Organizations today face mounting pressure to reinvent themselves—whether it’s adapting to shifting customer expectations, leveraging emerging technologies, or outpacing new competitors. Yet research shows much of that effort is being wasted. A Deloitte survey found employees spend 41% of their time on tasks that create no real value, while an MIT Sloan Management Review study revealed 75% feel overwhelmed by work intensification: too many tasks, too much bureaucracy, and constant firefighting.
“This isn’t a new problem,” says Nelson Repenning, professor at MIT Sloan School of Management and faculty director of the MIT Leadership Center. “When leaders and frontline employees are stuck in perpetual crisis mode, there’s no bandwidth left for the work that really matters. At a time when business moves at warp speed, this suffocates innovation and growth.”
In their new book There’s Got to Be a Better Way: How to Deliver Results and Get Rid of the Stuff in the Way of Real Work, Repenning and co-author Donald C. Kieffer—former Harley-Davidson executive and senior lecturer at MIT Sloan—propose a solution: the Dynamic Work Design framework. Built on years of research and real-world operations expertise, the framework is designed to boost productivity, cut costs, and eliminate organizational bottlenecks.
At its core are five practical principles every company can apply to make work flow better:
Solve the Right Problem – Don’t rush to fix. First define what’s actually wrong, without assumptions about causes or solutions.
Structure for Discovery – Help people understand why their role matters and engage them in closing performance gaps.
Connect the Human Chain – Replace meeting overload with targeted face-to-face interactions that truly keep work moving.
Regulate the Flow – Avoid gridlock by letting new tasks in only when capacity is available.
Visualize the Work – Make progress visible to everyone so teams stay aligned beyond spreadsheets and endless emails.
For leaders navigating constant reinvention, these principles offer not just efficiency gains but a way to restore meaning to daily work—ensuring teams focus less on red tape and more on impact.
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Source: MIT Sloan
