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Date
Sustainability. It’s a term that’s being used a lot these days. It’s being used so much, in fact, that we’re afraid it’s losing its meaning.
One of the definitions that we’ve heard (and we like!) comes from a book called Getting Green Done. In it, author Auden Schendler says that sustainability can be explained best by working as if you will be “staying in business forever”.
This is very difficult concept for us project managers because we are trained to understand (as we should) that a project has a definitive beginning and end.
So when a story like this one from NPR comes out, describing the decades-old problem of poisoned places – locales ruined for the very long term by industrial toxins - we can empathize, perhaps, but from a PM perspective we would tend to glaze over, since we are “only project managers” and are not focused on the steady-state operation of facilities or the long-term impacts of processes.
But maybe we should be.
And yes, of course we should be focused on the long term for the altruistic reasons that appeal to our sense of ethics, and if we have a lick of sense, because the planet is indeed our home and we must realize that we shouldn’t fill our own home with guck and goo and poison.
But it goes beyond that. And it goes beyond politics, and it goes beyond wherever you stand on climate change.
We, as a discipline, have to recognize that focusing on the steady-state can also greatly improve how our projects fit into the enterprise and meet enterprise goals. More and more companies have very strong environmental statements in their mission and value statements. Ray Anderson built Interface/FLOR into a tremendously successful example of this marriage of long-term thinking and mind-blowing profitability.
Marvin Odom. President of Shell, talks about sustainability being the top driver for innovation at his company.
And if you read this series of stories from NPR about Poisoned Places you will see what we learn about in the PMBOK® Guide (and rooted in Philip Crosby’s original writings) as “the cost of poor quality”, in the form of lawsuits, closed factories, ill-will, and mounting losses. In this case, we would call it the “cost of poor greenality”.
As project managers we stand at the intersection of strategy and operations. This means we have to be connected to both the lofty goals of our leaders - which are increasingly focused on sustainability - and the ongoing goals of our cousins in operations, who are "trying to be in business forever". Why then should we end up being the ones who break the chain? We should be a vital connection point, right? Not a roadblock.
Can you do anything about this?
Funny you should ask. Yes you can. We’ve started a petition to drive more attention to the issue of sustainability thinking in project management. It simply asks the PMI to consider already-submitted proposals about integrating sustainability thinking into the PMBOK® 5th edition and the Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct.
Sign our petition by clicking HERE right now.
Thanks.
Posted
by
Richard Maltzman
on: November 09, 2011 12:23 AM |
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