In Part 1 of this series, I discussed the giant Arapaima fish which is inspiring better designs for body armor.  In this episode, we leap from the fresh waters of the Amazon and other parts of the world to the skies of southern and southeast Asia, to learn about how butterflies are providing their own source of inspiration.

In the BBC podcast series “30 Animals That Made us Smarter”, butterflies are (so far) featured not once, but three times.  The first two:

• Paint and textiles inspired by the Blue Morpho butterfly
• Butterfly eggs inspiring architectural designs from the White Royal butterfly

This episode, however, is about biomimicry threaded through a project to significantly improve solar panel efficiency thanks to the Common Rose butterfly, featured in the top photo in the blog post.

So - what’s the story here?

Butterflies have no way to generate heat internally – they are cold-blooded.  They are constantly ‘harvesting’ solar energy – it’s a heat tactic to warm up their internal temperature.  California Institute of Technology scientist Radwanul Hasan Siddique explains, in the paper, “Bioinspired phase-separated disordered nanostructures for thin photovoltaic absorber”,

“The nanopatterned absorbers achieve a relative integrated absorption increase of 90% at a normal incident angle of light to as high as 200% at large incident angles, demonstrating the potential of black butterfly structures for light-harvesting purposes in thin-film solar cells.”

This team was able to create the structure organically – creating plastics which naturally organize itself into a lattice structure.  Doubled the amount of light collection, especially at “off angles” or indirect sunlight.

Below you can see figures depicting the process, and a closeup of the structure – something that is not an ‘obvious engineering solution’ – something we’re taught about from …butterflies:

Could your project use some bio-inspiration?  Check out the podcast, 30 Animals That Made Us Smarter!

Overall source: R.H. Siddique el al., "Bioinspired phase-separated disordered nanostructures for thin photovoltaic absorbers," Science Advances (2017). advances.sciencemag.org/content/3/10/e1700232

Other references:

https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/19/16503258/butterfly-wings-engineering-solar-cell-energy-biomimicry

https://phys.org/news/2017-10-black-butterfly-wings-solar-cells.html

This is the first part of a two-part series that is inspired by a tremendous BBC podcast called “30 Animals That Made Us Smarter”.  The real theme here is biomimicry – which is defined by the Biomimicry Institute as “a practice that learns from and mimics the strategies found in nature to solve human design challenges — and find hope along the way”.

For project managers, the overall takeaway is one of innovation.  Actually, not really innovation but rather, learning.  When you think of it, biomimicry is not that different from a project lessons-learned meeting.

This particular podcast episode is very short - and yet inspired me to do follow up ‘fishing around’ on the topic, which in this case was about a fish - the Arapaima Giga - that is impervious to the attack of the infamous piranha.  From a recent Reuters story:

Researchers from the University of California, San Diego and University of California, Berkeley on Wednesday described the unique structure and impressive properties of the dermal armor of the fish, called Arapaima gigas. They said their findings can help guide development of better body armor for people as well as applications in aerospace design.

The fish, also known as pirarucu, gets up to 10 feet (3 meters) long and weighs up to 440 pounds (200 kg). Arapaima, a fish that can breathe air and survive up to a day outside of the water, inhabits rivers in Brazil, Guyana and Peru infested with piranhas, known for razor-sharp teeth, incredible bite strength and deadly feeding frenzies.

It's all about the design of the scales.  Millions of years of evolution have developed a ‘best-practice’ combination of materials.  Humans can learn from – and take advantage of – this evolution.  From the story:

The scales, (scientists) found, have a hard, mineralized outer layer to resist penetration that is bound to a tough-but-flexible inner layer by collagen – the main structural protein in skin and other connective tissues in the body.

This structure means the scales can become deformed when bitten by a piranha but are not torn, broken or pierced, protecting the fish from injury.

Of course, this has immediate use in human body armor, so of course this story caught the attention of this industry, as described in this article from Body Armor News.

For those interested in the detailed science of the giga’s body armor, there is a feast of information in this article from Sci-News.  Below is a diagram from the article showing the structure of the scale design.

Image credit: Yang et al, doi: 10.1016/j.matt.2019.09.014.

Since the study was funded by the US Air Force, the research is publicly available here:

For those of us just more curious about what this giant fish looks like, I suggest this video from NatGeo. 

In it, we learn that this fish has adapted in another way: it has developed an air sac – akin to a lung – and can gulp oxygen from the air.  As oxygen in its habitat begins to decline due to climate change, this may give it another advantage over other fish.

If you’d like to see one being caught (and released) you can click on the image below.

But the focus here is on its body armor and the way in which we can learn from its evolution.

In Part 2 of this series, we will go from the water to the air as we study a butterfly whose markings may lead to a huge breakthrough in solar power.

