WLEI - Lean Enterprise Institute’s Podcast

By Lean Enterprise InstituteBusiness Management

WLEI - Lean Enterprise Institute’s Podcast episodes

July 28 Better Thinking Faster: Toyota Problem-Solving Secrets
In the first half of their podcast Better Thinking Faster, Josh Howell, Mark Reich, and Art Smalley discussed solving problems just in time and how the speed of quality problem solving depends on the level of the organization and the types of problems to be found there. In this second half of the podcast, they examine unique traits of problem solving at Toyota that help employees — frontline to senior executives — solve problems better and faster, characteristics that many companies attempting to be lean fail to grasp.
Create Experiential Learning
Many leaders attempt to apply lean based on reading about it and the management processes and tools involved, says Art, Toyota veteran and author of Four Types of Problems. That’s helpful, but it lacks lean problem-solving experiences. For example, working on a line and solving many small problems daily provides formative learning within Toyota that’s carried forward as a team member advances into management and executive ranks.

“Many of us who encounter these ideas later in life, when we’re at higher levels in our career and in our organizations, don’t always get that opportunity,” says Josh, LEI President. He admires Toyota for onboarding individuals, even white-collar executives, by throwing them onto the line “to work at that level of detail and all the opportunity that could be found therein, to just set a mindset that can be very useful to you even as you get into higher level, longer cycle time, more ambitious, more complex work.”

So what is an executive, without Toyota-like onboarding and problem-solving experiences, supposed to do? Mark, LEI Chief Engineer Strategy and author of Managing on Purpose, says they can at least go to line, to where the work is done, and experience it by observing. He’s seen executives who, when going to the frontline, are astounded by “the amount of difficult, unnecessary, frustrating work that happens minute to minute, day to day.” That helps them to experience the precise nature of work and problems there, but they also must care “that people shouldn’t have to work that way, and people are working like that in many organizations. I think Toyota leaders cared, and not just about the shopfloor ... but about everybody in the organization and that everybody in the organization had value-creating work.”

Art sees it as LEI’s purpose to close the learning gap among leaders not coming out of Toyota and somehow help executives gain the experiences he and Mark encountered when working there: “Mark and I got it through line work, working in Toyota, and in our careers of seeing it at various levels. Other people need to kind of come to that awareness, have the fish scales removed from their eyes in different ways.”

Examine the Process behind Outcomes
Toyota’s unique approach to problem solving includes an obsession with going well beyond the cause of a problem to determine how a process or processes contributed to the outcome and cause. Art cites the example of a failed launch at one of Toyota’s overseas plants. Equipment vendor problems contributed to poor outcomes. Instead of citing “failed vendor, not our problem” and moving on, every aspect of the business pertaining to precision equipment that went to overseas operations was thoroughly analyzed to ensure the next overseas launch would be better than the last. It turns out a variety of documentation, support materials, and training that accompanied equipment going overseas was poor, and Toyota worked for a year or more to make it right.
“Toyota is very good about thinking about the process that led to the end result,” says Art. “Most people want to be critical and criticize the end result. Toyota will go back, back, back, back, back. What were our initial assumptions and thought processes and conditions that led us down this path?”

Mark and Art say this approach is not for Toyota to find blame, but to ensure it does not happen again: 5 Whys not the 5 Whos.

Solve All Problems, Big and Small

The trio discussed how Toyota veterans on the frontline are capable of repeatedly finding and solving hundreds of small problems in the work they have been doing for years. That extent of problem solving on the frontlines is much less common outside of Toyota, where there is likely to be an overemphasis on bigger leadership problems and decisions.

“A lot of organizations look at the decisions and the problems that leaders are solving as key,” says Mark. “Toyota sees that the team member finding those 120 issues in their job is as important to the company as the CEO and the decisions they’re making.”

Toyota wants to be solving small problems fast before they can become big problems. “A lot of organizations tend to wait [and] only have a system to solve problems once they’re big,” adds Mark. “But, in fact, if we can solve a hundred problems fast, like at lower levels in the organization, those are things that won’t become big problems.”

In bringing the conversation back to its beginning, the trio discussed the differences of solving problems better and faster at the line and doing so in executive suites. “When you’re closer to the frontline, it’s much more explicit about what you need to do, but only if you frame the top well and cascaded things down, and a lot of organizations just don’t do that well,” says Art.

