After reading the front page, top story of today’s Boston Globe, we’re glad we recently finished reading this book.

The Globe story indicates that yes, some of the findings of scientists regarding climate change were wrong.  However, they were not wrong the way some climate change cynics have asserted.  Unfortunately the scientists were wrong in the other direction.  They were too conservative, especially in the area of estimating the sea rise due to climate change.  For folks along the northern part of the Eastern US coastline – especially New England, the outlook for sea water levels rising is, much more near-term than theoretical or distant. According to the Globe, “what was once a problem for our great great-grandchildren is one our children could confront.” The scary news goes on:

“Already, 65 acres of prime Massachusetts coastal real estate is swallowed by the sea every year; ocean waters have crept up about a foot here in the last century. While more land will be eaten away, storm surges — abnormal rises of water during severe weather — layered on top of higher seas could push much further inland, especially in flat coastal areas of New England, and oceanside homes in places like Scituate and Gloucester will be even more vulnerable. Some scientists say that climate change may also bring fiercer and more frequent storms.”

Sigh.

Alas, after such a pessimistic article, it was good to have some optimistic input – some hope – mixed in as well.  With chapter subtitles like “We have all the tools we need”, the book Sustainagility by Patrick Dixon and Johan Gorecki paints an empowering picture that shows how technology can slow the effects of climate change and allow the planet to do some recovering.  For example, it was nice to read that wind turbines, according to the book, “have the theoretical capacity to provide 40 times all the world’s electricity demands if storage and transmission problems could be solved in an affordable way.”

This makes us happy both because of the promise of clean power – but also for the incredibly selfish reason that if an organization wanted to:

• solve a wind turbine storage problem
• increase power transmission capacity and efficiency
• build turbines
• lay cables
• meter the grid
• and on and on and on…

..any of these would be – you guessed it – programs and projects.

The summary of the book says: “Innovation and agility will solve most of the greatest threats to our planet’s ecosystem, argue Patrick Dixon and Johan Gorecki. In “Sustainagility,” they suggest positive ways that businesses and individuals can address these threats while making a profit. “Sustainagility” covers how to encourage green innovation inside an organization, how to develop green technologies faster, and how to adapt rapidly to stay ahead of competition. It includes text boxes containing shocking statistics about the destruction of our planet, short inspiring examples of how innovation has created new profitable business and helped the world, and personal messages from global leaders about sustainable innovation. Case studies of numerous well-known, high-profile companies are featured, demonstrating that companies have successfully used innovative and agile processes to improve their businesses and fight some of the greatest threats to the world’s ecosystems.”

The book’s inviting approach is to use interviews with leaders from the year 2040 (in fact opening with an interview from the UN President from 20-May, 2040), with a retrospective of how close to the edge we were, until innovative, agile companies started solving problems (we would assert – with projects).

The book is interesting and – as we said – uplifting.  We liked two things the most, though.

1. Their use of smashing two words together to get a point across.  They combined Sustainability and Agility, to get Sustainagility.  We combined Green and Quality to get greenality.  In both cases, the authors were driven to communicate a concept by combining two well-known, existing concepts.

2. In the book’s “Afterword” there are “Ten Steps to Profitable Sustainability”.  Again, this is one of our themes – properly completed projects of any kind which are run with “Triple bottom line” thinking – will be better projects, not in spite of, but because of the life-cycle and holistic considerations involved.

Below we paraphrase the “Ten steps for your company”:

1. Make ‘sustainability’ central to your strategy
2. Look at the resources you use, directly or indirectly
3. Take steps to reduce carbon use – but also all resource use
4. Tell your own ‘sustainability story’ better than competitors
5. Link every sale to a triple bottom line benefit
6. Partner with environmental groups
7. Stay profitable -control costs and choose proper pricing
8. Work closely with experienced people
9. Small (incremental) changes do add up, and do count
10. Encourage your suppliers and customers to think with more greenality

The book goes on to provide 10 steps for governments and 12 things consumers can do.

Our point, as it has been from the start, and which we will sustain – excuse the quite intentional pun- is that project managers are at that point in most organizations which is particularly sensitive to getting things done.  The ideas above – remain ideas, until a PM grabs on to one of them and makes it real and can hand it off to the steady-state.

We hope that more and more project managers get this.  And more importantly, we hope that the leaders of the agile and innovative companies at the forefront of these efforts understand how much their project managers and through them, their project teams, matter in these efforts.

We’ve experienced some extremes when promoting our agenda of getting project managers to take the lead in what we call greenality – the quality of green aspects that are built into your projects.
We see the full spread of reactions:

• those who align immediately and ask what they can do
• those in the middle who sort of yawn or sigh
• those who get a little put-off, even nasty at the mention of ecology (“eww!”) green (“yich!”) or sustainability (“gag!”) and the association of those crunchy-granola items with projects.

