Why do organizational transformations fail?
Watchers of Ontario’s energy debates were treated over the past weekend to yet another helping of recycled misinformation on the relative merits of various “competing” non-emitting energy sources. Those are predominantly wind, solar, and nuclear. The misinformation comes from supporters of wind and solar, who claim, falsely, that these sources’ “prices” are falling, and that nuclear costs too much.
To people working in Ontario energy, these are familiar refrains. They are such obvious nonsense, and have been so often debunked that those who know might wonder at why so many in the “elite” either fall for it or truck in it.
And the answer to THAT question is, because they are factoids—falsehoods that have been repeated so often and so widely that casual listeners assume they are true. And when we say “repeated so often” we are talking about years and decades.
The repetition-of-factoids is standard operating procedure for those who truck in falsehoods, whether the falsehoods have to do with energy or other issues, for example political ideology. The key is simple repetition. This causes major problems with people who know the factoid is not just a falsehood but an obvious one; they wonder how so many others could possibly fall for it. But fall for it they do, and we must ask why.
(Not) unique, unclear nuclear
Leadership guru John Kotter once chided corporate executives who had presided over failed organizational transformation initiatives for “undercommunicating their vision by a factor of ten.” The executive team typically articulated the transformation vision, announced it to the firm, then sat back and waited for the transformation to happen. When it embarrassingly failed to materialize they wasted millions on consultant post-mortems that found everything except the reason why it had failed.
The reason was almost comically simple. They had assumed that having said it once, their brilliant vision was now uppermost in everybody’s mind. In reality it had gone into one ear and out the other, and not because their employees were flaky scatterbrains but because like everybody else they have other things to do than drop everything when the boss announces the latest management fad.
The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place — George Bernard Shaw
The tendency to undercommunicate is not restricted to CEOs and presidents of Fortune 500 companies. Everybody is guilty of it. Including those of us in the nuclear industry. In advocating for nuclear, we assume that because our advocacy case is so strong we just need to put the case and everyone will get it. In spite of literally a half century of putting the stronger case, we find ourselves unmentioned, unheralded, unappreciated and unknown. Who hasn’t noted the consternation with which simple statements such as “half Ontario’s electricity right now comes from nuclear plants” are received when we state this fact to members of the general public? It’s been a fact for more than half a century, yet nobody knows it. And that’s because we are too worried about repeating ourselves and boring our listeners or talking down to them.
We, the nuclear industry, are not unique in this respect. We say our brilliant and completely truthful thing, then, out of respect for our audience and out of a sense of humility and propriety we gracefully withdraw from the conversation and wait for the new build contracts. We don’t get out and repeat what we just said because frankly we’re already tired of hearing it ourselves, and we assume our audience is just as tired.
And John Kotter, and common sense, tell us this communication MO, or lack thereof, is why we are not getting anywhere.
Burgers and bullschtein
Let’s say you’re a burger chain that makes what you humbly believe is the best mass produced burger on the planet. So you say “this is the best burger on the planet.” What then? Do you book daily rides to the bank to talk about where to put all your money from burger sales? No. You repeat “this is the best burger on the planet” or some version thereof, and you repeat it, till you’re tired of hearing it. Then you hire an ad agency, get their copywriters to come up with fifty further versions of “this is the best burger on the planet,” and pay them to place ads to that effect in every medium on the planet: TV, radio, print, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Youtube, Tiktok. You pay to run the ads multiple times per day, on all those platforms. You tell the ad agency, come up with a new campaign to repeat yet another version of “this is the best burger on the planet” let’s say every 6 months, and to run the ads multiple times PER DAY on the aforementioned media and social media.
When the competition decides to go head to head with you in the burger ad wars, you up your game. You attrit them. You outspend, out-ad them. You drop your prices and make up for lower unit margins with volume sales. You do this to every competitor who dares to take you on. You wear them down with continuous advertising, till they close outlets and either retrench into niche markets you couldn’t be bothered with, or just plain go out of business.
As you probably know, that’s the MO of the biggest burger chain on the planet. The kicker is, their burgers are actually pretty average. And no, they’re not explicitly saying “this is the best burger on the planet”; they’re just flooding the airwaves and cyberspace with ads for their burgers so that when you think burger you think of them.
The nuclear argument is a bit different. Nuclear is the best power generation technology ever invented. There’s simply no question about that, statistically, objectively. That there is a subjective question, well that tracks back to John Kotter. Nukes let their technology speak for them. Their wind/solar competitors peddle false and misleading myths. Their pet technology is laughably incapable of powering a lemonade stand, let along the grid. But they don’t make the mistake of letting off the pedal because everybody’s already heard it.
That’s why today we hear that the Ontario government will seek a further 2,000 MW of wind generation capacity. Common sense and data say unequivocally that this is a bad investment. With electrification Ontario will need power generation capacity, yes, but that capacity must deliver on demand. The plot below shows five days of mid-August output from the 5,000 MW Ontario wind fleet, and from Pickering unit 8 which is rated at 515 MW.
And the plot shows it would be foolish beyond belief to count on wind doing anything but what it does on the plot—fail to correlate with demand, let alone deliver the energy Ontario needs to compete with other North American jurisdictions.
The firehose of fiction: what happens when there’s no firehose of fact
But the wind lobby has been advertising, falsely, for many many decades. We nukes upped our game communication-wise only very recently. So yes, Ontario gets half its power from three physically tiny nuclear plants. Yes, a single Pickering reactor outperformed the entire Ontario wind fleet for most of last week, including three working weekdays. And most people are simply blissfully unaware of these facts. They’ve been prepped by decades of McDonalds-esque advertising to think “wind!” when the issue of clean energy comes up.
We’ve undercommunicated, by at least a factor of ten, how good our tech is. For this reason, purveyors of technology that are quite literally not even competitors have branded their inferior technology like McDonalds has branded its burgers.
The antidote to under-communication is over-communication. And as McDonalds has proven, there’s no such thing as over-communication.