Five Steps to Failure

The Nut Island effect is a destructive organizational dynamic that pits a homogeneous, deeply committed team against its disengaged senior managers. Their conflict can be mapped as a negative feedback spiral that passes through five predictable stages.

1. Management, its attention riveted on high-visibility problems, assigns a vital, behind-the-scenes task to a team and gives that team a great deal of autonomy. Team members self-select for a strong work ethic and an aversion to the spotlight. They become adept at organizing and managing themselves, and the unit develops a proud and distinct identity.

2. Senior management takes the team’s self-sufficiency for granted and ignores team members when they ask for help or try to warn of impending trouble. When trouble strikes, the team feels betrayed by management and reacts with resentment.

3. An us-against-the-world mentality takes hold in the team, as isolation heightens its sense of itself as a band of heroic outcasts. Driven by the desire to stay off management’s radar screen, the team grows skillful at disguising its problems. Team members never acknowledge problems to outsiders or ask them for help. Management is all too willing to take the team’s silence as a sign that all is well.

4. Management fails in its responsibility to expose the team to external perspectives and practices. As a result, the team begins to make up its own rules. The team tells itself that the rules enable it to fulfill its mission. In fact, these rules mask grave deficiencies in the team’s performance.

5. Both management and the team form distorted pictures of reality that are very difficult to correct. Team members refuse to listen when well-meaning outsiders offer help or attempt to point out problems and deficiencies. Management, for its part, tells itself that no news is good news and continues to ignore team members and their task. Management and the team continue to shun each other until some external event breaks the stalemate.

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The consequences of this organizational pathology are not always as vivid and unmistakable as they were in the case of the Nut Island team. More frequently, I suspect, its effects are like a slow leak—subtle, gradual, and difficult to trace. Nevertheless, the Nut Island story should serve as a warning to managers who spend the bulk of their time on an organization’s most visible and obvious shortcomings: sometimes the most debilitating problems are the ones we can’t see.

The Nut Island Effect Defined

The Nut Island effect begins with a homogeneous, deeply committed team working in isolation that can be physical, psychological, or both. Pitted against this team are its senior supervisors, who are usually separated from the team by several layers of management. In the first stage of the Nut Island effect, senior management, preoccupied with high-visibility problems, assigns the team a vital but behind-the-scenes task. This is a crucial feature: the team carries out its task far from the eye of the public or customers. Allowed a great deal of autonomy, team members become adept at organizing and managing themselves, and the unit develops a proud and distinct identity. In the second stage, senior management begins to take the team’s self-sufficiency for granted and ignores team members when they ask for help or try to warn of impending trouble. Management’s apparent indifference breeds resentment in the team members, reinforces its isolation, and heightens its sense of itself as a band of heroic outcasts. In the third stage, an us-against-the-world mentality takes hold among team members. They make it a priority to stay out of management’s line of sight, which leads them to deny or minimize problems and avoid asking for help.

This isolation leads to the fourth stage of the conflict. With no external input on practices and operating guidelines, the team begins to make up its own rules. The team tells itself that the rules enable it to fulfill its mission. In fact, these rules mask the deterioration of the team’s working environment and deficiencies in the team’s performance. In the fifth stage, both the team and senior management form distorted pictures of reality that are very difficult to correct. Team members come to believe they are the only ones who really understand their work. They close their ears when well-meaning outsiders attempt to point out problems. Management tells itself that no news is good news and continues to ignore the team and its task. Only some kind of external event can break this stalemate. Perhaps management disbands the team or pulls the plug on its project. Perhaps a crisis forces the team to ask for help and snaps management out of its complacency. Even then, team members may not understand the extent of their difficulties or recognize that their efforts may have aggravated the very problems they were attempting to solve. Management, for its part, may be unable to recognize the role it played in setting in motion this self-reinforcing spiral of failure.

That, then, is an outline of the Nut Island effect. Here is how it played out at a small sewage treatment plant on the edge of Boston Harbor.

The Nut Island Story

Nut Island is actually a small peninsula in Quincy, Massachusetts, a mostly blue-collar city of 85,000 located about ten miles south of Boston. Sitting at the southern entrance to Boston Harbor, Nut Island was a favorite landmark for seventeenth-century sailors, who savored the scent of what one early European settler called the “divers arematicall herbes, and plants” that grew there. “Shipps have come from Virginea where there have bin scarce five men able to hale a rope” the settler wrote “untill they come [near Nut Island], and smell the sweet aire of the shore, where they have suddainly recovered.”

By 1952, when the Nut Island treatment plant went into operation, the herbs and sweet air were long gone. Before the plant came on line, raw sewage from much of Boston and the surrounding area was piped straight into the harbor, fouling local beaches and fisheries and posing a serious health hazard to the surrounding community.

