People, Planet, Profits & Projects

Here is Part III of my 2-part series that focuses on trees and communications.  I know… I know… I have violated two rules here – (1) having a third part of a two-part series, and (II) mixing Roman and Hindu-Arabic numbering.  Forgive me, and call it poetic (or bloggetic) license.

I would like to introduce you to the serviceberry tree.  Other common names for this tree are: Juneberry, shadbush, shadblow, and shadwood, (with the 'shad' reference alluding to the fish that runs and spawn at the same time these plants bloom). Other names you may see are sugarplum, Indian pear, May cherry, saskatoon, sarvisberry, wild pear, wild plum, and chuckley pear.  Better Homes and Gardens magazine says:

"This small tree thrives through all four seasons and offers so much to any garden. Abundant white blooms in spring are followed by delicious berries in summer, fiery foliage in fall, and silver bark in winter.

Serviceberry trees display white blooms just before their foliage emerges in early spring, offering some of the earliest sources of nectar for pollinators. The five-petaled flowers closely resemble apple blossoms but with skinnier petals.

After the show of these blooms, clusters of edible berries form. As summer begins, berry colors ripen to a deep red then purple color. The berries make a wonderful substitute for blueberries and can be eaten fresh or made into jams and jellies. Birds also enjoy them.

Serviceberry foliage has an open and loose habit. This allows dappled light to shine through, which creates a space for part-shade plants to sit below the base of serviceberry trees. As nights cool down in autumn, blue-green foliage transforms into beautiful shades of orange and red."

Here is a closeup of the serviceberries themselves:

I first read about serviceberries and how they connect with a gift-based economy in this article from Emergence magazine.  The article, An Economy of Abundance, by Robin Wall Kimmerer.  The article focuses on economics, but I found interesting because of the idea of the importance of ‘gifting’, especially during this Holiday season (after all, I am publishing this on Christmas Day, 2020).

So – what does this have to do with project communications?  It’s actually more about negotiation in this case.  The communications piece lies only in what the serviceberry tree is ‘communicating’ to us about a gift-based economy and zero-sum games.  We (should have) learned in our PM training that a negotiation style based on a zero-sum game is usually the least-preferred.  It has its place, but it should be avoided unless needed.  We tend to go with the “Getting to Yes” philosophy of looking to ‘expand the pie’.  And I wondered – could this pie be a serviceberry pie?  Sure - that’s a thing.  In fact, here’s a picture, and a recipe.

 Turns out the fruit taste like (from the article above), “a blueberry crossed with the satisfying heft of an apple, a touch of rosewater and a miniscule crunch of almond-flavored seeds. They taste like nothing a grocery store has to offer: wild, complex with a chemistry that your body recognizes as the real food it’s been waiting for.”  Wow, I certainly can’t wait to try that pie!

The author of the article is a registered member of the Potawatomi people.  In Potawatomi, the serviceberry is called Bozakmin, which is a superlative: the best of the berries.

She says,

…the most important part of that word is “min,” the root word for “berry.” It appears in our Potawatomi words for Blueberry, Strawberry, Raspberry, even Apple, Maize, and Wild Rice. The revelation in that word is a treasure for me, because it is also the root word for “gift.” In naming the plants who shower us with goodness, we recognize that these are gifts from our plant relatives, manifestations of their generosity, care, and creativity. When we speak of these not as things or products or commodities, but as gifts, the whole relationship changes. I can’t help but gaze at them, cupped like jewels in my hand, and breathe out my gratitude.

So she feels that she has learned a great deal from the serviceberry tree.  How?

What might Serviceberry teach us here? She replies, “Serviceberry, or shadbush as I learned it, provides a model of interdependence and coevolution that is the heart of ecological economics. Serviceberry teaches us another way to understand relationship and exchange. With a serviceberry economy as our model, it prompts the opportunity for articulation of the value of gratitude and reciprocity as essential foundations for an economy.” Reciprocity—not scarcity.

