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

A groundbreaking method for clearing the organizational roadblocks that keep you from doing your job and delivering results 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 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 the 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 rarely improve productivity, are expensive, and always add a lot of busy work. There’s Got to Be a Better Way is an antidote, enabling you to rethink basic beliefs about your tasks, changing the way you see and think about the flow of work in your organization, and allowing you to redesign your work to boost productivity and profit. 

Genres: Business, Nonfiction

320 pages, Hardcover

Published August 26, 2025

Reviews

[Derek · Rating 5 out of 5]

I took System Dynamics and Organizations Lab from Nelson Repenning at MIT and have eagerly been anticipating the release of this book for over 4 years.

In the vein of lean manufacturing books like Toyota Production System by Taiichi Ohno and The Goal by Eli Goldratt, There's Got to be a Better Way takes a close look at work and how we can complete work better.

This book avoids the fatal flaw many books in this category fall into - they are either written by a practitioner who has only their own experience to rely on, or by an academic who has done research and consultation but has little firsthand experience in the topic. Nelson and Don blend extensive first-hand experience, decades of consulting experience, and academic rigor in this book.

As the book states near the beginning, all methodologies of this type are some flavor of the scientific method. This book is no different. In fact, you may look at Dynamic Work Design and say "I've seen this before". You probably have.

Dynamic Work Design builds on 30 years of operational and work design. It is a distillation of things that work in practice, on the job.

The authors do not suggest launching this as a massive improvement program, rather, this is akin to untying a large knot by finding the first loose string. Start where you are, start small, and make a measurable improvement.

The stories which stood out to me most are the ones where a leader spent time on the factory floor, in the hotel lobby, or following the flow of work as it got done. As the leaders got out of their offices and experienced the work getting done, they noticed issues and inconsistencies, and learned things they never would have expected.

Successful change involves ensuring we have an accurate view of the world, and that is one of the best ways to achieve it.

The book isn't perfect. I would have liked a summary visual with all of the principles of Dynamic Work Design clearly laid out. The framework could have benefited from a more memorable name. A memorable acronym also could have helped. There were a few too many examples from the same domains (Broad Institute, oil fields). The examples and stories came heavily from Don and Nelson's own experiences - I believe a mix of other stories could have been added that would have strengthened the book. The examples skewed heavily towards work involving physical items such as manufacturing or drilling or processing samples. Although there were some knowledge work examples, they were in the minority.

I read a lot of books, and one of my main goals for reading is to be inspired to take action. This book left me inspired and with a drive to start improving things. Is it 5 stars? No, but I'm one of the early reviewers and I want to help this get traction. The concepts here are important.

[January · Rating 5 out of 5]

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 Repenning and Donald C. Kieffer (2025)
9h 37m narrated by Sean Pratt, 320 pages

Genre: Nonfiction, Business, Self-Help, Organization Management

Featuring: Introduction: The Better Way of Dynamic Work Design, From Static to Dynamic, 🌐 https:// shiftgear.work/dwd-stories/ 🌐 Obstacles, When Work Works Well: Getting Rid of Obstacles in the Way of Real Work, The Firefighting Trap: When Just “Getting Things Done” Hurts a Company’s Ability to Grow, Thrive, and Compete; Principles, Solve the Right Problem: It’s Hard to See Something When Your Brain Isn’t Looking for It; The Discovery Mindset, Structure for Discovery: From Tuning Individual Instruments to Playing a Symphony; Connect the Human Chain: Putting People Back in the Work; The Roles of Leaders, Work Chains, Huddles and Hand-offs, Regulate for Flow: Finish More by Controlling How Much You Start; Visualize the Work: Making the Invisible Visible; Action, The Power of Leading with Principles: Static Structure Will Take You Only So Far; Getting Started (Without Posters, Coffee Cups, or Three-Ring Binders); Print Version - Praise for There’s Got to Be a Better Way, Notes

Rating as a movie: PG-13 for language

Books and Authors mentioned: Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

My rating: 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟💭🌱🪴🦋🪟

My thoughts: 📱26% 2:29:51 Part 2 Chapter 3 Solve the Right Problem - This is an interesting read but it's definitely about managing people, not systems so it's probably not going to help me much. Although the stories are interesting, I am more interested in why Audible claims this story is an exclusive but I'm listening to it through Libby.

