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Date
Do you know the expression, "the elephant in the room"?
If you don't, as a project manager, it's an important one. Read about it here. It means "an obvious truth that is either being ignored or going unaddressed. It also applies to an obvious problem or risk no one wants to discuss."
Sound familiar? In projects, one of our key jobs is to point this out.
"Hey everyone", you need to say, "what about this key project threat?". When you do this, you are pointing out an elephant in the room.
So, think about an elephant for a while. Big, huh? Huge, even. Largest living terrestrial animals. Nice. A little odiferous, perhaps. Anyone have any room deodorant or air freshener?
Now, imagine a bunch of them. Say a hundred. Or a thousand. Wow, that's a lot of weight. 1,000 elephants would weigh about 4,000 tons.
Now get ready for the mind-blower. Imagine 95 billion elephants. You can't do it. It's incomprehensible. Inconceivable. Ninety-five billion elephants.
Yet, that's the weight of the ice being lost per year from Earth's poles. This article, based on recent scientific data, shows that the amount of ice being lost is somewhere between 290 and 379 billion tons per year, up by a factor of three since the 1990s.
We all know that there are cyclic changes in weather. And of course we need to be open to the possibility that this is cyclic. But a tripling of this kind of weight in such a short time seems beyond the realm of siimple probability.
To us, it looks like an elephant in the room. An obvious problem that people seem to continue to gloss over. And by people, we of course mean project managers. And those are some of the most influential people in the world, in terms of getting things done and being change agents. That's what we do! We find elephants in the room. We execute projects, which make ideas real! We are the ones that launch products which in turn are used in the steady state and consume resources, so we have a unique chance to affect those products-of-projects.
If you needed inspiration for your work as a project manager, you need only to imagine an elephant in the room. Or 10, or 1,000, or a million, or a billion. Or 95 billiion of them.
Remember this. Elephants, after all, never forget! Nor should project managers.
NOTE: We know this posting comes across with a strong message about climate change, and we know that not all project managers necessarily believe in it. To those people we say two things:
1. Not a problem. We urge you to check the science, but we have no issue with you if you don't believe in it. We only have an issue if you deny our second point.
2. It's still important to integrate sustainabilty on your project because it still will help you (for one of many examples) identify threats and opportunities.
Posted
by
Richard Maltzman
on: November 30, 2012 11:22 AM |
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