During our Holidays we are busy buying and receiving gifts.  How does a gift change a ‘thing’?  It makes us more interdependent on each other and to feel more like a community.  Could we consider the Earth as a gift to us?  Would it change the way we think about using resources?  Ms. Kimmeler thinks so:

To name the world as gift is to feel one’s membership in the web of reciprocity. It makes you happy—and it makes you accountable. Conceiving of something as a gift changes your relationship to it in a profound way, even though the physical makeup of the “thing” has not changed. A wooly knit hat that you purchase at the store will keep you warm regardless of its origin, but if it was hand knit by your favorite auntie, then you are in relationship to that “thing” in a very different way: you are responsible for it, and your gratitude has motive force in the world. You’re likely to take much better care of the gift hat than the commodity hat, because it is knit of relationships. This is the power of gift thinking. I imagine if we acknowledged that everything we consume is the gift of Mother Earth, we would take better care of what we are given. Mistreating a gift has emotional and ethical gravity as well as ecological resonance.

She even talks of the “monster”” in Potawatomi storytelling.  The monster is called Windigo and its trait is taking too much and sharing too little.  The Windigo is not a pretty creature.  It is described as “gaunt to the point of emaciation, its desiccated skin pulled tightly over its bones. With its bones pushing out over its skin, its complexion the ash gray of death, and its eyes pushed back deep into the sockets, the Windigo looked like a gaunt skeleton recently disinterred from the grave. What lips it had were tattered and bloody… Unclean and suffering from suppurations of the flesh, the Windigo gave off a strange and eerie odor of decay and decomposition, of death and corruption.”¹

By the way, this is not the decomposition we learn about when building a Work Breakdown Structure!  This is the biological, stinky one.

You can learn more about the Windigo here. (Warning: graphic content)

Below is one of the least-scary images of the Windigo that I could find.

Scary creatures. Moving words.  To come back to negotiation, especially ‘zero-sum game’ negotiation, perhaps we are focused too much on competition as a driver.  Is that the best way to go?  Again, referencing “Getting to Yes”, perhaps not.  In the author’s words:

…since competition reduces the carrying capacity for all concerned, natural selection favors those who can avoid competition. Oftentimes this is achieved by shifting one’s needs away from whatever is in short supply, as though evolution were suggesting “if there’s not enough of what you want, then want something else.” This specialization to avoid scarcity has led to a dazzling array of biodiversity, each avoiding competition by being different. Diversity in ways of being is an antidote to scarcity-induced competition.

I encourage you to read the article with an open mind and consider it as you give – and receive – during this holiday season.

¹Legends of the Nahanni Valley, Hammerson Peterson, 2018, Mysteries of Canada

^{Picture from https://www.evolves.com.au/trees-can-talk/}

In Part 1 of this post, I discussed the communications of trees.  Yes, that’s right – trees talk to each other.  The post was based on an interview with Suzanne Simard, an expert on underground networks that are now known to convey messages between hub or “mother” trees and other trees, perhaps miles away.  In the interview, Simard also talks about communications.  And that’s the theme of Part II.  Here’s the key portion of the interview for this part:

Q: Another word that can be slippery is “communication.” I would define communication as any exchange of information. That’s a very big umbrella; it can apply to, say, the co-evolution of berry coloration and bird tastes, so that over time berry color becomes more appealing to birds and correlates with nutrient properties. That’s communication—but we categorize that differently than we do the alarm calls squirrels give when a hawk approaches, or the conversation you and I are having right now. Where in that spectrum do plant communications fall?

A: Right in there. And we’re prisoners of our own western science; indigenous people have long known that plants will communicate with each other. But even in western science we know it because you can smell the defense chemistry of a forest under attack. Something is being emitted that has a chemistry that all those other plants and animals perceive, and they change their behaviors accordingly.

Given that definition of communication, you can see that this follows the sender-receiver model described in the PMBOK® Guide and which I use in my courses and consulting.  For a really well-done explanation of the PMBOK® Guide 6^th Edition’s treatment of this, click on this reference from EdWel.  Turns out that the model originated from an article in the Bell Laboratories Technical Journal¹, by Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver – you can read more about that 1948 published article and their book here, and see a reference below.  We can all take a lesson from this model which involves advancing an idea, a thought into a message by encoding it, and getting that idea to a receiver.