The Nut Island plant was billed as the solution to Quincy’s wastewater problem. Hailed in the local press for its “modern design” it was supposed to treat all the sewage produced in the southern half of the Boston metropolitan area, then release it about a mile out into the harbor. From the first, though, the plant’s suitability for the task was questionable. The facility was designed to handle sewage inflows of up to 285 million gallons per day, comfortably above the 112 million gallons that flowed in on an average day. But high tides and heavy rains could increase the flow to three times the daily average, straining the plant to its limits and compromising its performance.

During most of the 30 years covered in this article, the team charged with running the plant was headed by superintendent Bill Smith, operations chief Jack Madden, and laboratory head Frank Mac Kinnon. The three joined me recently for a reunion at Nut Island, which has been converted to a headworks that collects sewage from the southern Boston region and delivers it north through a tunnel under Boston Harbor to the city’s vast new treatment plant on Deer Island. The men’s affection for each other is evident, as are the lingering remnants of plant hierarchy. When someone has to speak for the entire group, Mac Kinnon and Madden still defer to Smith.

The three friends don’t need much prompting to launch into reminiscences of their years at Nut Island, which they still view as the happiest time of their working lives. They laugh often as they tell stories about the old days, featuring characters with nicknames like Sludgie and Twinkie, and they seem cheerfully oblivious to the hair-raising conditions that were part of daily life at the plant. When Smith talks about once finding himself neck-deep in wastewater as he worked in the pump room, he speaks without a hint of horror or disgust. It’s just a good story. “It was fun” Smith says, and his two friends nod in agreement. Holding an old sewer plant together with chewing gum and baling wire really is their idea of a good time.

Throughout our talk, the men frequently refer to themselves and their coworkers as a family. But Nut Island had not always been such a harmonious place. When Smith arrived there in 1963, fresh out of the navy, he walked into a three-way cold war among operations, maintenance, and the plant’s laboratory. Each side viewed its own function as essential and looked down on the other groups’ workers as incompetents. “The maintenance guys thought the lab guys were a bunch of college boys,” says Smith, a short, powerfully built man who at age 63 still has more black than gray in his long, ponytailed hair and thick beard. “And the guys in the lab said the maintenance guys were just grease monkeys.”

For the next few years, Smith did what he could to “get a little cooperation going.” By 1968, he had gained Madden and Mac Kinnon as allies. Before long, they had weeded out most of the plant’s shirkers and complainers and assembled a cohesive team. The people they hired were much like themselves: hardworking, grateful for the security of a public sector job, and happy to stay out of the spotlight. Many were veterans of World War II or the Korean War, accustomed to managing frequent crises in harsh working conditions—just what awaited them at the aging, undersized, underfunded plant. Tony Kucikas was typical of the breed. He signed on in 1968 after being discharged from the navy, where he had worked as an engineer and machinist. When he walked into the plant on his first day, even the smell of oil was familiar, he recalls. “It reminded me so much o the engine room,” he says smiling at the memory. “I can remember walking down those first stairs and saying to myself, ‘I’m going to like this,’ because I felt right at home.”

Nut Island’s hiring practices helped create a tight-knit group, bonded by a common cause and shared values, but they also eliminated any “squeaky wheels” who might have questioned the team’s standard operating procedures or alerted senior management to the plant’s deteriorating condition. That was fine with Smith and his colleagues. Assembling a like-minded group made it easier for them to break down interdepartmental animosities by cross-training plant personnel. The team leaders also made job satisfaction a priority, shifting people out of the jobs they were hired to do and into work that suited them better. These moves raised morale and created a strong sense of trust and ownership among plant workers.

Just how strong the sense of ownership was can be seen in the sacrifices the team made. Few people on Nut Island made more than $20,000 a year, low wages even in the 1960s and 1970s. Yet when there was no money for spare parts, team members would pitch in to buy the needed equipment. They were equally generous with their time. A sizable cadre of plant workers regularly put in far more than the requisite eight hours daily, but they only occasionally filed for overtime pay. In fact, several of the Nut Island alumni I interviewed seemed almost embarrassed when the subject came up, as if there was something slightly shameful about claiming the extra time.

From 1952 until 1985, the Nut Island plant fell under the purview of the Metropolitan District Commission (MDC), a regional infrastructure agency responsible for Greater Boston’s parks and recreation areas, some of its major roads, and its water supplies and sewers. (In 1985, the Massachusetts state legislature, under pressure from a federal lawsuit, shifted responsibility for water and sewers to a new entity, the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority.) Throughout the early and mid-1900s, the MDC had been known for the quality of its engineers and the rigor of its management. It had constructed and operated water and sewer systems that were often cited as engineering marvels. By the 1960s, though, the MDC had become the plaything of the state legislature, whose members used the agency as a patronage mill. Commissioners rarely stayed more than two years, and their priorities reflected those of the legislators who controlled the MDC budget. The lawmakers understood full well that there were more votes to be gained by building skating rinks and swimming pools in their districts than by tuning up the sewer system, and they directed their funding and political pressure accordingly. As a result, control of Greater Boston’s sewer system fell into the hands of political functionaries whose primary concern was to please their patrons in the statehouse. If that meant building another skating rink instead of maintaining Nut Island, so be it.

