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.
Equal and opposite
Well, now we have almost the exact opposite situation. This story takes place in (what used to be) a large lake – a very large lake, in fact, the world’s 4th-largest, and so large that it is called a Sea. The Aral Sea.
Instead of an island disappearing, here we have new land appearing because of the draining of the lake, and conflict between countries preventing anything from being done about it.
We think this is a good example of how life cycle assessment can and should be applied to a project.
It’s not hard.
Imagine if you will, a coffee pot. You pour some of the coffee pot into several cups. Are you with us? You keep pouring, diverting the coffee from the pot into the cups until the cups are full. Now here comes the thinking part. Can you imagine that there is now less coffee in the pot? Sure. Now just apply this thinking to the Aral Sea. Water from feeding rivers was diverted. The lake was not fed new water. So it dried up, to the point where now it is only 10% of its original size, and (as you see in the picture) a fishing industry was ruined, and salty sands from this large area are now brought via wind to places as far as Scandinavia and Japan, causing health issues in those remote areas. To put this in terms that are more familiar to North Americans, the Aral Sea has lost more water than the combined volume of Lakes Huron and Erie.
The Aral Sea is located in Central Asia. See the map below (it’s in the center, straddling Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan).
Here’s what happened (from a UN report):
Up until recently, atlases described Central Asia’s Aral Sea as the world’s fourth largest lake. Fed by two major rivers – the Amu Darya in the south, and the Syr Darya in the north – it stretched across an area of 66,000 sq km, with a total volume estimated at more than 1,000 cubic km. Its waters supplied local fisheries with annual catches of 40,000 tonnes, while the deltas of its major tributaries hosted dozens of smaller lakes and biologically rich marshes and wetlands covering 550,000 ha.
How the Aral Sea was turned into an ecological disaster – and might now be saved from still further damage, if never fully restored – is documented in a recent survey by AG’s Land and Water Development Division (AGL) of irrigation development in 15 countries of the former Soviet Union.
In the 1960s, planners assigned Central Asia the role of supplier of raw materials, notably cotton. Given the region’s arid climate, irrigation was imperative, and the Aral Sea and its tributaries seemed a limitless source of water. Irrigation development in the Soviet part of the Aral Sea basin was spectacular, expanding from an area of about 4.5 million ha in 1960 to almost 7 million ha in 1980. Local population also grew rapidly, from 14 million to about 27 million in the same period, while total water withdrawal almost doubled to 120 cubic km, more than 90% of it for agriculture.
The result was what water resource experts call “disruption of the prevailing water balance” in the Aral basin. Many minor tributaries were so overexploited that they ceased to contribute directly to the flow of the Amu Darya and Syr Darya. Low irrigation efficiencies – caused by unlined canals and a poor drainage network – led to major waterlogging and salinization that eventually affected about 40% of irrigated land. Overuse of pesticides and fertilizer polluted surface- and groundwater, while the delta ecosystems have simply perished: by 1990, more than 95% of the marshes and wetlands had given way to sand deserts, and more than 50 delta lakes, covering 60 000 ha, had dried up.
UN General Secretary Ban Ki-moon visited the area recently. Read the story here. Also, see an animation of how the lake’s profile has changed over the past decades here.
New projects to save the Aral Sea have begun. But wouldn’t it make more sense, dear project managers, to have thought this through at the outset, to think about the product of the projects that were draining the Aral Sea before it became a catastrophe? This is life cycle assessment, and if you only think about coffee pots, it’s not that hard.