People, Planet, Profits & Projects

This is going to be one of the strangest combinations of topics you’ve ever seen in a post about project management.  I think it will be worth it.  Read on.

It combines two seemingly unrelated things to convey the idea that you – as a PM – should be exercising your long-term thinking.

We start with a baseball bat donut.  A what?  Well, first of all, whether you’re from the US, Japan, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Korea, Taiwan, the Netherlands – any of the countries that tend play or at least enjoy the sport of baseball (or honkbal if you are Dutch), you know that the batter stands in and tries to hit a thrown ball from a pitcher.  Major league pitchers throw the ball at speeds up to 100 miles per hour (about 161 Km/hour).  So if you are a batter who wants to practice for those high-speed pitches, you swing a bat which is a little heavier.  How do you make a bat heavier?  You slip a weight – in the shape of a donut – on the barrel of the bat (see photo) and take practice swings, to help your muscle ‘memory’ get used to the heavier bat, so when you take OFF the weight, you are swinging with more speed.

From Wikipedia: A baseball doughnut is a weighted ring that fits over the end of a baseball bat, used for warming up during a baseball game. A doughnut is thought to help increase bat speed. Doughnuts can weigh as little as 4 oz. and as much as 28 oz. Players feel baseball doughnuts increase bat velocity because after warming up with a baseball doughnut then decreasing the weight after taking the doughnut off, the swing feels faster.  The heavier load of the weighted bat stimulates the neural system and increases muscle activation during lighter bat swings. Researchers have found that muscle contractions are stronger after reaching near maximal loads. One research study also found that additional weight added to the bat may strengthen the muscles of the forearms and wrists.  

The doughnut was created by former New York Yankees catcher Elston Howard. Interestingly, Howard, in 1955, was the first African-American player on the Yankees' roster, but later played on the Boston Red Sox.

So keep the baseball donut in mind as you read the rest of this post.  Stay with me now.

I’ve been talking for a long time about long-term thinking in projects.  At EarthPM, we have published two books on the topic.  What we mean about long-term thinking is thinking through – that is past the end of your project to that time when the project’s outcome is in its ‘steady state’.  So if your project is a bridge, you are thinking about the maintenance of the bridge, the traffic going over the bridge, the need to paint it every so often.  If your project is a piece of software that operates machinery you are thinking not only about whether or not the software “works” once, but whether or not it operates the machinery efficiently in terms of power usage.

That takes mental ‘muscle’ for a PM.  We are trained to think about our project's outcome – and we are motivated to move on to our next project.  We are “get ‘r done” people.  And yet, I am urging you to think long-term.  Not always a pleasant thing to do for PMs.  Maybe what we need is a donut.  No, not the fattening kind – the baseball kind.  Remember, we just talked about this a few moments ago.  Come on, stay with me!

So here it comes – your long-term-thinking baseball donut.

If you are having trouble extending your thinking in terms of years, slip on this mental baseball donut – try thinking in terms of eons – then years become elementary.  In this recent article from “Cosmos & Culture”, in turn from the USA’s NPR (National Public Radio), author David Grinspoon (@drfunkyspoon) discusses the various eons that the Earth has gone through – Hadean, Archean, Proterzoic, and what we’re in now – Phanerzoic.  So next time someone asks you what time it is, just say, “oh, about quarter past the Phanerzoic”.  It’ll make you a hit at the holiday party.  Well, I suppose that depends on what sort of party you're attending...

 From the article:

From a systems perspective, the early stages of this transition are highly unstable because global influence precedes global control. Such a system is characterized by unstable positive feedbacks which threaten catastrophe. Hence the dangers of our current "Anthropocene dilemma": We have global influence without global self-control. However, global technological influence clearly contains both peril and promise. Conscious awareness and control can also be sources of stabilizing negative feedback. This merely requires recognizing a problem and acting to fix it.

We've done this with our, so far, successful efforts to repair the ozone layer. There are pathways by which this stabilizing cognitive phenomenon could become a very long-lived and even permanent part of the Earth system. This would require that we reach a stage where we have a deep understanding of nature and an ability to forestall natural disasters, as well as the deep self-understanding necessary to forestall self-imposed disasters. In other words, it will require both technical and spiritual progress.