One challenge outside of Toyota is honing problem-solving capabilities among those at the top, where there are longer, slower cycles of learning for executives compared to short cycles at the frontline, according to Art. For example, when working on an annual plan, the leader may only experience the cycle two or three times before moving on, without having had enough of a learning experience to reflect and improve the process. At the frontline, the cycle is measured in seconds and experienced countless times daily. “We’re not good, I fear, at the slower learning cycles because people just move around, and we don’t have the standards mechanism to capture it and think about.”
“I can’t tell you the number of companies I’ve had the chance to interact with where the idea that, as an executive in particular, if you’re a successful, high-performing, rising-in-the-organization leader and executive, if you’re in the same job you’re in now three years later, it’s almost viewed as if you’re a defect,” says Josh. “Something must have been wrong with you that you didn’t get promoted or deployed to another lateral move more quickly.”
Without consistency of leadership and the experiences that affords, any lean transformation will be more difficult.
28 min
July 27Sebastian Fixson and Jim Morgan on Why Human Judgment will be Essential for Product Development in the Age of AI
In this episode of the WLEI Podcast, we speak with Jim Morgan and Sebastian Fixson about organizational implications for product development and what building your team’s product development capabilities looks like in the age of AI. Morgan is the author of Designing the Future and has spent over 30 years in industry as a product development leader including serving as a global engineering director at Ford Motor Company during the product-led revitalization under CEO Alan Mulally. Sebastian Fixson is Founding Faculty Director of the DBA Program and Professor of Innovation & Design at Babson College and author of The Innovation Navigator: Transforming Your Organization in the Era of AI.
The conversation explores:
What people-first leadership means in practice
Why particular structures, processes, and practices are needed in product development to help people do their best work
The trade-offs inherent in functional and product organizations
The organizational and product development implications of new technologies including generative AI
How today’s entrepreneurs are thinking about product development and how to invest in developing the next generation of developers
28 min
July 13Better Thinking Faster: A conversation about solving problems just in time
Time is relative, especially when it comes to lean problem solving. The LEI trio of Josh Howell, Mark Reich, and Art Smalley explored how the speed of quality problem solving really depends on the level of the organization in which the problem exists and the types of problems and thinking patterns in place at that level. In this first podcast of two, they examine what “better” and “faster” means in the lean world and how that manifests itself.
There’s often a debate among management circles calling for fast problem solving and change vs. slow, deliberate decision-making. Art, Toyota veteran and author of Four Types of Problems, says, “We’re all trying to think better and think faster, respective to our level and the speed that governs it. But it’s overly simplistic to just say ‘think slow.’ You want to, all things equal, arrive at a better end result faster. In reality there are different types of problems, different patterns of thinking, and different mental gears that can be used.”
Art discussed different types of problems and the different styles of work used in Toyota to address them. As outlined in his book, they are:
Type 1 troubleshooting problem, such as responding to the andon signal at a frontline workstation with a 45-second cycle time, needs to be solved safely and quickly, which will often occur countless times each day because these problems involve a known problem and known solution.
Type 2 problems are harder to solve and have unknown root causes and solutions, which require a more analytical mode of thinking.
Type 3 problems are actually continuous improvement efforts that seek to establish a new, better target condition.
Type 4 problems represent truly innovative new solutions (think hybrid powertrain technologies) that often require years of trial and error.
The problem-solving work moves from convergent thinking, known standards, and highly skilled execution at the frontline to middle management using the eight steps of Toyota Business Practice that can take days or weeks, to innovation, which is slower, more deliberate, divergent, and exploratory.
Josh looks back to his time at Starbucks and the problem-solving spectrum, contrasting the challenge of trying to transform a company of some 350,000 employees (“That’s going to take some time, and certainly the executives don’t want it to take too much time. It can’t take forever.”) compared to experiencing problems in a store during peak service time when there’s a new customer every 30 seconds. “The way that we were taught from our TPS and lean teachers to improve that situation, improve our performance for the customers, was to really dig into the details of what happens inside those 30 seconds.”
Speed is only one facet of lean problem solving. Remember, the Toyota slogan is “Better Thinking, Better Products,” and so quality has to be part of problem-solving work.
