ChatGPT Ate My Brain
Categories:
ChatGPT,
projectmanagement,
projectleadership,
green,
Sustainability,
Artificial Intelligence
Categories: ChatGPT, projectmanagement, projectleadership, green, Sustainability, Artificial Intelligence
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Many of us are hearing about ChatGPT and its impact on the world. This morning I read an article about ChatGPT writing real-estate postings. The agents are wowed by the results. I thought I'd try it out, so I made some real-estate available in my schedule and logged in. While by no means perfect, the system is scary-good. This brings up a whole bunch of ethical issues especially with respect to education. That's not in scope for this post. Here, I want to share with you the result of a conversation (that's the best way to put it) with ChatGPT about Sustainability in Project Management. Then I want to conclude by letting you see how it insulted me at the end of the conversation. I asked a series of questions in a variety of formats to ChatGPT. The real art and science of dealing with it is how you engage it in conversation. Yes, you can say, "write an essay about General Lafayette" and it will do that, but you get more thoughtful answers if you frame your questions more creatively. Let me start with one that absolutely amazed me. I asked it to compare two project managers' results based on their approach to sustainability thinking: Two project managers are working on large IT projects. One spends extra time and effort assuring that the project will have a more responsible, ecologically-sound long-term result, and overspends the budget and brings the project in a bit late. The other project manager focuses on the budget and stays under the budget, and delivers the project on time, but does not consider the project's outcome in its steady state. Compare the two projects. It almost sounds like a PMP(R) question stem, doesn't it? Anyway, here's how ChatGPT answered it: A comparison between the two projects would consider both the short-term and long-term outcomes. The first project manager, who focused on a responsible, ecologically-sound outcome, may have overspent the budget and brought the project in a bit late. However, the long-term benefits of a more sustainable project may outweigh the initial costs and delay. The project's positive impact on the environment, reputation, and stakeholder satisfaction can lead to increased support and profits in the future. On the other hand, the second project manager who focused only on the budget and delivered the project on time may have saved costs in the short-term. However, if the project has a negative impact on the environment or stakeholders, it could lead to decreased support and financial losses in the long run. In conclusion, while staying within the budget is important, it should not be the sole focus of a project manager. A balanced approach that considers both short-term and long-term outcomes, including sustainability, is crucial for the success of a project in the long run. Pretty, pretty, pretty, good, n'est pas? I went on to ask some other questions in different ways, and although not perfect, nor even totally consistent, there is wisdom (drawn, I think, from human minds) here. Have a look at the rest of the conversation (I will use italics for my question and purple text for the answers): Why should a project manager care what happens after the project is complete? A project manager should care about what happens after the project is complete for several reasons:
By considering the long-term outcomes of a project, a project manager can demonstrate their commitment to responsible and effective project management, and ensure that the project delivers positive outcomes for all stakeholders. As a project manager, can you give examples of projects where failing to consider the long-term caused problems after the project was handed over to operations? Yes, here are some examples of projects where failing to consider the long-term caused problems after the project was handed over to operations:
In all of these cases, considering the long-term outcomes of the project could have prevented these problems and ensured that the project delivered positive outcomes over the long term. As someone who wants to convey the importance of thinking long-term to an audience of project managers, can you give three examples of disastrous projects in which failing to consider the long-term led to problems? Yes, here are three examples of disastrous projects where failing to consider the long-term led to problems:
These examples demonstrate the importance of considering the long-term outcomes of a project and taking a responsible and proactive approach to project management, to ensure that the project delivers positive outcomes over the long term and does not result in disastrous consequences. Is there value for a project manager to think beyond the end date of their project? Yes, there is significant value for a project manager to think beyond the end date of their project. Some of the key benefits of thinking long-term include:
Overall, considering the long-term implications of a project can help project managers deliver more effective and sustainable outcomes, and increase the likelihood of success for their projects. Thinking as a program manager or PMO director who wants to help project managers think in the long term, what roadblocks exist to this effort? As a program manager or PMO director, the following roadblocks may exist in the effort to encourage long-term thinking amongst project managers:
Overcoming these roadblocks requires a strategic approach, including leadership support, communication and collaboration, training and development, and the development of metrics and incentives to support long-term thinking. Next, I got personal. I asked ChatGPT if it had an environmental impact: What is the environmental impact of ChatGPT? The environmental impact of ChatGPT is primarily associated with the energy consumption and carbon emissions associated with running the vast amounts of computer hardware required to train and run the model. This energy usage contributes to climate change, a major environmental issue. It is important for organizations using AI technology to consider energy-efficient practices and sustainable energy sources in their operations. Then, I got personal from my side: Who is Richard Maltzman? I am not aware of any notable person by the name of Richard Maltzman.