Even though I don't have to manage people or a company so it's not exactly directly beneficial to me in that sense, I got a lot out of this book about changing the way you look for and solve problems.

Recommend to others: Yes, especially if you're in any type of management, whether it's time or people.

Memorable Quotes: There’s Got to Be a Better Way is about applying dynamic work design so that, like Sheila and her Broad colleagues, you can correctly diagnose problems, take action, calm the chaos, and actually get stuff done. Think of dynamic work design as akin to undertaking a progressive shift to a healthier lifestyle, one that is systemic and avoids the quick but unsustainable fix of a fad diet. It doesn’t require extensive off-site training courses, inspirational speeches, or logo-embossed pens and tote bags. Dynamic work design won’t transform everything overnight. Instead, you start solving real business problems and immediately put “points on the board.” Ongoing problem-solving builds knowledge and helps calm the chaos of everyday work, making it easier to see the next opportunity for improvement and creating a virtuous cycle of capability development and engagement.

In this book, we describe basic skills that you can use right away. They are just the beginning. We also show how those skills combine to produce increasingly sophisticated methods for managing complex problems and organizations in a rapidly changing world. We show how you can change your workplace, step by step, to make it a truly dynamic organization—ready, as Broad was, to tackle the most intense challenges that may come your way.

Human beings are creatures of habit, and in many cases this serves us well. But an overreliance on the instincts built from past experience to guide future activity can blind us to major improvement opportunities. In this chapter, we introduce structured problem-solving to break the biases that come with past success and help you find new levels of performance.

Taken together, the five principles define an organizational system that constantly learns and adapts and creates significant competitive advantage in the process. But you can’t implement them everywhere all at once. Instead, the principles need to be combined with the following approach: start small, solve real problems, get the work flowing, and reinvest the gains in further improvement.

[Grace Tolman · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a hard book to read. I'm sure it was just me, but the way the authors progressed through their thoughts was very hard to follow. I found some nuggets of great ideas, for sure. However, it felt like such a drag to go from one thought to another. The way they organized the ideas mixed with the stories were hard to follow. For example, they would talk about a part of the dynamic design for one paragraph. And then go on for two or three full pages of a story that by the time they come back to the thought again, I've lost it. Maybe to some, the more details, the better. But for me, it became hard to follow. I even skipped many pages because the details became exhausting.

Anyways, I think the concepts are good and the real life applications are also good. I just wished that the book was more organized and the words to express the thoughts were more carefully chosen.

[Tõnu Vahtra · Rating 4 out of 5]

Getting started with dynamic job design often boil down to courage. Problems inthe periphery are easy to talk about, because they don't really matter. In contrast, discussing flaws in the core work of the organization that happen every day can be challenging. Nobody wants to acknowledge, that they might have been partially responsible for maintaining a broken status quo, so we all develop protective mechanisms to rationalize why it's not our fault. i.e. claiming that "product development is just messy", "we need a new IT system to fix anything", "chaos is a neccessary consequence of being in the cutting edge of technology". Confronting such claims produces dramatic gains in organizations performance. Have the courage to confront the core work of your organization, find the place where the work goes wrong. Start by asking basic questions, questions that people may initially hesitate to answer and work backward until you know why the work did not get delivered. Initially you will feel like you are working below your paygrade, you will however emerge with a long list of easy improvements, a few hard ones and a much deeper understanding of how your organization actually works. You will also be a more effective leader. As the dynamic work design gets embedded to your organization, you will feel that you have little need for big change initiatives and trappings. You will have an organization, that constantly senses opportunities in environment and continuouly updates and refines its own unique better way.

