 Here's a spout, right? Yeah. Okay. Thank you. Is this a slide of that? Yeah. But where is what I brought? Some place. The pointer. I did this. It's not original. Yeah. The laser pointer does it. That's okay. I like to run around anyway. The last presentation on the only sunny day. No pressure, right? Okay. Thank you. Do I sound okay? Is this about right? This is the way I'm going to talk. I don't want to yell into the microphone, but I do want to be heard. When we had our interactions on Monday, I told you that I worked as part of a program that did international engagement with newcomer countries who were developing nuclear power programs. We worked a lot with new organizations, small organizations, developing organizations. A lot of those were the regulators. I don't need that. Anyway, so we worked with the regulators. We had this program where we would go in and teach on certain things. We did teaching on reporting to the IAEA. We worked with them quite a bit. They were accompanying us on these visits. We had these multi-phase training sessions. We would start with a new country. We would get an agreement in place. We would go in and say, okay, we're going to start with the basic foundation. This is the essential stuff that we need to know that we're going to build on in future meetings and future engagements. We would come in and we would do this and we would spend anywhere from two or three days to a week depending on the subject that we're supposed to be to build this really good solid foundation. We say, okay, we'll be back in six months and we'll talk some more. Well, these are new organizations and these are growing organizations. We would come back in six months and one person would have been promoted. One person would have retired. One person would have been transferred. One person would have gone to work for the IAEA. So we had to start over. We would come in and give the basics again. We've been doing this for two or three years and every time we go back, it's a new group. So we can't make the progress in some cases that we want to be able to make. So when I talk about knowledge management, I talk about it a lot in the context of sustainability because that's what that means to me in a practical sense is going in, developing a knowledge base and then being able to keep that knowledge base moving forward because we don't want to have to go into these countries from now on to do the same thing over and over again. The goal is for the Department of Energy, who I work for, to be able to stand these countries up and work with them as partners where they don't need us anymore. It's just like with your children. Your goal is that you're not needed anymore. If you're needed consistently, you haven't really done the job of a parent. I'm not calling us parents, but the objective is the same. So that's one reason I think of sustainability that way. Another reason is because the department's program manager changed hands a couple of years ago. The first time I met her, I had breakfast with her. We had a regional workshop in Dakar, Senegal. It was a year ago last month, last August. We're having breakfast and I'm talking to her. You know how it is? You've got a new boss's boss's boss's boss. You kind of want to know what their thinking is, what their objectives are. I said, what do you think of knowledge management? And she said, oh, well, you know, it's a nice idea. We've got a lot of other things we need to work on first. Maybe in a few years we can look at it, but really we've got higher priorities of things that we need to be doing now. Okay, so we talk a little bit more. We have a little bit more discussion. I say, what do you think of sustainability? Oh, that's important. That's our top priority. We really need to put a lot of energy and sustainability. But okay, it's sustainability. So that's one of the reasons that I think that way. And when CS going back and forth to these countries doing the same thing over and over again to new faces, I start to think what we need is something in the way of succession planning, succession planning. All right, succession planning for these technical experts. Okay, I work at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. We've got over 4,000 people there. We have the world's fastest supercomputer. We have the Spellation Neutron Source, the Department of Energy's biggest science project. We have the high flux isotope reactor, which makes medical isotopes you can't get any place else in the world. We're modeling the small modular reactor program. We have a manufactured additive printing process that we printed a building. Okay, so we surely have a lot of smart people here and they have to think about how we do succession planning for these technical experts, these subject matter experts. So I went to our department HR person and I said, do we have a succession plan? Oh yes, we've got a great succession plan. We've done a lot of work on it. And I said, well, is it a succession plan for technical experts? No, it's for high level management. Don't you think that there might be some value? Yeah, it sounds like a pretty good idea. She said, let me put you in contact with our laboratory HR director. And maybe they know something I don't know. So we all got together and we sat down. We have succession plans. Yes, we do. It's very solid. We keep it up to date. We keep it current. We look at it every so often. I said, who's it for? Well, it's for our top level managers, for our lab directors, for our directorate provision heads. I said, do you have anything for our PhDs or reactor operators or our researchers? No, but it sounds like a good idea. She said, OK, OK, so I'm thinking we're going to have to start from scratch, at least from what I know. So what we did from that was we went to the Department of Energy Human Capital Development Program and we proposed a project. And that's the project I'd like to talk to you about today. I'd like to tell you what happened. It's an ongoing project that I can give you some current status on. I can tell you what we've done and I can tell you where we plan to go. And there's actually some information that's not on the slide that's new that I can tell you as well. So what I'd like to do is, first of all, I'll talk to you. This