People, Planet, Profits & Projects

First and foremost, People, Planet, Profits, and Projects wishes you and your family the utmost in terms of staying healthy and well.  We will recover from the COVID-19 crisis, and perhaps we will be more focused on things that can be considered threats to the entire planet when we do.  I plan to blog on that topic but as comedians often say…. Too soon.

So I will continue featuring projects which embed sustainability thinking, projects aimed at sustainability as an outcome, and organizations which establish themselves around sustainability and the ‘triple bottom line’.

Case in point is Footprint – recently featured by FastCompany Magazine as one of the Most Innovative Companies, for leading business toward plastic alternatives. 

I think that their start-up story is amazing.  Paraphrasing from the FastCompany article:

Footprint was started by Troy Swope in 2013 with Yoke Chung, a close friend and now the company’s chief technology officer.  Their mission: tackle food packaging’s environmental and human-health problems. They started by doing what some of do whenever we’re in a supermarket (actually now I long for those days)… looking through the aisles for over-use of plastic— toothbrush boxes, packaged wine, fruit (see photo below).  Then, these two would simply cold-call the manufacturer in hopes of business.

What’s their business?

Let’s let them tell you themselves! 

Right: they are working on a plastic-free world.  So basically, it’s a materials-science company, applying that science to packaging.

To see a short video from FastCompany about Footprint, view below:

Okay here comes the part I like best about this story, and why I write this blog called People, Planet, Profit and Projects.  This touches all of the bases.  Turns out that the founders both worked at Intel.

They believed that the way Intel was packaging its semiconductors wasn’t optimal. One of the world’s most advanced tech companies was shipping half-million-dollar bundles of microchips in plastic containers that leached—or “outgassed”—volatile organic compounds. Swope got permission to form a department with the sole task of innovating packaging. His team used advanced polymers developed for aerospace to protect wafers (the flat sheet of silicon upon which a microchip is built) from moisture, oxygen, and other contaminants, ultimately saving Intel $350 million over a four-year period.

So, people, focused on the planet, started a project which helped Intel make more profit.  Better yet, it helped launch a company now recognized by a top magazine as being one of the most innovative companies of 2020.  It’s all there!

How are they innovating?  How about this:

(Footprint now makes a packing) product that’s been used by Target and Walmart to protect TVs from damage during shipment. Over the past six years, Footprint secured nine patents that cover 125 distinct inventions, including a biodegradable six-pack ring that has more give than its dolphin-entangling polymer counterpart but degrades in saltwater after 12 hours.

I’m impressed and happy to read about their sustainability-oriented success.  At a minimum it’s a great distractor from the bombardment of bad news we’re getting every day.  So read more about it in the full article from FastCompany and tool around the Footprint website for inspiration.  Maybe you could launch a sustainability-oriented project at your company and the next thing you know, you’ll be featured in an international business magazine!

Tinder. Uber.  Indeed.  These companies are really matchmakers.   Like Yente, from Fiddler on the Roof.

Another company you may not have heard of, Indigo has started an initiative – I’ll call it a project – which is also a sort of matchmaker.

Indigo caught my attention because it showed up as #22 in FastCompany’s Most Innovative Companies, 2020.  Here’s a link to their section on Indigo.

If you had heard of Indigo, it may have been because of their introduction of a biocoating for seeds which reduces the need for fertilizers which are harmful to the environment.  You can read about that in this article from Forbes, which states in part,

Indigo Agriculture, a tech startup in Boston, Massachusetts, makes seed treatments that help plants grow. The technology involves coating the seeds of corn, rice, soybeans and wheat with natural microbes. The result? Plants thrive like they're supposed to.

The private company also appears to be thriving, and recently announced $250 million in new venture capital investments along with a new digital marketplace for buying and selling grain.

Indigo Ag was founded in 2014 by Flagship Pioneering, a Cambridge biotech investment firm, and reportedly has crops growing on about 1 million acres across the United States.

You can learn about the process with this video.

That’s some background on indigo.  Now on to that matchmaking Terraton Inititative.  It’s about connecting farmers to regenerative farming techniques.

The plan aims to eventually pay farmers in this program $15 to $20 per ton of carbon that they sequester using tools like no-till and cover crops, aiming to sequester 1 trillion tons of carbon into the earth.   Payments could tally an estimated $30 to $60 per acre.

The techniques for such sequestration, according to David Perry, CEO of Indigo, are (from an excellent article in agriculture.com):

• Cover crops. Besides protecting the soil from erosion, cover crops can enhance soil microbial populations and build soil carbon as they decay. 
• Incorporation of livestock. Grazing and manure deposited by livestock can help build soil carbon. 
• No-till farming. “When the soil is plowed, carbon is released into the atmosphere,” says Perry. “So, not tilling it keeps it in the soil.” 
• Diverse crop rotation. “A variety of crops in the soil can help build soil carbon,” he says.
• Commercial input reduction. Reducing commercial inputs like herbicides and fertilizers can help preserve beneficial soil life that helps build soil carbon

The initiative is also summarized in this video by Indigo

Is this catching on?  Well, Indigo had hoped to enroll about 1.5 acres of farmland in the first six months of the initiative.   Instead, farmers with more than 15 million acres have expressed interest.

