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A Complex, Swirling Mess - Part 2
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In part 1 of “A Complex, Swirling Mess”, I introduced the ideas from a brief story from NPR (link to the broadcast and transcript repeated here for your convenience). The story discussed how some companies are (in a valid, ethical way) profiting from the effects of climate change, by way of consulting and advising other organizations which need to deal NOW with changes that (whatever their cause) are going to happen in the next 1, 5, 10, 25, or 100 years. For a short story (the audio is only 3.5 minutes long!) it sent me on a journey of discovery about the fascinating business of actuarial science (see Part 1) and how climate change, in the spirit of secondary risk, is opening an opportunity for some companies. One of the companies featured in the story is Jupiter Intelligence. Jupiter is featured in this recent story from the Washington Post, entitled, “Climate change could put businesses underwater. Start-up firm Jupiter aims to come to the rescue”. Before you read about Jupiter, take a look at this report, entitled Risky Business, sponsored by Co-Chairs: Michael R. Bloomberg, founder, Bloomberg Philanthropies; 108th Mayor of the City of New York; founder, Bloomberg L.P., Henry M. Paulson, Jr., Chairman of the Paulson Institute; former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, and Thomas F. Steyer, retired founder, Farallon Capital Management LLC. You can download the full report here. The key paragraph in the Washington Post story is: “This week, a high-powered, well-funded start-up company has barged onto the scene to help businesses and governments confront their increasing vulnerability to climate change and weather disasters. Using cutting edge technology, it could revolutionize how they receive information about weather and climate threats and make critical planning decisions. Known as Jupiter, the company was founded in 2017 by Rich Sorkin, a serial entrepreneur who has worked with Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Elon Musk. Sorkin was Musk’s first boss as chief executive of Zip2, a company that provided business directories to online newspapers in the late 1990s.” If you go to the “Team” page of Jupiter Intelligence you will see that they have hired many top experts in the area of climate science. Many of these have become available as the ‘difference in philosophy’ between the Obama and Trump administrations about climate change and science in general has become apparent. The demand is there. A recent article in Nature describes “The Rise of Demand-Driven Climate Services”. It’s important to note that this is different – very different – from weather forecasting. This is about climate – sweeping, significant, impactful change over longer periods of time. Jupiter offers tools that predict the impact of climate-related incidents in a specific place and accounting for very local issues, Including FloodScore™ and HeatScore™. They’re built on a platform called ClimateScore™ which “leverages cloud computing to run and link multiple prediction models that ingest data from millions of ground-based and satellite sensors”. “FloodScore and HeatScore predict not only precipitation and temperature changes, but also simulate their interactions with the built environment and the surrounding landscape and how they’re altered by climate change. In the assessing flood risk in New Orleans, for example, the analytical framework would take into account the convergence of wetlands and concrete and sea level rise”, says Richard Sorkin, the Founder of Jupiter Intelligence. Below is an example output of one of the analyses for flooding potential in New York City.
Jupiter is also featured in this article from The New York Times. In it, a key extract is: As global warming advances, experts say that governments will ultimately have to invest more in their own local climate prediction tools to help cities and industries adapt. But they also see a role for private climate forecasters, much as weather companies have sprung up to supplement the work the National Weather Service does. “The federal government could be doing a lot more,” said James L. Buizer, who studies climate adaptation at the University of Arizona. “But there’s still an important role for the private sector. If companies are going to benefit from this information, they ought to be paying for it. After all, it’s their infrastructure that’s going to get trashed.” That private sector, exemplified by Jupiter Intelligence, has a chance to turn a profit on climate change. As they do so, it also may bring more attention to the issue, but the point here is that – like project managers - long-term planners are best off making decisions from solid data, based in science, and that’s what Jupiter and others such as Coastal Risk are aiming to provide.
Of course, you can read more about Jupiter or Coastal Risk on their websites. |
Batter up!
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Blogger's Note: There is indeed a Part 2 coming to "A Complex, Swirling Mess". But in the interim, I thought I would share this interesting and mildly-related post. Here's a trivia question for you: What is it that indirectly contributes US$23 billion (that's with a "b") to the US economy?
