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The author was hired by the US
Department of Energy (DOE) in 1987 after accepting the position
offered him as a result of
the
calling.
From the
professional path perspective and from the perspective of the
outside world,. he was hired based on his diverse background and
organization insights as part of the DOE response to the National
Academy of Sciences (NAS) report on its nuclear facilities. This
report concluded the Department was not technically competent to
oversee its contractors. He was hired specifically by the Deputy
Assistant Secretary for Safety to address the management structure
and organizational issues of DOE and its Contractors which under
lied the finding of the National Academy of Science Report. The goal
was to (1) improve technical performance of both the DOE and its
contractors and (2) improve the DOE ability to oversee its
contractors.
From the
mystical path perspective, he was hired to undergo an education
to protect “the children,” in response to the calling he had which
asked, “Who will protect my children?” Yet, the calling was only
course correction to the direction of his life. The course
correction was necessary to get the author into certain the types
and kinds of experiences. These experiences were required by the
author for him to be able to understand and communicate what lies
within each individual and
symbolized by the heart. It is what lies symbolized in the heart
that provides the understanding as to how we create the experiences
we have and the reality of those experiences. To obtain those
experiences and address the concern of the NAS, over a period of the
next ten years the author found himself changing career positions in
DOE to address specific weak links in the organization structure.
Each change addressing a deeper aspect of the issue of technical
competency and moving deeper and deeper into the world of creativity
and how we create the experiences we have.
From the author’s mental perspective and understanding he had at the
time, he was hired to protect workers and the public from the
hazards of nuclear radiation associated with the operation of the
Department of Energy’s nuclear facilities. It was as simple as that.
The logic was that fixing what the National Academy of Sciences
revealed about how the Department of Energy managed its nuclear
facilities would protect the children as he understood the children
to be. Having been called to the task by whom he thought and
understood to be God, he entered the effort with the zeal and fire of
an evangelist and courage of the most fiercest warrior. He was out
to conquer the potentially unsafe practices of the Department
wherever they lied. Of course, he did not share the fact he
understood he was on a mission from whom he understood to be God
with individuals in the Department. That would have been too much
for most to understand yet accept.
If it is not clear, an important note needs to be made. There are
two interpretations of “protecting the children.” There is the
interpretation given to that phrase by the author at the time he
heard the voice calling him based on what the author understood at
the time. He understood the children to be simply the workers and
members of the public who needed to be protected from the hazards
associated with the nuclear operations at the Department of Energy.
Here the word “children” was simply interpreted within the concept
that each and every human is a child of God such that we are all
children of God. That was the author’s interpretation of that phrase
from the time he heard the calling until he experienced the
Ultimate Accident seven years later.
The
Ultimate Accident changed his whole understanding of exactly who
and what the “children” were. The simple answer as to who and what
the children are which need to be protected is that they are our
creative spirit which lie in what is
symbolized by the heart. But it is not quite that simple. The
intention of the Releasing Your Unlimited Creativity understanding
has been an attempt to communicate who and what these children are.
The Releasing Your Unlimited Creativity Technology and its
applications is the parallel attempt to provide the understanding to
adequately protect these children. The discussion provided here
provides the essential evolution in the change in perspective as to
who and what the children are.
To understand the path he traveled for the next ten years in the
Department of Energy it is important to note the author did not see
himself as taking a new job. As a result of the calling he did not
take the position which was offered to him as a job. He did not see
himself as being expected just to perform based on his supervisor’s
desires or the position's description within the organization.
Rather, he took the position with the understanding that wherever he
was placed, it was only the starting position from which he would
work to fix the root issue of the National Academy of Sciences
report. Fortunately for the author, in many ways the author’s
perspective fully aligned with the desire of the Deputy Assistant
Secretary for Safety. Consequently, the two worked very well
together for quite some time.
The author was placed in a position within the existing safety
organization where he had direct access to the Deputy Assistant
Secretary. But organizationally, he did not work directly for him.
Even though the Deputy Assistant Secretary ran the safety
organization, the safety organization was part of the Department of
Energy. The Department as a whole was very rigid and bureaucratic in
it thinking. It can be said it was outright fossilized and frozen.
The safety organization needed to have a certain structure that
represented the desired department organizational flow and lines of
organizational responsibilities logical or illogical they may be.
Organizationally, the Department could not think outside the box
created by its own thinking created. It was organizationally
uncreative in the extreme. So, the effort had to start where the
organization would allow them to start.
The author was not allowed by the Department to be hired and placed
in a position that would have allowed the Deputy Assistant Secretary
to perform the desired safety function in a way that could readily
address the issues found in the National Academy of Sciences report.
