The most contaminated nuclear plant in the United States; Rocky Flats was an environmental disaster and the site of rampant worker unrest. Now on its way to becoming a wildlife refuge, the project is running 60 years ahead of schedule and $30 billion under budget. Using numerous first-hand accounts and public records, the authors draw a number of leadership guidelines that can be applied to any business.

DC: Marc Lavine and Kim Cameron are doing very important work in organizational development. I think it is the sort of thing that anyone in HR or, in fact, in senior management, will open their eyes to and say, “There may be things we can do to make vast improvements that we didn’t really consider possible before.” I am going to ask Marc to just dive right into this very interesting and unusual topic.

ML: We really started into the project first with a theoretical question that led to a practical question. The theoretical question was, “Are there organizations within industries where people who are knowledgeable about that industry say, there is everyone’s performance and then there is that other organization that is seemingly so far in front of other similar organizations, that it consistently defies expectations?” Certainly when you see examples like that where some organizations consistently outperform similar others, there are a whole variety of factors that lead to that, but our question was, when that happens over a sustained period of time, what explains it?

We understandably got some push back from people who said, show me what you are talking about exactly. We started to hear about a project that was completed last year in the state of Colorado, the clean-up and closure of the Rocky Flats site just outside Denver. In its almost 50 years of operation it was the most active nuclear weapons production site producing the nuclear triggers, the device that actually would explode a nuclear weapon. Every bomb in the US nuclear arsenal has triggers that were manufactured at this site, and the site was about 16 miles from downtown Denver.

Over the years, you tended to only hear about this site when bad news occurred and over time some horribly bad news had occurred. The largest industrial fire in US history took place there, various situations of contamination leaking out from the site. I remember growing up hearing about enormous protests, where 10,000 people would surround the site and protest the danger that it posed to the surrounding community as well as the kind of concern of nuclear proliferation in general, but in recent years, we started to hear a very different story. They were trying to clean up and close this site, and it was both the largest nuclear clean-up in world history and the first clean-up of a weapons plant. Contrary to what one might expect, things were going extremely well and they had pioneered a series of breakthrough approaches to operate incredibly ahead of schedule.

The thing that seemed truly unbelievable or literally impossible was that a site that was set up to take 70 years and many billion dollars to clean up, instead was cleaned up in about 10 years for about $6 billion. Still a lot of time and a lot of money, but enormously ahead of schedule and under budget. Our sense was assuming that that initial estimate is credible, how does one perform a first of its kind initiative, almost 90% ahead of schedule and under budget? So we started in really with that question, but we learned a series of things along the way that we think are really applicable to all kinds of organizations, not just a project of this kind, because we certainly recognize that not everyone is going to go and clean up a nuclear weapons plant tomorrow, but a series of things that we think are really applicable to complex change processes, complex organizational challenges really of all kinds.

DC: I think that the really extraordinary thing is that sometimes our best, most thoughtful estimates usually go the other way. We make a thoughtful estimate, and we end up well over time and over budget. But this case shows it can be possible by doing things a certain way to really exceed even the most optimistic expectations.

ML: This sounded like it went from a situation of really dire difficulty to a situation of just extraordinary performance, beyond good to great; it was really poor to spectacularly extraordinary. Here are just some of those indicators beyond the amount ahead of schedule and under budget: the final clean-up standard was many times cleaner than initially proposed. So that is the answer to another question: was success achieved because the site itself wasn’t cleaned up to as stringent a standard, and the answer is no.

Many of the folks who were really critical of the site were brought into the process and participated in what a solution should look like. A site that had had enormous labor difficulty, we interviewed union leaders on site, who described their labor relations in the shutdown as literally the best in their career. A site that had had below industry safety standards that was more than twice as good as the industry average during its decade of closure activity. A whole host of innovations have now changed how this kind of activity is conducted elsewhere. The other question we had was, if the folks in question who are doing this work are working so efficiently and effectively, seemingly working themselves out of jobs so much faster, what explains that? So, these were both some of the indicators of high performance which led to a set of questions about what was making this possible.

