Transforming Nuclear Construction using Active Agile Leadership

What has the effect been in companies who have used Active Agile Leadership Skills?

Intervjusing Head of Electrical Quality Management at Forsmark, Martin Larsson, about his experiences from Active Agile Leadership Skills and how they’ve put the program to use.

“It’s more than process, it’s a shift in mindset.”

– Martin Larsson

Tell us a little about yourself and your role?

Sure. At the time of the program, I held a managerial position in Nuclear construction at Forsmark, in “Electrical quality management”.

What is the challenge for leadership in nuclear construction?

I would say “courage to try something new”. The way we run things in nuclear development is by nature careful and conservative, for a good reason. But it carries a flip side, improving things becomes hard, even when you know it’s the right thing to do.

To constructively challenge, to improve what should, and to enable small experiments are the key tasks for leadership. It’s more than process, it’s a shift in mindset.

What is required from a leader to make this happen?

If I were to put it in one word, it would be “trust”. Think of it this way, there is a time for analysis, “is this the right thing to do? Will this advance our capabilities?”, and there is a time for doing and trying new things. For the latter, you need trust. You need to trust the transformation process, and you need to trust the people.

If your starting point is one of doubt, “oh but what it if goes sideways”? or “people are going to misuse the confidence handed to them?”, you won’t get any progress. If you think this way as a leader, you are reaching for control, not improvement. You are signaling that it’s safer to stay in the status quo. People will pick up on this, no matter what words you use.

If your purpose is to generate initiative, trust is required. You are basically asking people to try new things, get off the beaten path, and to take risks. That requires trust. Enabling an atmosphere of trust in the process in your people is a key task for a leader.

What do you do as a leader to prepare people for change by creating an atmosphere of trust?

I try to do four things:

  • Add training. Show how the new way of working is intended to work, help your people wrap their heads around it, and add skills so that our people can step into key roles.
  • Clarify boundaries or rules of engagement. For a team, share what is expected of them and what is not, which decisions are expected from which roles. Share also what they can expect from you.
  • Give trust. You take the ball and run with it.
  • Support, instead of control. Use questions like “what do you need to improve?”

How did you practically run the Active Agile Leadership program inside your organization?

We were a team of nine people, we had one session roughly every fortnight. Between sessions, we practiced and shared our insights. In our group, most members were line managers.

One thing we learned from our group is that we should have thought more carefully about the potential improvements ahead of us and structured a participant group a bit based on this. For example, including a few other roles who are expected to lead but who weren’t line managers.

The organization is running its second AAL program now using those insights from our first.

What are your three most important insights from the program?

The first and maybe the most important insight was that it wasn’t necessary that we started off by changing our construction process. There was so much we could improve by shifting how we operated. We could update our way of working and reap benefits from this, improving engagement and speed by working smarter. Some examples of this are reducing handovers, shifting patterns of communication (from documents to face-to-face communication in real time), co-location, to name a few.

The second insight was the importance of clarity in roles. And when launching them, ensure people who take them on have updated skills plus clarity in expectation before taking them on board.

The third insight was that the actual transformation we made turned out to be not as challenging as we had initially thought. Sure, there were both skepticism and question marks in the organization initially. But when people started to get firsthand experience from the new ways of working and experienced the positive sides, this impacted the attitude.

The fact that we did the transformation as a series of small experiments, used a pilot, learned from it, and then expanded, instead of doing it as a “big bang” really helped. Making transformation using a series of small experiments was a valuable insight from the program.

The fact that we did the transformation as a series of small experiments, used a pilot, learned from it, and then expanded, instead of doing it as a “big bang” really helped. Making transformation using a series of small experiments was a valuable insight from the program.

– Martin Larsson

How have your group of leaders put the skills to use? What has been the effect on the organization?

Armed with the skills, we basically transformed our way of working inside construction. We formed a team-based organization, which could take on more complex tasks. Our teams had cross-functional skills, one of them actually extends outside our own functional area.

We began by creating one pilot team. Then expanded it to two. Today, we have eight construction teams operating and we are looking to expanding this further.

We also co-located our teams, shifting the placement in our buildings to make it easier for these teams to communicate and operate.

It may sound simple and logical, but the hard part is going from idea to reality, creating engagement in the transformation.

So what were the keys to creating engagement in the transformation?

A few things come to mind.

One key was to run small pilot teams early. That enabled us to use the experience to improve both how we bootstrapped new teams and the environmental conditions we as leaders needed to put in place for them to have the ability to operate successfully.

A second key was to think through where you start. In essence, members of your pilot teams are going to be mentors for your up and coming teams. If you start in an area that’s too easy, the learnings from your pilot teams can be shrugged off as “of course it worked for them because their task was different”. On the other hand, if you pick the hardest possible challenge, you might run out of time before any positive experience emerges. We invested time in thinking through which areas we would start in, and I think that was a good thing.

The third key was that we as leaders worked hard in creating the environment for these teams. For example, preparing rooms which could hold Kanban boards, in co-locating teams, in gathering together simple things such as chairs with wheels that could be moved around. These are small things that really make a difference when you add them up.

To give you some context, our company carries legacy, so even simple things such as putting up a tv on a wall for digital meetings could easily have got us stuck. You could get stuck in processes outside your scope of control. In some cases, we brought our own screw drivers to get the job done. To build the environment, we had to problem-solve seemingly simple tasks. And there are constraints given by our facilities that simply cannot be worked around, we are far from perfect yet.

But, we have impacted the environment where the teams work. It showed more than anything that we, as leaders, meant what we said. We were taking this shift seriously. We were in this boat together, committing to make it work. And I think that effort did get noticed.

What results have you been able to observe from the transformation?

First, engagement. Engagement improved across the board.

Second, speed. We can see that we are faster, teams are able to complete more requests per time unit. And they take on one more complex task at the same time.

Third, we can see examples that members help each other out across the area of expertise. We are step by step becoming more cross-functional. This improves our resilience, we can today better handle variation in workload, plus it also improves the teams’ sense of pride – they can take responsibility for and complete more complex tasks.

What advice would you give a leadership team considering taking on a transformation?

First, figure out how you can improve with what you have. You can do much more than you think.

Finally, it’s easy to perceive a transformation as more difficult than it really is. The key is not to wait for the perfect moment, rather, know your direction, then get started.