Got it? Yes, it's a bat. Bats help keep plant-eating insects under control by preying on such bugs and also by hunting down bugs that, in turn, prey on pollinator insects. In short, without them, a natural form of pest-control goes away, and farmers suffer huge losses. Now, let's apply some of our project management fundamental knowledge. To bake a cake, we need to procure the ingredients. We need a recipe. Those in hand, we can mix the ingredients per the recipe and form a batter. We then can pour that batter into a pan and put it into a pre-heated oven. Once baked, we can take it out of the oven, let it cool, and apply frosting. Can we do this in a different order, or can we do these tasks all in parallel? No. There are dependencies. I can't speed things up by frosting the cake before the baking is done. I can't mix the ingredients until I have them. The dependencies define the 'logic' of our schedule and provide a true end-time for the cake being ready to deliver. Without the dependencies, the entire schedule goes... well, it goes batty. So that takes us back to the bats. It turns out that very recent research (Scientific American, Volume 318, Number 5, May 2018) indicates that, possibly because of a warming climate, bats are showing up much earlier than they did as little as 20 years ago, at cave locations where the bats spend the summer consuming crop-eating insects. The bats in question travel from Mexico to a cave near San Antonio, Texas. The schedule - the natural schedule - calls for the bats to arrive in time for their meal. But now, the system is 'out of sync'. It would be equivalent to us putting the raw ingredients in the oven without mixing them, or trying to frost the batter and then baking the cake. The study referred to in the article was done by the Rothamsted Research laboratory and used data from about 160 US weather stations to analyze activity of these bats from 1995 through 2017. A separate study in Indiana which was published last year also found that temperature variations affected arrival and departure times of the migrations of bats - another indication of dependency on temperature. A full-fledged connection to climate change is yet to be made, but there's certainly a suggested link since there is also a corresponding rise in temperatures during this period.
Bats exiting Bracken Cave near San Antonio I recommend a visit to this site which has the report from the Rothamsted researchers. I also recommend holding off on frosting that cake until you have taken it out of the oven and let it cool down.
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A Complex, Swirling Mess
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People, Planet, Profits, and Projects – that’s been the name of this blog since its inception. If ever there was a post that truly lived up to this blog name, it’s this one (well, actually two, because it’s too good to fit in only one post). This post was triggered by a very short story on NPR which you can listen to right now, and I suggest that you could do just that – stop reading and have a listen: The gist of the story is that People, concerned with how the Planet's climate is changing, are able to generate Profit by initiating Projects and starting up companies that focus on how to best deal with the changes that are predicted. See that? People, Planet, Profit, and Projects! In this Part 1, I’ll focus on the high level ideas raised in the story and some follow-up research. In Part 2, I will take you into some of the details and take a look at one of the companies which has arisen with this specialized expertise in climate change and its effects on cities, regions, and organizations. The title of this post, “A Complex Swirling Mess”, comes from a description given by actuary Rebecca Owen, who advises healthcare companies and insurers about the effects of climate change based on data. Between heat waves, droughts, dust, pollen, rainfall, and traffic accidents (just as a sample), she describes the combined effects of climate change with that term. It turns out that the entire aspect of actuarial science and the factual study of climate data is very interesting to me as a project manager, who wants decisions based on facts. Actuaries – well, that’s what they do. They aren’t politicians, they don’t work for Greenpeace, they have no “axe to grind”, they simple bear down and focus on statistics and what it means for the future. What does an actuary do? According to the Society of Actuaries, they are “professionals in the modeling and management of financial risk and contingent events”. Sounds interesting to us as project managers, right? In fact, this is the theme of Chapter 11 of the PMBOK® Guide, isn’t it, although focused on a particular project rather than an entire business. So what does the actuarial field find when they study climate change? Well, they find the risk trigger for a complex, swirling mess, as indicated by findings such as a steadily increasing amount and intensity of extreme weather and issues related to such things as sea level rise. The SOA, or Society of Actuaries, has created a Actuaries Climate Index™ and it shows a troubling trend when it comes to extreme weather. Here is their press release: Organizations representing the actuarial profession in Canada and the United States today updated the Actuaries Climate Index™, an objective, quarterly measure of changes in extreme weather frequency and sea level. The Actuaries Climate Index value for fall 2016 was 2.07, the highest seasonal level recorded for the United States and Canada combined. The current five-year moving average is 1.07, the highest level recorded for that measure. The index is available online at ActuariesClimateIndex.org. The key ACI chart is show below:
So the next question, and the topic of the larger Part 2 of this post, is, what can we do with this information? Just as in a project, when we get information about risk, we can ignore it, or we can work it into our planning for the future (the better choice, I would argue). Some organizations are working with the information themselves, and other businesses have sprung up which specialize in advising and consulting with solid information from these actuarial sources and directly from scientists and researchers. They’re taking the best from business, government, and academia to sell intelligence on how to plan for a changing climate. And it’s no small deal. In 2017 there were 16 major weather disasters which cost over $300B in damage, affecting an estimated 16% of the US population alone. So, some companies are turning this threat into an opportunity. Tune in to Part 2 to see why and how they are doing it. |
Secondary Risk in the Playground
