Get Work Back on Track With Visual Management
The key to fixing snarled knowledge-work processes is to make invisible work visible.
Ken Orvidas/theispot.com
A system that allows everyone to see when and how the work is flowing — especially complex knowledge work — prevents hidden problems from festering and limits the proliferation of work-arounds that can cause organizational rigidity. In this article adapted from their book, There’s Got to Be a Better Way, Nelson P. Repenning and Donald C. Kieffer of MIT Sloan explain how work process visualizations can reveal how individual activities affect one another, and surface problems sooner.
Despite corporate investments in digital initiatives, automation, AI tools, and reorgs, many managers struggle with the daily reality that the core work of their organization is both slow and error-prone. While head-spinning changes in the operating context are keeping many senior executives focused on strategies to fend off disruption, their employees and team leaders are growing frustrated with predictable mistakes, difficulties improving execution, and endless, productivity-sapping logjams.
Turning this common scenario around requires understanding and reconfiguring how work gets done. Three decades of collaboration on organizational research and our experiences working in and for companies led us to an approach we call dynamic work design. That model initially comprised four simple principles: structure the work to spot problems, use a scientific approach to solving problems, connect both front-line employees and managers more explicitly to each other and to the work, and regulate the flow of work into the system.1
Those four principles, which we expand on in our new book, There’s Got to Be a Better Way (Basic Venture, 2025), are often easy to see in physical work such as that done in an assembly line: A stopped line represents a problem to be solved; simple structured methods, like Six Sigma’s DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, and Control) or Toyota’s A3, support employees in tackling the gap in a systematic fashion; supervisors and line managers can be easily summoned when a problem can’t be solved locally; and line speed determines the balance between both the number of stoppages and the time available to fix them.
But what do we do in the far larger world of knowledge work when we can’t see that the work has stopped or something else has gone wrong? The answer, which we explore in this article, was crystallized for us a few years ago on a napkin from a hotel bar in Nagoya, Japan.
We were having dinner with three Toyota veterans, one of whom had been an early leader in the company’s Lexus program. Over the course of the meal, we quizzed them, hoping to divine the secrets of Toyota’s success, particularly how they had adapted their employer’s famous production system to work off the factory floor. During our conversation, one of them scribbled two Japanese characters on a napkin.
References
1. S. Dodge, D. Kieffer, and N.P. Repenning, “Breaking Logjams in Knowledge Work,” MIT Sloan Management Review 60, no. 1 (fall 2018): 47-54; N.P. Repenning, D. Kieffer, and J. Repenning, “A New Approach to Designing Work,” MIT Sloan Management Review 59, no. 2 (winter 2018): 29-38; and N.P. Repenning, D. Kieffer, and T. Astor, “The Most Underrated Skill in Management,” MIT Sloan Management Review 58, no. 3 (spring 2017): 39-48.