Now that’s a great start to a great initiative. 

So we’re talking about a pretty good matchmaker!

Yente would be proud.

COVID-19 and its spread makes it seem trivial to talk about a single solar power installation.  By the same token, we will - with science and good project management - defeat this virus, so in a way, one way to defeat it is to continue working on other important issues, and climate change is one of them. 

Installing solar power on one house is clearly not going to do much in and of itself, but I hope that one project will yield inspiration and enablement of others.

In any case, I had promised to give an update on our home’s solar installation when we went over 1 mWh (one megawatt hour).  That's where the wacky blog post title came from... mega-what-our...  In any case, we’ve achieved that milestone (see image below)!

March was a particularly sunny month and that put us over the top.

See other image below.

Yep, over 1.1 mWh, with about 580 kWh coming in one month alone!  Economically, our bills have dropped to near zero, and now we are enrolled in Massachusetts’ SMART program, which provides additional incentives to solar homes.

Learn more about SMART here.

The Massachusetts Department of Energy Resources (DOER), in conjunction with the participating electric utilities is setting their sights even higher for the most energy-efficient state in the nation by launching the Solar Massachusetts Renewable Target (SMART) Program. The SMART Program is a long-term sustainable solar incentive program sponsored by Eversource, National Grid and Unitil. SMART will encourage the development of solar photovoltaic (PV) technology by supporting 1,600 MW of new solar generating capacity.

The SMART Program began with 17 projects totaling 53.273 MW of solar PV. These new Solar Tariff Generation Units (STGUs) will generate clean, renewable power for decades to come. Along with this first block of awards, the Base Compensation Rate levels have been set for the SMART program. On November 26, 2018 the SMART Program became available to solar PV projects of all types and sizes, up to 5 MW per project. 

With your help, we can create a brighter, more sustainable future for Massachusetts.

So, it’s a start.  It’s one project in a program.  And it’s one program in the renewable energy portfolio.

Further updates to be posted.

Stay well, listen to scientists, and base your decisions on facts.

I had promised to give you an update on our solar power installation and I will shortly.  In fact, here’s a tidbit: we have produced 700KwH of power in just our first 2.5 months.  We're on our way to our first megawatt hour of power!

But I want to wait until I start seeing the economic benefit.  As soon as I see what this does to our electric bill, I’ll be back to you with more.  For now, I want to talk about power but of a very different kind: the power we use to run our PROJECTS.  Human power.  Project management power!  So this is a bit of a departure from the sustainability subject.  Or is it?  Don’t we want to make a difference? Don’t we want that ability to make a difference to be long-lasting?  So, I could easily make an argument that this IS a posting about sustainability in perhaps an even more meaningful sense.

Much of this post originates in – or at least the thinking behind it was stimulated by an article https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/09/28/power-paradox-dachter-keltner/ which in turn comes from a book called, “The Power Paradox” by Dacher Keltner.

What is "power" in the world of humans, and therefore in the world of project management?

From the book:

Power defines the waking life of every human being. It is found not only in extraordinary acts but also in quotidian (blogger’s confession: I had to look this word up – it means ‘everyday’) acts, indeed in every interaction and every relationship, be it an attempt to get a two-year-old to eat green vegetables or to inspire a stubborn colleague to do her best work. It lies in providing an opportunity to someone, or asking a friend the right question to stir creative thought, or calming a colleague’s rattled nerves, or directing resources to a young person trying to make it in society. Power dynamics, patterns of mutual influence, define the ongoing interactions between fetus and mother, infant and parent, between romantic partners, childhood friends, teens, people at work, and groups in conflict. Power is the medium through which we relate to one another. Power is about making a difference in the world by influencing others.

So that actually should make sense to you – it did to me.  But there is a problem, and thus the ‘power paradox’.

The power paradox is this: we rise in power and make a difference in the world due to what is best about human nature, but we fall from power due to what is worst. We gain a capacity to make a difference in the world by enhancing the lives of others, but the very experience of having power and privilege leads us to behave, in our worst moments, like impulsive, out-of-control sociopaths.

How we handle the power paradox guides our personal and work lives and determines, ultimately, how happy we and the people we care about will be. It determines our empathy, generosity, civility, innovation, intellectual rigor, and the collaborative strength of our communities (Blogger’s note: also our PROJECTS) and social networks. Its ripple effects shape the patterns that make up our families, neighborhoods, and workplaces, as well as the broader patterns of social organization that define societies and our current political struggles

As project managers, I think this next quote will ‘move’ you a bit.  Read it carefully, perhaps even read it twice, slowly:

Our influence, the lasting difference that we make in the world, is ultimately only as good as what others think of us. Having enduring power is a privilege that depends on other people continuing to give it to us.

