In June 1978, Lois Gibbs (a 26-year-old housewife in the LaSalle neighbourhood of Niagara Falls, with no professional organising experience) read a local newspaper story linking her son's elementary school to 21,800 tons of toxic chemicals buried beneath it.

As the team scaled past about twenty engineers, a highly competent senior architect quietly became the bottleneck for every significant decision, not because he wanted to be, but because he was the only person anyone trusted to get the architecture right, and every code review naturally flowed through him.