About

Nelson P. Repenning is the Faculty Director of the MIT Leadership Center and the School of Management Distinguished Professor of System Dynamics and Organization Studies at the MIT Sloan School of Management. His early work focused on understanding the inability of organizations to leverage well-established tools and practices, with extensive work in manufacturing and new product development, as well as studying the failure to use safety practices that often lead to industrial accidents. This research has been recognized with awards including the Jay Wright Forrester Award from the International System Dynamics Society and the Jamieson Prize for Excellence in Teaching. Repenning now concentrates on developing the theory and practice of Dynamic Work Design—a new approach to designing work that is both effective and engaging—and Dynamic Management Systems, which link day-to-day work to strategic objectives. He is also a partner at ShiftGear Work Design and serves as its chief social scientist. Repenning holds a BA in economics from Colorado College and a PhD in operations management and system dynamics from MIT.

Research topics

• Psychology
• Nursing
• Medical emergency
• Business
• Medicine

Selected publications

• Get Work Back on Track With Visual Management

  MIT Sloan management review · 2025-08-14

  article1st authorCorresponding

  A system that allows everyone to see when and how the work is flowing — especially complex knowledge work — prevents hidden problems from festering and limits the proliferation of work-arounds that can cause organizational rigidity. In this article adapted from their book, There’s Got to Be a Better Way, Nelson P. Repenning and Donald C. Kieffer of MIT Sloan explain how work process visualizations can reveal how individual activities affect one another, and surface problems sooner.

  PublisherDOI

• Efficacy of a Standardized Process in Optimizing Appropriate Use of Progressive Care Unit Beds in a Tertiary Care Facility

  Dimensions of Critical Care Nursing · 2024

  • Medicine
  • Nursing
  • Medical emergency

  BACKGROUND: Poor patient progression from the progressive care unit (PCU) beds has been recognized as a bottleneck, limiting the hospital's ability to optimize capacity for the sickest patients. Improving nurse management on PCU admission and discharge criteria could avoid PCU bottlenecks. LOCAL PROBLEM: Our institution lacked a standard process to identify clinically appropriate patients ready for transfer out of the PCU, causing delays in vacating PCU beds. OBJECTIVES: The aim of this study was to determine if creating a standard process to empower bedside nurses and unit nursing leaders to push readiness information to the provider team improves the appropriateness of PCU stay and transfers patients out of the PCU earlier. METHODS: The most common causes of delayed transfer out of the PCU were discussed among stakeholders. A process was designed to empower the bedside nurses to partner with a physician leader to send information to the provider team requesting evaluation of the patient's readiness to leave the unit. The improvement of meeting the criteria for PCU was evaluated by comparing 60 patients prior to the intervention phase with 139 patients during the intervention. RESULTS: The primary outcome, percentage of patients meeting PCU criteria, was 53% during the audit phase and 68% during the intervention phase (P = .05). The PCU transfer time was pushed 1 hour earlier in the day. CONCLUSIONS: The standard process of empowering bedside nurses to partner with physician leaders to push readiness for transferring patients out of the PCU resulted in a significant improvement in the percentage of patients meeting PCU criteria and earlier discharge of appropriate patients.

  PublisherDOI

• Cómo resolver los atascos en el trabajo cognitivo

  Harvard-Deusto business review · 2019-01-01

  articleSenior author

  Aunque se ha comprobado que mantener todas las maquinas y las personas ocupadas para lograr un mayor rendimiento no siempre es efectivo, se trata de un planteamiento toda-via muy extendido en el mundo del trabajo cogniti-vo. En este ambito, pasar de un sistema push a un sistema pull puede mejorar la asignacion de recursos y prevenir las sobrecargas de trabajo y sus nefastos efec-tos. Un ejemplo de ello es la experiencia del centro de investigacion biomedica y genomica Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard

  Publisher

• In-Hospital Delays Result in Worse Patient Outcomes and Higher Cost After Cardiac Surgery

  The Annals of Thoracic Surgery · 2018-08-16 · 9 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Improving Patient Flow with Dynamic Work Design

  2018-06-06 · 2 citations

  article
  Publisher

• Un nuevo enfoque en el diseño de los procesos de trabajo

  Harvard-Deusto business review · 2018-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Durante anos, los pensadores del campo de la gestion empresarial han dado por supuesto que habia contrapartidas inevitables entre la eficiencia y la flexibilidad y que el diseno organizacional optimo para una u otra era distinto. Pero es posible disenar la actividad de una organizacion de manera que se ofrezca simultaneamente agilidad y eficiencia. Eso si, hay que saber hacerlo...

  Publisher

• La habilidad de gestión más subestimada

  Harvard-Deusto business review · 2018-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Hay pocas habilidades de gestion mas poderosas que la de expresar claramente el enunciado del problema que se intenta resolver, antes de pasar a la accion

  Publisher

• Pull for Knowledge Work

  2018-05-14

  articleSenior author
  Publisher

• Agile for Everyone Else: Using Triggers and Checks to Create Agility Outside of Software Development

  DSpace@MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) · 2017-06-27

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  Publisher

• Making the Numbers? “Short Termism” and the Puzzle of Only Occasional Disaster

  Management Science · 2016-11-08 · 36 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Recent work suggests that an excessive focus on “managing the numbers”—delivering quarterly earnings at the expense of longer-term performance—makes it difficult for firms to make the investments necessary to build competitive advantage. “Short termism” has been blamed for everything from the decline of the U.S. automobile industry to the low penetration of techniques such as total quality management and continuous improvement. Yet a significant body of research suggests that firms that sacrifice long-term investment to manage earnings are often rewarded for doing so. This paper presents a model to help reconcile the tension between these apparently contradictory perspectives. We show that if the source of long-term advantage is modeled as a stock of capability that accumulates over time, the intensity of the firm’s effort to manage short-term earnings at the expense of long-term investment can have very different consequences depending on whether the firm’s capability is close to a critical “tipping threshold.” When the firm operates above this threshold, aggressively managing earnings smooths revenue and cash flow with few long-term consequences. Below it, managing earnings can tip the firm into a vicious cycle of accelerating decline. Our results have important implications for understanding managerial incentives and the internal processes that create sustained advantage. This paper was accepted by Bruno Cassiman, business strategy.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• John D. Sterman

  12 shared

• Rebecca Henderson

  8 shared

• Hazhir Rahmandad

  Harvard University Press

  5 shared

• Laura J. Black

  Montana State University

  4 shared

• Don Kieffer

  4 shared

• Leslie A. Perlow

  3 shared

• Gerardo A. Okhuysen

  University of California, Irvine

  2 shared

• J. Bradley Morrison

  Children's Hospital Colorado

  2 shared

Labs

• System DynamicsPI

Awards & honors

• Jay Wright Forrester Award (2003)
• Jamieson Prize for Excellence in Teaching (2011)