# 10 - Principles of Dynamic Work Design

Consider a well-known example of work and organizational design, Toyota’s Andon cord. In the Toyota scheme, a worker noticing such an issue is supposed to pull what’s known as the Andon cord (or push a button) to stop the production line and fix the problem. While the management literature has correctly highlighted the importance of allowing employees to stop the line, what happens after the cord is pulled might be more important. When one operator on the factory floor is struggling to complete a task in the allotted time, and so hit a yellow button, causing an alarm to sound and a light to flash. Within seconds, the line’s supervisor arrived and assisted the operator in resolving the issue that was preventing him from following the prescribed process. In less than a minute, the operator, now able to hit his target, returned to his normal routine, and the supervisor went back to other activities. A visual of this process can be seen below:

What, from a work design perspective, happened in this short episode? Initially, the operator was working in the “factory” mode, executing well-defined work to a clearly specified time target. But when something in that careful design broke down, the operator couldn’t complete his task in the allotted time. Once the problem occurred, the operator had two options for responding. He could have found an ad hoc adjustment, a workaround or shortcut that would allow him to keep working. But this choice often leads to highly dysfunctional outcomes.
Alternatively, as we observed, he could push the button, stop the work, and ask for help. By summoning the supervisor to help, pushing the button temporarily changed the work design. The system briefly left the mechanistic, serial mode in favor of a more organic, collaborative approach focused on problem resolution. Once the problem was resolved, the operator returned to his normal task and to the serial work design. The Toyota production system might at first appear to be the ultimate in mechanistic design, but a closer look suggests something far more dynamic. When a worker pulls the Andon cord, the system actually moves between two modes based on the state of the work. Though the nature of the work couldn’t be more different, such movement between the two modes is also the key to understanding the success of agile development. What happens when organizations don’t do a good job of cycling between factory and studio modes of work? We can get two related failure modes, ineffective iteration and wasted attention. When they are combined, they create a truly unproductive work design, named the axis of frustration.

Most work processes have not been designed with escalation mechanisms in mind. So, when senior managers want to intervene and scrutinize a project, they don’t know where to look and want to review everything. The result of such scrutiny is long review meetings, the majority of which focus on elements of the process that are just fine, thereby trapping the process in the upper left-hand box, “wasted attention.” Worse, long review meetings and the preparation that they require steal time and resources from actual work, thus intensifying the time pressure that prevented a proper shift between work modes in the first place. Without careful attention to the mechanisms that move a process between the individual and collaborative modes, processes can increasingly cycle between ineffective iteration (costly and slow iteration) and wasted attention, basically moving between frantically trying to solve (or at least hide) the latest problem before the next review, and endless, soul-destroying review meetings that never get to solving the problems that would really make a difference.