BUILDING MOMENTUM FOR CHANGE

Over the last eight years N Square’s vision for the nuclear field has held steady. We continue to envision a field in which nuclear professionals at every career stage engage in collaboration and innovation and in which leading organizations in the field prioritize, incentivize, and leverage that engagement while also welcoming and valuing the participation of nonnuclear experts in core work. Our North Star has always been the idea that the nuclear field could become a best-in-class example of creative problemsolving and innovation applied to wicked problems.

But even as we made progress toward this vision, it became clear that there were structural and cultural impediments that needed to be called out if it could ever be realized. Like any field, the nuclear field has issues, many of which had never been discussed or addressed head-on at the field level. An atmosphere of mistrust, scarcity, competition, and even open hostility made bright spots of progress difficult to see or to trust as more than short-lived. Critically, these issues were impeding the field’s progress—and its ability to infuse innovation and collaboration into its core identity.