In the opinion piece, entitled "Looking To The Skies", the editors discuss the Dennis Union Church - a 173-year-old building on Cape Cod, and its congregation's effort to get air conditioning into their building.
From the editorial:
"Earlier this year, the church was one of four religious groups in New England to receive an Energy Star label, recognizing the congregation's "environmental stewardship." In the case of Dennis Union, that stewardship includes photovoltaic panels, lights that shut themselves off automatically, and double-pane glass."
The congregation wanted to install solar panels so as to power the air conditioning. However, "the congregation discovered it could use solar panels to not only offset the energy to run air conditioning, but to turn a profit as well in the form of electricity sold back into the grid. And, as one congregant pointed out, although not everyone agrees about climate change, everyone likes to save money."
But the Editorial really got us thinking about project managers. As usual. Why?
What could a church tell us about project management and sustainabililty?
Well, first of all, this is a good example of a "Green By Definition" project. (See our book for the 4 distinct categories of projects). But more importantly, it shows how a group of stakeholders, in this case, a congregation and its leadership, decided to think long-term. Sustainably.
Perhaps the best line in the editorial is here:
"Perhaps religious organizations that look at history in terms of centuries, rather than days or months, are better suited to understand the concept of a big picture than individuals on their own."
We're not saying that project managers have to run out and join a religious organization and become regular church, mosque, or synagogue goers, but we are saying that the type of thinking exemplified here by Dennis Union Church is more appropriate than you might imagine for a project manager.
Think sustainably, act projectly.
For those of you more interesetd in the actual project, the architecture, and history of the church, see this case study.
Ray Anderson died yesterday (see press release here).
Words fail when it comes to discussing Ray Anderson and his importance to sustainabililty and business. He speaks for himself, and for those who (justifiably) count on results to prove something to be correct, Ray Anderson's company, InterfaceFLOR's results also speak for themselves.
Watch this video to see what this amazing man had to say.
So - nothing to add except we're here to honor his memory and hope that some of you will take some inspiration from this man.
One of the most valuable tools in the project manager’s tool kit is lessons learned. It can give a twenty-twenty hindsight perspective of a project to help avoid the mistakes of the past. George Santayana noted Spanish philosopher who, in Volume 1 of his Reason in Common Sense, coined the phrase “Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” Sometimes, while we don’t know whether or not a “lessons learned” was conducted, it is good to go back and look at a project to see what we can learn so we don’t repeat history. Since the connection between sustainability and project management is a relatively new concept, we thought it would be interesting to take a look at an infamous project, Union Carbide’s Plant in Bhopal, India, from a sustainability perspective.
METHYL ISOCYANATE UN 2480
Shipping Name: Methyl isocyanate
Other Names: Isocyanic acid, methyl ester, Methylcarbylamine MIC
CAS: 624-83-9
WARNING! l POISON! BREATHING THE GAS CAN KILL YOU! SKIN AND EYE CONTACT CAUSES SEVERE BURNS AND BLINDNESS!
Fire fighting gear (including SCBA) provides NO protection. If exposure occurs, remove and isolate gear immediately and thoroughly decontaminate personnel
DO NOT USE WATER! REACTS VIOLENTLY WITH WATER OR STEAM!
Just after midnight on December 3, 1984, methyl isocyanate (MIC) gas began leaking from Union Carbide’s Plant in Bhopal, India. Before it was all over, approximately 10,000 gallons of the highly toxic gas had been released forming a deadly cloud that covered 25 square miles and killed or injured over 100,000 people. According to the Harvard Business School Case, “Bhopal became a symbol of corporate negligence and risk.” According to Newsweek, December 17, 1984, “It was like breathing fire…..” The following morning, while all the buildings were intact, it looked like a nuclear bomb hit. Dead humans and animals littered the ground. It was the worst industrial accident in history.
It is interesting that the Harvard Business Case[1] is that the roots of this disaster could be traced back to the mid-1960s when India was in the midst of its “Green Revolution.” In a socially responsible move, India wanted to eliminate chronic food shortages by boosting food production. One of the ways they wanted to do that was to make fertilizers and pesticides more readily available, thus the need for a manufacturing plant like the UC plant that used MIC in the production of pesticides.
As always, we like to give the caveat that we were not in the room when the planning decisions for the project were conducted, so we don’t know for sure what did or didn’t drive the decisions that were made. What we can do is look at the information available, which includes an organization’s reaction to the crisis, to provide some insight to not “repeat history.”