| Photo Credit: Hanna Rosin Legal disclaimer: In this post it may seem like some of the stakeholders, perhaps even your humble author, have a nonchalant attitude towards children’s injuries. No children were hurt in the writing of this blog post, and as it happens, the author has a very non-nonchalant attitude to such injuries. Blog disclaimer: This post is a little less about sustainability than usual but it’s still very much about long-term thinking and it’s definitely related to major project management topics. Disclaimer disclaimer: There are no further disclaimers. Those of you who have been to a playground, lately, at least in the USA, have most likely noticed that everything is super-safe. Rounded corners, padded flooring, not a 90-degree angle in sight. As a parent, this makes you feel proud, good, calm, and less worried. Right? Things like putting down layers of rubberized mulch, super bouncy floors, and round, smooth edges -these are all example of a risk response we call mitigation – reducing the likelihood of a threat (in this case injury to a child). However, as good PMs we also recognize that there is something called secondary risk – new risk introduced by a risk response. But is there a secondary risk HERE? That is, do these risk responses to protect our kids from any possible threat, trigger any new risks? And what in the world would those risks be? Well, think a bit about it. Think of the threat of lost learning opportunities. Think of the way this may be insulating kids from the way the world really works. Is it possible that all of these safety measures are preventing kids from learning (albeit the ‘hard way’) about the world around them, the way things really work? There’s some very prevalent thinking that says something to the effect of: “Beware The Padded Floor”. For example, have a look at this extract from an article called The Overprotected Kid in The Atlantic magazine, discussing an adventure playground in North Wales called “The Land” at which from time to time there are fires: If a 10-year-old lit a fire at an American playground, someone would call the police and the kid would be taken for counseling. At the Land, spontaneous fires are a frequent occurrence. The park is staffed by professionally trained “playworkers,” who keep a close eye on the kids but don’t intervene all that much. Claire Griffiths, the manager of the Land, describes her job as “loitering with intent.” Although the playworkers almost never stop the kids from what they’re doing, before the playground had even opened they’d filled binders with “risk benefits assessments” for nearly every activity. (In the two years since it opened, no one has been injured outside of the occasional scraped knee.) Here’s the list of benefits for fire: “It can be a social experience to sit around with friends, make friends, to sing songs to dance around, to stare at, it can be a co-operative experience where everyone has jobs. It can be something to experiment with, to take risks, to test its properties, its heat, its power, to re-live our evolutionary past.” The risks? “Burns from fire or fire pit” and “children accidentally burning each other with flaming cardboard or wood.” In this case, the benefits win, because a playworker is always nearby, watching for impending accidents but otherwise letting the children figure out lessons about fire on their own. A more recent article in The New York Times delves into this even further, featuring a playground in a town in England with the very interesting name Shoeburyness. It describes playgrounds in this town as having removed the plastic playhouses with soft edges and introducing a mud pit, tire swings, logs and branches, and a workbench with hammers and saws (see photo).
Photo Credit: Andrew Testa, New York Times
And in London, says the article, Outside the Princess Diana Playground in Kensington Gardens in London, which attracts more than a million visitors a year, a placard informs parents that risks have been “intentionally provided, so that your child can develop an appreciation of risk in a controlled play environment rather than taking similar risks in an uncontrolled and unregulated wider world.” Amanda Spielman is the head of the UK Office for Standards in Education, Children's Services and Skills (Ofsted). Late last year, she announced that her agency’s inspectors would undergo training that will encompass the positive, as well as the negative, side of risk. She said the Ofsted agency plans to re-train its inspectors to recognize the “positive” side of risk. Humph. You could have just sent them to the PMBOK® Guide, Ms. Spielman! Finally, the article references a study (see cover below, linked to the PDF) that compared playgrounds in London to those in the US and reached these conclusions (pay attention in particular to #5): The U.S. seems to have reached ‘peak safety’. We have created a nation of overly expensive, homogeneously safe, and insidiously boring play spaces. Our injury rates demonstrate that these spaces have unintended consequences. In pursuit of fun, children are using play structures in unintended ways, falling on surfaces too expensive to maintain, and are not moving enough, becoming too weak to play without injuring themselves. To turn the tide, the solution is to follow London’s lead: 1. DESIGN FOR ALL AGES Both passive and active spaces are important, blur the lines between play and park. And don’t forget cafes and bathrooms! 2. PLAY EVERYWHERE Provide ‘play affordances’, such as boulders, logs, plants, and topography for inexpensive, but effective fun. 3. THINK OUTSIDE THE CATALOG All playgrounds should have the top five: grass, sand, climbing, swinging, and sliding. Water and loose parts are another plus. 4. PLAYGROUNDS ARE FOR PLAY Everything on a playground should be playable, including surfaces. Fun should be prioritized over safety and maintenance. 5. RISK IS A GOOD THING The best playgrounds look dangerous but are completely safe, offering ways to play based on skill level, strength, and bravery
Click on image for full "London Study of Playgrounds" report. I cannot leave you without at least one sustainability element here, and I found one, at least according to one commenter in a discussion about this topic. “Emily” says: “does anyone else think that ripping out the current playground equipment, because it’s “too safe,” after ripping out the previous generation of playground equipment, because it was “too dangerous,” is massively wasteful? Why not start with keeping the existing equipment (and bringing in some boards, hammers, nails, ropes, tires, et cetera, for “loose parts” play if desired), and just, giving kids more freedom in how they play? For example, right now, a lot of schools have rules against climbing up slides, hanging upside down from the monkey bars, sitting on top of the monkey bars, running on the playground equipment and/or in certain areas, doing cartwheels and handstands on the grass, et cetera. If those rules were reversed, even that would be a start.” Go Emily – think long-term!
