This is a story about risk response. And New Jersey. Let’s start with some definitions.
The 6th Edition of PMI’s PMBOK® Guide defines “Risk Avoidance” as ‘when the project team acts to eliminate the threat, or protect from its impact’.It involves ‘changing the plan or objective that is in jeopardy in order to eliminate the threat entirely’.
They further describe “Risk Mitigation” as ‘action taken to reduce the probability of occurrence and/or impact of the threat’.
Introduced in the 6th Edition, “Overall” project risk is ‘the effect of uncertainty on the project as a whole, arising from all sources of uncertainty, including individual risks, representing exposure of stakeholders to the implications of variation of project outcome, both positive and negative’.For the purposes of this post, we can think of overall project risk as those that ‘sweep through’ the whole project.
In PMI terms, these are distinct and different ways of response strategies for threats. In my graduate PM courses at Boston University, I teach (through examples) that in practice, a flowing minestrone soup of risk response – a mélange, a mixture, is often used, not distinct, staccato responses.
That’s the case with respect to the risk response to sea-level rise. Whatever your feelings about climate change and its causes, the reality is that sea levels are rising and island nations and coastal communities are RIGHT NOW facing the threats of sea-level rise, and the flooding, erosion, and other effects that come along with it. Sea-level rise is a fact, plain and simple. This is void of politics, bias, or opinion. Studies by the US military show the upcoming effects, of note, in this report. You can see a video about sea-level rise based on that study in the video below. In the video, the following sentence (aligned with this blog post!) is heard: “combinations of measures are more effective in reducing risk than reliance on a single solution”. There it is: minestrone.
One very meaningful effect is the loss of property. I called this blog post “Tame Abandon” – a sort of play on words from the expression ‘wild abandon’ (look it up). This is about responding to threat by virtue of retreat – of abandonment, but in a way that is productive and is not admitting defeat, not at all.
A very interesting article from Scientific American, called “Underwater: Coastal communities struggling to adapt to rising seas are beginning to do what was once unthinkable – retreat”, caught my attention. You should read this article as a citizen of Earth but also as a project manager. Think about it from the perspective of risk response, from the perspective of PROGRAM management, because what you’ll learn if you read this is that risk response, in some cases, has taken on the form of new PROGRAMS which are a minestrone – a soup – of risk avoidance, risk mitigation, and overall risk management, as defined by PMI.
Here is an excellent video summary of the article (think of it as a motivation to read the article, not as a substitute for reading it!).
To summarize the article, which focuses mainly on the US state of New Jersey, the statistics are frightening. 250,000 homes, says the article, representing a total value of $108 billion, are at risk of chronic flooding within the next 30 years. 20 of 21 counties in the state have shorelines that are “tidally influenced” by sea-level rise. Read more about that here, in an article from the State. The article goes on to talk about the Blue Acres Buyout Program (note: PROGRAM) which has been put in place to avoid the threat to the homeowners in affected areas buy having them abandon their homes and to let the resulting land go ‘back to nature’. This is the risk avoidance portion of the response. By recovering this land, however, and letting it ‘recover’, it will help prevent future flooding. This is the mitigation portion of the risk response.
If you happen to live in or near New Jersey and are curious about your own home, or have a relative there and want to check for them, there is a site that shows the situation by geography. It’s called the NJ Flood Mapper: http://www.njfloodmapper.org/slr/.
Getting back to Scientific American - its article describes the story so well, it’s better if I don’t continue to summarize it - read it for yourself. I hope that with this blog post, I’ve opened up your thinking to read it in a different way, under a project management lens. It’s my hope that this is a mutually-beneficial lesson in that as a PM, we have much to offer the world in the way of project and program management of such risk responses, and that as you see the impact and effect of such things as sea-level rise, you gain a longer-term, more ‘benefits realization’ vision of project management.
RAJESH K LProject Manager, PMP| Bharat Electronics, Bengaluru, IndiaBengaluru, Karnataka, India
Thanks for sharing
Jason MuckleySenior Project Manager| Teledyne Monitor LabsLittleton, Co, United States
Very interesting approach. I am sure there will be much more "re-imagining" situations as climate change has a constant direct effect on many peoples' lives around the world. This is a great reminder that we should see things differently as project managers, through risk management, etc.
