People, Planet, Profits & Projects

Photo Credit: International Business Times - James Palinsad

Many of the best blog posts I’ve read lately are about how understanding ourselves, how we work as humans, can make us better communicators, better negotiators, better facilitators, and most importantly, better project managers.  These excellent posts, focused on psychology – on individual human behavior and on group human behavior – in short, about the human brain, are very important.

This is not one of those posts.

Instead it’s about fish brains.

Yes, you read that correctly, it’s about the brains of fish.  How can this possibly tie into sustainability and project management?  Well, put on your thinking cap (and perhaps scuba gear) because I’m going to make that connection.

Recently, there was an article in The Economist called “mind bending”.  It focuses mainly on the levels of various contaminants in the Great Lakes of the USA and in the Niagara River, and Niagara Falls as well.  One twist to the article was regarding the effects of medicines taken by people and their effect on these waterways.  From the article:

When people take antidepressant drugs or hormonal medicines. traces end up in the Great Lakes.  Diana Aga, a chemist at the University at Buffalo, had found high concentrations of Prozac, Zoloft, Colexa, and Sarafem in the brains of fish taken from the Niagara River, which connects Lake Erie to Lake Ontario.

These drugs appear in fish brains in a rate that is 20 times higher than in the water.  And it has consequences.  Fish brains are similar enough to human brains such that they react to antidepressants in the same way, becoming ‘happier’ and more risk seeking, which is not good if you are prey to other species.  Some researches worry that the changes in behavior could “trigger the collapse of an entire fish population” and jeopardize the ecosystem of the Great Lakes, which is the largest freshwater ecosystem in the world.  On further research, the findings of antidepressants in fish brains is not only showing up in a random Economist article, it’s science, as shown in this article from the Journal of Environmental Science and Technology, which states:

The continuous release of pharmaceuticals and personal care products (PPCPs) into freshwater systems impacts the health of aquatic organisms. This study evaluates the concentrations and bioaccumulation of PPCPs and the selective uptake of antidepressants in fish from the Niagara River, which connects two of the North American Great lakes (Erie and Ontario). The Niagara River receives PPCPs from different wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) situated along the river and Lake Erie.

The antidepressants were selectively taken up by various fish species at different trophic levels, and were further metabolized once inside the organism. The highest bioaccumulation was found in the brain, followed by liver, muscle, and gonads, and can be attributed to direct exposure to WWTP effluent.

 Okay, so what does this have to do with Project Management and sustainability?  Well, it turns out that the molecules that make up antidepressants and other such contaminants are too small for the current technology of treatment plants to catch.  So, investment must be made to update or replace the treatment mechanisms of not 1, not 100, but 1,400 wastewater treatment plants around the lakes.  That’s going to trigger projects.  Lots of them.  So there’s the connection to projects, how about sustainability?  Well, as we’ve pointed out in this blog numerous times, what’s increasingly important for us as project managers is to think through the end of your project’s product.  In this case, a new pharmaceutical product that you help launch may do a fantastic job of solving the problem it was intended to, but what happens to it after it’s consumed?  Is that any concern of yours?  You should expand this to whatever product (or service) it is that your project’s outcome produces.  What happens to it 1 year, 2 years, a decade after it is in operation?  Of course you don’t have to manage that operation, but thinking about the steady state may help you identify stakeholders and threats you may not have thought of otherwise.

So take a moment with your human brain to think about how these fish brains may have a lesson for us as project managers.  While you are thinking, you can watch this old video of a song by comedy-rock duo Barnes & Barnes that may have been written under the influence of any number of pharmaceuticals!

Today I have the pleasure of providing you with a guest post from Kris Kohl, who also is the author of Becoming a Sustainable Organization - an excellent book on the project management intersection with sustainability.  In this post, though, she's focused on the People portion of People, Planet, Profits, and Projects.

Enjoy the post.

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During a recent presentation on “Female Empowerment”, I was asked the question, “Does the “Me Too” trend really just needed more time to bring equality for females and males in the workplace?” I opened up the answer to the women in the room and the responses varied but were in agreement on the point that women reaching equality in the workplace is not just a function of time. We need policy, process, and people changes in order to support our career, family, and lifestyle choices. The workplace of today needs to be more inclusive in order to ensure that our organizations not only survive but also thrive.