Mark (LEI Chief Engineer Strategy, author of Managing on Purpose, and also a Toyota veteran) says the quality of problem solving requires developing the capabilities of those doing the problem solving as well as the patience to take sufficient time to examine problems and come to better solutions: “We want to build the capability in the organization for leaders, for people, not just leaders, but for people at every level, to be able to produce good quality work. What’s unique about Toyota is that’s true in any function. We want good quality accounting work. We want good quality planning work. We want good quality work, of course, at where the products made and developed. And I think that does take time to build that capability to produce good quality, whatever function you’re talking about.”
The trio also discuss the:
Cyclical nature of processes in which problems occur, be that a seconds-long cycle on the line, an annual cycle for formulating corporate strategy, or a decades-long span for replenishing capital equipment. At all levels, the process repeats but the problems will vary, such as market changes impacting the strategy development cycle one year to the next.
Use of process cycles as learning: From frontline to the executive suite, it’s not just about fixing the current problem and getting back to work, but taking the time and data to come up with better solutions and standards for future work. “There’s so much here to look closely at, to analyze, to scrutinize,” says Josh. “There’s so many details that we can question, and inside all of those details are potential solutions, potential improvements, kaizen points that we can make things better.”
Need to involve as many people as possible in addressing problems — the work of problem detection, notification, response, and solving. Considering the number of problems that exist throughout a company and at all levels and functions, it would be impossible to meet the problem-solving demand if only top executives, management, and engineers were doing the problem solving.
Toyota Production System was designed not as a system to produce things perfectly but as a framework knowing that things will not go perfectly, that there will be problems. “Build in a system that accepts and recognizes there’s going to be mistakes, therefore have a system that catches and flags those, and have layers of ability stacked behind that to deal with it,” says Art.
Different levels within the organization need to focus on the problem solving commensurate to their level. Josh recalls how a Starbucks executive came to a store that had transformed significantly using standardized work and structured problem solving. This leader, however, was obsessed over a low-priority Type 1 problem he noticed that eventually would be handled by the frontline team instead of giving his attention to building the store team’s overall capability to identify and handle more problems on their own.
The problem-solving approach of Fujio Cho, President of Toyota Motor Manufacturing Kentucky and then Toyota Motor Corp., and other Toyota executives: Art recalls a time when Cho refused to follow along on a plant tour and instead went off on his own and found a significant oil leak at a machine. Cho then immediately engaged the team in problem solving, asking questions about how it occurs and how leaders find such problems, and discussed a process to signal such abnormal and potentially dangerous conditions. He knew the plant tour was set up to be perfect, and he was looking for the right teaching moment, not to scold people, but to build the education into an actual problem rather than view a rehearsed problem on a flip chart.
Look for the second part of the better-thinking-faster conversation to appear on July 28. Subscribe to LEI's newsletter at ean.org/newsletter-signup
40 min
July 08Past, Present, and Future of Lean and AI
Gene Kim, DevOps leader and co-author of Wiring the Winning Organization, joins Tyson Heaton, LEI Executive Director of LeanTech/AI, and Art Smalley, Toyota veteran and LEI advisor, for a lively, enlightening, and wide-ranging conversation about artificial intelligence. They discuss how AI is forever changing the work of individuals and organizations, and explore the good, bad, and ugly of AI today and tomorrow.
One thing they all agree on: the use of AI is picking up, even among lean practitioners. Up to 80% of people in the lean community I suspect still have little to no understanding of AI (“What’s a model?”), estimates Art. But there are examples that the other 20% across industries have started running with it. Tyson mentions, “incendiary events,” like an interaction with a hackathon, that are fueling some of this momentum as individuals return to their work with new capabilities and an appreciation for the technology.
“I've coded with chief medical officers, chief science officers, CEOs, CFOs, people in like revenue cycle management and healthcare,” says Gene. “And just to see these people all solving problems by themselves, you know, as they're using coding agents. It's just amazing to see.”
Discussion highlights from this often-amusing podcast include:
AI finds things that humans alone will not: At a personal and corporate level, AI is uniquely useful at analyzing and finding desired information in any form (data, images, etc.) within unstructured data, says Art.

