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The Greater Than Report

In June 2019 N Square embarked on a “listening tour” to better understand the conditions that enable—or get in the way of—collaboration and innovation in the DC-based nuclear arena. We conducted lengthy interviews with more than 70 nuclear professionals at all career levels. These individuals were extraordinarily candid about their challenges, dissatisfaction, hopes, and desires; their observations were honest, compelling, and sometimes very emotional. We then studied the 270 pages of data these interviews generated, looking for patterns. Ultimately we identified four core dynamics that were clearly impeding the field.10

1. Stasis and Risk Aversion

Many professionals in the field, particularly those in the early stages or middle of their career, see the field as static and averse to adapting and evolving to keep pace with a changing world. And yet they also see danger in speaking up and

Dissatisfaction With The Current State

challenging norms. Stasis and fear of taking risks feed off one another, helping maintain a loop where nothing can change because the call for change cannot be voiced. This dynamic keeps the field suspended in a “steady state” rather than open to exploring new ways of working—and it has an outsized impact on early-career professionals and their prospects for staying in the field.

The Inverse of This Dynamic: Reinvention and Reinvigoration

Structures and fields that regularly renew and refresh themselves are far more sustainable than those that do not—and yet this field has not yet found a way to reshape itself to meet a changing landscape of external threats and internal needs. How might this field renew itself, or even open itself to perpetual renewal? What might it look like if the field made a commitment to sustainability rather than stasis? What if individuals felt supported and heard when they voiced ideas about how the field might evolve and work better?

2. Fragmentation and Competition

Interviewees described a field marked by fragmentation and lack of cooperation, with organizations largely operating as silos. Organizations often feel the need to guard their work, a dynamic linked to competition for resources and the currency afforded by the publication of ideas. Interviewees also showed concern that the field seems calibrated to reward personal gain over collective impact. One critical factor feeding this fragmentation and competition is a notable lack of shared goals/metrics at the field level; there is both an absence of and a hunger for long-term, strategic alignment and no shared understanding of what system we are all part of or how we should operate together within it

The Inverse of This Dynamic: Coordination and Collaboration

The field lacks the mechanisms, capacity, and competencies to coordinate efforts effectively, and incentives and rewards—often established by funders—can be at cross-purposes with the goal of greater cohesion. How might everyone in the field gain a clear understanding of what everyone else is doing? How might mapping the field and seeing it as a system rather than a collection of parts change how everyone works—and how progress gets measured? What kinds of supports might be needed to make cross-organizational collaboration not just possible but foundational to the field?

3. Exclusivity and Toxicity

The third theme relates to the field’s culture—both who gets to be in the field and how people are treated once they enter it. Many interviewees stated a desire for more inclusivity in the field across multiple dimensions and a wish for a more diverse funding base. While nuclear threats are global and indiscriminate, only a privileged few have the economic, political, and social resources to engage in the professional community designed to eliminate them, and few are comfortable with this selectivity. The interviews were also full of commentary— largely from early- to mid-career professionals— about what they saw as the field’s “toxic” culture where many are made to feel “less than,” to the point of driving good people out of the field.

The Inverse of This Dynamic: Inclusiveness and Respect

The valuing of certain voices and kinds of expertise over others, and the exclusion of diverse perspectives and backgrounds from the field, limits the kinds of technical ideas and policy solutions that will emerge. What might happen if the field came to see diversity of thought and composition as a critical core strength? How might actively inviting new perspectives into the field change or reframe our understanding of nuclear threats and how best to combat them? What if the field was defined not just by expertise but by curiosity and compassion?

4. Career Uncertainty and Lack of Structural Support

Interviewees almost universally described a field where well-defined advancement pathways don’t exist and career progressions are marked by haphazard hops from one organization to the next. Many noted a lack of clarity about how to rise up within an organization or within the field as a whole. They also described a field that lacks many of the career supports that other professions take for granted, including strong managerial and leadership training, career mentorship, and HR departments. Of paramount importance to early- to mid-career professionals was compensation—not just sufficient base pay but benefits packages (e.g., parental leave, 401(k) plans, healthcare coverage) that would enable them to imagine staying in the field.

The Inverse of This Dynamic: Clear Career Pathways and Intentional Redesign

The nuclear threat field sprang up organically, without the benefit of intentional design. This has led to a situation where the field does not take care of its own—and many question whether having a “job” or “career” in nuclear threat reduction is even a sustainable paradigm. What if the field entered a period of intentional redesign? In that effort, how might we prioritize and show value for the well-being of our colleagues? What might career advancement look like in a field where career pathways are clear and professional support is universal?

Across the field, the response to N Square’s listening tour and our report, Greater Than: Nuclear Threat Professionals Reimagine Their Field, has been overwhelmingly positive. More importantly, the report has sparked significant conversation about the field’s dynamics as well as efforts by several organizations to improve its culture and effectiveness.

• The boards and/or executive staff of Carnegie Corporation of New York, the MacArthur Foundation, the Peace and Security Funders Group, Ploughshares Fund, Gender Champions, Physicians for Social Responsibility, the Arms Control Association, New America, Nuclear Threat Initiative, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and the Federation of American Scientists all requested and received briefings about our findings. Many have suggested that their own strategies will be informed by these findings.

• Fourteen leaders of organizations in the DC community enthusiastically agreed to form a task force to identify priorities from the report.

• The Peace and Security Funders Group is using the Greater Than report to identify and mitigate potential risks to funders in the Nuclear Funders Working Group.

• A growing number of organizations have begun to address fragmentation and lack of coordination in the field. Ploughshares Fund, Global Zero, Beyond the Bomb, Union of Concerned Scientists,

Physicians for Social Responsibility, and others are exploring a theme from the Greater Than report: the need to think systematically about the field’s desired outcomes and to reduce dissonance, duplication of effort, and competition—ideally through consolidation and focused cooperation.

