What Business Leaders Can Learn From CERN's Collaborative Management Model
As a business leader, imagine trying to manage more than 7000 scientists from 85 countries around the world - with their own languages, cultures, and expertise - on a 20-year collaboration to create the most complex system ever built.
Now imagine the goal is to recreate the conditions a billionth of a second after the Big Bang. And none of the experts on your team will get personal credit for changing our fundamental understanding of the universe. And oh, by the way, you don't have control of anyone's paycheck.
It might seem like an impossible management situation. But that is exactly what is going on at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland.
The LHC has garnered some attention to date: an explosion last September delayed the experiments for a year, myths of black holes still plague the program, and the just-released movie Angels and Demons features a fictitious "anti-matter bomb" from CERN. But these issues distract us from the real story.
Beyond the atom-smashing, business leaders have special reason to examine what is going on in Geneva. CERN's remarkable leadership and culture is what makes their extraordinary advancements possible. And most importantly, we all can apply these same lessons to stimulate innovation in our own organizations, no matter how big or how small.
The Power of Collective Ownership
I visited CERN twice last year, and it is a wonder to behold: a 27-km long circular tunnel and four enormous detectors, buried 100 meters underground. One of the four experiments, called ATLAS, weighs as much as the Eiffel Tower, has about 20 million components, uses 3000km of cables and 1000km of piping, and requires some 5 million lines of computing code to run.
You might assume a project this massive requires top-down, authoritative leadership.
But, there are no directors. No CEOs or presidents. No corner offices. (In fact, the main building is cylindrical, with every office the same size.) Symbolically, the leader of each experiment is called the "spokesperson," and a "resource coordinator" tracks the allocation of money and people.
LHC leaders create the framework for people to share and contribute. Gathering spaces throughout CERN serve as giant "water coolers" for ideas to be shared. Different perspectives are valued, and decisions are made with input from everyone. How does this happen? With week-long summits, held three to four times a year; thousands of lesser meetings, which are optional and open to the collaborators; and an online system that allows participants to browse agendas and watch presentations remotely.
To a fast-paced corporate executive, this may sound like overkill, but the investment up front eliminates costly issues that can surface later. Everyone feels ownership and commitment from the beginning.
Trust
The entire community at CERN operates with a profound sense of trust that comes from a mutual "code of ethics." Everyone is expected to work hard and share.
Because their community is close-knit and their most valuable currency is reputation, experimental physicists around the world know who contributes. Conversely, the few who have been too proprietary with their ideas have been ostracized. It's like a crowd-sourced performance review.
Notably, CERN promotes the "open access" movement in scientific publishing; anyone can access the results, which are posted to the CERN library site.
Experimentation
People don't fail, experiments do. At CERN, failure is a valuable learning opportunity, not a cause to point fingers. Remarkably, after an explosion last September delayed experiments for a year, no one was fired.
It may seem that on a project of such great scale, there is no room for taking risks. But in truth, the project evolves through a natural process of experimentation and peer review.
For example, the ATLAS experiment and its counterpart, CMS, both needed to make a very fundamental design choice in the early 1990's: what technology to use for the magnets. But they did not make a decision, start building it, and hope for the best fifteen years later. Failure at that level would definitely be disastrous. Instead, each experiment provided budget for two or three teams to prototype different technologies in parallel. After numerous iterations, CMS and ATLAS made their final and very different bets based on years of designing, building, testing - and, yes, sometimes failing.
Although corporate executives do not always have the luxury to undertake multiple major developments in parallel, leaders can encourage a culture of small experiments and risk-taking early in the development process. Ultimately, this up-front investment begets a better end product - and much less risk of a bigger failure later.
Shared Vision
The scientists at CERN are unrelentingly dedicated to a singular goal.
But surprisingly, because so many have contributed, it would be very difficult for anyone on the team to win the Nobel Prize. Regardless, thousands of experts manage to keep their egos in check and collaborate. They can do so because they share a common yardstick for all decisions: what is the best for the physics?
In business, this means having an ambitious yet attainable vision for the organization that is embraced the grassroots and embodied by the leadership.
Of course, egos at CERN do clash. And there is spirited competition between ATLAS and CMS to be the first to discover the "Higgs particle." But the leaders cleverly avoid wasting energy on trying to control everything; they instead focus on nurturing the right environment for innovation.
As I toured CERN, I was struck by the scale and complexity of their undertaking. But I was also struck by how simple, yet revolutionary, their approach to innovation seems.
Simple enough that we could all try it.
Thank you to Markus Nordberg, Robert Cousins, and George Brandenburg, who contributed to this column. This article first ran on Businessweek.com.
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I always knew that physicists are commies!
Well... the laws of nature are exactly the same for everyone, everywhere, at all times... so that kind of insight moves you to the left... intellectually...