Dynamic work design and optimizing for flow. This is one of the most recent books on Lean manufactoring topic which tries to cross over the principles to general business. I did find quite a few catchy quotes from the book, especially around firefighting culture and how not to approach strategy review or big reorganization efforts. The book promotes the Kaizen philosophy that one should start with small improvements (but not with something in the periphery which generates even more overload and does not get any momentum going) and focus on them continuously, it also stresses the Genchy Genbutsu discovery mindset philosophy ("go and see for yourself") for sensemaking. This book is probably not goot as a first intro to Lean or Kaizen as it feels hectic at times and it also does not provide a structured summary of the proposed framework which remains fragmented (yet there is plenty of thought provoking in those fragments).

"Survival methodology at Harley Davidson. When engineers were under pressure, they knew what they needed to do to survuve." (rest was actually mostly waste)

"There are few ways to waste money faster than automating a process that you don't understand"

"Do the work, and help us discover how to do the work better" (second part was added to job descriptions in Toyota).

Dynamic work design is a set of principles (an "anti-initiative", a lifestyle change, not a diet), it offers multiple paths for improving the work of an organization. It requires everyone to manage and lead differently.

Root of the failures to implement Toyota production methodologies relies not in the tools themselves, but in the strategies chosen to implement them.
*Most organizations make periodic attempts to introduce new tools and processes, often spurred by the latest fad (Cloud, AI...), most of those efforts produce little if any sustained change.
*Company leaders fail to recognize that in most organizations things get worse before they get better. They pull the plug on change programs that might have worked, if the expectations were more realistic.
*Some change strategies their leaders used left their companies less capable and more prone to problems than before. Each failed attempt breeds cynicism and disengagement as front line employees pereceive those efforts as little more than senior managements flights of fancy.

Start small.
Fix a few issues.
Calm the system.
Build a few new skills.
Help others think about their work a little differently.
With practice you will be able to generate positive results.
Based on those your collegues will start asking you what's going on.
The questions become natural opportunities to lead and spread the approach and principles to other parts of the organization.

The biggest error in getting started: in an effort to pick a small problem you pick one that is not important. Has to be connected to core work of an organization. Choosing a starting point that is both small and important. Initiative that will both eliminate a lot of firefighting with minimal impact and reveal the next problem to be solved. Changing an organization is like untangling a messy knot: pulling the right thread starts unravelling the mess, pulling the wrong one tightens the knot. Key decision is choosing which thread to pull. Then "go and see for yourself", and show others.

Leaders have an outsized impact on their organizations. The common image of what leaders do ("the Hollywood approach") is often counterproductive and it leads to many of the problems discussed. When leaders focus exclusively on setting high level strategy and then holding people accountable to the resulting budgets and targets with little regard to the work that delivers those results, they set their organizations up for trouble. Just as changing a bad habit often requires an identity shift, you will not succeed in transforming your organization if you cling to the image of leaders you see in TV and in the movies. You need to engage with the work. Leaders don't just issue commands, they step in to the gap and show the way.

Transformation is hard work. But there is a lot of magic in how you do the hard work. And it comes in resolving an apparent paradox. You need to pick a problem, that is somehow both small and important. The resolution comes in realizing, that just because leaders have big responsibilities, it does not mean that they always have to do big things. Equating a big job with big interventions leads to large scale change initiatives (vs discovery mindset). This belief represents an incomplete view on how leaders have impact. The things they do directly can have a big difference; mergers, technology changes and market choices all have enormous impact on the direction of any organization, but leaderes also have an equally large impact through the way they act. Everyone is watching them to figure out which behaviours are acceptable (AKA leading by example). It is more powerful to show, than tell.

As Goldratt states in "The Goal" that the most successful companies look really boring when looked from the outside (little firefighting).

[Jane · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was recommended by the MIT Sloan Management Review Fall 2025.
“Their new book, 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 (Basic Venture, 2025), addresses this with a fifth principle to “make the invisible visible”: Visualize the work. “Developing a visual representation of invisible intellectual work forces everyone into a common view so that they can see what is working and what is not,” they write. It surfaces problems, facilitates conversation and collaboration, and provides managers with the means to make decisions and solve problems more effectively.”

[Lauren Witty · Rating 4 out of 5]

read this for my work book club ! I enjoyed the narrative of this book and the anecdotes of real projects weaved in to illustrate the importance of quality improvement theory. Really just goes to show that making an effort to understand someone else’s perspective can solve a lot of problems.