How does this affect the way we view our future? It reframes our task. And it puts our immediate challenges over the next century, stabilizing population and devising an energy system that can provide for the needs of this population without wrecking the natural systems upon which we depend, against the backdrop of a much longer-term challenge. Once we get over the relatively short-term, century-scale threat of destabilizing fossil-fuel induced climate change, we need to learn how to become a long-term stabilizing factor on the planet. This will include: over the next several hundred to thousand years, asteroid and comet defense; over the next several tens of thousands of years, learning how to prevent ice ages and natural episodes of dangerous global warming; over several billions of years, compensating for the warming sun and preventing the inevitable runaway global warming that will otherwise result from solar evolution.

See what I did there?  Grinspoon just called ‘getting over climate change’ - something we think about as a huge, huge, and important problem, a ‘relatively short-term, century-scale threat’.  Using that measure (think baseball donut) of centuries as trivial ticks of a clock, a few years is like an instant… a blip.  When he says “long-term” – he is serious.  Given this definition – that is, after swinging the bat with Grinspoon’s Donut (maybe we should jointly trademark that!), it should be  really easy to think about our project’s product, say, 10 years from now.  Right?

There’s a lot to the article so I’d like to insist that you take an even smaller instant to read it, and note that the author (Grinspoon, not me) has a new book out called, “Earth In Human Hands – Shaping Our Planet’s Future”.  Just grab a donut, and read the article!

We're glad when the topic of sustainability in project management comes up.  And it came up in a big way in the most recent issue of PMI's Project Management Journal.  Here's the mission of the Journal:

"...to shape world thinking on the need for and impact of managing projects by publishing cutting-edge research that advances theory and evidence-based practice."

The most recent issue has an article called "Sustainability and Success Variables in the Project Management Context" by Mauro Luiz Martens, Methodist University of Piracicaba (UNIMEP) and University of São Paulo (USP), São Paulo, Brazil, and Marly M. Carvalho, University of São Paulo (USP), São Paulo, Brazil.

From the article's introduction:

"Sustainable development and the concept of sustainability, connected to the triple bottom line—economic, environmental, and social—has required a new perspective for projects (Labuschagne, Brent, & Van Erck, 2005; Valdes-Vasquez & Klotz, 2013; Munck, Galleli, & Souza, 2013).

Despite the fact that sustainability has attracted the interest of professionals and scholars in the project management field (Silvius, Schipper, & Nedeski, 2013; Sánchez, 2015; Silvius & Schipper, 2015; Sarkis, Meade, & Presley, 2012; Valdes-Vasquez & Klotz, 2013; Labuschagne, Brent, & Van Erck, 2005), and that project management can be a means to positively influence the integration of sustainability dimensions (Bocchini, Frangopol, Ummenhofer, & Zinke, 2014), there is a gap between the perception of importance and the actual use of sustainability in project management (SPM) practice (Martens & Carvalho, 2016a). In addition, project management can be considered a missing link in the ecodesign literature (Brones, Carvalho, & Zancul, 2014), being an incipient theme approached in specialized ecodesign articles (Brones & Carvalho, 2015)."

Notice all of the references.  That's because the Journal is an important academic instrument.

We suggest that you have a look at this survey of the literature.

And we also suggest (humbly, of course) that you also look at a couple of books that weren't mentioned in the survey of literature: Green Project Management, which won the Cleland Award in 2011, and follow-up Driving Sustainability Success in Projects, Programs, and Portfolios.

Whatever your choice of reference - the connection between project management and sustainability is undeniable, interesting, and important.  Look into it!

As project managers, we normally think of core values as beliefs that are very important to an organization.  As Oxford’s Dictionary puts it, a core value is “a principle or belief that a person or organization views as being of central importance”.

...and this is a theme we’ve discussed many times in this blog and on EarthPM – the need for projects to connect to the core values of their organization, using that connectivity to drive motivation for project team members, because if they know that their project work connects to project success, which connects to organizational success – it provides a sort of golden thread.

This post is not, however, about that type of core value.

Well, it is – but only tangentially.  This post is about the literal values determined by scientists when they take core samples of the thawing Arctic tundra, to better understand the effects of climate change on the tundra, and – unfortunately – vice versa.

You see, based on recent research highlighted in this article from the most recent issue of Scientific American, there is a bit of a spiraling effect here.  Record warm temperatures are thawing the Arctic tundra’s permafrost, which allows the decomposition of plant and animal remains in the warming soil, which in turn is potentially allowing almost 1,500 billion metric tons of organic carbon to be released into the Earth’s atmosphere.  That’s almost twice as much carbon as that which already exists in the atmosphere.  And it’s not just carbon – it’s methane, which is much more powerful as a greenhouse gas.

