People, Planet, Profits & Projects

Recently we've done a lot of thinking about how sustainbility is a driver of innovation.  Inspired by the words of Marvin Odom, President of Shell Oil, who has just come right out and said that sustainability "may now be the number one driver of innovation projects at Shell", we've been seeing this sentiment shared by leaders of enterprises around the world, and echoed by PMO leaders as well.

This thinking was reinforced in an odd way via two stories - one of which crossed our desk just this morning.

In this Boston Globe story, and again in this story from Mass High Tech, we learn about the Endicott House, a 1934 mansion in suburban Boston which has been converted into a guest house and conference center.

At the Endicott House, MIT has started to use two forms of electrolyzed water (hypocholorous acid and sodium hydroxide) instead of Windex, Ajax, and Spic 'n Span.  These cleaners are considered harmful in large doses and are obviously less sustainabile than what is basically ... water.

From a project standpoint, this means that the facility installs a system which is capable of separating salt water into the electrolyzed products and store it in two 55-gallan tanks, from which employees refil their spray bottles.

And they can do this withut fear of spills or burns.

A company based in Massachusetts calle Lynfield Green Technologies (LGT) has already sold 10 such systems, installing them in schools and companies that use these solutions to clean cafeterias and even semi-trailers.

So its about projects.

It's about economic sustainability.

It's about lowering toxicity and ecological sustainability.

It's about safer working conditions (social sustainability).

It's about cost of greenality.

Listen to Patrick Lucci, the co-founder of LGT: "The operating costs for using chemical cleaners or disinfectants is 20 to 25 cents per room per day, but you can virtually eliminate those costs by purchasing a $15,000 device and your carbon footprint gets smaller".

You can do the math, there is a finite payback period here.  In the case of the Endicott Center, they belive it will be only a year or two.  That's without taking into account the other "Cost of poor greenality" aspects which can be figured in as well in terms of health and well-being of employees, disposal costs for chemicals and packaging.  You can also mix in the attributes of "good corporate citizen", "greening up your enterprise", and "higher employee morale".

Check out the stories - if you're into chemistry you may find the science interesting.

No matter what - we insist that sustainability is not only a source of innovation, it's a source of PROJECTS, and thus, worth learning about.

And - coming back around to our opening - it's more evidence that sustainability is more and more an "instigator" for innovation.

Sustainability.  It’s a term that’s being used a lot these days.  It’s being used so much, in fact, that we’re afraid it’s losing its meaning.

One of the definitions that we’ve heard (and we like!) comes from a book called Getting Green Done.  In it, author Auden Schendler says that sustainability can be explained best by working as if you will be “staying in business forever”.

This is very difficult concept for us project managers because we are trained to understand (as we should) that a project has a definitive beginning and end.

So when a story like this one from NPR comes out, describing the decades-old problem of poisoned places – locales ruined for the very long term by industrial toxins - we can empathize, perhaps, but from a PM perspective we would tend to glaze over, since we are “only project managers” and are not focused on the steady-state operation of facilities or the long-term impacts of processes.

But maybe we should be.

And yes, of course we should be focused on the long term for the altruistic reasons that appeal to our sense of ethics, and if we have a lick of sense, because the planet is indeed our home and we must realize that we shouldn’t fill our own home with guck and goo and poison. 

But it goes beyond that.  And it goes beyond politics, and it goes beyond wherever you stand on climate change.

We, as a discipline, have to recognize that focusing on the steady-state can also greatly improve how our projects fit into the enterprise and meet enterprise goals.  More and more companies have very strong environmental statements in their mission and value statements.  Ray Anderson built Interface/FLOR into a tremendously successful example of this marriage of long-term thinking and mind-blowing profitability.

Marvin Odom. President of Shell, talks about sustainability being the top driver for innovation at his company.

And if you read this series of stories from NPR about Poisoned Places you will see what we learn about in the PMBOK® Guide (and rooted in Philip Crosby’s original writings) as “the cost of poor quality”, in the form of lawsuits, closed factories, ill-will, and mounting losses.  In this case, we would call it the “cost of poor greenality”.

As project managers we stand at the intersection of strategy and operations.  This means we have to be connected to both the lofty goals of our leaders - which are increasingly focused on sustainability - and the ongoing goals of our cousins in operations, who are "trying to be in business forever".  Why then should we end up being the ones who break the chain?  We should be a vital connection point, right?  Not a roadblock.

Can you do anything about this?

Funny you should ask.  Yes you can.  We’ve started a petition to drive more attention to the issue of sustainability thinking in project management.  It simply asks the PMI to consider already-submitted proposals about integrating sustainability thinking into the PMBOK® 5^th edition and the Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct.

Sign our petition by clicking HERE right now.

Thanks.