• Encode: To translate thoughts or ideas into a form of language that can be understood by the receiver; eg, written English, spoken Hindi, a text, a wink, or a drawn diagram.
• Message: What is sent: the output of encoding
• Medium: The method used for sending the message (face-to-face, telephone, email, text)
• Noise: Something - ANYTHING - that interferes with the sending or understanding of the message (distance, culture,language differences, stereotyping, predjudice)
• Decode: The translation of the message by the receiver from the medium into their thoughts.

That message has to go through a medium.  For us – that’s Slack, Microsoft Teams, email, or even a blog post publishing platform, like projectmanagement.com, which we are using right now in this communication.  And here’s where it gets interesting.  Noise and perception play a big part of that medium.  Even the medium itself can be noise - or indeed, it can be the message!  In fact, "The medium is the message" is a phrase coined by the Canadian communication theorist Marshall McLuhan and introduced in his Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, published in 1964. 

You know this to be true as a project manager.  You have likely had a situation in which just the very fact that a telephone call rather than an email from your client means that something urgent is happening.  The message, of course, is important, but the use of the phone communicates something as well.  As a project manager, you can take this to heart and be conscious of what medium YOU use to communicate.  For example, to express sympathy when a stakeholder has an illness in the family, is an email or text really the way to express this?  Or, should you pick up the darn phone and call the person?  Hint: the latter!

Going back to our trees, the medium is the mycorrhizal network discussed in Part I of this post.  To remind you and save you from having to refer to Part I, here is a quote from a Yale E360 interview with Suzanne Simard that explains it just a bit differently.

All trees all over the world, including paper birch and Douglas fir, form a symbiotic association with below-ground fungi. These are fungi that are beneficial to the plants and through this association, the fungus, which can’t photosynthesize of course, explores the soil. Basically, it sends mycelium, or threads, all through the soil, picks up nutrients and water, especially phosphorous and nitrogen, brings it back to the plant, and exchanges those nutrients and water for photosynthate [a sugar or other substance made by photosynthesis] from the plant. The plant is fixing carbon and then trading it for the nutrients that it needs for its metabolism. It works out for both of them.

It’s this network, sort of like a below-ground pipeline, that connects one tree root system to another tree root system, so that nutrients and carbon and water can exchange between the trees. In a natural forest of British Columbia, paper birch and Douglas fir grow together in early successional forest communities. They compete with each other, but our work shows that they also cooperate with each other by sending nutrients and carbon back and forth through their mycorrhizal networks.

If that medium is disrupted, perhaps by construction, that introduces noise into the communication.  Let’s assume that the message gets through without noise (I could easily produce a whole series of posts – and may do so – about the different kinds of noise and perceptual differences that we, as humans, and especially human project managers need to learn to deal with).

Now, that message gets decoded by a receiver, in the case of the trees, perhaps a seedling, and the seedling acknowledges the message with some sort of feedback.   The seedling may be providing this by virtue of growth or health status.  In our case, this could be a nod of a head or a text of a smiley face.  Importantly, even the feedback message is prone to noise and perceptual problems, and could be misinterpreted.  We have all heard the cartoonish but good example of an auctioneer receiving a feedback message of a “bid” for $10,000 for a really ugly painting when the “bidder” had simply meant to scratch her nose.  More practically, in some cultures, a “yes” means, ‘yes I heard you’ and not, ‘yes I will take on the important project task you have just assigned me’.  So be aware of this!  Yes?  Yes?

It turns out that there is even more to say about trees and project management.  So I have to introduce a “Part III” of this two-part series – and this one will coincide with the Holiday Season’s tradition of gifting, and will feature a tree called the serviceberry tree.  Stay tuned – that post should definitely bear fruit.

¹ Shannon, Claude Elwood (October 1948). "A Mathematical Theory of Communication". Bell System Technical Journal. 27 (4): 623–666.

Photo Credit: Amelia Martin / Shutterstock

Some of you who, are old enough, may recall a song by America called, “A Horse With No Name”.  It's from 1971, so that's a few years ago...

In that song, the following lyric appears:

“The ocean is a desert with its life underground

And a perfect disguise above

Under the cities lies a heart made of ground

But the humans will give no love”

In reading the article “Never Underestimate the Intelligence of Trees” from Nautilis magazine, that song immediately came to mind.    At least... my old mind...

