People, Planet, Profits & Projects

Do you know the expression, "the elephant in the room"?

If you don't, as a project manager, it's an important one.  Read about it here.  It means "an obvious truth that is either being ignored or going unaddressed. It also applies to an obvious problem or risk no one wants to discuss."

Sound familiar?  In projects, one of our key jobs is to point this out. 

"Hey everyone", you need to say, "what about this key project threat?".  When you do this, you are pointing out an elephant in the room.

So, think about an elephant for a while.  Big, huh?  Huge, even.  Largest living terrestrial animals.  Nice.  A little odiferous, perhaps.  Anyone have any room deodorant or air freshener?

Now, imagine a bunch of them.  Say a hundred.  Or a thousand.  Wow, that's a lot of weight.  1,000 elephants would weigh about 4,000 tons. 

Now get ready for the mind-blower.  Imagine 95 billion elephants.  You can't do it.  It's incomprehensible.  Inconceivable.  Ninety-five billion elephants.

Yet, that's the weight of the ice being lost per year from Earth's poles.  This article, based on recent scientific data, shows that the amount of ice being lost is somewhere between 290 and 379 billion tons per year, up by a factor of three since the 1990s.

We all know that there are cyclic changes in weather.  And of course we need to be open to the possibility that this is cyclic.  But a tripling of this kind of weight in such a short time seems beyond the realm of siimple probability.

To us, it looks like an elephant in the room.  An obvious problem that people seem to continue to gloss over.  And by people, we of course mean project managers.  And those are some of the most influential people in the world, in terms of getting things done and being change agents.  That's what we do!  We find elephants in the room.  We execute projects, which make ideas real!  We are the ones that launch products which in turn are used in the steady state and consume resources, so we have a unique chance to affect those products-of-projects.

If you needed inspiration for your work as a project manager, you need only to imagine an elephant in the room.  Or 10, or 1,000, or a million, or a billion.  Or 95 billiion of them.

Remember this.  Elephants, after all, never forget!  Nor should project managers.

NOTE: We know this posting comes across with a strong message about climate change, and we know that not all project managers necessarily believe in it.  To those people we say two things:

1. Not a problem.  We urge you to check the science, but we have no issue with you if you don't believe in it.  We only have an issue if you deny our second point.

2. It's still important to integrate sustainabilty on your project because it still will help you (for one of many examples) identify threats and opportunities.

We've combined two stories we've recently encountered to share with you some ideas that we feel work their way back into the realm of project management. 

Be patient - we think it's worth it.

The first story- the one which lends us the name of our posting - covered a recent event at Duquesne University at which Cradle-to-Cradle author William McDonough and Green to Gold author Andrew Winston addressed attendees with talks on sustainability.

From the BBC article:

Architect and author William McDonough said that businesses need to shift their focus from just reducing emissions to optimising positive impacts such as material use.

Arguing that eco-designers have an important role to play in stimulating a more ethical business environment, he said companies needed to offer products that pose no risk to society and that become nourishment for something new at the end of their useful life.

Emphasizing that "less bad is still bad", McDonough questioned: "Why don't we start designing things so we understand what's going to happen next?"

There it is.  The design is key.  Using sustainability principles in the design is important.  As project managers, we often only get involved in the design if the project IS the design.  We are blogging and writing to promote the changes and a tenedency to think sustainably in both product/service design AND in projects where the design is "thrown over the wall" to a team meant to execute it into a steady-state product or service. 

In the case of design, we urge you to read books like Cradle to Cradle and Green to Gold but also to take advantage of software like that produced by Sustainable Minds and others.  You can see reviews of such software in this review by LinkCycle.

This takes us to the other story of interest, one about the Namib Desert Beetle.  This is the Namib Desert Beetle, by the way, very different than the delicious and tasty Namib Dessert Beetle, best enjoyed with strawberries, cognac reduction, and whipped cream.

In any case, this story - and others like it, discuss how designers are using biomimicry to inspire design of wanter extraction by taking advantage of the way this particular critter survives in the desert.

From the article:

NBD Nano (the company featured in this story) aims to mimic the way a beetle survives in an African desert to create a self-filling water bottle capable of storing up to three litres every hour.

The insect harvests moisture from the air by first getting it to condense on its back and then storing the water.

Using nature as an inspiration for technology, known as biomimicry, is increasingly widespread.

The company using the Namib Desert Beetle, NBD Nano, is using its name in their company identity.  Their mission statement:

NBD makes use of a nano-scale surface to enhance water condensation. Mimicking the Namib Desert Beetle, our nanotechnology can be used to collect water in the most arid regions of the world.

You may not be working in a company like this - what we at EarthPM would call a "green by definition" company.  But that doesn't mean you can't 'plant the bug' in the ear of your design team(s).  That doesn't mean your project cannot seek ideas like these in execution.

Doing this is not without rewards.  To return the the first story - the one taking place at the sustainability conference at Duquense University. At that conference, Procter & Gamble (P&G) was recognised with an award for its sustainability achievements.

P&G's associate director of global sustainability Jack McAneny accepted the award and spoke about the company's long-term commitment to using 100% renewable energy and making products and packaging entirely from recycled materials.

This translates into sales.

So we can see that putting effort into sustainable design is not only less bad, it's good!