At EarthPM, we generally stay away from politics.  So – you may ask - why then is this blog post talking about votes? 

The reason is that there was a quote in a recent radio interview which was so striking and poignant that we couldn’t help taking it as a title.  It also makes the overall point of this post which is this: projects are about meeting objectives.  Project success – and enterprise success – needs to be defined on value, not (only) on traditional cost, scope, and schedule attributes.  This is reflected in the 4^th Edition PMBOK® Guide (see page 6).

The message of providing value came to us in a strange way as we listened to a radio program called Science Friday.

Science Friday is a tremendous radio show on the US National Public Radio (NPR) network.  Recently, Ira Flatow, the host of the show, brought in Rear Admiral David Titley of the US Navy, and director of the Navy’s Task force on Climate Change.  You can hear the entire broadcast of the referenced show here.

We think of the value of a Navy as defending the seas.  So why in the world would they be interested in global warming?  It has to do with the net value that they bring.  Whatever the cause, whatever the science, whatever one believes about climate change, if the geography of the arctic is changing,to allow open naval traffic where it wasn’t possible before – that’s something the Navy needs to know about.  So indeed, the Navy’s value is enhanced by understanding how the geography and coastlines affect their ability to defend.

Take a look at this exchange from the broadcast:

FLATOW: I'm interested in reading your biography and notes about you that you confess to at one time being a global warming skeptic.

Rear Adm. TITLEY: Yes.

FLATOW: What changed your mind?

Rear Adm. TITLEY: What really changed my mind was when you go and look at all the evidence, I think to - at least to me - I think it really showed that the climate was changing.

I was, as you might know, I was trained as a meteorologist, and you see, of course, the day-to-day and sometimes even hour-by-hour changes and variations. I watched the computer models in the '70s and the '80s, and, you know, as we all do - you know, how many times have all shoveled six inches of partly cloudy off of our driveway?

(Soundbite of laughter)

Rear Adm. TITLEY: So how, you know, if that was the accuracy, how well could we really say what was going on? But as I learned more about the topic, you see that really the climate is controlled not so much by what the day-to-day weather started as but by what are the larger things doing - what is the ocean doing? What is the sun doing? And what's our atmosphere doing?

So that really was able to show me. And the other part that maybe even is more important was just taking a look at all the different changes. One of my first jobs in the Navy, I was a navigator, and this is well before we had the global positioning system. So I may be one of the few guys who actually still know how to use a sextant and all that sort of thing.

And we are able to - when you navigate a ship, you don't just use one source of information. You use everything you can. And I kind of look at the climate the same way. So we look at the changes in the Arctic. We look at the melting of the glaciers.

We look at what's going on with the ice fields, especially in Greenland but also West Antarctica, look at the changes of the temperature in the ocean, the changes of the ocean acidity, and all of that observations, all of that evidence, if you will, together, along with my now better understanding of what is driving the climate, has sort of taken me from the, hey, I'm not sure there's really anything here, to there really is, there really is some changes going on. And to make sure that our Navy is ready in the 21st century, we have to look at these changes just as we look at changes in the political spheres and the economic spheres and the demographic concepts.

Facts.  Seek facts first.  This should be the mantra of the project manager. 

Rear Admiral Titley, now aware that there are changes in the Arctic ice, and unfettered by any other bias, is more clearly able to do his job.  This is reinforced as he takes a question from a caller, “Andy”.  Check this out:

ANDY (Caller): Hi, how are you doing today?

FLATOW: Hi there.

Rear Adm. TITLEY: Great.

ANDY: Great. Thanks for taking my call. Here in Oklahoma, we have a U.S. senator, Jim Inhofe, who seems to think that there's a lot of demagoguery and that global climate change is a hoax.

What - and if this isn't rehashing too much, but two questions. One is: What are the maybe top three or top five pieces of evidence that converted you as a meteorologist? And secondly: Do you in the Navy attribute any of the global climate change to human behavior, or are you all kind of staying out of that fray?

Rear Adm. TITLEY: Okay, well, thanks very much for the question. First, the types of evidence that at least I've looked at, and I've talked with our senior Navy leadership, is really the Arctic, is I think sort of a harbinger of the of some of the largest examples of climate change.

We have seen not only the extent of the ice in the summertime, or September, come down dramatically, but even more so the total amount of ice or how much thick ice and thin ice is up in the Arctic.

And we're seeing, really before our eyes, a very different system now in which - just 10 or 15 years ago, there was what people or scientists call multiyear ice, really thick ice last for years and years. It's probably five, 10, 15 or more feet thick. Almost all of that ice is now gone, maybe only 15, 20 percent - at the most - of the Arctic has that kind of very thick ice.

And now, the predominant kind of ice in the Arctic is single-year ice. So it melts in the summer, comes back in the winter, melts in the summer again. That's a very, very different regime.

