In this entry we look at a project conflict resolution tool and relate it to a news event from today’s papers which is funny in a way, but very, very sad in another way.
The tool is the Thomas-Kilmann model, which sounds very fancy and hard to understand but is actually very straightforward, powerful, and applicable to your role as a project manager in understanding and dealing with conflict.
And you know that as a PM you will deal with conflict.
Why? Here are three main reasons:
You can already imagine that the conflict is multi-dimensional. Between you and another project or project manager. Between “silos” of departments or organization. Between team members on your project. Between team members on your projects and their managers. And on. And on and on.
The Thomas-Kilmann model looks at the ways people deal with conflict in two dimensions: assertiveness and cooperativeness. Note that assertiveness is not aggressiveness. Here it’s a scale of how much you assert your will along a scale from ‘not at all’ to ‘at all costs, assert my will’. Similarly, cooperativeness is measured on a scale from ‘not at all’ to ‘at all costs, cooperate’. A simple chart (see below) plots two these dimensions against each other and yields 5 ways of dealing with conflict. You can even take an assessment to determine where you and your team members fit in this model. In any case, no one way is better than the other. A project manager has several key takeaways from this:
1. Recognize that conflict will exist and that these aspects (assertiveness and cooperativeness) contribute
2. Recognize the type of conflict you have and when the various types of resolution work when you are an arbitrator
3. Same as above for those times when you are a party in a conflict.
Looking at the chart you can see that there will be times – times of urgency – where the PM will need the competing role and ‘lay down the law’ and direct the project team. Perhaps the more steady-state role of the PM is in the collaborative area – at least in assuring that this is the area in which your team is working.
There’s alot more. See an amusing post from our sister site ScopeCrepe here.
Now let’s move on to today’s news. Here’s an extract from the AP (Associated Press) news story:
NEW DELHI, India – For nearly 30 years, India and Bangladesh have argued over control of a tiny rock island in the Bay of Bengal. Now rising sea levels have resolved the dispute for them. The island is gone.
New Moore Island in the Sunderbans has been completely submerged, said oceanographer Sugata Hazra, a professor at Jadavpur University in Calcutta. The disappearance of the uninhabited isle has been confirmed by satellite imagery and sea patrols, he said. “What these two countries could not achieve from years of talking has been resolved by global warming” Hazra said.
See the map below to locate this (former) island, called New Moore by India and South Talpatti by Bangladesh.
Scientists have noted a dramatic increase in the RATE at which sea levels have risen – not the rise, but the RATE of the rise – until 2000 the rise was about 0.12 inches a year, but in the last 10 years it has nearly doubled to 0.2 inches per year. Ten islands in the area, some inhabited, are at risk. Lohachara was an inhabited island which was already submerged, inhabitants having to move onto the mainland in 1996. Estimates by scientists say that 18% of Bangladesh’s coastal area will be underwater by 2050, displacing about 20 million people. You can read about this in an article from the UK newspaper The Telegraph, here.
So – how do you choose to resolve conflict? Perhaps you can just wait until climate change causes your project to go underwater. But we recommend using a measured, practical approach with the advantage of the knowledge provided by a careful analysis, perhaps using the Thomas-Kilmann model.
Sustainagility and Greenality: together at last
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:
..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”:
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.