The attitude of the MDC’s leadership toward the sewer division can be gauged by a story that became a staple of plant lore. As it was passed around, the story took on mythic power. It became a central component of the Nut Island team’s self-definition.

It seems that one day, James W. Connell, Nut Island superintendent in the 1960s, went to Boston to ask the MDC commissioner for funds to perform long-deferred maintenance on essential equipment. The commissioner’s only response: “Get rid of the dandelions.”

Startled, the superintendent asked the commissioner to repeat himself.

“You heard me. I want you guys to take some money and get the dandelions off the lawn. The place looks terrible.”

The story speaks for itself, but I would point out that it was something of a miracle that the commissioner had even laid eyes on the lawn and its dandelions. Visits to Nut Island by the MDC’s upper management were so rare that when one commissioner did show up at the plant, workers there failed to recognize him and ordered him off the premises. For the most part, Smith says, “We did our thing, and they just left us alone.”

At this point, the first stage of the Nut Island effect is in place. We have a distracted management and a dedicated team that toils, by choice, in obscurity. They are isolated not only from management but from their customers—in this case, the public. Team members, who share a similar background, value system, and outlook, have enormous trust in each other and very little in outsiders, especially management. Now, an egregious display of indifference from management is all it takes to set the downward spiral in motion.

On Nut Island, this display came in January 1976, when the plant’s four gigantic diesel engines shut down. The disaster was predictable. Since the early 1970s, the workers at Nut Island had been warning the top brass in Boston that the engines, which pumped waste-water into the plant and then through a series of aeration and treatment tanks, desperately needed maintenance. The MDC, though, had refused to release any funds to maintain them. Make do with what you have, plant operators were told. When something stops working, we’ll find you the money to fix it. In essence, the MDC’s management refused to act until a crisis forced their hand. That crisis arrived when the engines gave out entirely. The team at the plant worked frantically to get the engines running again, but for four days, untreated sewage flowed into the harbor.

The incident propelled the conflict between the Nut Island team and senior management from the second stage to the third—from passive resentment to active avoidance. The plant workers viewed the breakdown as a mortifying failure that they could have averted if MDC headquarters had listened to them instead of cutting them adrift. In ordinary circumstances, management’s indifference might have killed off the team’s morale and motivation. It had the opposite effect on the Nut Islanders. They united around a common adversary. Nut Island was their plant, and its continued operation was solely the result of their own heroic efforts. No bureaucrat in Boston was going to stop them from running it the way it ought to be run. (To this day, the workers at Nut Island deny that their cohesiveness stemmed from their shared disdain for headquarters; “I don’t want to give them credit for anything,” one worker told me recently.)

It became a priority among the Nut Islanders to avoid contact with upper management whenever possible. When the plant ran short of ferrous chloride, a chemical used for odor control, no one from Nut Island asked headquarters for funds to buy a new supply. Instead, they would contact a local community activist and ask her to complain to her state representative about odors emanating from the plant. The rep would then contact MDC headquarters, and Nut Island would receive a fresh supply of ferrous chloride. In part, this was a case of shrewd “managing upward” by Bill Smith and his colleagues. But it also shows how far the team would go to avoid dealing with management.

Another way the Nut Islanders stayed off management’s radar screen was to keep their machinery running long past the time it should have been overhauled or junked. Their repairs often showed great ingenuity—at times t hey even manufactured their own parts on-site. Ultimately, though, the team’s resourcefulness compromised the very job they were supposed to accomplish.

Among the plant’s most troublesome equipment were the pumps that drew sludge—fecal matter and other solids—into the digester tanks. Inside the tanks, anaerobic bacteria were added to eliminate the pathogens in the sludge, reduce its volume, and render it safe for release into the harbor. Years of deferred maintenance had degraded the pumps, but instead of asking Boston for funds to replace them, the Nut Islanders lubricated the machinery with lavish amounts of oil. Much of this oil found its way into the digester tanks themselves. From there, it was released into the harbor. (Beginning in 1991, treated sludge was shipped to a nearby facility for conversion to fertilizer.) A former sewer division scientist tells me he suspects the releases of tainted sludge account for the high concentration of oil in Boston Harbor’s sediments, compared with other harbors on the East Coast.

Rules of Thumb

A team can easily lose sight of the big picture when it is narrowly focused on a demanding task. The task itself becomes the big picture, crowding other considerations out of the frame. To counteract this tendency, smart managers supply reality checks by exposing their people to the perspectives and practices of other organizations. (For other suggestions, see the sidebar “How to Stop the Nut Island Effect Before It Starts.”) A team in the fourth stage of the Nut Island effect, however, is denied this exposure. Isolated in its lonely outpost, its stock of ideas limited to those of its own members, the team begins to make up its own rules. These rules are terribly insidious because they foster in the team and its management the mistaken belief that its operations are running smoothly.