#317 How to Reengineer Your Business Processes with Nelson Repenning & Don Kieffer, MIT

Every day, knowledge workers face the challenge of managing competing priorities and constant interruptions. When systems are managing us rather than us managing them, productivity suffers and morale plummets. But what if the key to improvement isn't complex reorganization but rather understanding how work actually flows through your team or organization? How can visualizing your workflow and regulating for flow transform productivity? What small, incremental changes might lead to dramatic improvements in both output and job satisfaction? Nelson P. Repenning is the Faculty Director of the MIT Leadership Center and the School of Management Distinguished Professor of System Dynamics and Organization Studies at the MIT Sloan School of Management. His early work focused on understanding the inability of organizations to leverage well-established tools and practices. He has worked extensively with organizations trying to develop new capabilities in both manufacturing and new product development. Nelson has also studied the failure to use the safety practices that often lead to industrial accidents and has helped investigate several major incidents. This line of research has been recognized with several awards, including best paper recognition from both the California Management Review and the Journal of Product Innovation Management. Building on his earlier work, Nelson now focuses on developing the theory and practice of Dynamic Work Design—a new approach to designing work that is both effective and engaging—and Dynamic Management Systems, a method for ensuring that day-to-day work is tightly linked to the strategic objectives of the firm. His book (co-authored with Don Kieffer) There Has Got to Be a Better Way describing Dynamic Work Design will be published by Public Affairs in 2025. He is also a partner at ShiftGear Work Design and serves as its chief social scientist. In 2003, Nelson received the International System Dynamics Society’s Jay Wright Forrester Award, w