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My guest for Episode #540 of the Lean Blog Interviews Podcast is Don Kieffer–executive consultant, former Vice President of Operational Excellence at Harley-Davidson, founder of ShiftGear Work Design, senior lecturer at MIT Sloan, and co-creator of Dynamic Work Design. Don has spent more than five decades helping organizations understand, redesign, and improve the way real work gets done. He and Nelson Repenning recently co-authored the new book There's Got to Be a Better Way.
In this conversation, Don shares the arc of his career–from starting as a machinist and “factory rat” to becoming one of the leading voices on human-centered work design. He recounts how Toyota legend Hajime Oba challenged his thinking at Harley-Davidson and why he eventually diverged from the “copy the rituals” approach to Lean. That experience shaped his lifelong focus on understanding the thinking behind Toyota's methods–not the artifacts.
We explore the core elements of Dynamic Work Design, including the five principles: solving the right problem, structuring for discovery, connecting the human chain, regulating flow, and making work visible. Don explains how these principles apply to factories, engineering teams, software organizations, finance groups, and healthcare. He draws sharp distinctions between work design and leadership style, arguing that good work design produces the behavior and culture leaders often try (and fail) to teach directly.
Don also tells vivid stories–from crisis management at Harley, to working with MIT researchers, to confronting executives who blame “morale problems” rather than looking at broken work systems. His reflections connect deeply with psychological safety, respect for people, and systems thinking. He makes a compelling case that the biggest gains–often 30% or more in weeks–come from redesigning intellectual work, which he calls “almost infinitely compressible.”
This episode is packed with insight on designing better workflows, creating real-time management systems, and restoring joy in human work. It's a great follow-up to Episode #538 with Nelson Repenning and a must-listen for anyone responsible for improving performance in complex organizations.
This podcast is part of the #LeanCommunicators network.
Full Video of the Episode:
Top Quotes from Don:
“Five percent of the problem is people. Ninety-five percent is bad work design.”
“If managers lose touch with how work really gets done, they start blaming dysfunction on people instead of the system.”
“Most executives cannot draw how work actually flows through their organization. They can draw the org chart, but not the work.”
“Intellectual work is almost infinitely compressible. In offices, I've seen 300-1000% improvements–far more than in factories.”
“Lean fails when leaders copy Toyota's rituals instead of its thinking. You can't paste someone else's culture onto your own.“
Thanks for listening or watching!
This podcast is part of the Lean Communicators network — check it out!
Automated Transcript (Not Guaranteed to be Defect Free)
Mark Graban: Hi, welcome to Lean Blog Interviews. I'm your host, Mark Graban.
Our guest today is Don Kieffer. He's a seasoned executive consultant and speaker who has spent his career helping organizations of all sizes improve the way they work. He previously served as Vice President of Operational Excellence at Harley-Davidson.
He's the founder of ShiftGear Work Design. He's the co-creator of an approach we're going to talk about today called Dynamic Work Design. He is also a senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management.
He is a longtime collaborator with our guest not long ago in episode 538, Nelson Repenning, the MIT Distinguished Professor of System Dynamics. Don and Nelson are the co-authors of the new book, There's Got to Be a Better Way.
Don, it's great to have you here today. How are you?
Don Kieffer: I'm good. Thanks for having me, Mark. I'm happy to be here.
Mark Graban: I hope people will check out the conversation with Nelson. It's in leanblog.org/538.
We're going to build upon that first conversation. Don's background in industry–it's an interesting pairing, wouldn't you say? Between a professor and, I don't know, a factory rat?
Don Kieffer: We like to refer to ourselves in a humorous way. I call myself a factory rat , and he called himself the pointy head, ivory tower intellectual. We're on either extreme of the continuum. He's a really smart academic guy, and I'm a really good crisis manager, a “give my hands on it, fix it” guy.
It's been an interesting–we've been working together for, it'll be 30 years next year, so we've been working together a long time. Even in the book, you hear the two different voices clashing sometimes.
Mark Graban: We'll hear your origin story with lean and system dynamics and working with Nelson. How long have you been lecturing at MIT Sloan now?
Don Kieffer: I don't know, 17 years, something like that. A while.