In northeastern Massachusetts you will find a town called Gloucester.  Importantly, it is properly pronounced “GLAW-stah”, not “Glow-chester”.  Not even close.

This post, despite the title, is not about pronunciation.  Rather, it somehow interweaves portfolios, copper paint, whales, and something (I am not making this up) called a Snotbot®.

Really, this is a Program Management story.  The Program is that of the Ocean Alliance.  Remember, a Program is a collection of projects, which, managed together, can achieve benefits not available if they were managed separately.  You could probably argue that this is a Portfolio as well.  We can have that argument later.  For now, let’s discuss the initiatives of the Ocean Alliance, because they are interesting and important no matter what we call them.

At the forefront of this is Chief Executive Dr. Iain Kerr, who joined the group 30 years ago, being offered a job captaining research vessels in the Galapagos by none other than Roger Payne, famous for his discovery and promotion of whale song.  We could easily do an entire blog post (and may yet) on Roger Payne.  For now, bookmark him as a famous person who brought Iain Kerr into the Ocean Alliance, and now it’s Kerr who has been the chief executive of the Ocean Alliance organization since 1990.

I’ll discuss two of the projects in the Ocean Alliance’s portfolio (I settled on Portfolio after studying the group for a while). 

The first of these two projects involves the aforementioned Snotbot®.  Let’s consider the project to be the introduction of this tool, and now the product of the project – the Snotbot – is in operation.  So what is a Snotbot?

From the Ocean Alliance webpage:

 SnotBot® is a modified consumer drone which flies through the blow of a whale and collects exhaled “snot” on petri dishes. This blow contains a treasure trove of valuable biological information: DNA, stress and pregnancy hormones, microbiomes and potentially many other biological compounds/indicators of the animal’s health and ecology. Best of all, the whale doesn’t even know we are there: This is a non-invasive tool that is safer for the animals and cheaper and more effective for the user.

Advantages of Snotbot:

Democratizing Science: A single tool that can collect a wide range of data but that costs relatively little represents a paradigm shift in the way we study whales. Drones can empower groups in the developing world, enabling them to conduct research and collect data on marine mammals that they would not be able to do using the research vessel model.

Benign:  Ocean Alliance was founded by Dr. Roger Payne on the premise of studying whales without doing them harm. Especially when working with endangered species, it is vital not to add to the stresses facing the animals while conducting research. During 7oo approaches to whales to collect snot samples, there have only been 3 reactions to the drone.

Vast range of data: The blow samples that SnotBot collects contain DNA, stress and pregnancy hormones, and microbiomes, and possibly other indicators of the animal’s health.

Below is a photo and a video to show you this amazing innovation in action.

The second of these two projects is a more traditional construction – or rather, restoration project, having very much to do with the town of Gloucester, famous as the first seaport of the United States, and famous of course, the Fisherman Memorial statue, as depicted in the header of this blog post.

However, Gloucester is also the home of a “manufactory” of copper paint, after two men (Tarr and Wonson) invented an elixir of copper oxide and other substances, which, when painted on the hulls of ships, prevented the “fouling” of these vessels by barnacles and other sea life.   They received a patent for the paint in 1863 and began manufacturing it here in Gloucester, shipping it in vast quantities, worldwide.

Photo: (C) Cape Ann Museum

 It had an effect on seagoing vessels of all kinds, from small boats to warships. Read more about the fascinating history of this copper paint here.  Indeed, you can learn about the history of the Tarr and Wonson Manufactory in the video below.

The buildings eventually became abandoned and fell into disrepair.

Dr. Kerr and the Ocean Alliance has taken on the project of restoring these landmark buildings – making them their headquarters.

Here’s a video tour of Copper Paint factory:

The Ocean Alliance is up to much more that these two projects – you can see that clearly at their website.

Whether you call their work a Portfolio or a Program, you can see that this is an example of an organization focused on good.  It’s inspiring!

I read this article in the Cape Cod Times about a project to reshape a company’s business based on the effects of COVID-19 and it inspired this post.

As you know, in our project management parlance, risk has two sides – a sort of Janus, two-headed being.  It is threat, of course, the way most people view risk, but also opportunity, the positive side of risk.

As I tell my students, always imagine what would happen if something goes “horribly right”.   I actually coach students to develop a list of threats and “flip them” and then do the same for opportunities.  It’s surprising how this actually generates more thorough and thoughtful risk identification.

So in this case, a firm – Blue Stream Aquaculture, is facing the threat of COVID-19.  Sales of their farmed fish were down.

Then came a wave of fish poop.

Or at least a wave of ideas involving fish waste.  Blue Stream Aquaculture is a hatchery that raises brook, brown, rainbow, and tiger trout.  Their sales were cut in half by the effects of COVID-19, as restaurant eaters were instead staying home and ordering pizza.  Or whatever.  But they were not in restaurants ordering fish.

