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.