Globally women face numerous challenges. According to a World Bank Report, 155 countries have at least one law impeding women’s economic progress. Even in the U.S., only a few organizations offer both maternity and paternity leave.  Women are often the providers of free care for children and the elderly.  As I discuss in my book, Becoming a Sustainable Organization, even in the OECD countries there is a “motherhood tax” versus a “fatherhood bonus.” Gender roles and pay gaps persist.  According to the WSJ, women earn 82 cents for every $1 earned by men and Hispanic women only earn 54 cents.

As we look to the C-suite, the WSJ reports that women are 47% of the workforce but only 26% of senior management. They represent only 11% of top earners. As leaders women serve as 5.2% of the S&P 500 CEOs. We continue to see the “Me Too” movement as a major trend for 2018. While organizations and their leaders clearly have challenges, we also see opportunities.

According to the U.S. Department of Education, women make up 56% of the college graduates in 2017. The talent pool of highly qualified candidates is tipping toward female. From an organizational performance perspective, McKinsey research shows that organizations’ with gender diversity outperform by 15% non-gender diverse companies. At the leadership level, a 10% increase in diversity at the senior level leads to .8x increase in EBITDA.  These benefits come from expanding market opportunities as your workforce becomes more reflective of your customer base. Winning the talent war in terms of attracting the best and brightest from a diverse talent pool. Improving organizational reputation with both internal and external stakeholders as leadership builds an inclusive workplace to support a diverse workforce. Leveraging a diverse group to drive innovation.

In order to build exceptional gender-based workplace partnerships, we take a page from Appreciative Inquiry, focusing on the positive rather than the negative. We ask employees, what is the best experience that you have had with your organization? When did you feel most excited about your involvement? What made the experience exciting? How were you supported and empowered in that situation? Who was involved and how did they behave? What resources were available and which ones were most important to your success? As we begin this process of asking what is working and building on positive experience, we lift up our successes as best practices and lessons learned to share across the organization and beyond. To succeed, we must collaborate across the organization including all genders and diverse groups in the process.

Figure 1

In Figure 1, Creating an Inclusive Organization, we layout a continuous improvement process to build a more inclusive organization. As we expand this process across the organization, we can create an inclusive environment to make all employees feel welcome and valued. Begin with a needs assessment, make inclusivity a foundational pillar of the organization, create a strategy to embed inclusion in the culture, implement, and continuously improve the process.

In order to promote female empowerment, we must balance power by integrating women at the most senior level.  In order to create a more inclusive culture, women need a voice in strategy and policy decisions. Developing workplace structures to support both careers and families including mid career “off ramps” and “on ramps” allows for fluid movement between roles. Intentionally include women in conversations around program design, analysis, and measurement allows for their in put in the development of the “rules” for success. As project managers, evenly distribute who gets the “Goldie Locks” projects so that all have an opportunity to shine.

A gender diverse workforce is good for society and business. However, females need to be integrated across all levels of the organization in order to create an inclusive and equitable workplace. Using Appreciative Inquiry as a tool is a way to focus on the positive and to reallocate time, attention and resources to what is working in the realm of female empowerment. Together, we can drive positive change within our organizations and society by removing the barriers to female gender equality.

Kristina Kohl, MBA, PMP

[email protected]

When Dave Shirley and I started EarthPM in 2009 or so, we often had to explain that our book, Green Project Management, was not about managing green projects, but rather putting the ‘green’ into project management thinking.

  In fact, we even had to go negotiate with our publisher to find a book cover that expressed the idea better than their first proposals, which inevitably were photos of fields of daisies with wind turbines in the background, or children running through a forest, or even the inevitable whale’s tail.  But our book was not a tale about whales, it was the story of how project managers could (and should) gain an advantage in their work by thinking long-term.  In fact, it really never was about “green” per se, which limits the discussion to the ecological part of the Triple Bottom Line.  Yes, it IS about that ecological portion, but it’s about all three – ecological, social, and economic.  This is why we settled on a cover that had a tree that grew money.  Money (economic) from a tree (ecological) can benefit people (social).  Well, it worked for us, anyway.

