Visual Management for Competitive Advantage: MIT’s Approach to Efficient and Agile Work

This leadership course helps executives and managers understand how continuous improvement strategies, sustained over a long period of time, affect core business metrics and business development strategy, and contribute to the success of the organization. As a participant in this course, you’ll gain a fundamental understanding of how visual management—specifically Dynamic Work Design—can help you find and fix issues in workflow, make improvements in real time, and create competitive advantage.

Dynamic Work Design was co-created by Nelson Repenning and Don Keiffer after a combined 20+ years of integrated industry practice and academic investigation, and further refined with insights and expertise provided by Sheila Dodge. This method leverages and builds on familiar process improvement techniques with which you may be familiar, including Lean Six Sigma, Agile, PDCA cycles, Kanban, and others, adapting and applying them to knowledge work and smart work design. You will:

• Learn how to implement this technique in your own organization directly from two of its creators
• Discover how the process of visual management can help you identify the value-added elements of your own work and that of your organization
• Identify opportunities for improving and get started based on a framework of principles and methods

Bring a current “headache” you’re facing in your organization to workshop and receive personalized feedback on an action plan you can implement immediately. You will leave this senior leadership course with practical real-world examples and an action plan that focuses on one simple (yet impactful) problem to solve over twelve months. Ultimately this will set the foundation for making additional incremental (and feasible) operational improvements and savings within your organization.

The main purpose of this program is two-fold:

• To help you understand how continuous improvement strategies, sustained over a long period of time, affect core business metrics and contribute to the success of the organization, from bottom-up and top-down perspectives
• To change how you see work and your own role as a leader in the culture of improvement

This program will enable you to:

• Understand the principles and approaches that drive improvement; and apply them in all areas in the context of a particular company, thus creating a tangible culture of continuous improvement
• Implement improvement naturally in your everyday work, not from a prescribed list, but from a deep personal understanding of the principles
• Recognize successful improvement initiatives already in place and build on them
• Identify the true value-added aspects of work performed by individual workers and the entire organization
• Ensure that business targets and improvement strategies are tightly linked at every level
• Develop inquiry and evidence-based problem-solving skills for individuals and organizations
• Transform from “controller” to “enabler” by leveraging the relationship between designing the work well and the engagement of employees that follows
• Generate “pull” from within the organization for new methods of work
• Implement “Visual Management”—a technique that makes problems visible so that they can be addressed constructively
• Not just remove defects, but to design work correctly from the beginning

Built on a foundation of highly adaptable principles and methods called Dynamic Work Design, this senior leadership course provides practical tools and methods for sustainable improvement efforts of any scale, in any industry, and in any function.

Proceeding from principles, not practices, is a key to sustainable change, allowing integration with current culture and processes while delivering fast results with little overhead, training, or major initiatives. You will discover how the process of visual management can help you identify the value-added elements of your own work and that of your organization. You will be able to identify opportunities for improving and get started based on a framework of principles and methods.

The method has proven to work in businesses as diverse as oil/gas, DNA sequencing, and engineering/innovation and works at the scale of discrete problems or organizational-wide strategic efforts. Improvement begins to happen in rapid and natural ways; results begin showing up almost immediately.