Three years in, the Greater Than report continues to resonate and remain relevant. The report has provided an enduring common reference point to name and deal with toxic behaviors that had previously been hidden or ignored. N Square has received requests to extend our research to include nuclear professionals outside the DC policy arena, funders, and international colleagues. While the listening tour was initially conceived as a one-time, short-term project, we have watched this response closely to determine the extent to which the listening tour might become a platform for ongoing network cultivation, professional development, and field-building.

The Report’s Influence on N Square Strategy

Even before the release of Greater Than, N Square was working to “flip” the concerning core dynamics identified in the report. Our efforts to attract new human, technical, and financial resources, introduce innovation and design methods, create collaborative environments and frameworks, and host an interdisciplinary, cross-sector network that innovates together were all in some way addressing the key challenges called out in the report. And yet the report also gave us clues about new threads to pull and other pathways toward change that we were well-positioned to test and explore.

Here are a few examples of the ways that we have leaned into these insights and sought to address them:

“Wish for a more diverse funding base”

Through a combination of our own primary research and work done by N Square Innovators Network fellows, we have learned a great deal about creative ways to engage influencers who bring various forms of capital to the nuclear field—human, intellectual, social, cultural and, critically, financial capital. Much of that work is captured in this primer about alternative ways to finance change, developed in collaboration with innovation fellow David Epstein and our colleagues at The Nucleus Group, but is also informed by research we commissioned on intersectional messaging points (building on Nucleus’s excellent work on this topic).

”Averse to adapting and evolving to keep pace with a changing world”

While we were already introducing tools and frameworks to the field designed to bring new forms of thinking and problem-solving, that work accelerated with the arrival of COVID-19. The pandemic introduced a period of ongoing disruption in a field that was simultaneously facing the loss of its largest philanthropic funder. This created both urgency and opportunity for N Square to help nuclear threat professionals develop and hone critical skills for managing uncertainty and building momentum, rather than losing it, through rough periods of change. From the earliest days of the pandemic, we were determined to lead by example by adapting quickly to the altered realities of work—and to help others in the field adapt quickly alongside us. To that end, we launched an “Adapting to Disruption” series that had several parts:

1. Remote collaboration.

Because N Square’s work depends on collaboration and convenings, we used the pandemic to establish leadership in distance collaboration and innovation processes; we believed that fully remote collaboration would keep our extended community of fellows and partners connected and productive during whatever lay ahead and ensure that our projects moved forward with full momentum. We analyzed new leading-edge platforms that use augmented reality and/or advanced interactivity to enable collaboration from a distance, trained our team to play both public-facing facilitation and behindthe-scenes support roles on these platforms, and then shared our learning with the field (through brown bags, workshops, virtual mixers, and more) in service of fostering more flexibility and a new capacity to collaborate remotely.

As a result, we saw numerous organizations experiment with the tools we were piloting. Most notably, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s biannual Nukefest and Women of Color Advancing Peace, Security, and Conflict Transformation (WCAPS) events happened on the Hopin platform partially as a result of N Square’s identification of Hopin as one of the best we’d found for interaction and collaboration.

2. Foresight.

Most of N Square’s staff have a background in futures work, and bringing long-term thinking to this issue space is something we’ve been doing since our early years—for example, by commissioning futurist Jamais Cascio to produce Crossroads: Five Scenarios for the End of Nuclear Weapons. Yet both the Greater Than report (and its insights on stasis in particular) and the pandemic underscored the need to more widely introduce the field to tools for thinking about the ways in which social, technological, environmental, economic, and political forces might combine to change the context in which this field does its work over the coming years. How will our challenges change—and how will we adapt—if bio-threats like the pandemic combine with natural and climate-related disasters like wildfires and earthquakes? How might the politics of nuclear threat reduction shift? In what ways must we be better prepared? What are we not thinking about today that will affect our capacity to respond effectively tomorrow? In collaboration with colleagues from the professional futures and design worlds, we created our strategic foresight and wicked problems trainings to bring futures thinking to the field.

3. Horizon 2045.

With the arrival of a global pandemic, we saw an opportunity to connect nuclear weapons both to an increasingly complex threat landscape and to our aspirations for global well-being. By exploring intersections between nuclear weapons and other global phenomena—health and climate insecurity, the rise of artificial intelligence, racism and poverty, advancements in brain science—we saw the possibility to reframe nuclear threat reduction in terms of greater human and global security. That insight became foundational to the work we began to do as part of Horizon 2045. We strongly believe that the greatest return on philanthropic investment will come when the tools, frameworks, and programs we have developed at N Square are applied to multiple, interconnected problem spaces. There is nothing issue-dependent about our work; our methods are universally generative and valuable largely because they support and benefit from transdisciplinary collaboration.

A key insight of the Greater Than report was both the fragmentation plaguing the nuclear field and how aware, and frustrated, the professionals we interviewed were about that fragmentation. At N Square, we saw this issue not just as a logistical/ cultural problem (significant in and of itself) but also as a systems problem. Given the limits on sharing and collaboration, and the often narrow focus of various organizations on a particular problem set within the issue space, there were few opportunities for nuclear professionals to see the whole rather than the parts—meaning both the whole of the field and the whole of the larger nuclear system of which the field was a smaller part. Our systems thinking course, launched in 2022, was in part designed to give the field the tools to think and see in systems and thus to see their own systems in ways they maybe haven’t before. Meanwhile, given the heavy US-focus of our network, we also supported BASIC’s development of a “network map” of UK nuclear