Mark Graban: I missed you there. I graduated in 1999. But I'm glad that there is such a collaboration with industry at MIT. I think that's one of the strengths.
Don Kieffer: It's the hands and minds. They have that idea right–hands and mind.s
Mark Graban: Yep. And it's in the university seal or the emblem for anybody who wants to look that up.
The Lean Origin Story: From Factory Floor to Haji Oba
Mark Graban: We're going to talk about the book, There's Got to Be a Better Way. But Don, I always like to hear people's origin stories, whether for you, whether that was at Harley or elsewhere. What's your lean origin story?
Don Kieffer: I'm not so sure if it was actually lean; it was being a fix-it guy. I was too smart to go to college when I was 18, so I went to work in the factories. It turned out I was good at solving problems, and I think that got me into engineering school later and got me to the executive position I had at Harley.
I tried everything along the way. There was Six Sigma and lean and all kinds of stuff before that. I tried all these kinds of things and usually didn't like them.
I think I got to a point where I hit a wall when I was running an engine plant at Harley. I read an article about this guy, Hajime Oba from Toyota. He was helping US companies. He was running the Toyota Supplier Support Center, so he was training US suppliers. I somehow talked him into coming to help me.
That's really when the lights went on working with him and his team, because he got way beyond the tools, which were kind of driving me crazy. People would say you have to do this and do that. I said, “Why do you do that?” “That's because you're supposed to do”.
From Haji Oba, I learned the thinking behind all this stuff , and it really helped me and explained why a lot of stuff I did had worked and really completed my thought process. That really got me going.
Mark Graban: Mr. Oba's son, by the way, Hide Oba, has been a guest on the podcast here. After his father passed, he was kind enough to come and share some reflections, and he's very active in this field himself.
I'd love to unpack what you were talking about there. If you can elaborate, you were saying you didn't like these different methodologies, it sounds in part because it was such a tools-driven approach. I'm with you. I think “always” and “never” statements are rarely correct in all cases. The classic would be like, “Oh, you always start with 5S”.
Don Kieffer: And then you do what do they call when they draw out the process? Value stream map. I said, “Why do you do a value stream map?”.
Once I started working with Mr. Oba, the first thing his people told me was, “Everyone makes the same mistake. Everyone does a value stream map. And then they look at it, it's okay, we did it right. It's no”.
Even with Oba, we got to a point where he was pushing me to do things in my plant which didn't make sense. A US automotive motorcycle engine plant. It made sense in Toyota. If you want to be Toyota, then you have to do it Toyota's way. But I was more interested in the thinking.
He was pushing me to do things, rituals, and specific practices that did not fit our culture and would only cause me trouble with the union and other people. I found other ways around it.
That's when we parted ways, but my goal with him was, “I want to understand his thinking. I wanted to be able to predict the question he was going to ask me”.
I wanted to make the pivot away from physical work because, by then, I was an executive. I wanted to turn it to intellectual work: engineering, executive work, strategy, legal, supply chain, all this other kind of stuff that was happening around me, not just physical work on the floor.
That was the big turning point for me. I got the big aha moment about how Mr. Oba's mind was working and was pretty much able to predict what he would say and imitate him. He was a very distinct personality, and people laugh, “Oh, that's exactly how Mr. Oba would say it” when I meet people.
The Trouble with Rituals: A Harley-Davidson Example
Mark Graban: It's interesting that from your perspective, he was a little bit off track. What's an example of a ritual or approach? Was it a matter of not fitting the Harley culture?
When I was at General Motors, I was in an engine plant, heavy on machining. But I think the good plant manager I had, with the knowledge background, had the thought process embedded within him at that point by Toyota people. What comes to mind about something that you thought was a bad fit?
Don Kieffer: I'll give you the one specific example that made me sensitive to it, and then I started seeing it other places.
It was the area that I asked him to come help me with. First of all, he almost walked out because I kept giving him these big speeches about what I needed to do, and I wouldn't answer his question, “What's the problem you're trying to solve?”. I got mad at him because he kept asking me the same question.
He did actually leave, and his guys told me, “Don, this is the way he's going to show you, and you have to get a specific area to work in”. This was familiar to me because that's the way I had been working when I was on the shop floor.