So what could have been done that may not have been done in the initial stages of the planning process for this project, specifically, the environmental risk assessment. Remember, we are looking at this as a retrospective and making some assumptions for the purpose of discussion. The gas is known to be highly toxic, see warning label above. UC’s name is on the plant. A risk encountered is whether or not UC will have enough control over the design and construction of the plant to provide the proper precautions when building this facility in the area of a city with a population of 900,000. The answer in hindsight is no, for a variety of reasons; vital parts of the plant including monitoring instrumentation and vent gas scrubbers manufactured in India by Indians (no control by US UC), limited safety training, employees selected and trained in India, many changes in design and configuration changes during the 10 years of construction, in other words, ceding of control to the Indians. Is that a good scenario for a company that has its name on the door? An observation we make because of the case study and other research into the disaster is that the executives of the US based UC seem to have felt that there was no liability for them because of the role of the Indian Government and the Indian engineers, builders, etc. Can that kind of accountability be delegated? We don’t think so. Sure, some of the responsibility can be delegated, but if your name is on the door, your name is on the door, and some of the profits are being returned to the US. You have no “case” for delegation of accountability.
Because of the toxicity of the gas, and the lack of control over some of the key safety factors, wouldn’t it be wise to take a very close look at the potential of a leak. Even if the likelihood is low, the impact will be very high. We conclude that there wasn’t much of a risk analysis done on the possibility of a leak by the circumstances surrounding the leak and the reaction to it. The storage tank holding the MIC showed a dangerously high pressure reading, but by the time it was caught, it was too late. At 2am (almost two hours after the tank started leaking) the plant’s emergency siren sounded. Thinking that a fire had broken out, “hundreds rushed toward the plant” right into the path of the gas. “The train station was littered with the bodies of railroad employees…tying up the station for 20 hours making it impossible to flee the disaster area.” Those who were wealthy enough to have cars tried to escape but were blinded by the gas causing numerous accidents. We would have thought that if the risk of a leak was more closely analyzed, a better plan would have been in place.
Looking back on the disaster, it is easy to speculate on what should have been done. But isn’t that what lessons learned are for? Some questions that could be asked:
Did they consider their ability to produce pesticides without stockpiling MIC?
Was the technology used in the Bhopal Plant inferior to that used in West Virginia?
Did UC know of safety issues at the Bhopal Plant?
Should the plant have been constructed further from a population center?
We have included sustainability as a criterion, which probably wasn’t as big a concern then as it is today and will be even more in the future. However, then and now, the consequences are the same; consumer backlash, law suits, devaluation of a company's stocks, etc. There are clear sustainability issues involved in this case, whether they called them that at the time, or not. Looking back on some of these “environmental” disasters can give project manager’s valuable insights for the future.
[1]Harvard Business School International Business Cases, Union Carbide’s Bhopal Plant, Rev. September 4, 1996.
One of the most fundamental and imperative things a project manager must do is to identify stakeholders.
We think this is best done by asking two thoughtful questions:
Who cares about your project?
Who cares about your project’s outcome?
We focus a lot on this last part – the outcome, because many times we’re so caught up in the project itself that we lose (in a forest-for-the-trees sort of way) sight of the steady-state operation of our project. And this is where many of the issues of CSR (corporate social responsibility) and TBL (Triple Bottom Line) come into play.
We recently came across a great comedy clip from the August 2, 2011 rendition of The Daily Show (a Comedy Central Network TV show, staring Jon Stewart). In this clip, The Daily Show’s Aasif Mandvi interviews a stakeholder in a proposed wind farm in south Florida, USA. Here, a stakeholder appears and is very concerned about the project’s steady-state use and its effect on a natural resource – ducks. We hate to give too many details because it may spoil the comedy of the clip. So watch the clip and come back here.
So if you saw the clip – and we hope you did – here are the learnings from our perspective:
Think broadly and deeply about who may be stakeholders while the project is ‘under construction’.
Now, imagine the project is done. It’s running. It’s working. It’s perhaps a year into operation. What happens to your stakeholder set? Acknowledge that it will change. Feed that back into your stakeholder identification process.
Know thy stakeholders!