is an outline of the presentation. What we're going to be talking about is the objective of the project itself, a little bit about succession planning, and this will tie in very nicely to what David has already talked about. Our project proposal that was accepted, the methodology that we proposed, how we did a pilot, Vlad, you said pilot, made me look good, OK, and the results of that pilot and where we're at right now on the project. So it's a simple project objective. We've already talked about it. What we suggested was to propose a methodology that could be used to do succession planning for technical subject matter experts. And that's really kind of a tricky thing because in my experience, if you're a good manager, it's a lot easier for you to be picked up and set down in a different management sphere if you've got the good management techniques. If you don't know the business, you've got a period in there where you can adapt. But if you're a good pottery maker and you're now being designated as a nuclear physicist, you either know it or you don't. I mean, there's not any chance to come up to speed on this stuff. You just, you better have a plan in place. So there's some differences there. A little bit about succession planning. Succession planning is a systematic approach to building a pipeline talent pool to ensure continuity of skills. That's exactly what David talked about earlier. Developing potential successors in ways that best fit their strengths. I worked with a guy one time in a software group and he was a programmer. He came from a bank. Very bank-like, okay? Very specific. What he did was this. He came in, he wrote these programs, he did these things. He hired into our group. Very dynamic group. We had shoot from the hip philosophy. Things changed from day to day. There was a crisis every day. It was a new crisis every day. He said, you're a project manager. Well, he panicked. We would go to meetings. He would not want to make a decision. We'd just talk about these things. He'd come to my office and say, I don't know how we can decide this stuff. We don't know everything. He went to revisit the questions from the last decisions and so forth. So he's not happy. So he wound up, we talked, and he wound up going to work for a different group. He's a software developer. He's very happy. He retired from there about several years ago, but he worked there for 20 years doing that. So it's an important thing is to recognize their strengths and develop their strengths. That's probably obvious to everybody, but just to kind of make that point to underline a little bit. Identifying the best candidates for positions and concentrating the resources to develop those. In this situation, we're going to be talking about a little bit differently, but the idea is the same. It's a case for technical experts. That's what I've talked about already. According to the United States Office of Management and Budget, there's a lot of work that's being put into succession planning for managers, high-level managers, but not so much for professional people. How many people in here consider yourself a high-level manager? How many in here consider yourself a professional? They don't have a plan to replace you. Maybe some of those high-level managers should be here so they can sort of think about this a little bit. Anyway, so why succession planning and safeguards? This was done by the safeguards group, so we focused a little bit more on safeguards, but this study was done by the Oak Ridge Institute of Science and Energy a little while back, and we were looking at the attrition rate of safeguards experts. So we started out in 2009 with an estimate of 250. By 2014, I don't know if this is verified or not. They estimated the attrition rate. It's going to be down a little bit lower. This is FY19. This is probably me, okay? So I'm not too worried about this. But anyway, so this is where we're looking at going on this. So this is a projected attrition rate in safeguards. And we've heard this over and over. We've heard it from the U.S. We've heard it from the drop where everything happened a few years ago, and we've heard it from Russia, you know, that there's this gap. So there's been a lot of effort to kind of bring this back up. What we proposed to our sponsor and what they accepted was that we would draft up a methodology on how to identify the critical skills of a technical expert. Now, that's where we stopped. And it's important to note that we didn't solve the problem. All we did was say we will try to identify for individuals what their key critical skills are. There are lots and lots of tools, and you've heard about them all week long. You'll hear about them some more on how to address the knowledge transfer, the knowledge retention for these different types of skills. What we're trying to do here is just identify where those tools, resources, and techniques should be concentrated. So we say, let's draft up a methodology. We have resources here at the laboratory that are very supportive. We can do a pilot test on the methodology and find out if it really works. We think it'll work, but it could probably be refined. So let us do a pilot process, let's compile the results, and then we'll refine our methodology and we'll give that back to you and we'll take it from there and go forward. They accepted. So the way that we said we would do this is we would select a facility or a group or an individual set of people, identify some candidates. So we did that by talking to like one of them was a high flux isotope reactor and the manager there is very supportive of this kind of work. So we work with them. We give you a couple of names. We've got some people who are going to retire. They would be good candidates for this. So we identified some people. We set up some interviews. We analyzed the results of the interviews. We validated the critical skills and the way we did that is if you go talk to me and say, well, what are your contributions? What's critical? What's key? What's important? What do you do that you think nobody else can do? I'm going to give you an answer from my perspective and I may be completely right. I'm the only one that knows how to do this and I'm getting older and I'm getting crabby. Well, my manager