This is a two-part story. In Part I, the crustacean is the villain. In Part II, the crustacean is the hero. Or… maybe it’s not so cut-and-dry. In any case, it is a two part story, and, as Yoda might say: “Read it, you can - learn from it you must”.
Just like in project management, stakeholders can be on either side of a project issue. Or, more interestingly, they can be on BOTH sides of a project issue.
Crustacean Frustration - Part I: The Crayfish Crime of Crater Lake(including a lesson in Stakeholder Management!)
Our story unfolds at Crater Lake. Crater Lake is a unique environment in south-central Oregon. It’s known for its natural beauty and crystal clear, deep blue water.
In the story you’ll find in this video, you’ll see that a series of decisions to attempt to preserve the environment of Crater Lake has led to some problems, one which threatens the existence of a critter that lives ONLY here – the Mazama Newt. That’s correct; this is the only place on the planet that you will find that species. Until the introduction of the Signal Crayfish (see feature photo above), the Mazama newt thrived here. And actually, the Signal Crayfish population was under control until suspected climate change effects have increased the temperature of the water by several degrees Fahrenheit. Now, the newt is on the run. Please watch this short video so that you can get the most out of this post.
The issue has launched several research projects and will likely launch one or more rescue projects as a result. These are green-by-definition projects (as discussed in both of our books) which are aimed at reacting to a realized threat which in turn is a result of a risk response from an earlier project.
You may ask: why was the Signal Crayfish introduced? Interestingly, the crayfish were introduced to serve as food for fish that were introduced in order to make Crater Lake a destination for fishermen. So, in effect the crayfish were introduced to be prey – to be fish food! Read about it in this extract from High Country News:
Over the past century, crayfish — aka crawfish, crawdads, or, if you study invasive species, “aquatic cockroaches” — have colonized lakes and streams from California to Taipei. In some places, as in Crater Lake, they were introduced deliberately to control weeds or feed fish; in others, they arrived accidentally as bait. They are, in many respects, the perfect invader: hardy, omnivorous, aggressive. “They have those big claws, and they’re really good at essentially brutalizing other animals,” says Jake Vander Zanden, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who has waged war against crayfish in midwestern lakes.
You don’t need to be an ecologist to guess what happened once the disastrous decapods arrived at Crater. The fish didn’t eat them, and all but two species (rainbow trout and kokanee salmon) eventually perished. The crayfish, meanwhile, persisted in the lake at low levels until the 1990s, when populations exploded — perhaps thanks to climate change, which may have warmed Crater Lake’s waters enough to stimulate rapid breeding. As the crustaceans boomed, they devastated aquatic invertebrates, like worms and midges, which plummeted by nearly 80 percent in infested areas.
So now the hunted have become the hunter. And they are also displacing and greatly endangering the Mazama Newt – which as you learned earlier are only found a this one location on the planet.
We see the effect here – on the environment, and on projects – from a very slight change in climate. In a way, this could be a ‘canary in a coal mine’ signal advising us of further potential problems, an early warning sign of other threats to be triggered by climate change, and of course projects to be launched to remediate them. The immediate threat is the possible elimination of the Mazama newt by the Signal Crayfish.
With all this talk of triggers and early warning signs, this could be a story about monitoring and controlling risks and issues. And it is, but it’s not the main spin of the story from our perspective.
So this is a lesson about the environment. And you can take significant value in the learning derived from the environmental piece. But there is a takeaway for project managers as well. This is where this blog lives – right at that intersection.
Here’s a project management connection: Stakeholder Management
Is the crayfish truly a villain? It is doing what we expect it to do in its environment. It’s the environment that changed. So as a project manager, if we look not only at power and attitude, but also interests, we know that the stakeholder will behave in its best interests – and that changes depending on the environment. In this case, the environment changes such that it continues to maintain its interests, but its power goes significantly up as it seeks to follow its interests. In your projects, look for the ‘signal crayfish’ out there – those whose power may go way up due to a changing environment. It doesn’t only happen in Crater Lake – it can happen on a new app development project just as easily.