Anyway, we picked one area, a small cell called the rotor and stator area. It's the winding and the magnets that go inside the rotational part of the engine that create power. It was a two-man cell. That cell had so many problems that it kept shutting down our assembly line that was inside the building. My goal was to get it ahead, get it calmed down, get the quality and cost down, and mostly the disruption down.
So we did that, but then he wanted to go farther. He wanted to bring the little card over every 15 minutes with 15 pieces and back and forth and set this quick cadence. This would've made sense if the whole plant was going that way. But he wanted to put in this added thing, which was not going to increase any output, not increase anything, but it would just be because “we want to show you the Toyota way”.
The union would've nailed me to the cross, like, “Why do we have to do this? It makes no sense”. They were okay with everyone else because they were tired of shutting down both engine plants, which were supplying both. Now they were the heroes, but they were saying, “This is just punitive. You're making us do stuff that doesn't make sense”.
That's when I got to, “Okay, I understand the idea of it, but I'm going to put the practice in where it makes good sense to advance the whole system and not just do it religiously”. And that's when we parted ways.
Mark Graban: It's good that people felt safe–maybe they had the union protections where they could speak up and disagree. But even better, you listened to them and took that feedback?
Don Kieffer: We had a really wonderful union. They saved the plant; they helped save the business in the eighties. It was a big partnership, so there was a lot of respect going back and forth between the management and the union.
I was a former union guy and former machinist. I was thinking, “I would've thought that was nuts, too”. I was reluctant to push them to do stuff that just didn't make sense. It was based on respect and a broader sense of, “How do I engage people that this is good, it's a better way to work, and it's more productive” instead of, “It's something the boss is telling you to do and you don't understand”. It was really that sensibility that I had.
From Compliance to Principles and Intellectual Work
Mark Graban: Did you turn that question back on Mr. Oba, or what problem are you trying to solve?
Don Kieffer: I would never do that to him, but I did to his guys, and they told me, “Don, you can't take this piecemeal. It's either all or nothing with a Toyota system. You can't pick and choose”. And that's how I said, “Okay, I'm going to pick and choose”.
It got me more into this thing about the principles and managing the change process, and not just, “Do what I tell you”. I've worked all over the world, and in some countries, you can do that. Some places in the US you can do that, because it runs like, “You just do what I tell you,” and people get that and it works. But that wasn't the way in Harley you could do things.
Mark Graban: In some settings, you can get away with telling people what to do, but I don't think that's what leads to a world-class organization. It's a compliance culture versus continuous improvement.
Don Kieffer: Especially moving off the factory floor where the work was mechanical and repetitive, and it was time-studied and all this kind of stuff. You start talking to engineers, finance people, lawyers, executives in other places, and they're saying, “I'm not, you're not telling me what to do. Help me think about how to, show me how to work better my way. And so I can be part of it”.
You're just not going to write rules for me. I'm the president of the company. The day I resigned from Harley, I went into the president's office, Jim McCaslin, and I said, “Jim, you're probably tired of me telling you what to do.” He goes, “You're damn right I am”. I was in that “we have to do this, we have to do that” mode, and he didn't like that. I think that was a big part of the pivot for me into intellectual work.
Dynamic Work Design: Definition and Principles
Mark Graban: When you think about principles or the Toyota System at a higher level, it's a holistic system. I think that includes encouraging, making it safe for people to speak up, whether that's pulling the Andon cord, pointing out a problem, and not punishing them for doing so, but engaging employees. If you look at the 14 principles of The Toyota Way, coming from Jeff Liker's book, a lot of organizations struggle with principle number one about long-term decision making.
The way you frame it is Dynamic Work Design. Is that something that is really best embraced as a holistic approach?
Don Kieffer: The difference with Dynamic Work Design is it's not principles about leadership or how you should act; it's not “be long-term” or “quality first,” which can be interpreted many different ways. Our five principles are about the work, not about people.
It's done from a position of deep respect for human work. This is the way we organize human work. When we organize the human work that way, it respects the people at any level doing the work. It gives respect to the president of the company and their role, as well as to the person mopping the floor.
Respect comes out of the method. If you just ask people what lean means or Google it, you're going to get 50,000 different definitions. It's not about an attitude that a person has; it's about how you organize the work.