-know – and expose as necessary - their true objectives and concerns (not always their spoken ones)
-understand drivers of their behaviors
Know the interactions of stakeholders with each other
To shift a bit from comedy to reality, check out the actual sites of the involved parties here:
We’re interested in your feedback here. What did you think of the video? Did the stakeholders’ interests surprise you? Where did you see hypocrisy? How would you have dealt with this if you were the wind farm project manager? How would you have dealt with this if you were the Waterfowl representative?
We know that this is a difficult part of any project, and so, with tounge firmly in bill, we wish you the best of flock.
In 2009, Brett Willis wrote a white paper for High Performance Solutions (HPS) entitled The Business Case for Environmental Sustainability (Green), Achieving rapid returns from practical integration of Land & Green. He wrote “It is a myth that being environmentally responsible is injurious to profitability.” To read the entire white paper, click here. “Environmental Sustainability must be as commonsense as Lean – it must enable us to quickly identify and eliminate wastes that may well include energy consumption, landfill avoidance, and much more.” Mr. Willis goes on to say that to be effective you need a process like Green Value Stream (GVS), a formalized and common sense approach to sustainability with its roots in Lean. He is not necessarily advocating any one approach, but he is advocating that to really be effective, one needs a systematic approach. “Even more good news is the notion that the larger Green initiatives are taken out of altruism is fading as the returns from their implementation are totaled. Many of these have become great revenue generators. Today's leaders understand that sustainability is now a critical part of the core value of the company. Employees are equipped, and given the freedom, to be creative and look for alternatives they may not have seen before. You unleash creativity when you give people a vision like we have for suatainability."
These sentiments are voiced by one of our favorite sustainability champions, Ray Anderson of Interface Global. In a recent (July 2011) video, Mr. Andersen states that the business case for sustainability has emerged very clearly. Costs are down, not up. Their products are better due to the inspiration and creativity spawned by the commitment to find more environmental friendly ways to do business; “the well spring of sustainable design, the lens of sustainable design, has made our products better than ever.” He also says that the “goodwill of the marketplace is astonishing.” “There is no amount of slick advertising at any cost that we could have done that would have created the goodwill that this effort (sustainability) has created. You are talking about authenticity at its very, very best. This is a better way to make a bigger profit and a more legitimate one, at that, because it doesn’t come at the expense of future generations and not at the expense of the earth.”
Still not convinced? Then let’s look at some real numbers. According to The Economist Magazine in a 2008 study “DuPont cut costs by $2 billion since 1990 through energy reduction initiatives alone. In addition, 3M saved $82 million between 2001 and 2005 and reaped another $10 million in savings in 2006.” Since executing on their climbing of “Mount Sustainability”, Interface Global has added more than $400 million to the bottom line. Bob Willard, an internationally renowned leader in sustainability practices, research has shown that large enterprises can additional yield profits in the order of 38% in five years by executing on sustainable practices.
As we’ve said before, and are confirmed in Mr. Willis’ article, there are other benefits, not as clearly definable, but as influential to the business case. In a 2008 survey conducted in conjunction with the Boston College Center for Corporate Citizenship showed that 68% of the respondents said that if the company had a strong environmental reputation for environmental commitment, it positively influenced their decision to buy the product or service, market share increase. Cone Inc conducted another survey that found that 83% of the Millennials (born between 1979 and 2001) trust a company more if it is environmentally responsible, and 68% said they would refuse to work for a company that is not socially and environmentally responsible.
One more important point that Ray Anderson makes is that the commitment to sustainability is organization wide, from the executive suite to the factory floor. To be truely effective, it has to be that way. That systemic approach is also voiced in Brett Willis' article.
For the Green Wave, the tide is rising. Business cases are being influenced by both real numbers and those not so easily quantifiable issues. It is real. Interface Global had to put together a consulting arm because they have been bombarded by requests from companies who are interested in how Interface has done what they’ve done. Because projects are the linchpin in any organization between business as usual and change, the project manager plays a key role in the execution of an organization’s sustainability practices. Stay in the forefront of your organization’s sustainability efforts. When armed with the facts that there are many ways sustainability leads to an increase in the bottom line, it is an easy sell!
From Ray Anderson: "I'll see you on the way (the journey to sustainability). We'll do this together because it is the right thing to do." From Earth PM's Assertion #1; "A project run with green intent is the right thing to do, but it also helps the project team do the right thing."
Believe It!
