Screaming Monkeys and Project Management
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Photo: Getty Images, via The Economist Have you ever seen a photo of three screaming monkeys and thought, immediately, “wow – what a great idea for a blog post!”? Nah. I didn’t think you would. But it happened to me while reading an article in The Economist about Colombia and its BIO program. As background, you may be familiar with Colombia’s long history with FARC. The acronym FARC is Spanish: Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia. FARC was a revolutionary military organization which you can read about in detail in this BBC article. They were founded in 1964 as the armed wing of the Communist Party and follow a Marxist-Leninist ideology. Their main founders were small farmers and land workers who had banded together to fight against the staggering levels of inequality in Colombia at the time. While the Farc have some urban groups, they have always been an overwhelmingly rural guerrilla organisation. A peace treaty between Colombia’s government and FARC was signed in late 2016. So, I hear you asking, what does any of this have to do with project management and screaming monkeys? Quite a bit. I think you can imagine that the FARC was not exactly ‘welcoming’ to visitors in its vast territories in Colombia. Because of this, per the featured Economist article, As a consequence, areas they controlled, which amounted at their height to about 40% of the country, are often more or less pristine from an ecological point of view. They are also, as far as flora, fauna and fungi are concerned, poorly catalogued. Now, let’s think about project initiation and value. Projects are initiated because they bring value to stakeholders. Colombia has an unknown amount of resources worth an unknown amount of money, needing an unknown amount of protection. Now, they have a way to get to this area and determine what’s there, what needs protection, what value may be extracted (sustainably, we hope), and in general – getting a handle on a huge chunk of their country once again. Enter BIO. BIO is an attempt by the government to take advantage of the FARC’s departure and to explore what is living in the recently vacated habitats. So far, since 2016, the project has sponsored 13 expeditions staffed by botanists, mycologists, entomologists, ornithologists, herpetologists and many other sorts of biologists. The figure should rise to 20 by the end of the year. So it really is a program (or portfolio) of expeditions (projects) to explore this area. Colombia BIO is the brainchild of the country’s president, Juan Manuel Santos. Just as, in the 19th century, many countries set up geological surveys to assess their mineral assets, so Mr Santos aspires to survey, in a comprehensive and systematic way, Colombia’s biological assets. The potential is gigantic. Colombia’s biodiversity is second to Brazil’s. What Colombia does not yet know, however, is what sort of value they have in this 40% of their land. For example, without knowing what sort of potential water power they may have in certain areas, the government does not know the effect of deforestation on the potential of hydroelectric power generation. When the President talks of turning Colombia into a “bioeconomy”, the government’s aspiration is that biodiversity itself might be harnessed as an economic resource, and that this might contribute as much as 2½% of Colombia’s GDP by 2030. You can learn about some of these projects from the Kew organization, part of the Royal Botanical Gardens – see the image below.
And, you can learn more about BIO, especially if your Spanish language skills are good, at this Colombian government site which describes the entire BIO Program.
In Part II of this blog post, I’ll discuss some of the specific projects (because they’re interesting and the way in which they connect to the sponsoring organizations’ overarching objectives is also interesting). I’ll also discuss some of the existential threats to BIO that are tied to the Colombian election cycle.
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