My best friend saves Wall Street Journal Reports for me.  He is very disciplined and reads the Journal front to back every morning.  I’m not so disciplined or inclined.  While we share a profound love of fly fishing and the outdoors, he also knows that I am also interested in sustainability.   Thanks to him, I read a recent Journal Report focused on energy, or rather “Investing in Energy.”  This is the first of many blogs about energy and how it affects the triple bottom line (3BL).  They probably won’t be in any sequence as interesting blog subjects come across our desks daily.  We wish we had time to blog all the time, but alas, there are other things we need to do.  To find out more of what we are doing, take a look at our home site, www.earthpm.com.

Continuing with the thought in the first paragraph, while we were preparing this blog post we saw a brief note from T. Boone Pickens, Chairman of BP Capital Management, an energy-focused hedge fund, in the latest issue of Parade Magazine.   He makes the point that we can affect our national bottom line by reducing our impact on foreign oil.  That’s not too original of a thought, but he further makes the point on how to do it.  We should cultivate our own resources more.  Domestic oil is 15% less expensive that foreign oil, and our natural gas is 75% less expensive.  If we were to convert 8 million heavy trucks to natural gas, we could save 3 million barrels of oil per day.  We now get about 4.5 million barrels a day from OPEC, so, according to Mr. Pickens, we would reduce our need for foreign oil by 2/3rds.  Natural gas is not only cleaner than diesel, and, by increasing our production of natural gas, we would create jobs.  Job creation = more people paying taxes = more revenue to the government = debt reduction or at the least somewhere to get money, rather than printing it or borrowing it from foreign govenments.   Just a word of caution, we do need to make sure that we protect the environment when we call for the increase in use or extraction of any of our natural resources.  Back to the Journal. 

In an article by Yuliya Chernova, she highlights an interesting project to modify parking lots.  Now parking lots are notorious for causing pollution problems. Runoff from them tends to be a pollutant itself, lack of surface area to allow rainwater to percolate into the soil and additional heat generated by its surface are just a couple of ways in which a parking lot can be viewed in the negative.  However, there are some parking lot owners who have discovered that can “double up on their under-utilized property, and to offset their utility bills at the same time.”  Putting canopies over the parking spaces that contain solar panels does just that.  “One of the largest solar carports is now under construction at Rutgers University’s Livingston Campus in Piscataway, NJ.  Rutgers expects to save $28 million in electricity over 20 years.”  However, it must be understood that it is not just money that drives sustainability projects.  This project will cost about $41 million before federal and state tax incentives.  However, it reduce the surface area of the paved part of the parking lot, reducing the polluted runoff, and reduce the strain on the electric grid in the area. 

In our last post on EarthPM, we talk about the possible connection between "Superstorm Sandy" and climate change.  And we of course make a connection to projects and project management.  And you know, we did a pretty good job.  But it's also good to know when someone else, someone with even more knowledge, expertise, and experience on the issue at hand, says it better than you.

And that's the case with Andrew Winston.

As you may know, Winston and Esty's book Green to Gold was the inspiration for our book, Green Project Management.  Winston and Esty were so amazingly convincing in that book (and follow-up efforts since) that they have continued to inspire us.

With that, we'd like to encourage you to read Andrew Winston's full blog post on the topic, which follows along the lines of our posting but gives an even stronger business perspective.

Please read Winston's entire blog post, "Should Companies Care If Hurricane Sandy Was "Caused" By Climate Change?"

If you're impatient (and which project manager isn't?) here are a couple of key extracts:

It's about business continuity, stupid!

"Take the example of one of my clients, a Fortune 200 consumer products company. As the VP of global risk management told me, the most expensive events in company history in every weather category (flood, earthquake, hail, wind, etc.) occurred in the last few years. After making $50 million in insurance claims in 2011 alone, the company's insurance rates will certainly rise. But that's a side issue; the real problem is the constant threat to business continuity. At one of its large manufacturing plants in Asia, a drought stopped production for 3 weeks."

Risk Assessment will be sexier

" Smart companies will be examining supply chains and operations very closely for risks associated with water shortages, floods, storms, and resource constraints. Risk assessment is going to get much sexier and much more important to global organizations. Their leaders will also seize the opportunity to offer products and services that help other companies and society deal with a world of weird weather. Think drought-resistant crops, new insurance products, distributed energy systems (so homeowners won't care if the power goes out), and perhaps boats for getting around Wall Street."

Let's get real!

"..let's get real about business impacts. If you're going to really assess risk to your operations now and in the future, you have to understand how climate change will increase the likelihood of severe events and what it will mean for your value chain. Not doing so would be costly, stupid, and irresponsible to your shareholders.

Companies are waking up to the immediate impacts. The most recent report from the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), compiled with the help of PwC (full disclosure: my consulting firm has a partnership with the U.S. arm of PwC), shows that most global companies acknolwedge climate-driven risks. Fully 37% of those reporting to the CDP — most of the world's largest companies — say that climate change is already creating business risk (up from 10% in just two years). Another 43% see risk to the business within the next 10 years."

So as we've always said - it doesn't matter where you are on the political spectrum, the climate science spectrum, or any spectrum for that matter.  The bottom line is, well, the bottom line.  And the organizations in which we work - or to whom we offer project management services of any kind, are taking note of these observations - and you would serve yourself - and your organizations (and perhaps the planet, but that's just our opinion) better by paying attention and acting on the basis of solid information, which means getting smart about this topic.  We intend to help - just stay tuned to this blog and EarthPM and we will do our best to provide you the latest from industry thought leaders.  Stay smart - and stay safe!