The point is, because of this connection of sustainability thinking and projects only being about ecological issues, I sometimes avoid stories that are indeed about ‘green’ or ecologically-oriented projects.  Now that the message is getting out there, and other authors (Silvius, Kohl) are publishing excellent work on the true sustainability-thinking aspect, and now that the idea is even slowly seeping into the PMBOK® Guide (see the two most recent posts here on People, Planet, Profits, and Projects), I think it’s okay, (no, not just okay, but a good idea!) to post about projects which are mostly ecological in their inception and execution.

And that takes us to the steppes of Mongolia.  And a dog called the bankhar.

In the Altai Mountains of Mongolia, there is a need to protect the cashmere-yielding goats (animals that are the sustenance for the families of many Mongolian farmers) from predators such as snow leopards and wolves.  Climate change, in the form of desertification (an interesting topic in and of itself) and over grazing has made the herds of these goats more susceptible to these predators.

Enter the bankhar.  The Mongolian Bankhar Dog Project whose mission (from their web site) is “to help slow down and reverse the desertification of the Mongolian Grassland Steppes, and to preserve and protect traditional Mongolian culture. We strive toward these goals by resuscitating the traditional use of the livestock guardian dog known as the ‘Bankhar dog’.”

The project is the brainchild of American biologist (and entrepreneur) Bruce Elfström.  Elfström, who was working on filming an IMAX movie in Mongolia, began talking to herders and researching livestock protection dogs as a missing link in the complex conservation puzzle. He realized that this was a historical solution to a highly modern problem. Discovering several families still using the original Bankhar dogs in remote areas of Mongolia, Bruce founded Mongolian Bankhar Dog Project in 2011 to put this research into practice.

If you’re interested in the chartering of this project, take a look at this TEDx talk by Bruce Elfström himself.  From a purely PM perspective, it’s interesting to hear how Bruce identified stakeholders, found sponsors, and sorted out the threats and opportunities at the start of his project.

The project also has to deal with stakeholders who insist that “a dog is just a dog” and that there’s no need to bring this specific landrace back.  So part of the project manager’s job (as usual) is to convince stakeholders of the value of the project.  In this case, it involves using DNA research to demonstrate the value of bringing this particular dog back as a “missing piece” in the puzzle of supporting the nomadic Mongolian farmers.   Using facts, persuading stakeholders to influence them to contribute… even though this is a project in the Altai Mountains of Mongolia, it sounds pretty familiar to a construction project just outside of Des Moines, Iowa, doesn’t it?

So what is the real motivation behind this project?

• One single predator like a snow leopard can kill up to 40% of a herder’s flock in Mongolia over the course of a season
• Mongolian nomadic herding families make an average of $3/day
• In a program similar to ours in South Africa, use of livestock protection dogs was shown to reduce depredation by at least 33 percent at every participating farm and eliminated completely at more than 90 percent of farms
• In North America, a study showed that livestock protection dogs reduced predation by 64%, and in one year, 53% of producers with LPDs had depredation losses reduced to zero.

What about the dogs themselves?

• Bankhar dogs are an ancient landrace ( a domesticated, locally adapted, traditional variety of a species) which co-evolved with humans to serve as an effective guardian of livestock on the Mongolian steppe.
• Males average 120 lbs and 30 inches at shoulder. Females average 100 lbs. Bankhar have heavy fur to protect them from the harsh Mongolian climate, as Mongolia is the coldest place on earth where livestock protection dogs are used. It’s not uncommon for Bankhar to live to 17 years old.  Traditionally they eat a diet of herders’ leftovers—sheep innards, whey, noodles, and bones.

I would suggest that you read the entire article which triggered my interest in this project, to learn about the threats and opportunities the project actually encountered, including working with other non-profit NGOs such as the Snow Leopard Trust.   [PAGE 65]

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/could-dogs-help-save-the-mongolian-steppe/

Also suggested is this video, “Bringing back the bankhar”:

All that said, we simply can’t leave you without a video of these amazing dogs, so for your viewing pleasure, I present bankhar puppies!