And I kind of like watching ice because, I mean, ice doesn't vote. Ice doesn't contribute to any political party. It doesn't caucus. It just melts. And the ice kind of tells a story. So there's just one piece of evidence, but as I mentioned before, I look at many pieces.

As to the causes of climate change, again, when you look at the physics, you know, about the only things you can really change is you can change the sun and how much energy's coming in. NASA's done a pretty good job of measuring that, and it shows that pretty much within a couple of tenths of 1 percent the energy from the sun over the last 50 years has been pretty constant. Or you can change the amount of greenhouse gases. You can change the aerosols.

So when you put all this together, it looks like the greenhouse gases have a significant impact. The details, of course, get very, very complicated. It's not for the Navy to say what the policies are going to be or what they should be. But, again, I'm interested in making sure our Navy and our chief of naval operations wants to keep our Navy ready for this coming century. So we need to understand these changes to the best we can and adapt to them.

Titley’s attitude is exemplary.   Granted, he’s not a PM but he is setting a great precedent for all of us. Notice his laser-focus on objectives.  “Keep our Navy ready for this coming century”.  Not assess the validity of climate change, nor take to the table any views that may blind or disperse that focus.

Now we are quite aware that this post has quite a bit of information for you about the science of climate change, and that there is value in that (after all, even a blog post needs to produce value!).  However, we hope that you also take away the main messages: work with facts, and keep a laser focus on project objectives.  That’s the real intended value of this blog post, and we hope you enjoyed it.

If you found Rear Admiral Titley’s topic to be interesting, or just want to learn more about climate change from his perspective, we suggest this video (below) as a follow up.

Rear Admiral David Titley - Climate Change Adaptation Congress Opening Address from 3PillarsNetwork on Vimeo.

I teach graduate level project management at Boston University.  During the nicer weather, I like to eat my dinner on the banks of the Charles River. So you can imagine my surprise when I read this op/ed piece from a recent edition of the Boston Globe (10/10/2011) by Globe columnist Derrick Z. Jackson.  I never even thought about the river in a negative way, although I am old enough to remember the 1966 hit by the Standells that had the lines “Down by the banks of the river Charles” and “Well I love that dirty water. Oh, Boston, you're my home.”  I guess this is what that song was referring to. According to the Globe piece; “It was unthinkable 20 years ago that the Charles River would ever be clean enough to win the world’s leading environmental prize for river restoration. Back then, human feces lapped at the Museum of Science. It was a river with “belly-up fish and algal blooms making dogs sick,’’ recalled Arleen O’Donnell, former state department of environmental protection acting commissioner.”  Further, Jackson states in his piece, “Today, the Charles is one of the nation’s cleanest urban rivers, and recently claimed the International River Foundation’s top award for river management, beating out more than 20 other countries. The award went to the Charles River Watershed Association, which was formed in 1965 to protect the river.”

It is clear what this has to do with sustainability, but what does it have to do with project management? In our book, Green Project Management, we talk about “stakeholder demand” as one of the drivers of the Green Wave, and how project managers should add green (sustainable) project management to their skill sets to take advantage of the Green Wave.  This is a prime example of that. “The award provides a great moment to see what can happen when degradation spurs people to action. Former Governor Michael Dukakis remembered last week the collective shrug of the shoulder when Havey Beach in West Roxbury was closed to swimming in the 1950s. “There were no protests, no nothing,’’ Dukakis said. “The city itself was deteriorating. State government was corrupt. It was an angry place. The river was so polluted; it kind of symbolized the time. One by one, people started believing, and we hit that tipping point where people remembered that their grandmothers swam in the Charles and wanted that for themselves again.’’” Stakeholder demand in action.

So what was done to stop the degradation and improve the water quality of the Charles River?  Well I’ll tell you.  Project management, that’s what happened.  ““The state’s environmental secretary at the time, John DeVillars, took reclassification to another level when he became regional administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency. He launched a 10-year mission (project) to make the Charles swimmable by 2005 and began issuing annual report cards on its water quality. “There was something about establishing a goal, timetable, and a measure of accountability that helped turned the tide (our emphasis),’’ DeVillars said.””  Sound familiar?  He established a green by definition/green by project impact - project!  Yes, there can be some overlap across the green spectrum.

“Towns whose sewage outflows emptied into the river as well as offending corporations were held accountable for violations, most notably the fines levied against Conrail in 1995. Pollution from its Allston rail yard resulted in $2.5 million in criminal penalties, including a record $1.5 million under the Oil Pollution Act of 1990. In a move to restore public relations, Conrail also gave $250,000 to CRWA to build a water testing lab. How the CRWA came to be the recipient was a story by itself.”