may know that we're phasing out that work anyway. So by the time he leaves, we're not going to replace him. So I may have what I think is a key skill but it may not be a critical skill. So what we wanted to do once we talked to the interviewee was go to their management and their supervision and say, you know, this is what we got. You know, what do you see of these skills, these things that he said or she said that they can do? Do you see as being critical to replace? So that was the next part to identify the criticality. And then we ranked those in a value of one to five. Here is a little, I think this is the only graphic I've got. This is who we started with. We went to the high flux isotope reactor and identified, I think, four people. Two of those were retirees and we worked through the interview process with them. And went back to our collaborators and they said, well, what about safeguards? We said, oh, it should be about the same for safeguards but we'll go back and identify some safeguards people and we'll go through the same process with them. We've got time, we'll do some comparison and see how the operators fare against the safeguards people. So we did that. So we selected the candidates. We got their job titles. We worked with their supervision. As I mentioned, there were four systems engineers from the high flux isotope reactor. Two announced retirements at the time of the interview. The groups, the International Safeguards Group. There was a group leader, a section leader. His responses were interesting to me because he was my boss. And then of the Safeguards and Security Technology Group we interviewed an R&D nuclear engineer and a senior R&D nuclear engineer. And that was interesting to get the perspective of those two. I don't think you can read this but this is the start of question, or the set of questions that we started with on an interview. Very basic stuff and it would tend to evolve based upon the responses we got back. So what is your job title? What education background do you have? How long have you been with the company? So it's basic stuff to get people loosened up a little bit. So as your work necessitate you to keep up with publications or open literature, that sort of thing. So it gets into more and more detailed questions. And what we did was to send those to them ahead of time so they could look at them and they could think about them. It wasn't just cold questions. We wanted them to be able to have good prepared answers. This is based upon, these questions are based upon the IAEA Risk Management Knowledge Loss and Nuclear Industry Organizations. So a lot of what we did, you'll see this in our ranking criteria as well, is we used resources that already existed. We didn't want to create things from the beginning. We took advantage of the knowledge of the agency and we tried to parallel the agency where we could. So anyway, we sent them ahead, sent the questions to them ahead of time. They knew what we were going to do. They knew this was a pilot. This wasn't something that was adversarial. We wanted them to be open with us. Two retirees were exceptionally open. They were very much willing to talk to us and give us their feedback. Larry mentioned something about working with smart people and so these are smart people and one of the advantages that we have in our industry is in most cases they're invested. They're invested in the work that they do. They've done this in the case for retirees for decades. And the last thing we want to see is all that work fail whenever they're gone. They're interested in telling you what you need to know. I've got 40 years into this and I don't want you to mess it up. I'm going home but I don't want you to mess it up. So this is a real advantage to that investing them in capturing this knowledge. They're usually willing to talk about it if you can get it out of them. We had two people in the room. We had one interviewer and we had one person taking notes and we're very fortunate. I told you that the laboratory HR person, HR director had this initial meeting with us. They were so involved in this that they've been participating at their own expense to keep this going. Whenever we ask the question, do you have a succession plan for technical experts? They said no but it was a good idea. They really meant it. So they've been working with us ever since to try to see what they can do and they've come up with a succession plan for the laboratory itself. The HR person was the one that conducted the interviews. They talked to people, they have a way of doing this and then one of our other people took the notes. This lasted for one or two hours each. You get people talking about their work and they can talk about their work. It was a conference room or an office, just kind of a quiet, just the three of them. We talked about having someone else in the room but we didn't want to surround them. We had those two people in there doing the interview. So we made notes and we let the discussion go on. We took our notes and then after that, we sent our notes back to the interviewees and said this is what we think we heard. Can you correct anything we got wrong? Expand on anything we didn't include enough information on. So once again, they're still invested in what we did. From the responses, we created a set of skill sets. We started out with a generic set of skills and based upon that, we modified it for the candidates ourselves. For our pilot, we found out that there's got to be some flexibility. You can't just say if we ask these 20 questions, we've captured knowledge. We've captured their critical skills. I think that's something that everybody's been talking about here today and all through the week is that knowledge management in some ways is an art form and you can't rigorize that too much. Once the skill sets were created, we sent them to the managers and asked them to look these over and say this is what we've got from your interviewee. Tell us what you think. Does their perspective synchronize with your perspective? So we got their feedback as well. We didn't get much. The high flux isotope reactor, we only got back from one of the four interviewees. The others we did get some feedback back from. But it helped. So this was our criteria that we