In other words, climate change has opened the door to accelerating climate change, which…which causes more climate change, which accelerates... well, you get the picture. 

In the article, author Ted Schuur discusses the scientific research project, which involves taking core samples, and recording significant amounts of data to better understand this dangerous scenario.  In fact, there is something called The Global Terrestrial Network for Permafrost – and it is loaded with the data taken from tundra core samples in the Arctic.  Below is a short video explaining their work:

The Permafrost Carbon Network started in 2011 and their main objectives are to synthesize existing research about permafrost carbon and climate in a format that can be assimilated by biospheric and climate models, and that will contribute to future assessments of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).  Their site contains research and maps of the core samples which indicate that this problem is serious and needs further study.

The point of this post is to remind us as project managers that there are project risks, and there are overarching risks (both threats and opportunities).  In this case, we see a massive overarching risk of not just climate change, but accelerated climate change – a nasty feedback loop, if you will – that we should understand.  The research projects being undertaken by these scientists is important.  Already, the research is yielding answers.  The question as to what percentage of the carbon pool will be released by thawing permafrost has been answered, using the data and expert judgment of the Permafrost Carbon Network: it’s 10 percent plus or minus 5 percent.  This is 130 to 160 billion metric tons of additional carbon entering the atmosphere, similar to the amount of carbon released worldwide thus far by deforestation and other land-use changes.  It will make climate change happen even faster than scientists project from human activities alone.

What can we do as project managers?  I return to the primary definition of core values.  Most of your organizations include sustainability, including ecological sustainability in their core values.  Make sure your projects are connected to those core values.  Your project includes and outcome.  That outcome will have an ecological impact.  Have you thought about that impact - the steady-state impact?  Or are you focused only on the handover of the product of the project?  We hope it's the former.  Every change you make is significant, especially put in the context of this accelerated view of climate change.  If your project can produce an outcome that is even slightly less impactful to the environment, it’s almost like a ‘matching donation’ program – the effect could be considered even larger, based on what this research shows us.

So please – learn more about this issue by visiting the links we’ve embedded, and consider that ‘golden thread’ when you set the ground rules and objectives of your project.  Connect them to your organization’s core values!

Further reference, from NASA:

Is a Sleeping Climate Giant Stirring in the Arctic?

One of the PMI Project of the Year Finalists was the CMPC Celulose Riograndense Pulp Mill in Brazil.  Its $2.4 billion expansion project was built in the Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul, in a suburb of Porto Allegre called Guaíba.  When reading the story about this in the December 2016 PM Network magazine, I was immediately impressed with the holistic views that the project sponsors and the project managers took in order to assure that the project was truly a success in the way that we’ve been discussing here on this blog.

For starters, the mill expansion project proactively considered the stakeholders’ concerns of noise, traffic, debris, pollution, and the effect on the local water supply.  The organization CMPC, as the article says, “started the conversation early, working with the community to ensure project goals went beyond boosting company profits.”  Later in the article we learn that although these non-monetary concerns were important, this did not mean the organization was un-focused on the economic element of the triple bottom line.  Indeed, they kept economics front and center, as they should.  It’s just obvious that they had their vision not ONLY on the economics.

The project team was willing to make the investments up front in innovative and efficient technology paid off in terms of allowing them to meet ecological goals but also enabled the mill to be more productive when it was turned over to steady-state operation.

“If you don’t have a sustainable vision, probably in the future, the society will close your mill or your business”, said Mr. Lidio Nunes of the organization.

The story is loaded with examples in which the considerations of the project team go beyond the scope of usual projects, and the vision for what the project’s PRODUCT – the mill – would deliver in the long term, was broader and deeper than most.

We have been told many times that the ideas we espouse about thinking sustainably in projects are limited to wind farms or to very small projects.  This example proves that a project can integrate these ideas even when it’s large and ‘distant’ from energy or other ‘purely green’ categories of projects on what we call the spectrum of green.  (see our books).

This is a large project, not a trivial one.  In and of itself, the new mill is 1.5 percent of the state’s GDP.  It created 28,000 jobs.  This proves that even a large project can succeed – in the broader sense of the term.

Even more importantly, the project team buys into their role as a change agent.  The story ends with the idea that “they will leave a legacy within the industry, showing other companies that they can protect the environment while turning a profit”.

I did a bit further research on this project and found a very interesting source of info in this newsletter, which includes an interview with the Chairman of CMPC, Eliodoro Matte.  In it, the Chairman responds to questions about social responsibility:

What does social responsibility mean for CMPC?

