on a lot in my career, and a lot of my early papers were on this. And I'd say for 10 years, when I would go out and speak and talk to managers, I would always finish, you need to do less stuff. Cut half your projects out of your product portfolios. And they would all look at me like, this academic has no idea how the real world works. And I would say that those talks had very little impact on, uh, how the world works. But we've been promoting another strategy that I think works much better, that I think will quell the CEO unease that you are very correctly alluding to, which is, now, what we really recommend is take the activities. R and D is an easy way to think about this, but it's true more broadly. Take the things you want to do. And what we suggest to people is just rank order them. This is the most important, this is the second, this is the third, this is the fourth. And then try to cultivate the norm in your organization that if you're on the critical path for the number one priority, I don't want to see you working on number three until your work on number one is done. And basically what's happening here is you're trading sort of individual and local priorities for organizational ones. Um, and this is kind of the opposite of the firefighting, arsonist thing that we were talking about before. Um, and what we've seen is that if leaders have the guts to say, this is the most important thing, this is the second, that often is enough to really get the work flowing. Because now everybody has much clearer instructions, like, okay, when project one shows up on my desk, I do that first. Um, and I know that people who are listening to your show will be like, well, we do that already. I go back and look, right, Because I'm guessing what most places have is actually they have 12 number one priorities, right? And what that does is it creates a lot of ambiguity. And so then people start to do their own local prioritization. Well, I like this project better than this one, or this is more important for my area. And then that kind of, again, is sort of an express lane into the firefighting. So I know it's very uncomfortable. Um, and I would say, and I always say this, I think this is the single most counterintuitive idea in the book, because basically what we're saying is, in many cases, by starting less stuff, you will get more done. And I think that's just a hard thing for sometimes for people to get their head around. Um, but it also Just turns out to be true. I don't know what else to tell people. That's just a sort of basic fact of the physics of how these systems work. And don't feel like you have to change it all at once. Just run an experiment, try the rank ordering, or try taking a little work out of the system. And I think what you'll find is your people will love you for it. Because now, oh, right now it's clear what I'm supposed to work on. I can just go do my job and I don't have all these interruptions and all this expediting and stuff like that. And you know, remember, at the end of the day. Right. The goal is not to keep people busy. The goal is to produce more products or serve more customers or what happens. And, um, I've been grading this year's projects for my EMBA class and so many of them have had really good luck with very simple regulate the flow strategies. And I think the reason is most organizations are so overloaded that when you pull back a little bit, there's some pretty big wins to be had there because you're so far off the optimal, the optimal loading in most cases.

Speaker B: I might challenge you on your use of words there. Was it more luck or was it more design? Yeah, you know, that's the role of the observer. Uh, so forgive me for that.

Speaker C: No,

Speaker B: what I really stood out for me as well was the airplane door analogy. So once the door is closed, we're taking off. And I think that analogy is excellent. Do you mind telling our listeners that? Because I thought that really helps you clarify and then you make the learning loop allows to happen. You have the clarity of the prioritization place.