“One of the big angles of this LLM play into functions out outside of ops — whether you're in purchasing HR, legal, finance ,ops, whatever — they're all sitting on mountains of unstructured data... Apple, of all companies, has this problem, too. There's unstructured data, structured data, and types, and suddenly we now have a way to ingest a lot of that and make it searchable in a way that was not before.”
Like lean standardization, AI removes waste from work that can open space for creativity: “Folks who are new to lean and standardization, they see a standard as potentially restrictive and limiting the creativity and limiting the potential,” says Tyson. Mature lean users, however, recognize that standardization removes constrains and allows them to create and experiment to produce better results.

“A decent chunk of [knowledge work] is basically pattern understanding, pattern synthesis, and pattern projection to get work done,” he adds. “And if you can take and offload that or pair with AI, which it's really good at, it unleashes your creativity.”
Negative reaction to improvements made possible with AI: Gene tells the story of an individual who would do many hours of Excel work each day on a highly specific “horrendous” task, and then AI applied a macro that could do it for her. “Her reaction was anger. She's like, ‘How dare you? I didn't ask for this.” AI removed something she held “near and dear.”

Tyson says a path to overcome this natural human reaction to someone’s work being removed is a better foundation of understanding of value-add vs. non-value add vs. incidental work from the customer’s perspective.
The fear of AI taking jobs is real for some individuals and in some companies: Art relates AI improvements back to early lean improvements, when removing non-value-added piece of work from someone’s work was viewed as taking away their job; they did not recognize the lean improvement was freeing them to think of the other ways they could be adding value to the organization.

Tyson says it’s critical to help rewrite people's identity as creators and improvers rather than lathe worker or spreadsheet specialist. “It's also kind of a tragedy that so many people and so many organizations aren't afforded the ability to remake their identity as an improver of their own work processes and workflows because of either the leadership structure or the behavior, the cultures of the organization.”
Overcoming resistance to AI: Pair coding/programming (when two people code together) and learning by doing together has real value in getting individuals to embrace what’s possible with AI, says Art. “If there's a respected person in the organization, sometimes there's peer learning that occurs. There's different ways people get influenced, different directions. And peer coding seems to me to be a very natural way of transfer of information that's often mutually beneficial, and you get a better result, learn by doing, low risk, high reward.” He adds the interest in AI goes from incremental to exponential.

Gene agrees, and points to examples of increased activation among individuals learning it and just doing it with respected members of their technical community. “We're now in a universe where it is easier to just do the experiment than it is to sort of like describe to someone else and try to justify the experiment. It's like, no, just open the laptop and try it, and we're all going learn something.”
AI weaknesses and role of humans: “It is difficult to overstate just how useful and expert these things are,” says Gene. “So that's on one hand. On the other hand, like these things are also like summer interns. They are prone to doing the most stupid things, right? They delete data, they don't follow instructions very well, they sometimes get confused, right? They forget things. So your job as a human right now — kind of in this weird time where we know what how powerful the AIs are — sometimes it takes a lot of vigilance and supervision and judgment to make sure that are we really getting closer to the goal.”
The dangers of falling in love with AI: Art says AI has given him a sense of control, wonder, and fun in building things again that he has not experienced in years. Gene also says that solving problems — his own and those of others with AI — has been exhilarating and that he hasn’t “been this productive in a long time, maybe even ever.”

Tyson notes, however, that the way he’s working, too often task-switching and working on multiple projects while AI delivers outcomes, “was not leading to the result I wanted either in like the depth of work around a component of work that I was doing or my attention span. I think I'm getting a little shorter, and I think I'm losing some depth... I need to countermeasure the way that I'm working to be able to make sure that I'm kind of maintaining myself as a person of depth, as being able to dig in deeply into these issues that are important or into these work threads that are important, rather because otherwise I spend a whole bunch of time cleaning up the slop that came because of my poor custody as a workflow manager.”

Gene says that the critical personal constraint for AI has gone from the number of tokens a user has and the number of agents to how focused we can be on one thing. “Attention, focus is like the most precious constraint and constrained resource we have.”
1 hr 14 min
April 14Coaching and Co-Learning — Coach as Mirror
This week The Management Brief presents the second installment in our series on coaching across the lean community and the benefits of mutual learning — senior leaders with external and/or internal lean coaches as well as peer-to-peer relationships. These connections can deliver more value and open avenues of understanding and growth not possible when leaders try to go it alone.