Hold that thought as I set this up for you.

The article starts this way:

Consider a forest: One notices the trunks, of course, and the canopy. If a few roots project artfully above the soil and fallen leaves, one notices those too, but with little thought for a matrix that may spread as deep and wide as the branches above. Fungi don’t register at all except for a sprinkling of mushrooms; those are regarded in isolation, rather than as the fruiting tips of a vast underground lattice intertwined with those roots. The world beneath the earth is as rich as the one above.

See?  If you are a fan of music from a certain era, that line should pop into your head – especially with the little push I gave it there at the beginning of the post.

But this is not a post about America (the band nor the country).  It’s about trees, and the magnificent ignorance we have as a species about them.  It’s an ignorance which is fading, however, as we learn more about trees, forests, and the ways in which trees interact.

The article features an interview of – more of a conversation with - Suzanne Simard (pictured below), 

Simard, a scientist from the University of British Columbia, has shown, through extensive research projects, that fungal ‘mycorrhizae’ (a mashup of the Greek words for fungus and root) helps trees extract nutrients from the soil, also connects trees into root-based ‘networks’.  It's a symbiosis - a mutually-beneficial natural relationship.  That itself could be considered a form of communication (and even negotiation!).  But there is much more to the story.

In these networks, individual ‘hub’ trees (which she calls Mother Trees) form the center of forest communities.  These forest communities are even linked to each other – which should sound a little like the Internet, because it quite resembles the Internet.

Where this gets interesting to project managers – aside from the many research projects that are studying this interconnectivity – is best represented by this quote from the article:

(Trees can be) understood as creatures with capacities that in animals are readily regarded as learning, memory, decision-making, and even agency.

This can be difficult to wrap one’s head around. Plants are not supposed to be smart, at least not according to the rubric of traditions known as western thought. There’s also a case to be made that, while these behaviors are indeed extraordinary, they don’t map neatly onto what people usually mean by learning and memory and communication. Perhaps trying to define plants’ behavior according to our own narrow conceptions risks obscuring what is unique about their intelligence.

We all know that communication is 90% of project management.  We also know that learning (for example, “lessons learned”) is an important part of improving our discipline.  Here we find that trees are doing this?  Of course, I’m not suggesting that you hire a birch or oak as your next project manager.  What I am suggesting as that we expand our perception of what “intelligence” and “communication” really means. 

In Part II I will continue this post by focusing on communications. By understanding the ways in which these ‘tree networks’ operate, we may be able to improve project communications as well.

Between Part I and Part II, you can sit back, relax, and enjoy two videos – the first is the America song I referred to above (A Horse With No Name), and the second, is a 4-minute ‘backgrounder’ on how this tree network gets established and works.

A Horse With No Name - America - 1971

How Trees Secretly Talk To Each Other

A recent story (4 hours old) from BBC caught my attention because of its intersection between project management and sustainability.  The story is about not only the potential impact but the rationale for three infrastructure projects in Goa, a state located on India’s west coast.  Of note, the state is a former Portuguese colony with a very interesting history, and the reason that many residents have names like Fernandes, Alvares, and Rodrigues.  From Wikipedia: The Portuguese invaded Goa in 1510, defeating the Bijapur Sultanate. The Portuguese rule lasted for about 450 years, and heavily influenced Goan culture, cuisine, and architecture.  See below for some geographic orientation:

The three projects, as summarized by this article in the Hindustan Times, are:

• …the doubling of an existing railway line between Hubli in Karnataka and Vasco da Gama in Goa, the expansion of the national highway 4A between Belgaum in North Karnataka and Goa and a power line. The railway line, by far the biggest of the three, will come at a cost of diversion of 113.857 ha. of forest land from the protected area and felling of 18,541 trees.
• The second project – a doubling of the existing two lane highway to four lanes that was constructed by the Portuguese colonial government between Panaji in Goa and Belgavi in Karnataka will cost 31.015 ha of forest land and 12,097 trees proposed to be done partly by widening the existing highway, but largely by creating completely new roads on viaduct structures parallel to the existing highway, wherever it cannot be widened due to the difficult nature of the terrain.
• Thirdly, a 400KV power line -- 3.5 km of which passes through protected forest to augment power supply between Goa and Karnataka to provide additional feed to Goa is also proposed.