If it was possible, the National Academy of Sciences report would
never have been written the way it was for the problems would not
exist as they did. The organizational structure did not permit a
direct report to the Deputy Assistance Secretary in the way that
needed to be done. So a position was found within the existing
organization for the author to function in a way that would allow
him to address the issues in the National Academy of Sciences
report. Fortunately for the author, he was taught by the
intervention of his High School teacher and subsequently his first
college chemistry professor
how to work creatively outside any system. In many unexpected
ways, he was well versed at ferreting out the root issue and fixing
it no matter what obstacles presented themselves.
This first issue faced in being hired was only the tip of the
iceberg and set the tone for much of the next four years. The
Department was not structured to think safety, or truly incorporate
safety into its thinking. This fact only revealed itself in time as
the string was pulled on the root issue. Two quirks of fate over
time caused the ability for the Department to become unable to manage
itself with a corporate safety mentality. One was laid when the
Department was first created. The second was laid when the Atomic
Energy Commission was separated into the US Nuclear Regulatory
Commission and the Department of Energy. Ultimately, the Department
could not save itself. In the end the Department would have to be
rescued from itself - which in many ways it was. Unfortunately, this
fact only revealed itself in time and the full implications not
really seen for what they were for years.
The story of the Department of Energy is a most interesting case
study for its lack of organizational creativity and how it evolved
to become organizationally uncreative. However that is not the focus
of this discussion. In essence, from a
creativity perspective, what the author came to find is that the
Department was given the equivalent of a
free will and never taught how to properly use it. Yet the story
of the Department only reflects on a collective scale the issue we
each face individually. This realization only came in time. The
author tried to capture that understanding in creating the concept
of
orchestrating the organization and his attempts to address the
root issue through
organizational creativity just before he left government to
write about the organizational creativity
lessons learned.
In following this story, it needs to be remembered there are two
parallel sets of events occurring. One set of events was to address
the National Academy of Sciences Report. This set of events is
reflected in the actions of the external world. The other set of
event was those reflected in the author’s experience to “protect the
children” and address the voice which called him to the Department.
Both stories parallel each other and use the same set of
circumstances. But the conclusions that are drawn from each are quite
different as are their solutions. The two stories track the same
events for a while and then the two stories split. When the split
occurs, the organizational issues and associated discussion are
picked up and addressed in the
Origins and occasion for creating Organizational Creativity. The
evolution and unfoldment of
the
calling and the “children” referenced in the calling will
continue in the discussion provided here.
As stated above, the author did not see working at the Department of
Energy as a job. Rather, he saw it more as a mission to “protect the
children” as he understood them to be. Yet, in reality, much of the
time at the Department of Energy was only to gain the experience to
understand what must be done to protect the children as he came to
understand who the children really were. Creating effective and
adequate action to “protect the children” required moving through
four organizational components. It wasn’t so much of what he was
able to accomplish in each position as much as it was an education
for the author to understand exactly how complicated the issue of
“protecting the children” was. Each organization move addressed a
different aspect of the root issue and what it would take to
“protect the children” as seen as protecting the children from
nuclear radiation. However, each organizational stop is a metaphor
for the deeper issue of “protecting the children” to which the
calling really referred.
The starting point and first organization stop to address the issues
of the National Academy of Sciences Report was the Office of Safety
Policy. This Office was responsible for developing the safety
requirements for the Department of Energy. Others were eventually
brought on board to fix the problem but it started with establishing
the correct policy. There were known design issues but the effort
had to start were it was found. The effort started with addressing
control of the hazards associated with the nuclear operations and
the mitigation of any incidents of accidents that could occur in
operations within the existing system. So the question on the table
was, “What should the safety policy be for the operations as they
currently exist?” The only way to answer the question was to realize
an effective and adequate safety policy could only be established by
an awareness of exactly what was happening in the field. One needed
to go and find out what people were ,or were not, doing. That is
what was done.
So began a series of field appraisals to identify what needed to be
fixed. The goal was to identify exactly what it was that caused the
National Academy of Science conclude the Depart of Energy did not
provide for adequate safety and that the Department was not
technically competent to oversee its contractors. By all existing
Department standards, qualified personnel and individuals with
adequate credentials were hired by DOE and its contractors. Yet an
aspect of technical competency was missing. To start, the best
operational nuclear safety practices that could be found were used as
the criteria and the Departments performance compared and assessed
in relation to them. Areas where the operations were found lacking
were identified as areas to be upgraded. Where there were no
criteria to assess the unique Department of Energy operations,
existing established criteria were used as guidelines to see how
effective the same kind of intent was met.