OK, ChatGPT, well, then, fine, I am not aware of any notable person by the name of ChatGPT! But I am now aware that this is going to have an impact on search technology, research, education, and (despite its closing slap in my face), a pretty good understanding of how sustainability connects with project management! What are your thoughts? No fair asking ChatGPT. I want your actual thoughts. |
Ten CO2 Risk Response Pathways
Categories:
LCA,
project,
green,
Carbon,
CO2,
CO2 Utilization,
green project management,
life cycle analysis,
life cycle analyses
Categories: LCA, project, green, Carbon, CO2, CO2 Utilization, green project management, life cycle analysis, life cycle analyses
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As project managers we are (or should be!) very familiar with the concepts of risk response, including secondary and residual risk. As a quick refresher, secondary risk is new risk (threat or opportunity) generated by the risk response. For example, an air bag is a risk response to the impact of a car crash on a human. It is possible that this very air bag causes injury to you (this has happened - see this video). The new threat, generated by the air bag, is a secondary risk (in this case, clearly a threat). If the air bag does not do a sufficient job in reducing the impact (perhaps it does not inflate fully), and injury still occurs, then that’s residual risk. In this post, I’ll talk about CO2 emissions (which 99% of scientists agree is a threat) and the threat responses that have been proposed. This is taken mainly from a Nature magazine article from this month (Vol 575, P87) and 10 “pathways”, which we can consider risk responses, and the potential secondary and residual risks of these pathways. Below is the abstract from the article: "The capture and use of carbon dioxide to create valuable products might lower the net costs of reducing emissions or removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Here we review ten pathways for the utilization of carbon dioxide. Pathways that involve chemicals, fuels and microalgae might reduce emissions of carbon dioxide but have limited potential for its removal, whereas pathways that involve construction materials can both utilize and remove carbon dioxide. Land-based pathways can increase agricultural output and remove carbon dioxide. Our assessment suggests that each pathway could scale to over 0.5 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide utilization annually. However, barriers to implementation remain substantial and resource constraints prevent the simultaneous deployment of all pathways."
The pathways focus on utilization of carbon dioxide, as opposed to carbon capture and storage (CCS) which I have blogged about several times on People, Planet, Profit, and Projects, for example here, and here. Why talk about this in a project management blog? Well, there’s already the connection to risk identification, analysis, response, and control, but the ten pathways discussed here each offer significant potential for project initiation – and project management jobs. So there’s another good rationale to cover this topic! So: on to the ten ‘utilization pathways’. Utilization here refers to the use of carbon dioxide – not as naturally occurring, but ‘concentrated’ at levels above those found in nature – to serve as raw material to supply or fuel a machine or industrial process (feedstock). One example is using derivatives of ammonia to capture and condense the CO2 from the air for use as feedstock. The article defines utilization as “a process in which one or more economically valuable products are produced using CO2 whether the CO2 is supplied from fossil-derived waste gases, captured from the atmosphere by an industrial process, or – in a departure from most of the literature – captured biologically by land-based processes”. Covered below are some – not all – of the utilization pathways, but the ten that are illustrated will give you an idea of the potential projects that could be launched, and some of the secondary and residual risks involved. In short form, the 10 pathways are:
The image below (from Nature magazine) provides a clear graphic explanation, including net flows, and coding as to whether the pathway is closed, cycling, or open.