“Locals fear the works will damage the state's biodiversity and turn it into a coal hub”, says the lead of the story.  Goa is indeed identified as a biodiversity ‘hot spot’.  This had led to legal battles and protests.  See, for example, this news clip from India Today:

 For example, an organization called the Federation of Rainbow Warriors has filed a complaint, summarized here, which seeks to block the projects  The story summarizes their viewpoint:

"All the documents point to Goa becoming a coal hub," says activist Abhijit Prabhudesai. "We have shared these documents with the government more than five months ago, but they are still unable to produce a single document to refute our claims."

The reaction to the three projects by local residents has been vocal.  Below are two videos which summarize the stakeholder concerns:

Here you can also view a 50-minute (at times quite contentious!) interview by Faye D’Souza of Nilesh Cabra, Environmental and Power Minister of Goa.

And here is the interview with the stakeholders who are protesting, also by Faye D’Souza:

I’ll continue to track this and come back with updates but there is a lot to learn from this in terms of:

• Long-term, big-picture thinking in planning projects
• Full (meaning broad and deep) identification of stakeholders
• Understanding how stakeholders (especially opponents) may align
• Better communication and engagement of stakeholders

Keep tuned to People, Planet, Profits, and Projects for updates.

When we last left our star-crossed pair – Sustainable Project Management and Project Success (SPM and PS from here on in), we knew there was a certain tension between them but we also sensed that they may be made for each other.

In this short entry we conclude the story.  Sort of.  Since this is based on academic research the answer, as usual, is “more research is needed”.  And it is.

However we do have a conclusion to share.

The authors of the referenced article (Dubois and Silvius) got results from 112 participants in their survey.  From the article:

112 responses were received. Based on the assumed total population of over 1 million project managers, the sample provides a confidence interval of 9.26% at a 95% confidence level. Given the 5-point Likert scales that were used in the questionnaire, this confidence interval is satisfactory.

If you recall from Part 1 of this post, SbP is Sustainability by Projects and SoP is Sustainability of Projects.  Those terms are defined in Part 1 (and of course, in the article itself).

Here is a sample of the questions that were asked by the researchers:

The answers to this survey were very illustrative especially in the relationship of PS to SPM.

Instead of going through the entire data analysis as did the authors, I will go right to the illustrative conclusion. And here it is:

• SPM and PS show a strong positive correlation

The main finding of the study reported in this paper focuses on the relation between SPM and PS. In line with the earlier studies on this relationship, also this study found a positive correlation that can be considered as strong. And despite the concerns that Silvius and Schipper (2016) expressed about the potential negative effects of considering sustainability on the iron triangle criteria of PS, the overall relation between SPM and PS still appeared as positive. Khalilzadeh et al. (2016)

The study reported in this paper aimed to answer the question How does considering sustainability in project management relate to project success? Based on a literature analysis of the concepts of Sustainable Project Management and Project Success, the study developed a conceptual model of the relationship in which the independent variable SPM was operationalised in six questions, three questions related to SbP and three questions related to SoP. The dependent variable PS was operationalised in five items, which provided a holistic set of criteria.

Based on the analysis of the responses of 112 professionals involved in projects, the study found that both variables PS and SPM showed a high level of internal consistency…This correlation subsequently showed a strong and positive correlation between SPM and PS. And although the study was not aimed at developing proof for the causality between SPM and PS, this conclusion does provides another indication that SPM supports PS.

This is illustrated in the graph below as well:

So yes: Sustainable Project Management, which I assert means, “keeping the big picture in mind”, and “thinking through the end of the project to the steady-state”, and “Focusing on Benefits Realization Management and Value”, does indeed actually have a POSITIVE net effect on Project Success.

So as you watch “It’s a Wonderful Life” this Holiday Season (you can’t help it in many parts of the world), starring Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed (pictured at the top of this post), consider the wonderful life your project can have if it does indeed include Sustainable Project Management!