Mark Graban: Toyota doesn't call it lean. They may begrudgingly acknowledge that a lot of the world refers to TPS as lean, but then you have so many divergent paths of fidelity to TPS. For people who didn't hear the episode with Nelson, what's your quick definition of Dynamic Work Design?
Don Kieffer: My quick definition would be: It's an approach to changing and improving work, underpinned by five principles of good work design.
Mark Graban: Can you share those five principles in brief?
The Five Principles of Dynamic Work Design
Don Kieffer: The first one is about homing in on the right problem. So, solve the right problem and solve it the right way. A lot of people start with a solution in mind, and they don't really get down to what the physical problem is. We have a structured way of running a scientific experiment (what people in lean know as A3).
Your pattern-matching brain and your experience will shout at you something that you should do, but it might not be the right thing. Writing it down and actually looking at the data forces it into the logic part of your brain. Don't give me a solution; give me the problem, and use a structured way of solving it.
The second one has to do with how we set up management systems, and it's called structure for discovery. A lot of times, the structure is for following the plan. The structure for discovery is more like: when we do the work, we're also going to ask the question, “Is it the right plan?”.
That requires four elements:
- We need a clear target with a clear intent behind the target. Don't just tell me to go faster. Why faster? What are we trying to accomplish?
- We need supporting metrics. If you want me to go faster, you also want me to preserve quality and cost. As in Toyota, “create a box with three walls”. You have to actually improve the work; you can't cut corners.
- I want to see the activity sets. I care how you cut [costs], because every time we do the activity, we want to run it as an experiment. We did the activity that we assume will work: did it help or not? What did we learn?
- We create learning all the way through, and then what are the issues we come across, and let's solve them as we go. We treat it as an experiment.
The third one is connect the human chain. We recognize that, in our view, the only work that ever gets done is by people. No machines, no software, no suppliers. Work moves through an organization, person to person, especially intellectual work. I get an input, I do work, I have an output. It goes to another person.
We see two ways:
- Work moves along the work chain horizontally.
- Work moves through the management chain up and down to provide resources, direction, guidance, all that kind of stuff. We connect the human chain both horizontally and vertically.
The fourth one is lean people will know this as pull, which is regulate the flow. Don't put work in the system that's not able to process right away, because it just piles up. We regulate for flow, because that's the other big idea of dynamic work design: work should always be moving, even intellectual work. If you've got 500 messages in your inbox, maybe that's a problem.
Intellectual work is hard to see, and that's part of the big problems. We can see physical work; we can see when the assembly line stops. But can you see when a project hits an issue or when decisions get stuck?
So the fifth principle is visualize the work. We do that with all kinds of tools: Post-it notes, computer visualizations. Once we can actually see the work, all the tricks that we use in physical work come into play.
By visualize the work, I don't mean the status like, “Oh, we're 50% done”. I want to say, “Where is the invoice? Where is the project?”. Like a digital twin. Like an air traffic controller sees where the planes are on a radar scope. We want a digital twin on the wall or on the computer that shows the work actually moving, the status, and the issues. I want to see where the work is and at what stage. That's the fifth one, trying to visualize the movement of work.
The Origin of the Collaboration with Nelson Repenning
Mark Graban: I'm curious again maybe about the history of your introduction to system dynamics and in particular to Nelson. Had he reached out to Harley as a place to come do some research? How did that come to be?
Don Kieffer: Nelson had just was a newly minted PhD. I think he was like 26 years old. He had gotten a grant from the National Science Foundation, and one of the stipulations was that you had to have an industry partner to do your research.
He was reaching out, and a guy by the name of Ron Hutchinson, who was the Vice President of Quality (sadly, he's passed away now), asked Nelson and his team to come to Harley to help them figure out the next step of quality–to increase quality at Harley.
As it turns out, Ron basically said, “You've done a lot of stuff in manufacturing, now you've got to fix the design so it's easier to manufacture”.
They were walking down the hallway one day, the two of them, and I'm coming the other way. He says, “Oh, you've got to talk to this guy because he's changing everything. He's got this engine project and product development, and he's really offending [people]. You've got to talk to him”.
