When senior executives commissioned a review of product development for Harley-Davidson in the early 1990s, the authors concluded that Harley’s process yielded products that were LEW: late, expensive, and wrong. The review also identified Harley’s most seasoned, most can-do project managers—the ones who had literally saved the company—as one of the core problems. Their heroic efforts to get product out the door, by focusing on resolving the crisis without addressing its underlying cause, created the conditions for new problems to emerge, turning the project managers into unwitting firefighting arsonists. Well-intentioned efforts to get things done hamstrung the company’s ability to grow, thrive, and compete. The company was getting increasingly good at managing symptoms but was making little progress in fixing the underlying process. Harley’s success in creating demand for their products had somehow trapped it in a state of increasing adrenaline-fueled chaos and frustration. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]The firefighting-arsonist dynamic isn’t unique to Harley. You’ve probably seen it in your organization. People work hard to deliver results, but, often despite good intentions, their efforts often leave more chaos in their wake. Efforts to “get sh*t done” leave lots of issues that impede performance, but those problems rarely get the attention they deserve. It’s easy to blame those who constantly work around the system (at least if you aren’t one of them), but the situation is more complex. We were an unlikely pair to help Harley. Nelson was a professor in MIT’s System Dynamics Group and Don, a self-described lifetime “factory rat,” had just talked his way out of being a technical manager in the manufacturing plant and into leading Harley’s biggest engine development project in a decade. We first started thinking about what we now call “dynamic work design”—our approach to creating organizations that constantly evolve towards higher performance—when we began looking for an alternative to the tribal methods of bringing new products to market that had been developed during the years Harley was in financial crisis.We knew there was a better way for Harley to survive than relying exclusively on firefighting. We could see the firefighting trap at play and wanted to help companies like Harley escape it. We rejected the approach embodied in most large-scale change programs that attempts to fix everything with one big overarching solution. This can, at first glance, appear sensible to an organization mired in firefighting, where every day reveals another problem. “The system is broken,” say the decision-makers. “Let’s fix everything now.” But in a world in which you still have to deliver results, thanks to worse-before- better, large-scale initiatives often contain the seeds of their own demise. In our research, work with hundreds of MIT Executive MBA students, and in the field with clients over the last 25 years, we have seen several companies attempt to fix everything at once. They make significant investments in their underlying processes, only to abandon them when performance begins to degrade. In the research for his doctoral dissertation, Nelson studied Ford Motor Company’s electronics division (now Visteon) and its effort to completely overhaul the product design and delivery processes. They changed everything from the computers they used to the suppliers on which they relied. Despite millions of dollars of investment, it took them years to reap the full benefits. Their engineers didn’t have time to learn the new tools while also doing their work. As one engineer said, describing the new computers in every cube, “We all now have very expensive paperweights on our desks.”Rather than jumping into large-scale change at Harley, Don (with Nelson’s help) took a more modest tack, one that we still follow today. As a first step, the project leads, including the ones caught in the firefighting-arsonist mode, began reporting to the Project Management Office (PMO), which Don then led. The PMO was more than a tracking function that reported milestones back to finance. Instead, project status was reviewed biweekly, and the goal of the meeting was to surface and solve problems quickly and publicly, so that everyone could benefit. Initially, project leads were not happy. The meeting seemed like additional, bureaucratic oversight that just slowed them down even more. But the meeting soon became a critical venue for surfacing and solving problems and, where possible, removing barriers. New ideas, rather than being private workarounds, were now quickly vetted and appropriately shared across the system. The official methodology increasingly became a living document that reflected an evolving balance of time-honored techniques and newly emerging methods, many created by project leads themselves. Knowledge gained from the meetings was also used to help guide investments in labs, technology, and people that removed real bottlenecks. The former firefighting arsonists were finally getting the help they needed to get their work done. They responded by increasingly working within the system, rather than around it, and by helping improve it in the process. Don may not have always been their best friend, but they began to put their creative energies into improving their projects in ways that also contributed to the health of the product development process. As one example, the teams in the plant often complained that the designs they received had lots of problems that had to be fixed on the shop floor. Working together, the plant teams agreed to accept shorter lead times for receiving prototypes in return for designs with fewer problems. To meet this challenge, the design engineers worked to find new ways to uncover problems earlier, pushing the envelope on computer modeling, developing more rigorous testing, and collaborating more with the engineers in the plants. Both teams started to see that better work on the design side saved massive amounts of time once they started building physical products in the plants. The cycle of firefighting was starting to break. The project leads still focused on delivering their projects on time, but now they were doing it in a way that could be repeated and improved upon next time. Each gain was another brick in the foundation of a healthy product development system. The senior leaders, rather than creating more reports and meetings about why things were going wrong, were now supporting the process with expertise and resources when and where they were needed.The change that Harley experienced wasn’t easy. It was the product of lots of hard work from many people. But it did happen, and it is possible in your organization. Excerpted with permission from 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 by Nelson P. Repenning and Donald C. Kieffer. Copyright © 2025. Available from Basic Venture, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.