Nut Island Effects

The Nut Island effect describes a human resources condition in which a team of skilled employees becomes isolated from distracted top managers resulting in a catastrophic loss of the ability of the team to perform an important mission. The term was coined by Paul F. Levy, a former Massachusetts state official, in an article in the Harvard Business Review published in 2001. The article outlines a situation which resulted in massive pollution of Boston Harbor, and proposes that the name of the facility involved be applied to similar situations in other business enterprises. The work is used as a source in human resources management case studies and is featured on the websites of several business management consulting firms and health care institutions.

Nut Island is a small roughly 5-acre (0.020 km2) former island in Boston Harbor that was joined by landfill to the Hough's Neck peninsula in northeastern Quincy by the 1940s for use as the site of a sewage treatment facility. The operation of sewage treatment and disposal facilities in populous eastern Massachusetts was the responsibility of an independent state agency known as the Metropolitan District Commission (MDC). The commission, also responsible for the construction and maintenance of several roadways, recreational facilities such as swimming pools and hockey rinks and water distribution infrastructure, became known as fertile ground for political patronage in Massachusetts.[2] As a result, top management became focused on the satisfaction of political goals and constituent recreation requests at the expense of mundane, less visible responsibilities including sewage treatment facilities operations. At the same time, following the ends of World War II and the Korean War the sewage treatment facility opened in 1952 at Nut Island was manned by several ex-servicemen. These men were by nature of their military experience both strongly inclined to build a powerfully cohesive unit possessing excellent improvisational skills and well suited to operating in isolation under adverse conditions.[3]

The management and employee situations satisfied the requirements of step one of Levy's analysis. As time progressed management focused on political issues and became reliant on the quiet, consistent operation of the facility that the workers gladly provided. The plant staff found management to be so trusting and distracted as to provide little or no assistance in the resolution of problems. This resulted in the workers resenting the distant managers and creating a self-sustaining, self-regulating operation that often misreported situations and problems in an effort to both satisfy outside regulators and avoid management entirely. This environment led to staff reliance on unscientific treatment procedures and improvised unorthodox plant operation, primarily to avoid equipment replacement that required management approval. Eventually a series of plant failures culminated