Forest Service 'Transformation': Engaging Employees

US Forest Service Chief Gail Kimbell recently sent a letter to Forest Service leaders, daylighting a report [PDF, "discussion draft", 46 pp] from Dialogos International on FS culture, transformation efforts, safety and more.

The report and accompanying studies show how all improvement efforts are grounded in and guided by organization culture and culture improvement. The studies were begun with an eye toward safety, but it soon became clear that safety could only be dealt with as part of a much broader organzaional transformation.

Noteworthy, the report highlights what I'll call 'Forest Service cultural impediments' that limit success in the short- and longer-run. The report, a "discussion draft", argues, among other things, that these "impediments" are "critical 'high leverage' points that must be addressed and transformed." They include:

• Ceding Power — "[T]o the regions …[resulting in a] lack of a clear, central focus …"
• Mission Confusion — "… [C]ompeting stories about the right and central focus of the Agency"
• Family "Collusion" — "… [P]eople tend to use ["FS family"] as a defense, attributing that others do not understand as we do, and seeking to fend off positions of external stakeholders. …"
• Lack of Straight Talk — "… People often seem to be unwilling to speak out and name difficulties that they see, and attribute that to do so is to run serious risks. …"
• Capability Trap — "… [A] phenomenon where people are working increasing hard but where overall capability … is not improving and can in fact be deteriorating. …"
• Impaired Learning — "… Errors are not generally embraced as opportunities for improvement, particularly now, in a climate where people fear that the admission of error may lead [to retribution] …. Many suggested that the Agency has been poor at reflection on itself, and learning from reflection. … [A] proliferation of rules and requirements … tend[s] to have the effect of creating compliance, but not internally motivated commitment to change and learn."
• Physics of Accidents — "… Changing environmental settings … and budget pressures result in more demanding conditions that need to be faced with the same or fewer resources…. More intense circumstances, fewer people covering greater distances, simply icrease risks and chances for error.
• Initiative Proliferation — "… [Tending] toward a fragmentation of focus.

Here is Kimbell's letter, with highlights (in red) to denote the FS Chief's emphasis on employee engagement in "Transformation":

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Date: June 15, 2007
Subject: Safety Culture Report and Broader Implications
To: Regional Foresters, Station Directors, Area Director, IITF Director, Deputy Chiefs and WO Chief Staff Directors

Last year Chief Bosworth charged our national safety council with examining the ingrained habits, expectations, and "ways of doing business, or culture" that contribute to death and injury, despite visible commitment to the safety and health of Forest Service employees. Enclosed is a summary of the report called "Safety Culture for the 21st Century" that the consultant Dialogos International prepared in response to Chief Bosworth's charge. The report describes our safety challenges in terms of a much broader set of issues and dynamics.

After interviewing over 400 Forest Service employees at every level of the organization and analyzing what they learned, Dialogos determined that our safety record is not just about safety – it is about literally everything we do, and how we do it.

Our safety record and our operational challenges are embedded in how we:

• Contribute to mission confusion by not making hard strategic choices;
• Avoid or discourage straight talk, including reporting near misses;
• Divert energy from mission work, overtaxing people and diminishing our capacity;
• Skip time to detect, learn from, and act on our errors;
• Lose energy to a proliferation of piecemeal initiatives that come and go;
• Support a normalized attitude that it is okay to deviate from safety protocols.

This is not easy for most of us to hear. However, it is critical in this time when we are transforming and realigning our national and regional organizations. We need to ensure that we as core leaders are better aligned; provide more mission clarity; ensure better community and working relationships; and integrate our work and capabilities across boundaries. To ensure our success, we must continue to engage our employees in identifying things that drain energy away from our mission, and integrating what we learn in a single, unified effort to work well, safely, and consistently for the long run.

Our agency fatality rate (six or seven people a year "do not go home") is triple that of the National Park Service and more than four times that of the Bureau of Land Management. Clearly, it is not just that we are a natural resource agency in an intrinsically dangerous line of work.

Perhaps most painfully, our can-do mindset is diluting our effectiveness, overtaxing our workforce and resources, and contributing directly to fatalities and injuries. Every time we say "that rule does not apply to me," we are exacerbating operational challenges that put our coworkers and the Forest Service itself at risk. As Einstein once noted, "insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results." Our culture creates the results we get; we cannot expect different results until we do the hard work to change it. The good news is that we now know we can turn this around.

I thank the hundreds of people who participated in the Safety Culture for the 21st Century project and contributed to the Dialogos report. No change effort, however important, has ever survived without deep commitment from the people charged with doing the work.

I ask you as senior leaders in the Forest Service to:

• Distribute this letter and enclosed summary of the report for further discussion;
• hold and promote regional change dialogues, and report results to me;

Stay tuned. We are in this together.

/s/ Abigail R. Kimbell
ABIGAIL R. KIMBELL
Chief

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On the heels of Chief Kimbell's letter, and the Dialogos "study", comes an 6/29/2007 email from a member of the Transformation Team (subject: UPDATE: WO/RO/Area Transformation; to: [distribution list] "wo change champion roster") saying, in essence that, henceforth, employee engagement will be strictly limited due to time constraints and managerial commitments:

… Employee Involvement: Early in this Transformation effort, I (and the Transformation Team) had high expectations for how employees would/could be involved in a very transparent collaborative process for this effort. Given the timing of and re-definition of the WO/RO/Area Transformation task, the direction from leadership, and the extremely short timeframes assigned to this effort, it is not going to be feasible to engage employees in the early design to the extent I/we had originally envisioned. There will still be opportunities, albeit limited. As a result, it may look and feel like a top-down effort. For this, I am sorry. It does not reflect my personal desires or values. However, it is the nature of the task the Transformation Team has been handed. We'll do the best we can with the time we have. Please call me if you'd like to discuss this further. …

Let's hope that the Transformation Team "Update" is simply a missstep, and that Chief Kimbell's stated desires prevail. Let's keep pitching for deployment of both blogs and wikis to engage Forest Service employees and others in much-need "Transformation" dialogue. We will "stay tuned".

