The nuclear disaster at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station in 1986 was a reflection of the leadership culture of the Soviet Union. Nuclear reactors are complex and potentially dangerous machines that demand smart, collaborative work from many people to operate safely. As with any endeavor by many people, its success or failure is dependent on successful leadership and the culture leadership creates. After reading Serhii Plokhy's recent book Chernobyl I was struck by how poor leadership contributed to the nuclear accident and the subsequent loss of life.
The Soviet organization was so complex it shielded everyone from responsibility
Although I knew the Soviet Union featured a centralized economy and single party rule, before I started this book I didn't realize how widely responsibly was diffused across the system. The Soviet government was a web of ministries. Control over the nuclear energy program was divided among several of them. The military, academic community, non-nuclear power generation engineers, and nuclear experts were all involved in the design, construction, and operation of the Chernobyl power station. Complicating the twisted web of interests, the leaders of the ministries were beholden to the leaders of the Communist Party, both at a regional and national level. The Party leaders had the final say on any issue.
As a key example, the directorate responsible for constructing the power station was independent of the directorate responsible for operating it. The construction group was expected to build the reactors as quickly as possible. Quality was not a consideration, so the reactors were hastily assembled and declared finished so the construction directorate could meet its deadline. The poor construction inevitably led to the station's operators struggling to meet their performance metric for power output. Had one entity been responsible for both construction and operation of the plant, the incentives of construction and operations teams would have been aligned.
It's a challenge to keep up with all of the decision makers and power brokers in the Chernobyl story. The organizational complexity made it difficult for any one person to take decisive action during the design, construction, or operation of the power station. The inability of individuals to make changes they recognized as necessary was a key enabler that led to the accident.
Managers were focused on quantitative performance measures with no subordinate input and relied on fear to achieve them
The Soviet system of management relied on quantitative targets arbitrarily determined by senior leaders. Chernobyl nuclear power station had an annual electrical production goal. In order to satisfy the ambitions of senior leaders, all hoping to impress their even more senior government or Communist party bosses, the targets increased every year. Without adding any actual additional capacity to the station. By 1986, Chernobyl's manager could only meet his electrical production target if he didn't take the reactors offline for periodic regular maintenance. Delaying maintenance on a nuclear reactor in the name of meeting a distant boss' quantitative performance target is clearly a terrible idea.
Even scarier than the numerical target was the punishment for not meeting it. Mid-level managers knew that if they didn't meet their superiors' goals, they could be shamed in the government-controlled local media, transferred to an undesirable job somewhere far away, thrown out of the Communist party, jailed, or worse. Fear was the primary leadership tool.
In the long run, fear is never a successful leadership strategy. People who endure a threat of personal harm do not make decisions based on what is best for the organization, they make decisions only to protect themselves. The organization will clearly suffer as a result. Leaders who rely on fear may feel they are succeeding in the short term, but eventually they will find their organizations surpassed by others led more humanely.
The complex organization enabled superiors to easily shirk responsibility
The Soviet government prosecuted three engineers in the aftermath of the accident: the manager of the power station and two of the leaders on duty on the night of the accident. Unsurprisingly, Mr. Plokhy's book shows clearly that although mistakes were made in the control room on the night of the accident, the underlying causes of the accident were decisions made years before by detached senior leaders. The ministers of the Soviet energy program selected a reactor design less safe than those used in western nations. The Chernobyl station was constructed in a populated area not far from the large city of Kiev. The control rods, the component most important to calming an out of control reactor, were designed in a way that increased nuclear output for the first seconds they were deployed. None of the individuals prosecuted had made any of those decisions. The people who had, largely still in positions of responsibility in 1986, were not held accountable.
Even in the dark leadership environment, emergent leaders shined
As in many stories of disaster or tragedy, there were leadership bright spots. I noted two examples, one a senior leader who tried to do the right thing after the accident, and another an emergent leader who rose up to inspire the self-reflection the Soviet government needed.
The first of these was Valery Legasov. Legasov was assigned to lead the Soviet government commission to investigate the accident. He traveled to Chernobyl, exposing himself to radiation, in order to conduct a proper investigation of the accident. He was able to identify the strategic failures that led to the accident, painting a far more accurate picture than the Communist party's preferred story that mistakes by the engineers on duty were the only cause of the accident.
He displayed even greater courage when he presented his findings to the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, Austria, several months after the accident. Soviet leadership intended to use the conference as a public affairs tool, sharing minimal information yet claiming the political benefit of openness. Legasov instead shared a complete and detailed report of the causes of the accident. He was cheered by the international community and disparaged by the Soviet leadership. He was removed from his senior position at the Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy, the leading academic home for the Soviet nuclear program. Sadly, he would commit suicide two years after the accident.
The emergent leader was Alla Yaroshynskaya. She was a journalist in Ukraine with the courage to speak truth to Soviet power. Like Legasov, she put herself in physical danger by traveling to Chernobyl to investigate after the accident. She spent weeks traveling throughout the surrounding villages, documenting the harm still being done to the people that lived there. She fought the Soviet media system to write about what she saw and inspired other people to demand more information from the government.
In the years after the accident, Gorbachev introduced mild democratic reforms in an attempt to kickstart the Soviet economy, including an elected body of representatives from around the Soviet Union. Already a leader in Ukraine, Yaroshynskaya was elected to the Congress of People's Deputies on a platform of improved transparency about the Chernobyl accident and its long-term health impacts. Despite multiple attempts on her life, she continued to push the boundaries of Soviet media, publishing stories and making secret documents public in order to inspire others to demand ethical action from the government. Her courage inspired the people of Ukraine and Belarus, also greatly impacted by radiation, to begin to resist the Soviet system. There were certainly many reasons for the collapse of the Soviet Union, but it is fair to say that All Yaroshynskaya's emergent leadership following the Chernobyl accident was one factor.
We shouldn’t think it couldn’t happen to us
The greatest danger for leaders examining the Chernobyl disaster is to explain it away as a result of a terribly flawed Soviet system. How could something this bad happen outside a centrally planned, single-party system?
The truth is that the flaws of Soviet leadership, primarily diffuse responsibility, blind adherence to quantitative performance measures, and management by fear, can happen in any organization. Smart leaders will be mindful of the organizational culture they create and strive to avoid any of the Soviet pitfalls.