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An Excerpt from There's Got to Be a Better Way: How to Deliver Results and Get Rid of the Stuff That Gets in the Way of Real Work

by Nelson P. Repenning & Donald C. Kieffer

An excerpt from There's Got to Be a Better Way by Nelson P. Repenning & Donald C. Kieffer, published by Basic Venture and longlisted for the 2025 Porchlight Business Book Awards in the Leadership & Management category.

The chaos of everyday business forces people into an exhausting, ineffective, seemingly never-ending cycle of work-arounds, firefighting, and Whac-a-Mole. The irritatingly urgent crowds out the lastingly important.   

There has to be a better way.  

And there is: the game-changing discipline of dynamic work design improves productivity, reduces costs, and increases efficiency, ensuring that all parts of a company can work in concert. It has been used in organizations around the world to close the gap between results promised and results delivered. 

The five principles of dynamic work design—solve the right problem, structure for discovery, connect the human chain, regulate for flow, visualize the work—have yielded breakthrough results in settings ranging from biotech labs and hospitals to oil refineries, homeless shelters, and casinos.   

Large-scale change initiatives, reorganizations, and productivity programs are costly, rarely improve productivity, and always add a lot of busywork. There’s Got to Be a Better Way is an antidote, transforming how you understand your own tasks and your organization’s workflow, allowing you to redesign your work to boost productivity, profit and genuine engagement. 

There's Got to Be a Better Way has been longlisted in the Leadership & Management category of Porchlight Book Company's 2025 Business Books Awards. The excerpt below is adapted from the a section about the difference between static and dynamic organizations, and how to become the latter.

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In contrast to their static counterparts, dynamic systems are those that regularly adjust to their environment. Dynamic systems include all living systems, ranging from microorganisms to plants, animals, and natural ecosystems. Dynamic work design will help you create similar adaptability in your organization. To see the power of this approach, let’s return to the GPS analogy. Today’s GPS is a dynamic entity. The technology left the static world for good in 2009 with the commercial introduction of the Waze app. A group of Israeli software engineers working on an automated road map built a system that included real-time traffic data—first messages from volunteer drivers and then real-time analysis of GPS signals from many cars. Now when you ask your GPS system to guide you from one city to the next, the algorithm continually recalculates the route based on all the latest traffic information, not just the map. The system regularly updates your estimated arrival time and suggests new routes if it learns of an accident in your path or of a major sporting event about to finish. The GPS system doesn’t need to know the baseball schedule, the city’s construction plans, or the recorded complaints from people on a quiet street. It just needs to know what’s happening now. The app’s ability to adjust to changing conditions makes it dynamic and allows users to update their plans in real time. 

Introduced in the twentieth century, the modern hierarchical corporate form represented a major advance over prior orga-nizational structures. Using specialized groups and intricate reporting relationships, it allowed companies to scale to massive global size. However, such organizations were largely built on static systems, which tended to grow less flexible with time and scale. The rules and practices that made organizations successful also made them bureaucratic and slow. When events challenged the world around them, their structures remained frozen, and many once venerable companies are long gone. Fortunately, some organizations experience moments of dynamism. A crisis often brings it to the fore. But after the crisis is resolved, static structures reemerge. Organizational management is ready for a vital upgrade. Instead of waiting for a natural disaster or a big screwup, let’s embrace the inevitable gaps between plans and outcomes and put dynamism to work on a regular basis. 

Increasing an organization’s dynamism often leads to significant gains in performance. It’s also fun. It can be incredibly motivating, even exhilarating, to work in a dynamic organization. The difference is palpable when you visit Broad’s sequencing lab. People there have always had a sense of mission about their work—they know the research is important. Now, however, they also have the confidence that comes with being in control of their workflow. They no longer hide small crises and workarounds. At every moment, a dynamic structure helps everyone know both the current priorities and the pressing problems. Walls are full of charts that everyone marks up, showing the real-time progress of each complex line of activity. 

Startups often succeed because their initial approach to work is highly dynamic. The freewheeling way they work fits the messy, chaotic, unpredictable nature of their reality. Success and growth, however, can breed rigidity as internal controls and structures are solidified. Dynamic work design provides a way to avoid that rigidity by simultaneously adding necessary structure to the work and retaining the dynamism that engaged people in the first place. Dynamic organizations continually draw data from the work environment so that people can respond to change in real time in the same way that today’s GPS systems operate. 

The principles and approach we set out in this book will help you harness the fundamentally dynamic nature of your organization. They can halt the vicious cycle of workarounds that don’t scale and develop your ability to adapt and thrive in a changing world. 

When managers use dynamic work design, they often feel, for the first time, that they are managing their organization rather than that their organization is managing them. The workday is transformed. The tasks of goal setting, planning, and budgeting no longer involve lengthy annual or quarterly negotiations, the results of which must then be worked around. Instead, planning and goal setting become part of an ongoing process of identifying problems and sensing new opportunities. Dysfunctional hierarchical reporting relationships and painful review meetings take a back seat to providing guidance, delivering critical resources, and communicating about what is really happening. The question “Who is responsible?” is replaced by “How can we help?” Instead of pushing long lists of tasks that are all ranked “high priority,” the tough decisions are made up front. 


Excerpted from There's Got to Be a Better Way: How to Deliver Results and Get Rid of the Stuff That Gets in the Way of Real Work by Nelson P. Repenning & Donald C. Kieffer, published by Basic Venture. Copyright © 2025 by Nelson P. Repenning and Donald C. Kieffer. 

 

About the Authors

Nelson P. Repenning is the School of Management Distinguished Professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He is the director of MIT’s Leadership Center and Poets & Quants named him one of the world’s top executive MBA instructors. He lives in Cambridge, MA.

Donald C. Kieffer is a senior lecturer in operations management at the MIT Sloan School of Management and founder of ShiftGear Work Design. He was previously vice president of operational excellence for Harley-Davidson. He lives in Somerville, MA and Burlingame, CA. 

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