08/15/2025

Apply Visual Management to Get Work Back on Track

Make invisible work visible

Despite investments in digital initiatives, automation, AI tools and reorgs, many managers struggle with the daily reality that the core work of their organization is both slow and error-prone. While head-spinning changes in the operating context are keeping many senior executives focused on strategies to fend off disruption, their employees and team leaders are growing frustrated with predictable mistakes, difficulties improving execution, and endless, productivity-sapping logjams.

Turning this common scenario around requires understanding and reconfiguring how work gets done. Three decades of collaboration on organizational research and our experiences working in and for companies led us to an approach we call "dynamic work design." That model initially comprised four simple principles: structure the work to spot problems; apply a scientific approach to solving problems; connect both front-line employees and managers more explicitly to one another and to the work; and regulate the flow of work into the system.

Those four principles, which we expand on in our new book, There's Got to Be a Better Way (Basic Venture, 2025), are often easy to see in physical work such as that done in an assembly line.

Please select this link to read the complete article from MIT Sloan Management Review.