On that same note, this was a complex enough change effort that we wound up writing the findings in book form. We spent a good deal of our effort interviewing, and we are really fortunate to have a huge amount of interview data. We spent a lot of the process of writing the book really conveying things from the first person accounts of people involved in the clean-up, and our thought that that certainly enhances the accessibility of something to not just learn about it from a conceptual standpoint, but really to also get a sense of how people in the moment understood and articulated what they were doing. The other thing I want to point out is I think it is easy to hear about something like this that sounds so remarkable but then think, ‘that is not the scope or scale of challenge that I am dealing with on a day-to-day basis.’

One of the things that we believe is that there is real value and power in talking about extreme examples because in some ways, the dynamics stand out in high relief and it is easier to see what is going on if everything is on this kind of scale. I think the question becomes how to say, well what is the parallel to that that people might face in other more normal kinds of challenges?

DC: The book is an interesting mix of the really engaging story about what happened, but there is also a lot of theoretical explanation. You are not just left having read an entertaining story or left with a theory of organizational dynamics -you get both.

ML: And just to get into some of those dynamics, one of the ideas that we talk about in the book is this notion of positive deviance. Some people note that deviance always had a negative association. Our sense was things that deviate from the norm, things that are essentially outliers, really can go in two directions. In the same way that most of medicine focussed on getting people from a state of illness back to health, there is much less attention given to how you get people from a solid and acceptable baseline to, in the case of physiological standpoint, real wellness, thriving, and flourishing.

From an organizational standpoint, we found as well that the vast majority of organizational research really looked at things gone wrong, how to prevent problems, what kinds of problems occurred, how to get things back in line, and as important as that is, our sense was that there is much less attention given to how you get things from that place of again going well to really going exceptionally. So, we talked about if there is an idea of this notion of deficit gaps, and a lot of our attention, all of us as skilled problem solvers, focus on finding the problem, closing the gap, but there is a tendency to not think about the other side of that, which is maybe abundance gaps.

Our sense was that a significant critical factor in the success of this project was the organization’s tendency to focus on those abundance gaps and look at how you can really organize around real out-of-the-box greatness. This is not to say that you are neglecting those deficit gaps because, of course you have to attend to them, but to see those as being things that are done in the service of aiming for these things that are really extraordinary performance. It is just in terms of overall orientation and outlook it seemed to be a key part of what was going on there.

DC: And I think this is one of the powerful ideas of the 21^st century - you will see a lot of different fields being interested in abundance gaps.

ML: We deemed this overall approach, the abundance approach, and said okay, on the one hand there is positive deviance. We also said there has been what we termed an affirmative bias, which is again that kind of opportunity seeking orientation which is a complement to problem solving, not an either/or as well as this focus on, for lack of a better term, virtuousness, which is again this notion of seeing trust, credibility, and integrity as essential to strong and bold action, opposed to being something that was added on what you know is only core to this approach. Our sense is that this leads to, okay that sounds good but how does that work?

We have a few high-level thoughts about that, which are the three notions. One is Heliotropic: students of biology may recognize this term, which is this notion of things growing towards an energy source or towards light. There is a fair amount of data that people and human systems or organizational systems also respond in somewhat similar ways towards positive energy and again, that orienting around a compelling vision of what could be, so that has inherently energizing qualities in organizations.

DC: Sometimes this can sound a bit mystical, you know, positive energy and so on, but it really comes down to some pretty basic psychology that if you have everyone sitting around focused on problems and complaining about problems, that’s where the intelligence is going to be applied. If you have people thinking about what they can do that is going to be extraordinary, that’s where the intelligence is going to be applied, that’s what the conversations are going to be about and as a result, the organization moves in that direction.

ML: Yes, I think it’s absolutely true. Our sense is that the abundance approach does these two things: it essentially amplifies already good things that are going on, so that it fosters the tendency for people to be helpful to others, fosters information sharing across the organization, builds on the kind of strength that all organizations typically experience and it has buffering benefits. It protects organizations to some extent from some of the trauma and harm they might be experiencing. A big part of this story was a large workforce, over time, getting smaller and that of course creates trauma for organizations and difficulty for individuals. The organization was able to approach its work in a way that made some of the difficult things that go along with closing any kind of organization down to have it happen in a way that is done as well as possible.

