I once worked in an organization where people who had disagreements with coworkers would regularly go to their boss and complain to their peers rather than work it out directly with the person they had the issue with. This not only created a culture of mistrust; it caused confusion and gummed up the system of work. One person would speak to their boss, who would then speak to the other party’s boss; then that person would speak to their own employee, often getting a different picture of the event. We’d inevitably call a meeting to get all parties together to get to the root of the problem and resolve it, using up valuable management time. It was dysfunctional.
We stopped this corporate version of the telephone game by having managers coach employees to deal with the other person directly. Over time, there was a lot less conflict and unnecessary escalation.
This is not a unique problem, and it happens at all levels. In Jonathan Hughes and Gabriella Salvatore’s research on organizational effectiveness, 84% of executives reported regularly dealing with counterparts they considered unreasonable. However, they also found that when problems are escalated in a way that addresses disagreements at the right level and resolves issues collaboratively — including serious problems such as unclear decision rights, resource allocation authority, and communication — expectations are brought into the light, where they can be addressed. It surfaces underlying coordination problems for proper resolution.
Just as conflicts can hide underlying problems until they blow up into organizational dysfunction, work design problems can stay invisible until they create crises. To help managers identify and fix problems in work processes, authors Nelson P. Repenning and Donald C. Kieffer developed four principles for dynamic work design. Those principles have delivered strong results when applied to physical work, such as manufacturing. However, the authors realized something else was needed to address problems in the larger world of knowledge work, where it is more difficult to “see” the work and to know when something is going wrong.
Their new book, There’s Got to Be a Better Way: How to Deliver Results and Get Rid of the Stuff That Gets in the Way of Real Work (Basic Venture, 2025), addresses this with a fifth principle to “make the invisible visible”: Visualize the work. “Developing a visual representation of invisible intellectual work forces everyone into a common view so that they can see what is working and what is not,” they write. It surfaces problems, facilitates conversation and collaboration, and provides managers with the means to make decisions and solve problems more effectively.
Visual management and sound escalation procedures serve a similar function: to shift an organization from crisis management to problem management, with more effective decision-making and operations. In the end, organizational effectiveness isn’t about having fewer problems — it’s about seeing and addressing them sooner.