Speaker C: Yeah. So a good regulate the flow strategy is to maybe go the next layer deeper. Has sort of three elements and I'll, uh, define them. There's an airplane door. There's a rule for letting things through the door. And then there's what we call a cadence. So let me just go through those. So the idea behind the airplane door is a simple analogy to what we're looking for is if you think about when you're on a commercial flight, Right. You know, before the flight goes, the airline is often, you know, changing the passenger list. You know, your fly lots, you're probably getting upgraded to first class. They're getting standby passengers. Right. There's a lot of kind of churn about who's going to be on that plane. But as everybody knows, right. The moment that door shuts, barring some major calamity that is who's on that plane and if you miss it, you got to go to the next one. Right? So there's a point of no return when we move from who's going to be on this plane, who's not to. Okay, this is what we're doing. And now the job is to get them to their destination safely. And we're really not revisiting that. Um, and I don't think it's so obvious until you think about it. But that actually creates a lot of efficiency in the air traffic control system. Because I often ask people to imagine a different scenario. What if the airline said, well, hey, we really want to serve our frequent flyers because they're very profitable customers for us. And so if Williams had triple platinum Flyer, maybe we'd be willing to bring the, the plane's off the Runway to get them. But thank God we don't do that because it would be total chaos, right? Because the plane would leave and get out to the Runway, A high roller traveler would show up, they'd bring the plane back, he or she would get on, but then they'd try to nudge their way in line, back out on the Runway and we'd be going back and forth. We'd never get anywhere. And so the idea in uh, regulate the flow style system is you need an airplane door, right? Which is we're going to do all our tough decision making upfront, but once we decide this is what we're working on, then we're not going to change it. Then the second thing you need is a rule. So basically when do we think we can let something new into the process? Basically when can we pick up a new project? And as I said earlier, the basic rule there is that work really should flow. So if you see big accumulations in backup and time delay, that almost means you're overloaded. And then particularly for knowledge work, the last element you need is what we call a cadence, which is basically how often do we open the airplane door and make sure that we have the right passengers? Um, and the easiest way probably to see this is one of our lead users that we talk about a lot in the book is the Broad Institute, which is um, they're the world's leader in gene sequencing and we've been extremely fortunate to work with them now for more than a decade. And the way they run their R and D setup is they basically are on a quarterly cadence, which basically means once every quarter they open the airplane door, they look at their projects, they pick about 12 as it turns out that's about what they can get done. Each quarter, they have a deep debate about what they're going to work on and what's important and what's the strategy. Then they close the door, and then they don't revisit it again, barring a major calamity for a quarter. And then they open it up again, and it works really well for them because all their developers and engineers and scientists, once the door is closed, they think, okay, I got three months to work, and people aren't going to change my priorities. Right. So that allows them to focus. They create a lot of efficiency. And then after three months, okay, what do we learn from these experiments? What are we going to do? Let's revisit it now. I don't think there's anything magical about that particular cadence, the quarterly cadence. I think it works well for the pace of their industry and the kind of technology churn that they're dealing with. Each of your listeners will need to choose their own cadence that kind of matches the speed with which their industries move. It may be faster, it may be slower, and basically what you're trading off is the faster the cadence, the more ability we have to redirect our work to match changes in the industry. But we're making some, um, efficiency sacrifice, because opening the door and revisiting it does take time and sort of distracts you from getting stuff done. That said, I'm guessing for most of your listeners, they probably m. You know, the cadence is too long. And the reason that I'm guessing that is probably what's happening is they're kind of changing the passenger list sort of all the time randomly, which is hugely disrupted rapidly, rather than on that fixed cycle, which I think tends to create a lot of efficiency. Right. Uh, and then, you know, then the other thing is you got to start making good choices about how much stuff do we let through the door. Um, and I think, again, as I said, you sort of got to learn your way into what is a sort of sensible loading. For our friends at Broad, they've Learned it's about 12 projects. And it was funny. I was out there a couple weeks, uh, ago, and they had added a piece of paper on their visual board at the bottom, which was the 13th project. And I looked at, uh, one of my students is like, you know, that's not going to get done. They're like, yeah, we know, but we just couldn't, you know, we couldn't make the difficult choice to cut it. So we're going to put up the symbol knowing full well they were going to regret it. So it's even the best, you know, will fall off the wagon sometimes and have to relearn the core lessons.

Speaker B: Speaking of this, and this is the final podcast question, the display of information and visual management, where you are making progress. So here that. Here are the priorities or hear the fires that we're putting out. You're saying about visualizing the work so a problem defined, investigated, solution designed, implemented, and then putting all the learnings aside into a completed pile. There's something about that approach that I think is very appealing. So for me, for example, if you're in a workshop with me, I do a lot of pin board facilitation. So sticking in a pin, a little sticky note. And I give people a framework like you have in your book, and we go through that. Like, what is the power of doing something visual like that that's paper and not something that's on a screen. Yeah.