The larger issue is the climate change indicated by the temperature rise in Crater Lake. Let’s move on to another story in which the crustacean is no longer a villain, but a victim – even a hero.
Coming soon... Part II: The Case Of The Missing Krill
Originally I was going to call this blog post, “The Low Spark of High Tech Boys”, but I was pretty certain that not many people would get the reference (to an 1971 album by Traffic, “The Low Spark of High Heel Boys”),and this is not about boys – it’s about men and women of science and the projects they are leading.
So I focused instead on of our main messages: you don’t have to believe in climate change to believe in the intersection between sustainability and project management. You just need to have at least a little respect for science and you just have to be aware of how much money is going to be involved in launching climate change oriented projects.
Have a look at this table we assembled, mainly from The Financial Times – showing some pretty big bucks coming as a result of the Paris climate conference COP21:
Just a sample of some climate change-oriented developments (thanks to this link from the Financial Times)
• India and France unveiled a plan to mobilize more than $1 trillion (with a T) over the next 15 years to make solar energy affordable in sun-rich developing countries.
• A group of 20 countries including the US, China and India vowed to double their existing combined $10bn of spending on clean energy research over the next five years.
• Norway, Germany and the UK said they would deliver more than $5bn over the next five years to support countries committed to reducing deforestation, a significant contributor to global warming.
• Germany, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland unveiled a $500m plan to make large scale cuts in greenhouse gases in developing countries, in league with the World Bank.
““We’ve demonstrated these technologies are possible, but we don’t know yet how to manufacture them at a large scale,” he said. “We need to be trying a lot of things, in parallel with one another. We have many more ideas than we have the funds”. – Jeff Grossman, MIT professor of materials science and engineering.
This in turn reminded me of one of the best lines from the film, The Martian, which gave me the actual title for this post.
The article goes on to talk about some of the research projects being done at MIT and the manufacturing projects they will launch. It’s easy to see from the table above, and the quotes below – there will be PLENTY of project managers needed to oversee the vast quantity of projects that this investment will kick off. From the article:
Professor Yet-Ming Chiang, a professor of materials science and engineering who cofounded the companies A123 Systems and 24M, has spent years studying how to make batteries cheaper and last longer. He’s now seeking to cut in half the costs of the kind of lithium-ion batteries that power cutting-edge electric cars made by Tesla. He’s also looking at building batteries for electrical grids that can store energy from wind turbines or solar farms, so it can be distributed when needed.
“The right storage can solve many of the problems we have now with creating a low-carbon future,” he said.
Meanwhile, MIT is embarking on an unprecedented program to accelerate progress on low-carbon energy technologies. In the coming months, MIT plans to launch eight “energy centers” on campus that will seek more than $300 million in research funding over the next five years from companies, foundations, and other sources.
The centers, announced last fall as part of a “plan for action” to curb carbon emissions, aim to further research and ultimately commercialize new technologies in the areas of solar energy, nuclear energy, energy storage, energy bioscience, electrical grids, nuclear fusion, materials science, and the capture and use of carbon.
Another global effort called the Breakthrough Energy Coalition involves recent pledges by 20 billionaires, including American tech magnates Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg, to invest in new clean energy projects and help commercialize them.
So whatever your views on climate change, there is no denying the straight up fact that if you are a project manager, you can be ‘chomping at the bit’ to get to work on some of these exciting project opportunities!
I’m a fan of the television series NOVA. I think it’s one of the better produced TV programs, containing great value and educational content, perhaps second only to Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.
A recent episode of NOVA was entitled “Life’s Rocky Start” and it covered the ‘co-evolution’ of minerals and life on our planet, spanning back a few years – say 4.5 billion or so. I’ve also been a rockhound (a person interested in rocks and minerals), so this show was perfect for me. In and of itself, it’s a worthwhile investment of 50 minutes of your time – and since it’s produced by the USA’s Public Broadcasting System, it is available streaming, free, here. Please do have a look.