So we had lunch together. Of course, I'm like 15 or 20 years older than he is, but I'm acting like the excited teenager. He's the newly minted PhD from MIT, and he's listening very quietly. I was telling him, “Look what I did, Nelson. I did this”. Basically, I told him that I had invented a stage-gate process.
He looked at me and said, “Don, why didn't you read a book once in a while? The stage gate was invented like 30 or 40 years ago”.
But another time I showed him what I was doing, and he goes, “Wait a minute. I want to talk more about that”. I said, “Why? It's just some dumb thing I did.” He goes, “Because there's very little literature on this point. And what literature there is says you should do exactly the opposite of what you did, and your results are stunning. So I want to understand more”.
Mark Graban: That's an interesting problem to dig into.
Don Kieffer: So, all of a sudden, I'm changing everything like a loose cannon, and here I get this guy who goes, “Let's think about this for a minute”. I thought, “Maybe this is a guy that can help aim this loose cannon”.
He got a ton of energy and primary data for me. I got somebody who knows what they're doing from a historical and contextual point of view. We were both interested in always making things better, and we hit it off right away.
Mark Graban: That was around 1996, I think.
Dynamic Work Design in Healthcare: Handoffs and Huddles
Mark Graban: Thinking back to the title of the book, There's Got to Be a Better Way. You knew there was a better way. How do we discover better ways?
You talk about dynamic work design in different settings. I'd like to dig into healthcare. Everyone is a patient and can see the symptoms of poor work design. Can you share an example from healthcare, not just of the improvement, but helping leaders see the problem wasn't the people per se, but the system and the opportunity to actually design the work? Because there's a lot of blaming in healthcare, unfortunately.
Don Kieffer: It's a really complex industry. I don't have a ton of history working in it myself, but I do have an example that shows you what a good work design looks like and what one doesn't.
Let's just talk about one of the principles: Connect the Human Chain. Basically, that says that work should flow, work should keep flowing, and when there's a problem, management should come right away and help, just like the Andon cord.
It also says there are basically two ways we work: handoffs and huddles. If the work is repeated and known, then we just hand off work. “Send me my paycheck.” We don't need a meeting; it's just a handoff.
But if there's a problem or an issue, we need to huddle. We need to talk.
If you think about someone working on an assembly line, they're doing repetitive work. That's a handoff. When something new comes up, and I have a problem, that goes to a different part of your brain. Now we have a problem or an issue and a decision to make. So I pull the Andon cord, and the management system, in the face of my team leader, comes over right away. We have a mini meeting and we decide what to do. It's a huddle. To get those pieces of work flowing, we need the right combination of huddles and handoffs.
If I try to get something signed off on email–did you ever get one of those really long emails with 20 people in it about a problem that just goes around and around? The obvious solution is you get those people in a room, and five minutes later, the problem is solved. It's the wrong design. They're designing as a handoff what should be done as a huddle or a short meeting face-to-face.
Let's look how that plays out in a hospital. A good example is an emergency room that's not backed up for four hours. You come in, and there's the right combination of face-to-face conversation (“What's wrong? What are we doing? What's the data?”) and handoffs (“We need a blood test. Get the results, get me the data”). Those move very quickly to move the patient through the process and get them the care they need.
Now think about paying the bill for that emergency room visit. You get the bill six months later. It's ten times what you thought it was going to be, and then you try to call to find out what the answer is. You can be talking to a person, but that person can't make a decision or give you any information, and they send you around and around. You can't really get the right combination of, “I need the data, and then we need to make a decision or solve a problem”. You're at it for months. This is the difference between work flowing in a good human design versus it getting caught up without having the right type of conversation with the right person and the right transfer of data. The problem doesn't resolve forever.
Management's Role and the Intellectual Andon Cord
Mark Graban: There's a broad definition of work, it seems, when you talk about dynamic work design. There's the physical handoff of blood going to the lab. There might be an electronic order, but the lab work design still might be poor. They've improved that handoff, and now there's a very slow, batchy, poorly designed process in the lab, and it takes an hour and a half to get the test result back.
Part of the work design might include what's the scope of a nurse manager? How many people are they supposed to be helping potentially at a given time?
Don Kieffer: It depends on how many problems they have. That's the answer I got from Toyota. Why is it always a five-to-one ratio? Don, there's no rule about a five-to-one ratio.