:-)
In my view there are two models operating in business. Occasionally we will see evidence of a third model, often unrecognized as distinct by observers because they can only "see" through one or other of the prevailing models.
The most dominant model is hierarchical command and control with clear lines of authority, and rules and procedures to "regulate" behavior. Most C-Suite execs and their managers are steeped in this model. I'd say 75+% of org operate in this model
Occasionally a phenomenon like CERN pops up. It really operates as a complex, adaptive, intelligent, human, social system functioning in an aligned coordinated fashion for a common purpose. Pretty much like a swarm of bees establishing a new hive - a few simple rules keeps the "system" functioning optimally. This operating model is rare.
The second most dominant model, though a distant second to command and control, is an organization operationally biased toward the "CERN model" with a few Carlo Rubbia's in key roles nugging the system (forgive the pun nugger). Onlookers mostly only see the "contolling Carlo" and miss the underlying org design which is to minimize control and optimize the conditions for the emergence of free expression, collaboration and creativity which is (in my view) foundational for real innovation.
In my personal experience there is absolutely nothing about CERN that makes it a great place to work for or at. But there is also no choice.
As for innovation... CERN has innovated very little besides some really nice ideas like the WWW. I should know... I did try to innovate at CERN and I had to learn a hard lesson: unless your boss is part of the in-crowd, your contribution is not going to be taken seriously. CERN is as political as any research lab I have ever seen. Nothing in there is about "free flow of ideas". Either you are sitting on the right commission and are one of the key decision makers... or you aren't.
As for quality of work... I have seen a lot better in US high energy physics laboratories. CERN had to be bailed out more than once by workgroups from the US which had to "nudge" some of the excesses of their system back to reality. But, sadly, over here we have cut ourselves off at the knee and we will not recover from it, despite an incredible talent pool that could far, far outdo anything that is being done at CERN... if they were given the chance.
Why would there be only two models in business? In my experience there are as many as there are people who conduct business. Probably more because not everybody, at all times, adheres to their own model.
Now, as for CERN... it's all but a "phenomenon". It's a political construct of a fledgling Europe and is designed along the lines of
"Gosh, if we can't stick a bunch of the smartest people on the planet in one room and make them work out their differences, how are we ever going to do it with 500 million Europeans?"
Well, they did. And that bunch of people is still in that room. They still hate to work with each other on a daily basis, they still scheme and play Machiavellino whenever they can, but in the end it boils down to this: "You want to play high energy physicist? Well... my son, this is it. This is the only place in the accessible universe where you can!"
i read angels and demons...................
lol.
Some historical context is necessary here before jumping to unwarranted conclusions.
It's well known in the scientific world that CERN's consensus management approach (necessary given it's funding structure) has limited it's productivity over the years. For most of it's existence, CERN built better machines than the US, but came in second in pioneering discoveries. CERN's one shining moment (W,Z discovery) happened when a driven, authoritarian leader named Carlo Rubbia pushed past the "consensus".
There is a good chance that the LHC will repeat this pattern - it's a great machine in the long run, but the "paper clip and tape" machine at Fermilab will likely see the Higgs first. The LHC would then follow in the footsteps of another legendary CERN project - the Intersecting Storage Rings - as an engineering marvel and a scientific also-ran.
I would agree what you said about CERN, but I am not optimistic about the Higgs discovery. For one thing it's not even clear that the Higgs exists. For another, Fermilab had a decade of problems (that I know off) and is, at best, at the wrong side of the edge of the detection limit of the best case Higgs scenario as far as I know. I wouldn't give them too much credibility, even if they manage to coax out a signal from the noise. Without LHC the Higgs will be elusive, at best.
In addition, LHC can do so much more than discover the Higgs that in comparison the discovery of the non-physics that the Higgs represents won't do much for high energy physics, at all. One would probably not even have built LHC if the Higgs was the only serious discovery candidate.
What is worse, though, is that the US government has basically killed off the high energy physics community in this country when it stopped SSC. One could almost argue that it had killed the field when it approved funding for it... but that's another discussion.
I agree... LHC is not the right machine. SSC would have been. But the mismanagement and the stop and go funding of Congress have set an end to American science superiority. And that is just sad.
I used to work at CERN and unless it has changed completely over the past decade and a half it's a very slowly acting, highly buerocratic place that has a single purpose (which is exactly what it needs to be!). Just what you need to build an accelerator for physics... however, I would never want to adopt the kinds of strategies used over there successfully to explore the laws of nature in business where speed and nimble adaptation to market changes count most. It's a totally different environment and one should not conflate one success strategy for one class of problem with that for another.
I agree. One should admit that business has a long way to go until they know what they are doing.
How about making a start?
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