We believe that, in its widest sense, the main social responsibility of companies is to remain active and profitable, producing and competing in the market. When this happens, not only does it create a return

for the shareholders, but it also has very favourable social consequences, like new employment opportunities through expansion and investment, and the creation of wealth and valuable services for society.

How has the company taken on this responsibility?

Since its establishment 90 years ago, the company has shown real concern for what used to be called ‘social issues’. Already at the start of last century, it carried out various initiatives to collaborate with

neighbours and workers. This feeling of social responsibility towards the community has continued throughout the years, determining an administration style and a company tradition. It is an attitude that has adapted to different eras and needs.

In what way?

During recent years we have increased our capacity to understand our environment, and the challenges, desires and concerns of those around us. In today’s world it is not possible to do business without looking outwards. We have to be concerned with these local factors that will be key to determining the long term viability of our ventures.

I’d like to use this blog post to encourage you – as a project manager – to watch the documentary “Before the Flood”, which you can find on the National Geographic channels. 

Here’s a description of the show, which features Leonardo DiCaprio, not in an acting role, per se, but rather as an ‘explorer’ of the issue of climate change and its solutions.

Before the Flood presents a riveting account of the dramatic changes now occurring around the world due to climate change, as well as the actions we as individuals and as a society can take to prevent the disruption of life on our planet. Beyond the steps we can take as individuals, the film urges viewers to push their elected officials in supporting the use of alternative energy sources such as solar and wind power. “We need everyone to demand bold action from their political leaders and to elect representatives who have their best interests at heart, not the interests of corporations to perpetuate a cycle of greed and destruction,” says DiCaprio. “This documentary shows how interconnected the fate of all humanity is — but also the power we all possess as individuals to build a better future for our planet.”

The film is directed by Fisher Stevens and produced by Leonardo DiCaprio, Fisher Stevens, Jennifer Davisson and Trevor Davidoski with Brett Ratner and James Packer of RatPac Entertainment. It was written by Mark Monroe and Executive Produced by Martin Scorsese, Adam Bardach, Mark Monroe, and Zara Duffy.

Why should a project manager care about this (aside from the ‘planetary citizen’ aspect)?

There are many significant opportunities for projects, large and small, in the area of mitigation of climate change.  We’d like to draw your attention to the Solutions portion of the Before the Flood website.

On it, they say: “The good news is that climate change can be solved today with readily available technologies and sustainability measures. It will take significant investments on the part of governments and businesses, but that investment will be a small fraction of the price we would have to pay for increasing natural disasters and other climate impacts. New research has shown that using currently available technologies, we can meet all of our energy needs for heating, electricity, and transportation through 100% clean renewable sources by mid-century. We can get on track by 2020, when the Paris Agreements enters into force by reducing pollution through a price on carbon and protecting our forest and ocean ecosystems. Learn more about the array of solutions to solve climate change.”

Think about it. The solutions are all about projects, or in many cases, program and portfolio level management.  On the site you will find examples of these in major categories like these:

• Renewable Energy
• Governmental Oversight
• Reforestation
• Climate Adaptation
• Business Leadership and Innovation
• Climate Education
• Energy Efficiency
• Green Cities
• Ocean Conservation
• Carbon Capure

My eyes were drawn to the Business Leadership and Innovation topic.  In this area, we know that it will involve us as project managers, recalling that projects – by definition – are unique endeavors, like these.

In this section of the website, there is this important write up:

“The most exciting changes happening within companies are driven by raw innovation: the development of new products, services and business models that are beginning to outstrip the competition and cutting carbon emissions at the same time. A growing army of entrepreneurs around the world are leading start-ups that are making plastics from waste landfill gas, growing furniture from mushrooms, re-inventing energy markets, and redesigning windows to generate their own power. Nike is harnessing new footwear design and dyeing processes to radically reduce waste and water use whilst improving performance. Spurred on by the rise of Tesla’s electric cars, auto manufacturers like BMW and GM are developing radically different vehicles and business units. Some lesser-known industrial companies like Royal DSM and Umicore have completely shifted their core businesses away from mining to areas like nutrition and recycling. We will only see much more of this radical change in the next few years - watch this space.”

It's going to take project managers like you, me, and our colleagues, to accomplish objectives like these.  Again, I urge you to see the film first, then explore this site for the kinds of projects that you may end up working on – either accidentally, or because you think that this is particularly important work.