A pile of sand responds in any environment. It doesn’t need a pressure or crisis situation to do what it does as grains of sand are added to the pile.
Its focus and direction of energy is natural. Sometimes we can’t say the same thing for human beings. And in some cases, that can be a problem.
Belle Fire Recap
Take the workers at a DuPont plant in Belle, W. Va., more than 25 yeas ago. As was covered in my previous post, those workers responded efficiently and effectively to a plant fire and the aftermath in order to get the plant back up and running in short order despite heavy damage to the plant. Everyone engaged, were moved to action and did what they had to do (even things that were technically outside of their job description) to keep jobs at the plant and to get back to full productivity as quickly as possible to satisfy customers and vendors.
When crisis arose, this group of human beings organized itself efficiently to get done what was needed. But once the dust settled and the plant was back to “normal,” many of the inefficiencies from before the fire began to re-appear, meaning that workers and supervisors fell back into old habits and disharmony and inefficiency, which affected overall productivity and morale.
Back to the Sand
In the previous post, we touched on the concept of “self-organizing criticality,” using a pile of sand as an example. That moment when the pile shifts with the addition of a new grain of sand to the pile is considered that moment of self-organizing criticality, keeping the pile organized when many grains change position on the pile to shift the energy so the pile remains balanced as individual grains are added.
What Richard Knowles, a co-author of an article in a recent issue of Professional Safety magazine about the Belle plant fire and its aftermath, observed as a manager at the plant was that the self-organizing criticality disappeared from his plant when the crisis passed. Rather than treat it like a phantom that can’t be grasped again, Knowles did the work to find out how the plant reached self-organizing criticality and looked to implement that crisis performance in the overall everyday performance of the plant.
Knowles wanted to turn the plant into a pile of sand, and here is what he observed.
A Flatter Hierarchy
The most important factor that Knowles noticed was that the usual hierarchy of the plant changed dramatically in the wake of the fire. Workers didn’t continue reporting to their supervisors; workers and supervisors worked in small ad-hoc teams to get certain things done for the sake of the plant. Everyone was an equal in terms of getting work done and communicating with each other, to provide more efficient communication and activity.
The smaller teams focused on specific projects and did the work to get the job done, working only within their teams, even with some people doing things that they normally were not doing as part of their jobs. If there was work to be done, they stepped in and did it. And without considering hierarchy and thinking of everyone on the team as an equal, and everyone on other teams as equals, communication was more free-flowing, decisions were made more quickly and work was achieved more efficiently.
A New Performance Model
Knowles noted that when this flatter hierarchy was in force, the plant operated with great efficiency and effectiveness, so after the past tensions arrived with the re-creation of the old hierarchies, he decided to do his part to break it down and return the plant to what worked in the crisis aftermath.
Knowles started shirting the plant into this flatter hierarchy, reducing the levels of bureaucracies, eliminating a group of “decision-makers” and put more power in the hands of each worker and in small teams to do what they needed to do to get their jobs accomplished, and to encourage a better sharing of information between individuals and teams, especially more direct communication.
The Results
We have all heard the axiom, “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” In the case of the Belle plant, this certainly can be true. Flattening communication channels and the hierarchy created better efficiency and focus among workers, and we have all experienced what happens when all of our energy is focused like a laser, right?
We believe we get things done better and more efficiently than we would otherwise.
In the case of the Belle plant, the proof was definitely in the pudding. In the months after the fire, the plant’s injury rate dropped 98 percent, emissions dropped 87 percent, earnings rose 300 percent and productivity went up 45 percent. And those levels were consistent for the next 17 years.
Just some food for thought.