“I’ve really only worked on one problem my whole life, and that problem boils down to, ‘Why don’t organizations do the things that we would all agree are good things to do?’” shares Nelson Repenning ’89.
Repenning is a School of Management Distinguished Professor of System Dynamics and Organization Studies at MIT. He finished high school a year early but gained an extra year at CC as the Economics Department’s first paraprofessional – which he calls the “best trade”.
As a student, Repenning rode on the cycling team, and discovered a love for economics and a subspecialty named system dynamics.
“CC was totally transformative for me in terms of my career path. As a paraprofessional, I really got hooked on the enterprise of reading and doing research and teaching, and that came from the enthusiasm of the faculty and the classes.”
Early in his career, Repenning studied how companies implement, or fail to implement, best practices and techniques in industries like manufacturing and oil and gas. He consulted on the investigation following BP’s Texas refinery explosion in 2005.
“As it turns out, the techniques you need to run well refineries safely are pretty well known,” he says. “BP had just completely eroded all of their kind of commitments and adherence to sort of good practices.”
At that point, Repenning focused his research on helping companies overcome barriers to implementing best practices for safety and productivity.
“So now we have this diagnosis,” says Repenning. “What do you do about it? Can we provide some tools to practicing managers to make it work better?”
The result was a set of techniques named dynamic work design, outlined in his book releasing in August 2025, There’s Got to Be a Better Way.
“CC was totally transformative for me in terms of my career path. As a paraprofessional, I really got hooked on the enterprise of reading and doing research and teaching, and that came from the enthusiasm of the faculty and the classes.”
Nelson Repenning ’89
One trap that Repenning identifies in his research is that companies focus too much on short-term results and earnings over long-term strategy. The capability trap means companies spend all of their energy maintaining a failing system, then find themselves in crisis like BP or Boeing after failing to sustain long-term capabilities.
“You have to make capability developments in learning an ongoing part of what you do on a day-to-day basis, rather than something you do every two years or in a cataclysmic reorganization.”
Another issue Repenning identifies is that companies abandon new techniques prematurely because they don’t anticipate the trough in performance before the improvement. He applies these challenges to not only industrial work, but knowledge work through visual management techniques.
“All these techniques work,” he says. “If companies use these tools and frameworks regularly, we’ll all be better off as a consequence.”
In addition to safety, Repenning hopes one consequence of his work will be more enjoyable work.
“While the Industrial Revolution was an enormous innovation in terms of efficiency, it also made work really tedious and boring. I hope dynamic work design provides a different way of thinking about work that makes it less tedious and more interesting, and that we’re tapping into the human capital of people who do the work.”