Once the issues in the field were identified, operational standards
and requirements, and training and qualification criteria could be
changed to correct deficiencies and either (1) individuals qualified
to implement those standards and requirements could be hired or (2)
the existing staff could be retrained to implement those new
standards and requirements. What was clearly understood was that it
would be necessary to educate the staff on the problem and how to
fix the problem. If they truly understood the problem in the first
place, the problem in question would never have existed. Changing
standards and requirements without providing the essential and
accompanying cultural change, which understood what needed to be done
would not provide adequate corrective action.
After finding the problem and correcting the standards, a cultural
change needed to occur. The necessary cultural change was best
accomplished through creating a new training organization and
developing the experiential training to go with the new
requirements. Next began a program to educate and indoctrinate the
existing Department technical staff at all levels on the new
standards and requirements. But the effort was not simply teaching
them the requirements. There was the need to change the culture and way of thinking that
went with the new requirements.
In addition to teaching the Field the new requirements, the Field was
taught to teach themselves. In this way they were ultimately able to
take ownership of the culture. Since culture is something that must
be lived and shared, it could not be imposed from the outside. All
that could be done was to live it with them. This was achieved
through a train the trainer program where the primary teachers came
from the operational groups - those who had to implement the
changes.
It is here this discussion between addressing the issues in the
National Academy of Sciences Report and “protecting the children”
begins to split. It is around this time frame the control of
addressing the issues was being taken away from the Department.
Additionally, with a changing world situation, the mission of the
Department was changing radically with the demise of the Russian
Empire. But as for the author, he continued on what he perceived as
his mission to address the safety issues from within the Department.
He received no “marching orders” so to speak to go and do something
else until seven years after this point in time.
After having taught the field to teach itself and the standards and
policy changes or either implement or being revised to implement,
the author felt it would me appropriate to become part of the line
organization. From within the line perspective, he could help
implement the necessary changes and to “lead the way.” The line is
that part of the organization that is responsible for getting the
job done and making things work as opposed to a staff function which
only supports doing the job. The line has the author to act and make
things happen. The safety organization, personnel organization,
legal organization, training organizations and the like advises the
line as to what they, as experts in an area or aspect, recommend.
However it is the individual in the line that makes the decision and
causes the consequences for the organization. Sometimes it is
appropriate to split the line into programmatic and functional
responsibilities but that depends on what one is attempting to
accomplish in an organization.
It was here, as a line manager, that the issue of individual
creativity surfaced as the arrow pointing to the root cause of what
drove the need for the National Academy of Science’s Report. As a
line manager, as the Acting Director of the Office of Research,
Development and Testing Facilities, the issue the author ultimately
came to face was how does one get individuals to freely play with
the situation they face to find those creative solutions that go to
the depth of the situation and address the root of the issue they
face. It was clear individuals seemed to lack the creative ability
to solve the problem they faced at the root level. What he began to
observe, that no matter how creative and/or intelligent individuals
claimed to be unless the issues lied in their particular area of
expertise, they usually tended to look to someone else to solve
their problem. Individuals seemed to be creatively blocked outside
their direct area of expertise.
The author began to wonder why individuals could not step out of
their current thinking to find alternatives that would work. He was
working with some of the best scientific and engineering minds in
the world. He initially could not understand how and why these often
brilliant minds were unable to be sufficiently creative to address
the problem as it existed at the root level. They were creative in
so many other ways. Why was their creativity blinded? He found that
he often had to resort to "management by embarrassment" before these
brilliant minds would step out of their limited thinking to see other
options.
Over the years, while watching people in the work place lose
enthusiasm for their work, the question kept coming back, “Why do so
many people loose their creativity and enthusiasm for life by the
time they reach middle age?” Where was that spontaneity of childhood
to explore. Young children, in general, seemed to have such a great
capacity for creativity and were so free to try new things. They
engage life with an enthusiasm that is so quickly lost. Where did
the willingness to approach life in that child-like enthusiasm go?
As a line manager he was faced with a very unusual situation. The
Directors of the three of the most prestigious government
laboratories in the United Stated went to the Department of Energy
Assistant Secretary for Defense Programs and said they could not do
everything on their plate with the money that was given. They said
they could not do all the safety upgrades and do the Weapons Program
for the Department of Energy. No speculation on their real motives
are made here but within a matter of hours, the author, as the
Acting Director of the Research, Development and Testing Facilities
was sitting in the office of the Deputy Assistant Secretary for
Defense Programs for Safety and told, “You and I are going to
Albuquerque and meet with the three laboratory directors. We are
going to fix this problem and it is your responsibility to make it
happen.”
