A plant manager's perspective on exploring, learning and growing together...

EXPANDING THE GROWTH OF SELF-ORGANIZING SYSTEMS

Richard N. Knowles — E. I. DuPont de Nemours & Company: Belle, West Virginia

In 1987 earnings and other performance indicators were in a dive; we were headed toward shutting down. Our economic health is now restored and we are moving toward being a world class manufacturing facility. This is the story of our turn around.

Belle's success indicators today — Over the last seven years, at the Belle, West Virginia plant, injuries have been reduced by about 95 per­cent, and on December 10, 1994, we celebrated seven years without a lost workday injury. We have averaged about 1000 employees during those years, and handled the second highest num­ber of hazardous chemicals in the DuPont Company. In addition to this, over the last three years our fixed costs have been reduced about 19 percent, productivity is up 25-50 percent (varying according to product line) and earnings per employee have more than doubled.

Turning things around involved a three pronged approach — The progress we've seen came about as a result of three elements coming together:

1. Acquiring new technology.

2. Developing a clearer and stronger vision and mission.

3. Encouraging the growth of self-organizing work and decision making systems.

Improving our technology... We improved our technology in: electronic control systems; the chemical processes; engineering and maintenance standards; our quality performance; and our ana­lytical procedures. This has been a widespread effort totally involving the organization.

A stronger, clearer focus on vision and mission... We developed a stronger, clearer focus on our vision, mission and the need to serve our customers better and better. Our stan­dards of performance were clarified, and we worked with everyone to help them understand and see how they are connected to them.

Encouraging self—organizing systems... We learned to open ourselves up to the spontaneous forces of self-organization which released the great talents, creativity and energy of the people, which in turn enabled the technology improve­ments and more intense business focus to move toward their maximum potential.

Each of these elements alone would have resulted in some limited progress, but it was not until they were all moving together that leaps of progress were made. Since much has been written about the improvements in technology, quality and a stronger business focus, in telling this story, I want to focus on the third element, self—organiz­ing systems.

Self-organization and growth — Self-organi­zation is a deep, natural phenomenon in living organisms and other biological systems enabling their survival and growth.* Organizations are liv­ing systems too, so the more you pay attention and look at them, the more you see self-organiza­tion taking place.

I see it everywhere — sometimes producing results in support of the organization and some­times not. In traditional, command and control organizations we've tried to stamp out self-orga­nization because it seems so threatening. I used to do this before I learned to value and appreciate the potential and possibilities of self-organization. Learning to open up, let go and live in the ambigu­ity has been difficult, frightening at times and won­derfully rewarding.

Creating the conditions to support self-organization — During the Berkana Diologues in the winter and spring of 1993 with Margaret Wheatley, Myron Kellner-Rogers and others, three conditions were identified as poten­tially necessary for self-organization to occur:

• Information freely and openly flowing in the orga­nization.

• Relationships understood as all of us being con­nected to others, bumping into each other all over the organization.

• Self-reference established through knowing our­selves; connecting our values to each other's and the organization's.

Creating conditions to support self-organi­zation at Belle... At Belle, we spend a lot of time communicating with each other, our cus­tomers, the businesses, and our community. It's vital that we each understand our vision, mission, principles and standards of performance, so we talk a lot about this:

• We regularly share information on our business performance, and people are free to ask any questions they wish to whomever they want. Nothing is off limits except personal and medical information.

• We try to answer all questions as promptly as we can; usually on the spot or in a few days at most.

• Information is available to everyone and people have learned to sift through it, selecting that which is appropriate for them — we do not try to decide who needs to know about something, rather we let each one decide for themselves.

Supporting the new environment through shared learning... It's taken time to nurture this environment, and we've all done a lot of learning in the process. Because learning is critical to the normal and natural processes of change, it is very powerful when shared.

As we learned together, we created our future together. Our future is pulling us forward as each one sees opportunities to improve, has the skills and knowledge they need, and the freedom to act responsibly.

We now see leaders emerge all over the plant, stepping out and making a difference. At one Berkana Dialogue someone talked about the organization becoming leaderful; that's what it feels like at Belle.

Finding meaning in work... People are finding meaning in their work which is powerful and ful­filling. Understanding things more fully, and seeing how we each fit into the larger picture, allows personal growth to take place. Now as we are moving into an environment where people see that what they are doing makes a difference, they begin to feel much better about themselves and their work. Discretionary energy* is released and people become more creative — a significant increase in the organization's capacity to do work cakes place.

Supporting the environment by entering it... We have to help create the environment where people can find meaning in their work and want to open up. To help to create this environ­ment, we have to put ourselves into the process, becoming active participants; being spectators doesn't work. This makes a big difference in our collective energy levels, as we solve problems together and improve. In this type of environ­ment, people naturally self-organize around the work and teams come together in ways that make sense to them. This results in better, faster prob­lem solving, more flexibility and improved responsiveness.

An example of self-organizing principles in action — In 1989 we decided we had to change our process control system on one of our major, continuous units from a pneumatic to an elec­tronic one to improve quality, increase uptime and reduce environmental upsets. Our engineer­ing consultants told us this would cost about $5,000,000 and take two years — their plan included a parallel control room so we could run side-by-side for a while to line everything out. We couldn't afford this large investment or take two years, so we thanked them and they left.

Beginning in January, we all worked together meeting weekly in the control room for project status reviews. Everyone became involved, knew what the stakes were, and put themselves into making the project a success. Construction pro­jects were approved in July for about half the original estimate, and we planned our annual November shutdown to be the window for changing out the 100 control loops (this required an entire plant shutdown to install them).

As the whole team came together, we swarmed all over the place during the shutdown, removing the old pneumatic system and putting in the new, electronic control system. We started up in just three weeks (not running with a parallel system) without incident, and have run smoothly ever since. We also set a new DuPont standard in retrofitting the new system.

Getting flatter and leaner and smarter together... The second example concerns the time when we removed the first line supervisors from production shifts as we moved to a flatter, leaner organization in January of 1993. Teams of operators formed across the production areas, helping each other with safety audits, etc.

When they discovered the total rolled-up cost of demurrage (the fees we pay to railroads and own­ers of trucks when we keep their equipment on the plant too long) was about $800,000 a year they decided that they could go after it and reduce it considerably. (The costs were spread out over many areas so individual area costs had not seemed not very large.) I was unaware of their work until I saw the costs coming down and asked what was happening. In just nine months this team reduced the costs to a $ 100,000 a year rate.

Closing thoughts

In freely sharing all information, what used to be the currency of power has become the medium in which we live; like the air around us. Using this information as we work together, openness and trust are building, freeing up creativity and improving our speed, responsiveness and the quality of our decisions. Through our extensive communications processes (written as well as personally being in the plant two to three hours a day talking with everyone, and in our twice week­ly business meetings), people feel connected to the businesses and see their place in the larger picture.

All three of these conditions coming together, nurturing and encouraging self-organization has resulted in a place where our work is becoming more meaningful, our total performance and cus­tomer focus is much stronger and the long-term health of the plant has been restored.

It's good for the people and it's good for the business; that's what it's all about.