(Figure from cited Nature magazine article) Fascinating to me as a project manager were facts such as this: “perverse indirect effects – such as land-use change resulting from BECCS* – could increase net atmospheric CO2 concentrations”. *Bio-Energy with Carbon Capture and Storage This is actually up for debate. See the video below for coverage of that scientific debate about BECCS: As far as the 10 pathways, I won’t discuss them all, but here are a couple of examples (see the article for a table that summarizes all of them):
Enhanced Weathering: In this technique, atmospheric CO2 is mineralized through the use of pulverized igneous rocks to be used for cropland, grassland and forests. The product is agricultural crop biomass, and it has low probability of release, except under extreme acidic conditions. The process is described in the 8-minute video below from Harvard University. Products from microalgae: CO2 from the atmosphere is absorbed by microalgae, producing biofuels, and bioproducts such as food for aquaculture (fish farming). This has a high probability of release, based on combustion and consumption of the bioproducts. This process is explained in the short video below: Again, what was fascinating to me as a project manager was the attention that this article gave to secondary and residual risk. In particular there is a sidebar in the article dedicated to “net climate benefit” which refers to doing LCAs (Life Cycle Analyses) on the entire pathway to see if the process under consideration actually does contribute a net benefit or a net problem with respect to carbon impact. The conclusion of this article is as follows: Life-cycle analyses on some industrial CO2 utilization pathways suggest that the potential for net emission reductions is much larger than for net removals (CCS) which appears very modest. The article closes with a mildly optimistic view of the pathways of carbon utilization: CO2 utilization is not an end in itself, and these pathways solely or even collectively will not provide a key solution to climate change. Nevertheless, there is a substantial societal value in continued efforts to determine what will and will not work, in what contexts the climate will or will not benefit from CO2 utilization and how expensive it will be. From a project management perspective, the “efforts to determine what will and will not work” sounds to me like a set of projects to be launched. The 10 pathways are already launching real projects all over the world, and the lessons learned from the life-cycle analyses are applicable to projects of all kinds. So whether this means a new job – or even a new career path – for you, or whether this simply yields a learning opportunity, there’s value in discovering what is being done in this area of CO2 utilization. |
A river runs through it
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As a ‘seasoned’ project manager, I often find that the tools we use in PM are useful elsewhere – and I’m always on the lookout for tools and philosophies from outside our discipline that can be adapted and brought into PM to help us manage – and contextualize – projects from a broader viewpoint. In a way it's like having a river of sustainability thinking running through PM and a river of PM running through sustainability thinking. Such was the case from a recent article in Nature, Prepare River Ecosystems for an Uncertain Future. I mean, the title says it all, Project Managers: Preparing for an Uncertain Future – well, projects are unique, which means they are, by definition, working with an uncertain future. We’re in unknown territory. With climate change, it’s the same thing. We’ve never seen some of the things we’re going to see over the next few decades. How do we deal with that? The article states: Rivers around the world are struggling to cope with changing weather patterns. In Germany and Switzerland, a heatwave last year killed thousands of fish and blocked shipping on the River Rhine. California is emerging from a six-year drought1 that restricted water supplies and devastated trees, fish and other aquatic life. Across the US southwest, extended dry spells are destroying many more forests and wetlands. The article says that “the tools of old” will not serve us in the same way. We can no longer even hope to restore river systems to their original state as the climate warms. We need to be less reactive, says the article, and more proactive. We need to identify risk, it says in so many words, and come up with risk responses in advance, rather than reacting in real time to the massive changes expected. Sound familiar? In short, the article (and others like it) are promoting the use of tools we know and use in project management: data analytics and modeling (a la Monte Carlo simulation), trend analysis, and so on. Note this extract: Today, river managers track properties such as species diversity and population abundance, and compare them with historical averages. If they spot troubling declines, they might intervene by, for instance, altering the amount of water released from dams. But by the time trends are detected, they can be impossible to arrest. Understanding how sensitive ecosystems might change is crucial to managing them in the future. Again, this is about being proactive, about understanding systems on a system level as opposed to measuring specific reliable attributes we’ve always used in the past. Those indicators simply may not be as trustworthy when the system itself is dynamic and being driven by sweeping changes – overarching changes – that we have never seen before. And, armed with this information (and knowledge and wisdom) we can plan risk responses that are effective: ...in the US southwest, river flows could be increased strategically from reservoirs to protect important species, such as cottonwoods. And in Australia, letting more water pass through dams in spring could stop rivers drying up while the eggs of Murray cod mature. The reason Murray cod are mentioned in particular, is the recent demise of thousands of these very valuable fish (Australia’s largest freshwater species) in a recent heat wave there. Assuring that risk response is both efficient and effective is key here. We’re all familiar with the use of Pareto analysis to choose the 20% of problem causes to get rid of 80% of the problem effects – and the same applies here. So does the concept of secondary risk. If actions are taken to intervene, what are the possible secondary risks? This also comes up in the article: Process-based models can look further ahead and save time, money and disruption by limiting the number of interventions as well as avoiding adverse impacts. They would help stakeholders and managers to choose which features of ecosystems to maintain, to justify costly interventions such as major engineering works and to weigh trade-offs to build resilience under increasing climatic uncertainty An example of using system models to predict change decades or even centuries in advance is shown below. We’re not used to this as PMs, are we? Our projects last months, years, or in some rare ‘megaproject’ cases, last decades, but not centuries. Yet our “planning horizon” can and should be broader, especially when climate change is in the picture.
In other words, we, as PMs, can learn a lot from what these researchers are doing – and I would assert that ‘vice-versa’ is true as well. Since we, as PMs are masters (or should be) at managing in uncertainty, we can help with the application of our mindset and tools for dealing with uncertainty to the important work of identifying, analyzing, and responding to the coming threats (and perhaps even opportunities) |