WOW.

We gain power (and the ability to influence) by improving how others think about us, whether it’s good-natured-ness, or competence, or expertise.  But watch out, project managers, we can lose this power easily, because…

…another paradox lives inside the power paradox — the more powerful a person becomes, the busier and more rushed she is, which cuts her off from the very qualities that define the truly powerful. What would the studies Keltner cites look like if we controlled not only for power, but for time — for the perception of being rushed and demand-strained beyond capacity?

Does that sound familiar, busy project managers?

I plan on covering this a bit more in Part 2, including any feedback from all of you all, and some definitions of  Power, Status, Control, and even Social Class.

That means I would like to influence you to respond to this post with your observations and reflections on how you have successfully made a difference in your projects by using your personal project management power.  Will you help?  Sure, you will!  Do it now while you are thinking about it!  Your comments may appear powerfully in powerful part 2!

(AP Photo/Rodrigo Abd)

In Part 1 of this series (which you really should read first, no – really, it’s worth it), I discussed the La Plata region of Peru, and how it has been devastated by illegal and environmentally-unsound mining for gold.

In this post I will review some of the project management-related aspects of the rescue program.

For a little history on this you can visit this article regarding the Peruvian government’s approach to halting the mining.  And here, from The University of Maryland’s Public Policy Peru website is a description of Operación Mercurio 2019:

The Vizcarra administration and the Council of Ministries adopted a plan for intervention that entered its first phase in February of 2019. It is intended to end gold mining in La Pampa in the near term and invest in sustainable alternatives in the longer term. The formal name of the plan can be loosely translated as the “Integral Plan Against Illegal Mining in Madre de Dios.” It’s known more commonly as “Operación Mercurio 2019.”

The plan has four priorities:

1. Eviction of illegal mining operations.
2. Formalization of legal mining in limited areas with cleaner practices.
3. Addressing social problems like human trafficking and child labor.
4. Investment and development in sustainable alternative livelihoods.

“Priority 1” is done. The Guardian article summarizes this:

By air, land and river, hundreds of army commandos and more than 1,200 police officers swooped on La Pampa.

Peruvians had grown rather used to seeing images of commandos helicoptered into the jungle, driving out miners and blowing up machines in what many suspected was a show for the cameras. But this time, the scale of the operation and the tone of the rhetoric was different.

“We’re not leaving until we see this place green, as it always was,” said Peru’s defence minister, José Huerta. Security forces say they expelled some 6,000 miners, captured dozens of suspected criminals and rescued more than 50 trafficked women in the raid, the result of months of meticulous planning and intelligence gathering.

Photos from https://panamericana.pe/nacionales/260104-autoridades-ejecutan-amplio-operativo-mineria-ilegal-pampa

Note the planning element – we can appreciate that as project managers!  There is more project management intrigue here as well.

Agile prototyping

Silman’s team (if you remember, this refers to Miles Silman, the conservation biologist at Wake Forest University who uttered the bad word that gave Part 1 its PG-13 rating) has been growing test plots of more than 75 plant species to guide the reforestation push. The scientists are tracking how the plants perform in a variety of conditions; some prefer flat terrain with direct sun, whereas others need shade or very moist soil. The team’s results suggest that adding charcoal — or a similar substance called biochar — to the soil bolsters plant growth and survival. “We want to give people options, so that we aren’t just planting trees that are going to die,” Silman says.

Done is better than perfect

Stuart Pimm is an ecologist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.

But rather than worrying too much about trying to recreate what was there before, Pimm says that scientists and the government should get some plants in the ground and let nature take its course. “Just getting some forest cover is something they can probably do,” he says, “and it’s going to be a hell of a lot better than a barren landscape with some toxic puddles in the middle.”

The reversal of an expletive and a transition to the (very) long term

As you recall, in part one, when Miles Silman saw the devastation, his first words were (appropriately) nasty ones.  I close this post with the way the story in Nature closes – hopeful and thoughtful, focused on the future, not the past or present. 

You can see some of this project work in this rather beautiful article (and photos and videos) from APNews.

Here is how the article in Nature ends:

As Silman and his colleagues wrapped up their day of field work in June, the sun was setting — and La Pampa was coming alive. Ducks were on the move, and fish in ponds began rising to feed on insects. Silman has little doubt that plants and animals will recolonize this largely empty space over hundreds or thousands of years. The question, he says, is whether scientists can help to accelerate that recovery, or whether La Pampa will remain little more than a monument to human stupidity over the coming decades.

There is a lesson here also for PMs – focus not just on the project, but past its results and years, even decades – or in this case, even centuries – into the future.