You can actually help fund this project – here’s their Indiegogo funding page:

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/mongolian-bankhar-dog-project-one-year-funding#/

…or their fundraising video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=234&v=0sWDpkv-_vQ

Don't forget to register for PMXPO-2018. 

I am proud to be one of your speakers!

Here's the link - do it now, while you're thinking about it.

https://www.projectmanagement.com/events/431895/PMXPO-2018

The topic of my presentation:

...and as you might imagine, it will be aligned with this blog's main themes: People, Planet, Profits & Projects.

In Part 1, I discussed some of the aspects of the intersection of sustainability and PM with the new concept of “Overall Risk” introduced in the 6^th Edition of the PMBOK® Guide.  I promised that there were other hiding places that I’d uncover, and in this Part 2, I’ll continue with a new risk response.  That’s right, PMI has introduced a new response (that is listed for both Threats and Opportunities) called Escalate.

Let me summarize “Escalate” (I’ll focus on the Threat response) and then connect the dots with respect to sustainability.

First of all, a brief refresher on the other risk responses.  You should recall that the responses to threats in the 5^th Edition were Avoid, Transfer, Mitigate, and Accept.  I put together this handy table to help you relate this to reality.  I use the scenario of a telecom team installing equipment on a rocky, steep cliff.

This is how we responded to threat up until the 6^th Edition.  Now, however, we’re much more modern. We have added Escalate.  Escalate allows the project manager to acknowledge that threats that may be visible to the PM exist outside his or her realm.  The description in the Guide also includes cases in which – even if the threat is in the project area – the response would exceed the project manager’s authority.  This is key, as you’ll see later.  In writing about sustainability and project management, and in commiserating with others who do so, we often get a sort of whiny feedback that goes something like, “we manage a project and not the company, so when you tell me about these large risks like ‘what this means to the environment’, it’s beyond my control or area of concern, so I have to let these go, and worry about my project’.

PMI just took that excuse away.

You should be looking for these sorts of threats, and if you find one where either the threat itself is ‘beyond your vision’ or the response would require ‘bigger things to happen than you can control’, PMI is saying that you should speak truth to power, and not just squelch the threat, but give it to the people who can care for it. 

And, even if you are not looking for these sort of threats, they may still reveal themselves to you.  The same logic applies.  If you realize that the threat is ‘bigger than your project’, that doesn’t mean to silence it!  It means you may have to escalate.

This speaks more to the more mature view of project management as the connection between vision/mission/strategy to day-to-day operations, and it seems (at least to me) that it encourages a more vocal PM who should raise these threats, rather than burying them, either literally, or by virtue of saying “not in my job description”.

The Escalate risk response also says this: “Escalated risks are managed at the program level, portfolio level, or other relevant part of the organization.”

My co-author Dave Shirley, PMP and I wrote Green Project Management back in 2010.  Although it won PMI’s Cleland Award for literature in the following year, the response from project managers was, well, let’s just say it was good but uninspiring.  That’s why we followed it up with a book called, Driving Project, Program, and Portfolio Success.  Just as in the 6^th Edition, we realized, in writing this second book, that sometimes sustainability issues are at those levels (program and portfolio) and the project management population sees these issues as being part of a ‘great beyond’.  What I like about this “Escalation” risk response is that it defines ‘the great beyond’ – makes it approachable and familiar.

For completeness, I do want to reiterate that Escalate shows up on both the Threat and Opportunity sides of the risk equation.  It’s pretty much the equal and opposite of Escalate for threats.

One last point: in both cases (Threat and Opportunity) the PMBOK® Guide advises us that “escalated (opportunities or threats) are not monitored further by the project team after escalation, although they may be recorded in the risk register for information.  I applaud this notion of transferring this knowledge to future project managers for their consideration.

So with all this wisdom in hand, let’s finish that table above and make it 6^th Edition compliant.  For this, let’s change the scenario to my example of the paving material choice in my post “Paved With Good Intentions”.  It's a more appropriate example for this response.