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Look up!
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Photo ©2014 Valerie Dionne Maybe it’s because I was looking up at the sky, wondering if the Chinese satellite (Tiangong-1) would land on my house*. Maybe it’s just a lifelong fascination with space. Or maybe looking skyward is a proxy for the idea I’ve had trying to get ourselves as project managers to stop thinking “in the box” and through the end of their project, as well as around the project - to consider triple bottom line concerns. Maybe. But for whatever reason, an article in PM Journal caught my attention and I’m glad it did. The article, Project Networks as Constellations for Value Creation by Markus Laursen (see citation below), talks about the idea of project networks – not the ones that have critical paths and float and dependencies, but the stakeholder-interaction sort of networks, the ones that we study in terms of ‘number of channels in a network of stakeholders is “N times N-1 all divided by 2”, where N is the number of stakeholders. Laursen, with whom I chatted just today, says that he was aware that many people would think of the “Network” concept this way, so this is a learning moment – consider the communication connectivity network in your project – that’s what this article discusses. We’re talking about something that looks a little like the below:
This looks like a constellation, right? Thus the name for this sort of network drawing and the title of the article. But alas, my focus was not on the heavens, but rather on the afterlife. Say what? The afterlife? Yes, this is one of the terms Laursen uses in the article to deftly describe that portion of the project after it starts delivering value, after you as the PM have moved on to other projects. This is a main theme of this blog and one of the main things I am trying to convince project managers to do – to think of the project’s longer-term use and delivery of benefits, of value. This is where the article really started to get my attention, because Laursen takes pains to point out that value is not only limited to immediate economic benefit. He says, “Knowing more about how value is created and how organizations act in value constellations has implications for how projects are managed,prepared, and handed over to operations.” And then, “It is especially interesting to explore non-financial effects and value, as focusing on these types of value may lead to better project performance also in terms of financial value”. He cites Martinsuo & Killen, see reference below, who have written on this very subject in detail. Their point (and you should read their article cited below) is summed up well with this extract: We use the term strategic value as the key concept in this study, referring to ecological, social, health and safety, societal influence, learning and knowledge development, and longer term business value. Thus far, few studies have explicitly covered how strategic value should be assessed when managing a project portfolio. Some studies include synergy (Jonas et al., 2013; Teller et al., 2012; Voss & Kock, 2013), sustainability (Luchs et al., 2012), future preparedness (Meskendahl, 2010; Martinsuo & Poskela, 2011; Voss & Kock, 2013) and other related aspects as criteria for portfolio selection, balance or success; however, there is little guidance on practical project portfolio coordination and control mechanisms for promoting such values further. The article has a great discussion, beyond the scope of this post, but worth reading, regarding the definition of value. Laursen correctly says that in PM, value is “a concept that is often understood as somewhat vague and is sometimes used interchangeably with words such as benefit, outcome, and worth. Indeed, I think I’m guilty of this in this very blog post. He uses this definition: value is the relation between benefits and costs. The key, then, is what sorts of benefits, for whom? Are the benefits only related to economics or do they consider ecological, social, and economic benefits? Well, that’s what this blog has been asking PMs to do since 2011! It’s great to see that this is gaining ground in the technical journals. Next, in my humble opinion, we need to see this in the PMBOK® Guide itself, and also in the Program and Portfolio standards. Projects do have an afterlife, and we can be stars as PMs if we look up and consider it in our planning. What will the project deliver? What side effects does its daily operation have? How can we provide more benefit and value for our customers and other stakeholders (like the Earth) by considering that afterlife in our planning? Check it out. Things are looking up!
*this actually reminds me of the film “The Discovery of Heaven” in which [SPOILER ALERT!] one of the main characters, Max, an astronomer, is actually obliterated by a meteoroid because he has located Heaven and you’re just NOT SUPPOSED to do that…
So long, Max.
Cited articles from PM Journal: Project Networks as Constellations for Value Creation - Laursen, M. (2018). Project Networks as Constellations for Value Creation. Project Management Journal, 49(2), 56–70 Value management in project portfolios: identifying and assessing strategic value. Martinsuo, M. & Killen, C. P. (2014). Project Management Journal, 45(5), 56–70. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/pmj.21452 |