We try to keep the issue of climate change off the table, other than to provide proven and illustrative facts wherever we can.  We know that preaching about saving the planet can just politicize the issue and add what we call “unnecessary noise” into the argument.

In any case, we just saw a great article in the NY Times which seems to support that philosophy.

It’s about an organization working in a very conservative part of Kansas where the the word Gore (as in Al Gore) is really a four letter word.  We know that it has four letters already, but we’re referring to a whole different kind of four letter word.

In the article, which you can read by clicking here, an organization which seems to think a lot like EarthPM, called the Climate and Energy Project (note that name Project!) has sought to”extricate energy issues from the charged arena of climate politics”.

From the article:

The project ran an experiment to see if by focusing on thrift, patriotism, spiritual conviction and economic prosperity, it could rally residents of six Kansas towns to take meaningful steps to conserve energy and consider renewable fuels.

Here is the context in which they are working.  Only 48 percent of people in the Midwest agree with the statement that there is “solid evidence that the average temperature on earth has been getting warmer,” – a number much, much lower than the rest the country.

Working with that context – and carefully leaving out the climate change argument, the project was able to get buy in and generate several key conservation efforts, even resulting in the following indicative quote from a conservative farmer: “Whether or not the earth is getting warmer,” he said, “it feels good to be part of something that works for Kansas and for the nation.”

That’s quite a turnaround.

And that attitude is also reflected in results.  Energy use in the towns in which this project was active declined as much as 5 percent relative to other areas a notable savings.  1 to 2 percent savings are more typical for this type of conservation program.

This is what we hope to be achieving with our efforts.  Believe what you will about climate change, the efforts to conserve energy, reduce toxins, prevent unnecessary extraction of resources from the earth, and reducing waste, are all plain old logical, good things to be doing, whether a farmer or a project manager.

We suggest that you read the story and also visit the Climate and Energy Project’s  homepage.

And if you’re one of the folks who agree with us – try to keep climate change and project greenality as separated as, say, oil and water.

Evidently, the whole Climate Change thing (say some folks) is just vaporware.  Pun intended.

Today’s Boston Globe has a very telling article (read the whole thing here), with some poll statistics showing that people are backing off their belief in climate change.

To us, the most revealing statistic is this one: Just since 2008, the number of people who do not think “that global warming is happening” has doubled. It’s still an (ignorant, in our opinion) minority of 20%, but it’s 20% now, when it was 10% in 2008.   see the chart below.

And, according to the surveys, done by Yale and George Mason Universities,

Sixteen percent are considered “dismissive’’ – believing that global warming isn’t happening and is probably a hoax – up from 7 percent in 2008. So the number who actually think this is a hoax, has MORE than doubled.

Here’s a quote from the article:

“This issue is so politically sensitive, scientists need to be careful they [focus] on the science and not advocacy. . . . The science is robust and can speak for itself,’’ said Adil Najam, a lead author of two Intergovernmental Panel assessments and director of Boston University’s Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future. He said the recent errors do not undermine the fact that man is significantly contributing to global warming, “but the review process needs to be strengthened’’ for future reports.

Dyslexia is not equal to a hoax

One of the issues providing fuel (again, pun intended) for the cynics, is the fact that some of the scientific reporting has been sloppy.  Not good, ladies and gentlemen, please tighten up on this. Turns out that when one report cited the ice on the Himalayas would melt by 2035, they reversed a couple of numbers – it should have read 2350.  In scientific terms, of course, that’s a blink of the eye.  In talk-show host language, though, this is ammunition, baby.  It shows bias.  It proves that this is a hoax.  Damn lying scientists!  Proving their points with false facts! Give the talk show hosts a little nub like this and they will hang their hats on it.  Again, to quote the Globe, “the errors went beyond sloppiness and were troubling to scientists because advocacy group reports, no matter how robust, can give the perception of bias and are often not peer-reviewed – meaning they have not been vetted by independent scientists, as are studies published in scientific journals.”

More than one way to be wrong

The article also points out – quite correctly – that errors have probably also been made which underestimate the problem.  And even without errors, are we 100% sure that we have all of the effects in hand?  We may be missing an “accelerator” factor that actually would either increase the intensity or speed of some of the changes that have been detected, and may not even have detected or predicted other changes at all.

Have a look at the detailed poll below.

Your comments wanted

What do YOU think? If you’re a cynic, where are you getting your energy (pun)? And if you are in the camp that thinks that there is a change to the climate initiated by millions of tons of GHGs (greenhouse gasses) produced by humankind, what’s keeping your belief level high despite the dyslexic and dumb dabbling of some of our scientists?