From Crisis Performance to Everyday Performance: Part I

Lighting the Fire of Performance

The article, written by Richard Knowles and Carl Stent, discussed the aftermath of a major fire event at a DuPont plant in Belle, W. Va., more than 25 years ago. One of the authors of the piece was a manager at the plant at the time and recounted the events and how the plant’s workforce adjusted.

The fire enveloped an area of the plant where some dry product was being made, and that entire part of the plant was out of commission for nearly three weeks, as the damage was extensive even though the fire brigade on site responded quickly and put out the fire in short order.

The Rally

With the fire paralyzing the plant, workers and supervisors took it upon themselves to rise to the occasion to put the plant back in service as quickly as possible. Everyone  communicated and took on whatever roles were needed to put that part of the plant back together and get it operational again. Most tensions that had existed between workers and supervisors or managers virtually stopped as everyone worked together, put their differences aside and kept the focus on the overall goal of keeping the plant running so no workers would lose their jobs due to lost production.

While there was still a lot of cleanup to be done, the plant was back in operation in less than a month and the plant returned to normal productivity very soon thereafter, despite the fire restricting the company’s dry-product inventory to about three weeks, with several orders needing to be filled during that time.

During the immediate post-fire crisis situation, the entire workforce worked in harmony and great cooperation to get the plant up and running.

Back to Normalcy

The pant was running about as well as it had in ages during those immediate weeks after the fire. But within a few months after the crisis had passed, it was noticed that without the crisis situation, the plant workers began falling back into their own habits and old ways of doing things, which proved to be much more inefficient and less effective than the period of managing the crisis. While it was good to see the plant get back to normal after such a devastating event, that normal wasn’t exactly ideal.

The author who worked at the plant (Knowles) noticed that the workers did a great job in the crisis, but much of the same in-fighting, pettiness, lack of communication and efficiency problems that existed before the fire came back into reality at the plant. It was almost as if everyone who participated in the crisis forgot what they did, and didn’t see a need to maintain that performance when there wasn’t a need to do so.

Knowles realized, after overhearing a conversation about some workers reminiscing about the fire and the immediate aftermath, that it was time to take a look at what worked during that crisis environment and see if there were ways to replicate it in a more “normal” environment so the plant can remain efficient and effective at all times.

What’s with the Sand?

The next post will go into detail about what the plant did to assess its success in crisis and the effects of implementing those actions as part of everyday work at the plant. But this is the point where the “pile of sand” metaphor comes into play.

Renowned theoretical physicist Per Bak once observed  something that occurs naturally in most organizations, and used a pile of sand as the discovery.

A pile of sand changes as single grains of sand are added one at a time. You can notice this yourself as you do it; as you add a grain, the energy of the pile changes to keep the pile balanced; you’ll see “waves” as one grain is added and many of the existing grains in the pile shift downward on the pile. Some of the “waves” are miniscule, some are quite large.  As the pile grows, this slippage of grains (or shifting) is called “self-organizing criticality,” and that is the key to most organizational success – the ability to self-organize.

What Knowles observed with the workers at the Belle plant was how they managed the crisis as the plant self-organizing its energy, creativity and attitudes in a high-pressure situation. As pressure was added, the pile of sand that is the workforce organized itself and developed better efficiency and energy.  But when the pressure was released after the crisis passed, the pile of sand didn’t grow or build any more energy and it became less organized.

What happened? How did the self-organization take place? Knowles spent the rest of the article going through his discoveries and explaining those actions and how they improved the work on the plant overall in future years.