The rule is: we always have enough support to solve all the problems. If you have more than ten people, you can't solve all the problems. So, of course, it goes down to around five or seven people. They come at it from a different way about why that rule exists. It's about, “We need to respond to the problems in real time”.
The problem in offices, Mark, is that there's no Andon cord. Management interacts with the frontline in two ways:
- Meetings: We have to time those meetings correctly to the pace of the work. We have a daily standup, a weekly staff meeting, a monthly staff meeting, quarterly strategy, annual whatever. If those meetings aren't timed to catch enough problems to solve, either people are having too many meetings that are boring or not having meetings often enough, and their problems are growing in between.
- Andon cord (Event-Based Trigger): The other way we initiate that is with an Andon cord. So, event-based with some sort of intellectual trigger. In between the meeting, if something happens that crosses this criteria, here's who you call. That person is supposed to respond right away.
Think about the fire department. Fire trucks don't go up and down the street once a week asking, “By the way, you got any fires going on?”. No, you call the fire department, and they don't come and blame you. They come and help , and the criteria is pretty clear.
When you call 911 for a fire department, the call does not go out to every fire department in the Boston area. It goes to a specific fire department who's trained to respond right away. We usually don't have that mechanism in intellectual work. If you're my boss, you tell me, “Don, if X, Y, Z happens, you call me right away, and I'll get back to you within two hours or four hours or whatever”. We don't set that up, so that mechanism rarely exists for that type of interaction to keep managers in touch with what's really happening.
Mark Graban: Thinking back to the example of firefighters or EMS, a very small percentage of their time is spent actually fighting fires. Somebody who is solely focused on a single number would say their utilization is very low. But society has prioritized and designed the system to get a response when there is a fire. They do other things to fill their time, including inspections and education.
It seems like a lot of organizations, in search of “efficiencies,” end up eliminating layers of management. But now they're stripping out their ability to react to problems.
Don Kieffer: They strip out layers of management because the managers or people making the decision have the wrong idea of what managers are supposed to be doing, which is helping and not just telling people what to do.
They are not just sitting behind a desk, giving orders and having stupid meetings, but actually being connected to the work. The managers who lose touch with what's really happening day-to-day work, how it gets done, and the problems and frustrations people face in getting work done, moving through all the bureaucratic inconsistencies and dysfunction, don't see that.
Then they blame the dysfunction on people who are mad or angry. “They're not engaged, they're not motivated.” Of course not! You've put every blockade in the way, and then you blame them when bad stuff happens. Instead of being, “I'm responsible for good flow and for making sure people have what they need”.
5% of the problem is people. My experience, and I've been doing this a long time (over 50 years), is that 95% of the time, the problems are because of bad work design, not bad people. We've seen executives say, “My people are stupid. They're not engaged”. And three months later, when things are going well, they go, “Wow. These people are so wonderful”. Of course, they are!. They love doing their job. They just don't love fighting all the stupid bureaucratic battles that you make them fight because the work is not organized.
Mark Graban: Instead of, and maybe in some organizations, these layers of management haven't been taught, trained, and developed to do these things. If you go back to, “What problem are you trying to solve?” are you just trying to cut cost, or are you trying to have a more effective organization looking at how the work is done? You could invest in those leaders and teach them improvement principles and how to do better problem solving.
Don Kieffer: Let me come back to why we're a little bit different than most. We would not teach people how to engage people; we would teach them how to organize and design the work. Because in the design of work that we have, engaging people is part of the work. Those feedback loops and those triggers are there.
Once they design the work better, then they get the result with the people that they want. The culture comes out of the repeated behavior of the work. Instead of preaching at people how to do it, let's fix the system first.
The other big piece of dynamic work design is the approach, and that's really the heart of it. The principles are the diagnostics, but the way we do the change is the approach, which is start small, pick a specific problem. In your hospital case with the lab, what's the problem we're trying to solve? You don't have to invent the entire perfect system. If we made the electronic thing fast, but now we're waiting for seven hours for the piece to come to the lab, let's go fix the throughput in the lab then.