Mark Reich, LEI Chief Engineer Strategy, is joined by Desh Edirisuriya, General Manager, New Zealand Manufacturing and Business Excellence with Fisher & Paykel Healthcare, and Jim Luckman, LEI Coach and Partner in Lean Transformations Group. Fisher & Paykel is a manufacturer of respiratory care products based in Auckland, and the company is driven by an objective to improve care and outcomes for patients.

Desh was instrumental in setting up the company’s Business Excellence function. He was first exposed to lean during an extraordinary growth phase at the company, implementing tools and processes to solve the problem of scaling up. Desh has been with Fisher & Paykel for 25 years, along the way learning how to better understand his role as it has changed and where he must focus. Desh says Jim has helped him with that by “being sort of a mirror [to] get good feedback, reflect, and also help me see my role, my gaps, and then help me through developing a way to bridge those gaps.” Desh adds that he often does not know he’s being coached by Jim, but inevitably he ends up changing his behavior as a result of their conversations.

Jim spent 30 years with General Motors, including time at Delphi as a Chief Engineer, director of a site with 600 R&D people, and learning and practicing how to apply lean in R&D. He got involved in coaching after Delphi, and he sees coaching as a means to help individuals solve fundamental problems inside of their businesses from top to bottom, with “the right people solving the right problem at the right time.” He describes his experience with Desh as a “co-learning experience, it’s not one way. I don’t feel like a coach as much as a co-learner.”

Topics that Mark addresses with Desh and Jim include:
Experiments run by Desh at Fisher & Paykel with leaders, direct reports, and shopfloor teams to build social connections and create respectful dialogue among respective groups, and the challenges Desh has encountered with those experiments.
Asking good questions that get people to think about what’s actually going on instead of focusing on their own thinking and not listening to the person you want to do the thinking.
Learnings achieved by Desh and Jim in their work together and their future plans.

Interested in bringing a coach to your organization? Learn more at lean.org/CLP
17 min
April 07Coaching and Co-Learning — Understanding that Lean Is a Journey
This week The Management Brief kicks off an extended series on the coaching and co-learning that is occurring throughout the lean community. We’ll be exploring the benefits of mutual learning in all its forms — senior leaders with their lean coaches, be they external or internal to the organization, as well peer-to-peer relationships — that deliver more value and open avenues of understanding and growth not possible when going it alone.

Most if not all leaders are looking for guidance tailored to their positions, and that’s especially true of lean leaders seeking to transform themselves and their organizations. Effective coaching and co-learning relationships offer a “follow me and we’ll figure this out together” association that enables both partners to navigate a lean journey, establish a path for lean transformation, and achieve sustainable results. We will examine what makes lean coaching and co-learning relationships effective, and, in the process, provide insights into how to establish your own co-learning opportunities.

Our initial installment in this series brings together Marco Lopez, CEO Dreamplace Hotels, & Resorts in the Canary Islands, which embarked on a lean “never-ending” journey 15 years ago, and Oriol Cuatrecasas, coach with the Instituto Lean Management in Spain and a lean practitioner for decades. Mark Reich, LEI Chief Engineer, Strategy, interviews the duo who discuss co-learning and the Dreamplace journey, including:
In 2009, Marco says he and others in the company asked, “What can we do to be more competitive,” and realized they had to do something new and that lean was an option. He is grateful they came to the decision to pursue lean, now seeing it as “the only way,” despite not recognizing early on that the journey would not be easy or fast and takes continuous attention and effort to sustain.
Marco recalls directors working on the first A3s with Oriol, with them being instructed to go out to the gemba and solve real problems. He realized this approach was going to take time, and he and directors would need to be patient and support people every step of the way. Marco recognized that lean was not a “plug-in solution.”
Oriol recalls what attracted him to working with Dreamplace. Around 2010, he was speaking at a public conference and, at the end of the event, advised attendees to take a problem, take a team, learn, apply lean, and share successes (as Jim Womack often advised). Five years later he received an email from an operations manager at Dreamplace who described doing precisely what Oriol had suggested, wanted to share with him what a team was working on, and asked, “When are you going to come?” Oriol went to Dreamplace and met the manager and Marco. A Dreamplace team had begun breaking down silos (lodging department, kitchen, housekeeping, etc.) that prevented flow in serving hotel guests better, and also was working to have a majority of business decisions made by frontline employees. “Immediately I fell in love with these people, and said ‘When do we start?’”
Marco and Oriol discuss how lean was meant for the hospitality industry, an environment that is purely value-added and in which every customer requires a customized experience. This environment requires a reliance on cross-functional teams to seamlessly support the customer’s journey throughout all aspects of their stay.
Coaching has helped Marco and managers within Dreamplace learn how to set goals, manage and empower people, and be honest and open with teams. For example, Marco learned to show up at the gemba and support staff without dominating the situation. Dreamplace started its lean journey internally, working on its own for five years. In hindsight, Marco advises others to ask for professional help from the beginning: “You will save at least two or three years.” Oriol says it helps to be coaching “the right executive,” someone who can make real decisions to change things, own the transformation, and accept that there will be moments of frustration that must be worked through to avoid failure.