While I watched this program and appreciated the insight of professor Robert Hazen, author of “The Story of Earth”, a book which divides Earth’s history into six distinct stages (more on this later), I noticed a theme that got me wondering about climate change. The theme was that the planet’s minerals contributed to the evolution of life (that’s logical) and that the opposite was also quite true – life on the planet, not necessarily humans, but life in general – had an immense impact on the planet’s development. A great example is the Stromatolites, a microbial form of life which themselves form mineral, coral-like structures (see photo below) which expelled massive amounts of oxygen into the atmosphere, which at that time had almost none. The arrival of oxygen meant that the Earth’s atmosphere – at the time consisting mainly of carbon dioxide and nitrogen was increasingly corrosive and also increasingly supportive of life on land. Not only this, Hazen has determined that 2/3 of the minerals that now exist on the planet are only there thanks to this introduction of oxygen by the Stromatolites.
So in this case, life significantly transformed the planet, moving it from what Haze calls “Blue Earth” to “Red Earth”.
I’ll fast forward to the stage we’re in now: “Green Earth”.
At the end of the show, Hazen talks about humans. Are we the new Stromatolites? He doesn’t ask that per se, but this was my takeaway. He does say note the “power of life to transform a planet” and does say this: “humans are transforming the planet, we change the composition of the atmosphere, we change the composition of the oceans”. Well, that’s what the Stromatolites did.
Whatever your view on climate change, this show is a very good take for a project manager, if for no other reason than to expand your ‘timeline’ back a ways, having you look back at our planet’s formation, perhaps allowing you to put your own project in more of a long-term perspective. Looking back that far backwards can only help you look forward, as well, to the product of your project, and its long-term effects, looking past the traditional 'end' of your project.
Speaking of endings, here’s how the show ends: “there are going to be global changes, changes whose consequences are now beginning to unfold. This is the latest chapter in Earth’s epic story. A story that began 4.5 billion years ago…with a rock.”
Below: Stromatolites at Shark Bay, Western Australia.
Conflict as an engine for innovation. What a concept. We often think of conflict as bad. Agree or disagree with President Obama’s State of the Union speech (here is the full text), it’s clear that he touched on this topic last night - mentioning conflict and innovation and even linking the two at times.
Here's some of what he said:
A better politics doesn’t mean we have to agree on everything. This is a big country, with different regions and attitudes and interests. That’s one of our strengths, too. Our Founders distributed power between states and branches of government, and expected us to argue, just as they did, over the size and shape of government, over commerce and foreign relations, over the meaning of liberty and the imperatives of security.
To our point, we want to start off by entertaining you. Have a look at this short, stupendous presentation of a popular classical piece (“Summer” from “The Four Seasons” of Antonio Vivaldi).
What these fantastic artists have done is to embody conflict, at the start of the performance. Individuals are staking their territories. Musical ideas are almost literally set down like a gauntlet, or a threat. But as the performance (the project) unfolds, we can see that the conflict is driving new ideas, innovation, and eventually, some pretty incredible collaboration.
We see that as an important lesson for project managers. We’re not saying that you need to learn to play the piano or cello upside down (these women do both of that in the video – go ON, watch it!), what we want you to take away is that conflict is not necessarily a bad thing, especially when it comes to innovating.
Sometimes conflict arises on projects when the concept of sustainability – perhaps in the form of thinking about the environmental effects of the project or its product is introduced to a PM or to a project team that is cynical about its benefit. We get that. No matter which side you’re on, think about this little musical expression of conflict. Is there a way to harness the ‘argument’ to drive innovation? Is there a way to make some beautiful music from the apparent dissonance of disagreement? We assert that the answer is yes. But you need to give it a chance.