Speaker C: So I think the easiest way to do this is another analogy, um, which is, you know, seem to be a lot of airplane analogies today. But, um, you know, imagine if we asked air traffic controllers to do their work with spreadsheets. Right. You know, let's imagine I could give you a perfect scorecard that would have every plane, it would have its coordinates, it would have its speed. Right. It was all numerical information. I mean, I've never been an aircraft controller, but I doubt they'd be able to do their work. And fortunately that's not what we give them. Right. They get the radar screen that shows the little icons of the plane and how they're kind of moving around. And humans are visual creatures, Right. We're very good at negotiating kind of complex visual environments. Just imagine we're all driving down the highway at 75 miles an hour and these multi ton lethal beasts. And yet most of the time we actually get it done pretty well. I think the idea behind visual management is rather than doing all our work in spreadsheets, could we create a kind of equivalent of that radar screen that would allow us to sort of leverage our natural propensity to, um, you know, kind of interact with the physical world. And so there's many different versions of this. The lowest tech version is just whiteboards and post its. And every project's a post it. Here are the phases that it goes through. Um, and what we see when we get people to do that is they, the, the quality of the conversation they have when they're interacting with visual representations tends to go up very dramatically. Um, so you know, as a simple example, we were just talking about overload. You know, Don and I will often we start working with the group. Like every project you're doing, just write it on a post it. Let's draw a quick, simple schematic of your process on the board and just place the post its where they are. You know, where they are in the process. First thing you see is, oh, nobody knew about all the projects we had in progress. They immediately see that they're overloaded. People say, well, how did that project get there? Well, someone else approved it. Right. And so even that little exercise will be pretty revealing. And then if you get people to put dates on those post its like this project is supposed to exit this phase on this date. Then if it misses the date, we often will tell people put a contrasting colored post it on it. So if it was yellow, pink. Well, now we meet in front of the board every, every week. And all the ones that have missed their dates that have pink post its, let's talk about those, right? Those are problems. And what can we do to get this moving? Or do we need to do this? And just that little exercise I think will allow people to take advantage of the human capital in the room that's available to them far more effectively. And you know, I haven't been able to stick students in MRI scanners yet to test this, but I think the reason it works is I think that we're just much better at interacting around visual information as a purely quantitative information. And that would certainly make evolutionary sense given sort of how humans have existed on the planet. That's a hypothesis at this point, but the results that we've seen are very real. So I think any visual representation that basically helps you see whether the work is moving or not moving and the interaction you have around that will typically increase the conversation quality and help teams make better choices about where to allocate their scarce resources.

Speaker B: If listeners are interested in that, like I have done this myself, that visual Facilitation, uh, piece. But also when you're talking about the neuroscience behind this, we have an episode with Annie Murphy Paul called the Extended Mind and How to Use the Brain. And there's a huge amount of neuroscience that actually leverages how we move our body in different ways and how we interact with physical objects. So I might, um, direct listeners to that. Nelson, we are coming to the end of our time here today. Thank you so much for joining the Workplace podcast. This has been, uh, fascinating. If people, um, were to find more about you, your book and what you do? How might they do so?

Speaker C: Yeah, a couple ways. If you're interested in kind of my more scholarly stance, um, you can just type my name in your favorite browser. I have a faculty website at MIT and all my papers and scholarly work is connected there. If you're more interested in the practical stuff, um, Don and I are part of a little tiny work design consulting, um, education firm called Shift Gear. So you can go to shiftgear.com uh, and then the book There's Got to Be a Better Way also has its own website that are associated with this, but I think type our names into your favorite browser search engine and be very easy to find us.

Speaker B: So, Nelson, this has been fascinating. Thank you so much and encycle for anybody listening in.

Speaker C: My pleasure. Thank you. It's been great. Really appreciate it.

Speaker A: Thanks so much for listening to the workplace podcast in association with Dynamic Partners. We really appreciate you being part of the conversation. Want to start the conversation about leadership in your organization at AH Dynamic Partners? We help leaders and, um, teams build a culture, uh, of performance that drives real results. Visit dynamicpartners.ie to find out more about our workshops and coaching services, or email infoynamicpartners. Ah IE to start the conversation. We're ambitious for your leadership. Are you.