Interested in bringing coaching and co-learning to your organization? Schedule a call today.
27 min
April 0620 Years Later: How Toyota's Product Development Principles Are Still Core to a Lean Enterprise
In this special edition of the WLEI Podcast, hosts Lex Schroeder and LEI President Josh Howell sit down with former product development executive Jim Morgan to explore the lasting impact of The Toyota Product Development System: Integrating People, Process, and Technology, the groundbreaking book he co-authored with Jeff Liker. Two decades after its release, the insights that revealed Toyota’s unique approach to product development remain a cornerstone for any organization striving to become a great product company.
Together, they examine:
The story behind the research that inspired The Toyota Product Development System, what drove Jim to uncover Toyota’s secrets of innovation, and how to apply them today

The enduring principles engineering leaders still rely on to build teams that consistently design products customers love (and buy)

How Jim translated lean product and process development (LPPD) lessons into practical action across his own career as a product development and operations executive, adapting them to diverse challenges and contexts.

Common hurdles companies face when putting core LPPD ideas into practice—and where to begin the transformation journey.

Why so many organizations hesitate to take those hard, necessary steps to develop their people and achieve genuine enterprise transformation.
Whether you’re new to lean thinking or deep into your own transformation, this conversation offers both history and insight into how timeless principles continue to shape the future of product development and provide the key to a lean enterprise.
Learn more about lean product and process development at lean.org/LPPD
30 min
December 04, 2025Cutting through the Noise in Tech: Sarah Milstein's Advice for Leaders Who Want to Keep People Focused on Value Creation
In this episode of the WLEI Podcast, we speak with executive coach and engineering leader Sarah Milstein about how to keep teams focused on value creation by putting people at the center of work design.
My conversation with Sarah explores:
How to create cultures of respect as a leader
How companies can simplify job roles, salaries, and raises to focus employees on high-value work
Sarah’s advice for how engineering and product leaders can successfully navigate this moment in tech, including the trends that will pass and the trends that will stick
How to work with teams of engineers to create the conditions for continuous learning
How to support people well so that teams build strong, sustainable lean product and process development systems
About Sarah Milstein
Sarah Milstein coaches executive and emerging leaders in tech. Previously, she held executive roles at a number of tech startups and in the federal government. She was also CEO and co-founder of Lean Startup Productions. Earlier, she was a freelance journalist writing regularly for The New York Times. She holds an MBA from UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business. https://sarahmilstein.com
25 min
November 20, 2025Keeping Our Humanity in Tech: Julia Austin on Why It Pays to Put People First in Product Development
In this episode of the WLEI Podcast, we speak with Julia Austin about what the lean product and process development principle “Put People First” looks like in practice.
An executive fellow at Harvard Business School, Julia is an executive coach with experience leading successful product teams in tech at companies like Akamai Technologies, VMware, Inc., and DigitalOcean. She is also author of the book, After the Idea: What It Really Takes to Create and Scale a Startup.
My conversation with Julia explores:
How to create effective collaboration across people and teams to support an excellent product or service
Where leaders and teams struggle in product development in 2025
How leaders can support people to drive high-performance
Standout moments of people working together vastly improve a product and service
How to leverage AI while keeping human beings at the center of work design
Why a culture of care and respect builds teams of responsible experts
22 min
November 11, 2025Designing Work to More Effectively Solve the Right Problems
In this week’s edition of The Management Brief, Josh Howell, LEI President, and Mark Reich, LEI Chief Engineer Strategy, speak with Nelson Repenning, School of Management Distinguished Professor of System Dynamics and Organization Studies at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Nelson also is the co-author of There’s Got to Be a Better Wayi and the Co-Founder and Chief Social Scientist of ShiftGear Work Design, a consultancy that focuses on understanding the factors that contribute to the successful implementation, execution, and improvement of business processes.