Project funding, and of course you’d need a budget for this project, can come from unusual places.  We know as project managers to be careful of discounting any potential resource.  “Bob Zimmerman, executive director of the Charles River Watershed Association says “A snaggle-toothed guy with bad breath came to my office. I listened to him talk about the river for half an hour. I didn’t think anything about it, but then came the Conrail headline and the money for us. It turned out that the snaggle-toothed guy was the fly-fishing writer from Sports Illustrated and he went fly fishing with senior officials of Conrail on the Rappahannock River [in Virginia]. I guess Conrail was trying to figure out what to do and they mentioned this to him and he said, ‘No question you should give the money to these guys.’ ’’”

Again, stakeholder demand asserted itself.  ““When we started, the attitude was, ‘So what, even if we fix our pipes, what about the next town?’  Walsh-Rogalski (Bill Walsh-Rogalski, a longtime attorney in the EPA’s New England office) said. “But one by one, people started believing, and we hit that tipping point where people remembered that their grandmothers swam in the Charles and wanted that for themselves again.’’”

We know that a project is not a project without a way to measure its success or failure, and this project is no exception.  It needed a metric. “Another visible tipping point of the Charles is the wildlife. The river now hosts otters, beavers, fishers, herons, hawks, herring, and migrating loons. Maury Eldridge, one of the river’s most dedicated kayaking photographers, says it has become more a “national park or wildlife sanctuary than an urban/suburban river.’’”

And as further prove of the effectiveness of project management discipline; “Still, major challenges remain, such as phosphorus runoffs from car exhaust, fertilizers, and animal waste, which can cause toxic algal blooms. But the lessons (learned) of the Charles have inspired and informed river cleanups in the state and throughout the nation. Frymire (recreational kayaker Roger Frymire) is today most frequently at work on the Mystic River, where he says he has seen at least 50 source problems.”

“So long a pauper among rivers, the Charles is now one of the greatest American civic accomplishments of the last 50 years. That in itself is a crowning achievement.”  We believe that this is a good example of green (sustainable) project management at work.  The effort could not have been accomplished without the acknowledgement of the green wave’s driver of stakeholder demand, and the intersection of the disciplined approach of project management.

We were listening to one of our favorite podcasts the other day - Wayne Turmel's Cranky Middle Manager.  In this particular episode, Wayne was - in his usual witty and outstanding fashion - was interviewing Adrian Gostick and Chester Elton, co-authors of The Orange Revolution.

The more we listened to this podcast and the more we heard these authors speak, the more we thought that the Orange* Revolution and Green Project Management had something in common other than an association with a crayon color.  Much more.

In our book, Green Project Management, we assert that the project manager, as a change agent, can be a source of change for their organization.  For example if they are to seek a connection to their organization's Environmental Management Plan (EMP) - and find tha their organization has no EMP, that you - the project manager could be the one to prompt the organization to create one.

And in The Orange Revolution, the authors study hundreds of thousands of people (350,000, to be exact) in a wide variety of organizations, and share their findings about how great teams were formed - teams with "breakthrough" capacity.  In many cases these were operational teams - groups of nurses, for example.  However the principles they expound certainly fit with project managers, and definitely can be adopted by green project managers.

For example, the authors found four essential qualities amongst these breakthrough teams:

• A noble cause
• Simple Rules  (simple, boiled down to 3: [Wowing customers, no surprises due to great communication, and mutual team support].
• Drive engagement
• Have team loyalty, sometimes at the expense of enterprise loyalty - not always popular with CEOs, but it works

In the book they go on to define 6 traits of breakthrough teams:

• Big dreams and ambitious goals
• Belief in in each other
• Belief in what the team can accomplish together;
• Take calculated risks while closely measuring results;
• Perseverence despite problems or conflicts that arise; and
• They have a "charming habit of Telling Stories" exemplifying what they are trying to achieve.

The big dreams and ambitious goals could be the dreems of making an organization as a whole more sustainable (economically, socially, and ecologically), couldn't it.  And that's one of many touch points we found.

Some others, very quickly -

Perserverence despite problems - well we know that getting people to think sustainability takes (ironically) sustained perserverence.  Telling stories - that's what we've been doing at EarthPM and it's working.  By telling stories and giving webinars on the topic of sustainability in project management we have found that our followership (heading towards 1,000 twitter followers, and an exponentially growing LinkedIn Group for example) is growing by leaps and bounds.

Bottom line: we recommend that you start with listening to Wayne Turmel's podcast regularly, but in particular the interview with Gostick and Elton.  Then, or in parallel, pick up their book, the Orange Revolution, perhaps buying it in tandem with Green Project Management.  After all - as the post heading says, they go together.

*why Orange? We knew you'd be curious...it's a nod to the authors' first book, the Carrot Principle.