I want to point out that like most kinds of complex processes, we certainly didn’t come away with the magic answer, the silver bullet that resulted in everything being successful. Our sense really was that there was a series of forces that enabled or that helped make possible the success. We came up with 21 different principles that we think all contributed to the success. It seems like there is a whole series of forces that happened in combination, that resulted in the success. One of the challenges that this presents is that you don’t want to reduce something that happened in a complex way down so much that what you take away from it really isn’t useful. At the same time, to keep track of a whole series of forces, is in itself hard to get one’s mind around.

So we used a tool that my esteemed colleague, Kim Cameron, helped develop, which is the notion called the competing values framework. It’s really a tool to organize some of these findings. The central idea is that most organizations and individuals have specific strengths, but our sense and there is great data to back this up, is that most organizations and individuals that are highly successful counterbalance those strengths by what would seem to be almost paradoxically opposite strength. These terms - CLAN, AD-HOCRACY, HIERARCHY, MARKET - tend to say these are different domains that exist in each organization.

The CLAN domain is familial focused on people and community. MARKET forces are very externally focused, focused on what competitors are doing. So that is in a sense, the opposite of being internally focused and focused on people within the organization.   Similarly, AD-HOCRACY is a sort of cumbersome word but if the idea of something that happened in an ad hoc way is that an organization or a group of people are nimble and agile and able to come together in creative ways around unique problems or unique opportunities, and they perhaps dissolve those bonds or ties that were assembled to deal with a specific problem, that implies an organization’s been innovative, kind of thinking outside the box. In some ways the opposite of that is HIERARCHY, it’s the forces that provide stability and control, etc. Both are really necessary but in a way, I think it is helpful to think about them to some degree as this kind of counterbalancing.

DC: And I think what you are going to say is that successful groups and organizations manage to fit in two quadrants at once, so if they are mainly in one quadrant they have some aspects of some other quadrant that helps balance them.

ML: Right and what we really found with this was that no individual, no organization can do everything well, but time and again the organizations and individuals that are more successful seem to operate in at least one quadrant, perhaps two with great success and are at least competent or at least average in the other areas. In some cases we see organizations and individuals that can move quite skillfully between each of these quadrants. For example, with Rocky Flats specifically, now we see for each of these quadrants some examples just by having headline of the kinds of things that the organization did well in each of these quadrants, that we believe strongly contributed to success. It’s nice to see a set of activities that really supported people and the strength of internal relationships as well as some things that were externally focused and skillful, to get that kind of essential sense of these different areas of activity. 

On this notion of clan or community or group, we are trying to say, look, here is what is conventionally done. In many cases the organization did those conventional things but additionally approached some of those things with this positive orientation that we are talking about as an abundance approach to leadership. We all know that in a conventional leadership strategy the vast majority of decision making and leadership is at the top. But here is an organization that certainly continued to make key decisions at a high level but also really masterfully involved a whole variety of stake holders and critically, internal stake holders in this process, in a way that was critical to the success.

One example is vastly increasing the involvement of senior managers in the work and clean up activity and really trying to limit the distance between the frontline workforce and the more senior managers, recognizing the critical importance of line supervisors and the organization was keenly aware to say that the quality is important. It also needs to be backed up with adequate time for people to do their jobs well, adequate resources to do them, adequate training and a whole series of things that were done to really respect the workforce. I think central to this success was getting buy-in from the brother organization and saying, “Look, this site will close and you all as people who have worked here a long time know it better than anyone,” and really giving people a chance to do something that had historic significance and built on their expertise and really respected them in that process.

DC: And then going in with the presumption that these people are not going to be a barrier to success but that they are going to be a part of the answer to the success.

ML: Right, and I think the organization did a whole series of things to try to make that so, one of the things that the high level leaders talked about was trying to change culture in a way that current activity you are facing clearly can’t be supported by the old culture, so on the one hand trying to inspire people, on the other hand letting people know clearly that the situation they find themselves in can’t be sustained by the old pattern as well. Again, that in a sense is somewhat paradoxically opposite or a counterbalancing approach.

Stakeholder engagement again went beyond simply trying to manage interests but really trying to build relationships and involve people in the process in a way that made them feel like they had both an enhanced stake in the process and required them to be part of some of the solution.