Paraphrasing from the article, Keith Wilda and Jim Malandrinos own three farms altogether.  One in Turners Falls, MA, raises warm-water Barramundi. Blue Stream Aquaculture New Hampshire and the West Barnstable (Cape Cod, Massachusetts) farm raise trout. Between the three locations, they had 1.6 million fish when the pandemic hit. 

They decided that they could market their fish waste elixir, collected from the closed aquaculture system in West Barnstable. Wilda has 30 years of experience in hydroponics, and when he tested the fish waste elixir on his lawn and vegetables, the results were amazing. For example, his tomatoes had never grown so well.  Below is a photo of two basil plants, one grown with, and one grown without the fish elixir.

Turns out that the high level of micro activity in it does the trick.  It is full of (helpful) bacteria and fungi, protozoans, amoebas and freshwater diatoms, which make it a great soil conditioner and fertilizer.

The company cleverly avoided the temptation to use the brand name, FishPoo® and instead developed a line of products under the name Fish Brew™, which includes soil conditioners called Bold Flo™, Epic™, 'Rise and Thrive' and Hydrolysate, a fertilizer. 

They have worked with the Commonwealth of Massachusetts because of the environmental benefits of the product line, and Massachusetts has helped the firm switch over to solar power.

You can read more about the company here, and look at the sustainability elements of Blue Stream’s mission here.

My coaching for project managers:

• Take on the Janus view of risk
• There may be a silver lining – even on fish excrement.

I had just finished teaching a graduate PM course segment about the PMO, and it features a somewhat recent article from PM Network magazine which featured McDonald’s Digital Acceleration project as a Project Of The Year Finalist.  In fact, you can read about this project here.  It’s a good example about controlling scope creep in a project.  This post is also about McDonald's, but it’s about controlling plastic creep.

As luck (or karma) would have it, on my way home from the University that night, a news story came up describing how McDonald’s was removing plastic toys from its decades-old Happy Meals. 

That news story from NPR (The US’ National Public Radio) is available here.

If you are not familiar with the Happy Meal, they’ve been around since 1979 and have been served to over 1 billion customers.  That’s a lot of Happy! See a commercial for the Happy Meal here:

So yes - it's a lot of Happy.  But it’s also a lot of plastic.  Of course, the plastic toys are a small part of the plastic waste in the world, or even a small part of the plastic used by McDonald’s. In fact, McDonalds has previously taken steps to remove the plastics in its cutlery, but this seemingly small step of removing the plastic toy in the Happy Meal, according to the company’s press release, is equivalent to 650,000 people stopping the use of any plastic every year.

The switchover to sustainable materials is clearly a project unto itself.  You can read about this in a company-provided video in which a young “Happy Meal Superfan” interviews Jenny McCollogh, the Chief Sustainability Officer of McDonalds.

Like any organization, it rolls out its projects using a pilot.  Indeed, McDonald’s has piloted plastic-less Happy Meals in France, as you can read about here.

I like to provide both sides of a project-based news story, so here is some alternate views of what McDonald’s is up to.  In this article from Eater, a food and lifestyle platform, they acknowledge the positive move to reduce plastic that this project introduces, but also points out that it was slow in coming and that there is much more work to do.  From their excellent article,

Across the UK’s coastline, new research suggests McDonald’s is one of just 12 companies responsible for two-thirds of plastic pollution. The company has taken some positive steps other than swapping out Happy Meal toys: McDonald’s pledged in 2018 that by 2025 all of its packaging materials will be recycled or otherwise sustainable. And while the company has committed itself to greatly reducing its carbon emissions by 2030, there are serious questions as to how the company will do so, while, in some instances, sourcing from companies that don’t report their greenhouse gas emissions and haven’t set public goals of reducing their negative impact on the planet.

Also, importantly, the Eater article talks about project stakeholders.  What’s the rationale for launching this project?  Is it to save money?  Is it to make money?  Is it to improve reputation?  Is it to be a better corporate citizen?  The answer is… all of the above.   However, for that to happen, people who are concerned about the environment need to be ‘noisy’ stakeholders.

As always, the onus is on consumers to express dissatisfaction with companies that underpay workers, destroy the planet, and otherwise act badly until they have no choice but to respond. Whether the company’s reasons for inching toward a more sustainable model are altruistic or not, increased demand is forcing McDonald’s to do so, one cardboard puzzle piece at a time.

If you’d like to read the entire press release from McDonald’s, please find that here.  If you are interested in general in the way McDonald’s is dealing with Packaging and Waste, click here.

In the meantime, consider your role as a happy (or not-so-happy) and noisy stakeholder!