The solution to the problem is another story and resulted in the
Laboratory Integration and Prioritization System that did have
the potential to adequately and effectively fix the problem. The
proof and the evidence were there. But something unexpected was
revealed in the process that no one wanted to directly face. This
issue is discussed in the discussion on “The
Essential Finding Within the Calling.” Fortunately or
unfortunately, external events took a sudden turn that removed the
Departments options. Quite simply the Laws of the Land began to
change and the Department was losing its ability to make its own
choices. This required significant internal organizational
restructuring to meet the new external demands. It is at this point
in time the opportunity began to consciously take a journey into
creativity.
The restructuring provided an opportunity arose for the author to
being to
actively look at organizational creativity. The situation
arranges itself such that the author found himself in a very unique
position to coaching the organization on implementing and
maintaining the safety fixes and grades. In moving from the Acting
Director, for the Research, Development and Testing Facilities to a
Senior Technical Advisor to the Director of a newly formed
engineering support office in response to the external changes, it
allowed him to explore what was known about organizational
creativity and accelerated learning techniques.
The new position also gave him more time in his private life. Given
his previous medical background, this free time became occupied by a
physician friend asking him to create a mind body foundation
implementing conventional and alternative medical techniques. For
several years the author was free to both explore organizational
creativity within the Department and health related creativity
outside the department. In essence the author become free to explore
what was known about creativity and how to become creative both
professionally and privately.
In this journey of exploring creativity, he listened to what the
experts said and read what they wrote it. However, there was a
synchronicity which occurred outside the workplace that allowed him
to look deeply into the creative desire of another and from where our
creativity actually arose. That experience was the key to
understanding creativity, the creative spirit, and the issues he
faced in the workplace. That experience also caused a new phase of
the journey into exploring creativity to occur.
As part of developing awareness of creativity there came a unique
bridge point where he was able to apply what was being learned
externally with the physician to what was being learned internally
with organizational creativity. Only available in hindsight, the
author was
unconsciously putting together the pieces of a critical mass.
The pieces were the pieces to create a critical mass of
enlightenment.
As discussed in ”A
Foolish Thing,” there came an opportunity which helped create
the occasion for the
Ultimate Accident. That then changed the whole picture as to
what the journey into creativity was all about. The author
metaphorically created a critical mass and exploded it. It provided
a brilliant flash of insight to light his life in a way he could
never imagine. It is in the creation of the Releasing Your Unlimited
Creativity Technology and the associated applications that the
pieces are reassembled from that critical moment. Yet they are
reassembled in a completely different way than as blown apart. It
was in that brilliant flash of insight what he knew and understood
about Creation and the
source/Source of our creative energy was shattered and he saw
what the children really are and how and why they needed to be
protected.
This journey through the organization began to reveal something
else. Although effective correction actions were implemented, the
traditional management methods were still lacking at resolving the
basic issues. Something was still missing. The solution was given to
those who needed it but the individuals could not seem to find the
solution themselves. Without the ability to find the solution and
modify them as the situation changes themselves, a long term
solution would not be sustainable. Another, or others, seemed to be
almost always needed to point out what was lacking. Quite simply,
the organization lacked the ability to create the ability it needed
to find a solution. It lack the ability to be organizationally
creative to be able to respond to the changing demands being placed
on it. What became clear was that National Academy of Science’s
Report was only a snapshot in time. Everyone assumed the snapshot
was accurate over time. So we fixed what the snapshot revealed in
the moment but we were not addressing what the snapshot revealed
over time and why there was a lack or organizational creativity
relative to the identified issues. The effort did not address the
reason why the snapshot existed as it did which lied inherent within
the organization.
It is interesting to note that one of the observations that made
corrective action so difficult was not because the problem was
insolvable or difficult. Rather the difficulty arose as a result of
the lack of an organizational
single point focus for the effort, a short term, “quick fix”
mentality and the continual changes in Department priorities as each
Secretary of Energy, or their primary appointees, changed. Few
realized the depth and breadth of the problem that existed and what
needed to be done. Few had the ability to remain focus and not be
distracted for as long as was necessary. Yet it was this experience
that helped give rise to the information discussed on this and
related web sites, and in particular and, surprisingly, “Meditation
Concepts and Principles for Creativity.” Creating cultural
change and effectively managing any change within an organization
whether it be for safety, quality, production or even profit
requires a focus of the organizations attention and awareness as
deep as meditation of an individual.
The Next Step .
The Conscious (Elective) Journey into Creativity
An Alternative step
The recovery of a creative spirit - a soul retrieval
Index of topics related to the origins of the Releasing Your Unlimited
Creativity Technology and applications
The pieces of the puzzle
Origins and Occasions
for the Releasing Your Unlimited Creativity Technology and it
applications
Index of origins and occasion topics
Related topics
The Password
Protected Area provides access to all
currently posted
(click for current loading) Releasing Your Unlimited Creativity
related discussion files and applications.
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