Human Resources: Thought Leaders, December 14, 2006

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Thought Leader: Mark Lavine on "Making the Impossible Possible"

Marc Lavine and Kim Cameron are doing very important work in organizational development. David Creelman recently spoke with Marc about
their new book, and how other organizations can harness the lessons of the astonishing success of Rocky Flats.

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.

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David Creelman is CEO of Creelman Research and a well-known writer, research and speaker on critical issues in human capital management. David’s previous work includes Chief of Content and Research for HR.com, in addition to working as a management consultant in Canada and Malaysia, most notably with the Hay Group.

David holds an MBA from the University of Western Ontario and has also taught Rewards and Performance Measures at the University of Malaya executive MBA program. David’s clients include think tanks, consultants, academics and organizations from around the globe. His current focus, in collaboration with Dave Ulrich, is on what organizations should report about human capital intangibles to the financial markets (see www.rbl.net "What the Fortune 50 Tells Wall Street").

David Creelman can be reached by email at creelmanresearch[at]gmail.com

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