Play the video for your team. Who knows? Maybe you’ll end up with a symphonic result!
We close with these words from the State of the Union Address: [bracketed words are our own]:
[Our project] grinds to a halt without a willingness to compromise; or when even basic facts are contested, and we listen only to those who agree with us. Our [project communication] withers when only the most extreme voices get attention. Most of all, [project teams] break down when the average [team member] feels their voice doesn’t matter; that the system is rigged in favor of the rich or the powerful or [a particular stakeholder].
Here at People, Planet, Profits, and Projects, we have been promoting the importance of integrating long-term thinking, sustainability, “green”, and strategy – into your projects for at least seven years. Two books (Green Project Management, andDriving Project, Program, and Portfolio Success) and all these years later, it’s very reassuring to see these aspects of PM on the “hot list”. This article from CIO magazine by Moira Alexander, PMP, features the “5 Trends That Will Transform Project Management”, and these aspects explicitly come out in not one, but two of the trends. Let’s have a look.
In Trend 1, “The laser focus on strategy over progress”, we see the elevation of strategy and cross-project, long-term thinking as being key. This is in line with the idea of benefits realization versus simple project metrics, and as you’ll see below, is also very connected to Trend 3 – in which companies (and therefore projects!) had better align themselves with social responsibility and environmental accountability. Here’s an extract of Trend 1:
"Trend 1: The laser-focus on strategy over projects
Competition, limited resources, internal and external environmental factors, time and budgetary constraints, are increasingly impacting businesses. Leaders will need to transform their PMOs or project management teams to focus all efforts around reaching business goals.
…
It may also serve the business better if individuals are selected for goal-centric projects based on their high-value core strengths in relation to business requirements, instead of selecting project team members in the traditional style of departmental representation. Taking this laser focus approach to strategy over projects can optimize resource, time and budgetary use."
In summary, it’s important that project managers are not sub-optimizing their projects to accomplish goals that are perhaps aligned with a smaller business unit’s goals but are not connected to the corporate strategy. And because organizations are increasingly including the social and environmental elements in their annual report and strategy (see below), projects need to increasingly check their goals to look for that “golden thread”.
Here’s an extract of Trend 3:
Trend 3: The increased need for accountability and social responsibility
With the whole world watching, businesses can no longer conduct themselves in anonymity, while
People and businesses want to do business with companies that provide transparency, offer visibility and conduct themselves in ways that are ethical, socially responsible and accountable. Projects are no exception.
Safeguards should be identified and implemented to ensure accountability is at the forefront to protect stakeholders, clients and the general public as it applies to the project activities and outcomes. Ultimately these factors do have the power to directly or indirectly influence the bottom line. giving no thought to social or environmental factors.
Note the important reference here to the word “outcome”. More than ever, we assert (and the trend says!) project managers should be “thinking through” the long-term application/use of the product of the project and not just the handover and pizza party. Success should be thought of not only as accomplishing scope, time, and budgetary goals, but (and yes, this does take time and patience) whether or not the project outcome yields the expected benefit it was meant to provide. That benefit should also be thought of in terms of economic, social, and environmental outcomes. So, and we know you don’t like to hear this, but if a project is done on time, within budget, and meets all requirements, it’s still not really a success if, for example, one of the side effects of the factory expansion project is that the system is leaking poisons into local streams.- or if the coffeemaker’s steady-state use generates millions (or billions!) of non-recyclable plastic cups. On the plus side, there are examples of projects in which the outcome reduces energy use or waste, or provides an improvement in the quality of life for the local population. These minuses and pluses should not be parenthetical discoveries but rather part of the planning of the project, combining 2 of these 5 transformational trends.
Imagine, just by doing this you are grabbing yourself 40% of the trendiest and important project management trends for 2016! What a great New Year’s Resolution!
and this is not about boys – it’s about men and women of science and the projects they are leading.