It's always, “Let's go to a specific problem. Where is the problem the biggest?”. When you solve one problem, you see the next, and the system begins to prioritize what is the next biggest problem to solve. You generally get to fix the whole system, but a piece at a time. We avoid all the religious stuff like a 12-week training program or using Japanese words. Let's just go solve problems and understand them clearly based on the work, and then we find the behavior follows that.
The Entry Point of Dynamic Work Design
Mark Graban: What is an entrance point for dynamic work design into an organization? Is it usually a plant manager, a VP of ops, sometimes a CEO? What level in the organization is at least amenable to this idea of a different approach to work design?
Don Kieffer: We don't really do marketing or advertising, so it's mostly word-of-mouth and teaching. We are mostly exposed to mid-level to high executives who have a problem and they think this sounds new. The entrance is always someone with a problem. We're not teaching dynamic work design; we're teaching them how to solve a problem using a framework.
The idea of the principle-based approach is that the same problem shows up in a completely unique way in every different organization. So you have to come in and solve the problem and then learn. That's the entry point–someone who's got a problem, and usually, it's mid to upper management.
Mark Graban: I imagine you have to reach agreement on how we're framing the problem.
Don Kieffer: That's a really interesting point. The hardest thing about this is not doing the fix. The hardest thing about is to get the leader to articulate what the problem is. They start with, “I want to get this software in,” or “These people are mad,” or “These people aren't doing what I want”.
We have to get them down to, “Hey, sales are at 75%. I need it at 80%”. Or “It's taking 15 days to do this; I need it in five”. Getting them down to a single sentence with no attribution, no solutions, no assumptions, and just, “What is the physical problem and where does it show up?”.
Once we get that, then we can go in and, in 30 or 60 days, make 30, 40% improvement or more. Then they go, “Okay, how did you do that?” Now they're hooked. They're used to thinking in terms of a big program, big strategy books, or new software. We always start small, and once they see that spark, they want more. They begin to see how to take it to scale.
Mark Graban: There are times where I've been brought into an organization where I've thought the framing of the problem was what the Toyota people would call a big, vague concern instead of a tightly defined problem statement.
Or there are levels of blaming. Twice in a year, hospital systems said, “Lean or Lean Six Sigma or opex, or however they were labeling it, is not working”. They were blaming the methodology and saying, “Our people aren't engaging with it”. The answer in both these organizations was staff members very consistently saying, “All management cares about is cost”.
That doesn't engage people. But when you can engage people in making the work easier, better, and faster, that engages people, and it leads to cheaper [results].
Don Kieffer: I have one short story on this. I worked in a smallish manufacturing company. The VP of HR gets me aside and says, “Don, I have this program to improve the morale in our company. I just want you to look at the presentation before I give it to the staff”.
I said, “First of all, what makes you think there's a morale problem?”. She goes, “Everyone knows we have a morale problem.” I said, “Really? Where did you see it today?”. I said, “You came into work, got your coffee, did some email. Where did you see the morale problem? Where did it physically show?”. This was a very hard question for her to answer, because it was turned into this big religious belief.
It turns out, in the staff meeting, the head of sales and head of manufacturing have been at war for years. One's saying, “Why don't you build what we sell?” And the other one's saying, “Why don't you sell what we build?”. They'd never reached an agreement on a nice blend of that. They turned it into tribal warfare, and the whole plant was either on the sales side or the operation side.
I said, “You don't need a million-dollar program for picnics and games and gold stars and hugs”. “You need to put those two people in a room with a facilitator and lock the door until they come out with what the plan is going to be that they can both live with. Then you put them on a stage in front of both sets of employees, and they talk about it together. Then your morale problem will improve“.
She just couldn't get past articulating, “Oh, it's a morale problem,” but she'd never really thought about, “Where did I get that idea? Where can I go see it?”. People like us help people get down to a specific problem that we can go see and solve. And then things that need to be solved will go away.
Reach at MIT Sloan and Future Potential
Mark Graban: Our guest today is Don Kieffer. The book is titled, There's Got to Be a Better Way, co-authored with our previous guest, Nelson Repenning.
One other question, just going back to MIT Sloan, are you reaching students that are already of that operations-minded bent, or are you also getting exposed to the more traditional MBA types that might be more interested in strategy and finance? Who are you able to reach?