Note: 6/19/2007 I gleaned the Chief's letter from:
"They Said It," Archives, June 2007, June 19: "Safety Culture Report'
Home of the Wildland Firefighter

Comments

[Wolfy]

Smoke and Mirrors: Chief Kimbell is as full of crap as any politician. The aim of all this transformation or downsizing process is to get rid of enough people to fit in the new, smaller offices in the regional service centers. There is nothing wrong with our agency; the accident rate for our employees is well below many similar sized corporations. We do a lot of hard work and Kimbell knows it. She just has her marching orders from Rey and Bush to strip the service down and contract out two thirds of the work. She has also reintroduced the weakened NEPA guidelines. Bosworth is a company man, but he started to push back on the administration, so they got rid of him. In comes Abigail; she proved her loyalty to the administration by getting rid of the trouble makers (whistle blowers) in her old job on the Bighorn National Forest. She just the kind of person the administration needs to accomplish its goal: gut the forest service. Lord help us.

[Christopher]

Its been twenty six years since Zane Smith and Max Peterson detonated the Bernardi Consent Decree time bomb, demanding that 43% of the workforce in Region 5 be female. Contrary to popular thought, court records reveal Judge Samuel Conti never requested, nor certified what was essentially a Forest Service order.(It was never a court order.)

By 1993 the 43% quota had spread to every other region, making the Forest Service the most matronly agency in the nation. Please see Dale Robertson's "Blue Book."

This was despite the fact FS was acting in direct violation of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, several sections of the 1991 Civil Rights Act, as well as multiple sections of the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978.

Nothing has changed since the 1980s; thus small wonder Dan Berman reports that Forest Service employees are confused about the future direction of their agency. The 400 employees interviewed by “Dialogos (who charged the Service $987,000 for uncovering the same problems agency mavens knew existed for a quarter of a century--money much better spent on the ground) reported “The agency is experiencing confusion and drift in its central identity and direction and ambiguity in the way it allocates power and responsibility.”

Was there anything in that statement at variance with the terrible events that the agency has inflicted on itself over the past twenty five years?

Dialogos states that fire related costs are now accounting for nearly half the Forest Service annual budget. Agency workers “described fire fighting as a burden and said it is unfair the Forest Service has to fight fires for other federal and state agencies.”

Well, to the lace curtain post-moderns, firefighting is more than a “burden”; in fact it is down right dangerous. Which is why special people who meet the rugged physical and psychological standards prerequisite to fighting fires are so badly needed. They may get thirsty, hungry, tired, exhausted, injured, and at times frightened, but they never think of firefighting as a “burden.”

Another of Dialogos’s findings suggests the inquisitions if not the purges of the 1980s and 90s remain at full throttle. “Even if they know their mission, employees said the agency’s culture is not welcoming, as they fear ridicule or punishment for raising unpopular topics or questioning superiors. ‘Individuals that raise difficult issues can be accused of being negative and subsequently feel their input is not welcome. They may even be ejected from the system. Employees do not feel safe to speak up with such a climate, adding to the perception of suppression.’”

Questioning the guiding principle behind promoting large numbers of women into positions they knew nothing of always brought suppression to Forest Service employees. So did qestioning the promotion a women to fire management officer over a man with many more years experience. Questioning the long held, very expensive agency principle of “creating non essential urban office positions are far more important than filling on-the-ground positions in the forests" brought mountains of suppression.

(What Chief Kimball should now be doing is vacuuming the cash out of the Washington Office, and those urban caves known as regional offices, closing them down and hand carrying all [urban employees included] to the forests themselves.)

And Heavens, don’t question the near exclusion of men from forest personnel departments, or the efficacy of transferring minority employees from urban environments into the forests of Oregon, knowing full well they will not remain more than a month. All the while the F.S. literally gives local youths an elbow to the teeth. Remarking on any of the above has left many employees not only suppressed, but mashed.

I digress: at one point in her interview Gail Kimball called into question the Forest Service’s once vaunted “mindset of can-do,” that quality that fell so naturally into place under the stewardship of Pinchot, Graves, Silcox and McArdle. Said Kimball, “[the mindset of can do] is diluting our effectiveness, overtaxing our workforce, and contributing directly to casualties.”

The "can do mindset" she is referring to once led to the thinning of slash, thinning of timber stands, the clearing of fire lines, controlled burns, reforestation on a massive scale, and maintenance of back country trails. Today, when and if ever these jobs get done they are are contracted out, or undertaken by volunteers who indeed possess a “can-do mindset."

More than any Chief before, this mediocrity has an obsession with safety, which she is certain will reduce casualties and minimize the loss of timber and structures to fire. Dozens more initiatives are pouring out of her Washington Office that in no way relate to the quality of the skeleton staff on the ground.

There is also her mantra “enhance diversity workforce and visitors.” As if a score of fortunes had not already been thrown to the winds of diversity, while thousands upon thousands of invaluable male professionals of wrong skin color were told to hit the road.

The single amusing moment within the entire Dialogos Report was Kimball's use of Einstein’s famous quote: “Insanity is doing the same thing over again and expecting different results.” With every intention of following in the footsteps of her failed predecessors, there is good reason to doubt Kimball's sanity.
Sincerely Chris Burchfield