started with. Once again, this is from risk management of knowledge loss in the nuclear industry organizations from the IAEA. And these are the risk factors, one through five. You don't have to read this. Number one is the lowest common knowledge and skills. Number five, critical and unique knowledge or skills. That's what we started with. Once again, this work had already been done. We took advantage of it. This is what we came up with. Number one, least critical on up to number five, most critical. So not especially artful, but was good enough for our public process. This is an example of the results of one of these. And I don't expect you to read this either, but this was for the safeguards subject matter expert, the R&D nuclear engineer. Here's where the interviewer saw his ranking being. Here's where his manager saw his rankings as being. Some of these topics on here performs independently in a specialty area. I know you can't read it. And actively impart knowledge to others. Both the interviewer and the manager thought that that was a very critical skill. This one down here, availability to attend required training and certification. Both him and his manager saw that as a low skill. The funny ones are the ones that they're different on, like this one, ability to accept criticism. He said, not important. His manager said critical. So those are the more interesting ones. And these presentations are going to be available, I think, on the CLP Fournet. I don't know if you can tell, but these are in red. The ones that are different are in red. That's typical types of response that we got back. So lessons learned. We learned that by sending the questions to the interviewees a couple of weeks ahead of time, they were much better prepared. We've got much better answers than if they just been ad hoc or off the cuff. We learned that the conference room settings for the interviews are better because there are less distractions. No cell phones, no emails popping up. One to two hours, you know something's going to happen. If you kind of get them off to a nice quiet place, you're better off. We trimmed down our questions said a little bit. We realized that asking the same question over and over again was getting tedious. So we were able to refine our basic questions said a little bit more. What we started out doing was to get the rankings and then ask the supervisor what we went up doing later was we got the rankings from the interviewees and then we let them verify those before we talked to the managers. I think in future activities, what I'd like to do is not even show the manager what the interviewee said, but to interview the manager and then compare the numbers. I think that would be a little more interesting overall. One of the things we learned is why it's a pilot. And we also learned that having somebody from HR made a big difference. Really useful in getting the credibility that we needed and getting this stuff transferred to our organization laboratory HR people. They got something out of it as well. So our plan, what we've done so far is we drafted up the draft methodology. We got it reviewed. We got it approved. We got it released. It's available for public distribution. And if you want, I can put that on the website for the project. Okay, we can do that. So the next thing we did was to do the interviews and we got all of those. We got those written up and part of what you saw in one of those charts is kind of what that looks like. That's a supplement. And it's done. It's going through the review process now. And when it's completed, it'll also be available for public distribution so we can put that out there. The third thing is that we said we would revise the methodology. So we've talked about that. Everybody's on travel this week, but we're going to get the methodology revised and updated based on what we learned in the pilot. And we're going to make that available so we can put that out there too when it's eventually done. It's kind of being held up because of me because I travel too much. But the more exciting thing that I couldn't put in here that's just happened has been that every few years, Oak Ridge National Laboratory offers an incentivized retirement package. There are certain programs that they want to spend down. Other programs spend up. So what they'll do is they'll make an offer and there's a window of time that opens up that if you qualify, then you could take this retirement package. It's an early buyout package. There's a very nice payout incentive that goes with it. Oak Ridge is in the process of doing that right now. And they're looking to reduce staff by, I think, around 350 people. And there are going to be some really smart people that are part of this program. They won't know if they've been accepted to the program until October 25th. But they have to leave the company by December 31st. So they've got like nine or 10 weeks. And if they're not accepted, they won't know either way until the 25th. So we have talked to the Department of Energy and they've given us permission. And for the next phase of this project, we're going to really, really feel tested. We're going to go out and get some people that are really going to retire, really talk to them, really find out what their key critical skills are and revise our methodology one more time to reflect this updated. We may refine our question set. We may expand our question set. We may come up with different question sets for different skill sets. But they've approved of that. So it's going to be quick. We've got 10 weeks from the time they're identified to the time they leave the company at the most. So we're going to find out how this works in the real, real, real world and be able to apply that. And our laboratory HR people are willing to work with us to do this to help find those people, talk to them and get them part of this process because they want to be able to develop a succession plan for technical experts. And the Department of Energy wants to look at what they developed to be able to spread across the Department of Energy's entire Oak Ridge, our entire DOE complex. So that's good news. And I couldn't say that when I had to give you the presentation because I didn't have permission. I guess that's it, how to do it.