Don Kieffer: Jamie Flinchbaugh, who you mentioned, when I was still at Harley and Mr. Oba left, I called him because he is one of the few people in the country at that time, back in 2002, who understood how Toyota actually thought, and he came and helped me a lot.
Nelson, my colleague at MIT, might give you a different answer. I'm a senior lecturer there, which means it's the highest place you can get without a PhD. I only work with executives, so I work in executive education, custom programs, two-day public programs, and I teach in the Executive MBA. 25% of those people are doctors or from the medical profession. They come from every country, from every kind of business: financial, startups, huge organizations, the military, the government.
People say, “That works in the industry you talked about, but will it work in my industry?”. Nelson has a great answer for it : “Dynamic Work Design is about how we organize and improve human work. It's not the work people do; it's the flow of work through human systems. So it only works in organizations that have people in them”. If your organization has people in it and work flowing through, then dynamic work design can help you.
Mark Graban: People love to fixate on the elements of “how we're different”. We don't build cars, for example. If you bring these principles and ideas up to the right level of abstraction, the approaches are transferable.
Don Kieffer: I think this is one of the appeals to dynamic work design. By the way, I think the new ISO standard in the same section that cites Toyota Production System now cites Dynamic Work Design as the TPS for intellectual work.
I was one of those executives, too. I thought, “Don't send me to the 12-week class to learn to say all these Japanese words and fill out these forms. I have to move fast; teach me how to think about it differently”. The principle's approach works really well because, one, it doesn't constrain you. Two, the executives are exactly right: their organizations are unique.
I want to teach you how to see the good work, use your existing culture stories, and the good things that you do. You can recognize them by the principle now and create your own unique solution based on that principle. I think that's a much more flexible and fast way, especially because it builds on the culture. It doesn't force you to throw your culture out for executives. They learn how to use these tools and move at their own speed.
Mark Graban: We can find the “we're different” and not just put our hand up and say, “Go away”. Maybe a final question: what would your hope be for the economy and businesses as a whole? How much potential is there if companies were applying dynamic work design? Is it almost infinite potential?
Don Kieffer: When I started focusing on office work in 2001, 2002 after Mr. Oba, people would say, “Oh, Don, you're just trying to bring the factory stuff into the office, and that stuff just works in factories”.
My experience, Mark, is that because intellectual work is almost infinitely compressible, it works far better in the office area, if you know what you're doing.
Mark Graban: You're not hitting the laws of physics.
Don Kieffer: If you have a stamping press, you can take all the waste out with a one-minute setup, but you still have a stamping press. In intellectual work, I can make that stamping go away.
People ask, “How much improvement in a new area?” I'll walk into a business that I know nothing about, and they go, “How much should we target for this project?”. I'll say 30% improvement. I'll give you the same answer Mr. Oba gave me. He would always make me work for the answer. But when I asked him, “Why do you always say 30%?” Here's what he said: “Because it works”.
I have very rarely been denied 30% improvement the first time through in the first six weeks. I've seen 100, 200, 300, a thousand percent increase, depending on what we do. Even the best businesses today, no one is teaching this framework.
You ask executives who know their business to draw how the work moves through their organization, and they cannot do it. They can draw the org chart, the static piece, but they can't draw the dynamic piece.
The thing that drives me is not just the stunning results we can get in a quick amount of time. The thing that drives me is what it does for the motivation and engagement of people doing the work. All of a sudden, we can bring joy to work. Whether I'm a frontline worker on the assembly line or a machinist, I love getting stuff done. I love learning. Or if I'm an executive, we bring that joy of collaboration, of human work to serve a purpose. We can bring that back to almost any job.
To see people's faces light up when they're producing 50% more, and then the people around them begging them, “When are you going to come do that for us?”. People begging you to be more productive because it's a better way to work, a more human way to work. That's what keeps me going. I don't know where the top line is, but it's pretty high.
Mark Graban: The human impact, not just as customers, but as people working in these systems. I agree with you, Don. Thank you so much for being here on the podcast.
Again, the book title is, There's Got to Be a Better Way. We'll wrap it up here for today. Don Kieffer, thank you so much. Hopefully, let's find something else to talk about again in the future.
Don Kieffer: Happy to do it. Thanks for having me, Mark.
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