This month The Management Brief is presenting theories that are guiding organizational transformations, including Nelson’s dynamic work design, an “anti-initiative” approach for redesigning work to solve the right problems effectively and, in doing so, increase productivity, profits, and associate engagement.
Dynamic work design helps organizations challenge the mindset that they can forecast and plan — budget, strategy, human resources, capital — with accuracy. Nelson’s alternative: “If we accept that the world is not perfectly predictable, we might go back and design some of our core processes a little bit differently to create an organization that not only plans but also is capable of learning from experience and adapting to the new information they get as they go.”
Dynamic work design is based on five principles:
Solve the right problem: This principle is “a charge to focus on bite-sized pieces of important problems and use structured methods, whether it’s the A3 or DMAIC or whatever your preferred version is to make sure that you actually solve that problem in a fundamental way,” says Nelson.
Structure for discovery: This involves configuring every job in the organization so that the individual doing the job learns the right lessons and can get feedback to adjust behaviors to do work in the right way.
Connect the human chain: “Let’s leverage the collective intelligence of the organization by making sure that problems quickly get to the person who is in the best position to solve them,” instructs Nelson. “So it’s essentially a charge to wire together the information flow so that knowledge about a particular issue gets to the right place and gets there quickly.”
Regulate for flow: This is a version of Toyota pull that involves making sure there is the right amount of work in the system to prevent “traffic jams” of work.
Visualize the work: This principle helps to apply visualization usually found in physical work to knowledge work, which frequently lacks such signals. “If we can create a kind of digital twin or radar screen ... so that we can see whether knowledge work is moving or not, it often unlocks a lot of that natural problem solving that you would get in other contexts if the work were a little bit more available to us,” explains Nelson.
Nelson described how the Broad Institute, a research organization dedicated to understanding the roots of disease and closing the gap between new biological insights and impact for patients, successfully applied dynamic work design in a knowledge-work environment to improve research grant workflows. The institute had one grant process that was particularly problematic, time-consuming, frustrated staff, and required workarounds.
Sheila Dodge, COO of Broad Clinical Labs, followed the dynamic work design principles in a direct manner and set clear targets: get grants approved in 10 days rather than the 20 or 30 days that it was taking. “They mapped the process pretty carefully so you could see all the steps that they went through. And then ... they created a really simple visual management system to plot how the work was flowing or track how the work was flowing,” says Nelson. Using a white board they depicted steps in the process, with a sticky note representing each grant moving through the process, which quickly revealed their poor design choices. They then reconfigured resources and the work started flowing dramatically.
The trio also discussed Nelson’s work relating to:
The efficacy of face-to-face communications: When designing processes for getting work done, face-to-face communications should in place where most helpful, such as where there is ambiguity or uncertainty that needs to be processed. “We have discovered that often a daily meeting can replace, if it’s well designed, hundreds of emails a day if you design the meeting [to] bring all the uncertainty into the meeting,” says Nelson.
Seagull management: This refers to the uncomplimentary behavior of managers who, when there is a crisis, “fly in like a flock of seagulls and then sort of poop on everything and then fly away.” Nelson says that “as leaders get more senior, they really underestimate the symbolic impact of their actions... The thing that people don’t understand when they get to those corner offices is that everybody is looking at them to try to figure out what behaviors are appropriate in this organization. They are the chief role model, whether they like it or not. And so I think as a consequence, with the best of intentions, leaders often have really pathological impacts on their organization.”
AI will change work dynamics: “There’s no question that AI is going to change our lives in very material ways,” says Nelson. “But I actually think it is going to put an even greater premium on the kinds of things that we collectively do... It’s best captured by one of my former students [who] said, ‘You know, there’s few ways to lose money faster than automating a process you don’t understand.’ I think that’s going to be very true in the machine learning AI-enabled world, and I think it’s going to put a real premium on understanding how the work actually gets done. And then using these new tools in very strategic ways.”
1 hr 3 min