I encourage folks to review some examples of the organization having this high level kind of market orientation and to provide on the spot financial awards to employees who either came up with production innovations or safety innovations. When I read that statistic that says the organization came up with a few hundred innovations, to me that speaks to creating a kind of climate where there is within a controlled setting the ability to experiment to some degree and find what works. In a sense that is harder to do in this kind of case than just about anywhere given the incredible safety considerations, more than incredible constraints on experimentation because the risks are so high and again, the organization didn’t see safety as a stumbling block but really as a key building block to successful performance. There was incredible value and appreciating people at the same time, having an incredibly aggressive and innovative approach to actually planning the closure process. 

DC: And they made the contract that set the stage for closure.

ML: Yes, and this was the first time that the Department of Energy, which is the oversight agency for these facilities, shifted to the first contract structure. There is a whole series of contract innovations to say, both in kind of an incentive-based contract for the first time, reward faster performance and penalize slower performance and a series of changes to say everything from let’s evaluate how much overall work towards closure you achieve as opposed to being locked into specific milestones such that if you get slowed down in one area as you are resolving that issue, you could continue to make strides in another area, a whole series of changes that really were essential to the success.

DC: And what I am seeing here is there are some very practical spot awards for various kinds of innovations, but we all know that won’t work without an overall abundance mindset. By the same token, the abundance mindset isn’t going to work without the specific down to earth actions that they took: changing the rewards of this team, building a certain kind of contract. So the abundance mindset goes hand in hand with the specific practices, which I think we can all understand as being smart practices to encourage innovation or teamwork or rapid progress or whatever. 

ML: That’s exactly right. I think it is a nice segue from talking a moment ago about the contract, that the company responsible for the clean up was principally an environmental engineering firm. Masterful engineers, who as you might imagine in terms of figuring out the critical path to bring an incredibly complex project to closure, were very smart about that. At the same time they did things that had enormous symbolic value. I remember talking to folks on the site who talked about the water tower, which was the tallest building on the site coming down much earlier than it needed to but being taken down simply to remind people when they drove to the site each day, this place is closing, I can no longer see this landmark that has been here for the last half century.

One of the times that we visited the site prior to its closure we noticed that all of the cafeterias had been closed on this site, even though thousands of people were still working there and instead people were getting their food from lunch trucks. They said at this point they were close to closure; this place should feel like a construction site. We want people to remember everyday that we are moving swiftly towards closure. So again, kind of a series of things that were, that had great symbolic or emotional value. 

DC: It is interesting that we tend to think of symbolic things as being immaterial, but taking out a water tower and closing down some cafeterias is very material. Even though it is also very symbolic. 

ML: Right, exactly and I think that gets to the point that what is going to be both resonant and appropriate will of course vary from situation to situation. I think it was a key to this whole endeavor and again I think you start to see some of that creativity and some of the alliances that were created between parties, so as an example, the relationship between the regulating body and the body carrying out the work for the company to say let’s have one of our staff people work with you. We will place them with you full time so we can better understand your needs and build that into our practices from the get go as opposed to waiting until we get it wrong and then dealing with it that way.

There were a whole series of ‘why couldn’t we approach this…’ ideas. I think again if any of us sit down and think about our own organization and start with why couldn’t we, a whole series of ideas spring to mind. I think being creative and innovative is essentially coming up with great innovations, at the same time how to have stability and ability to systematize the good idea becomes really important as well. So again we have this idea of how to have the systems in place that take care of, as an example, downsizing well. Again, how to have the sort of responsibility and accountability processes to back up great ideas.

Something we did not touch on quite as much is the notion of again moving top level ownership to really enabling multiple leaders to play roles at all levels in the organization. One of the things we saw was this notion of building continuity into leadership as being essential. Finally this idea that we did talk about in the competing values sense was not just valuing congruence and consistency but also seeing the importance of paradoxic contradiction or really what I think of as counter balance to say we need areas of strength, let’s think about what the opposite or sort of shadow side of that strength is and how we can address that as well.

DC: I know we have covered a very big issue here both in terms of organizational development philosophy as well as some hints on what the actual practice is like. There’s a certain sense of excitement here that maybe there is a different way of thinking, combined with using tools we already know about, tools about how we organize, how we reward people, how we communicate, how we use symbols and so on but if we were able to get a sense that maybe with this abundance mindset combined with existing know how, we can actually achieve great things. I think it is exciting work you are doing Marc.