Ignorance of the state of world

A non-profit venture called Gapminder has done surveys regarding how well people know the major facts about the state of world and results are startling.

A total of 1012 respondents in UK answered a set of multiple-choice questions. Among 7 questions highlighted by Gapminder roughly 10% of the answers were correct. The proportion of right answers varied between 6-30%. Even more remarkable was that for these same questions the answers of a set of 373 respondents, that had reported to have a university degree, were on average even worse than for the total set of respondents. Highlights of the survey as well as the initial conclusions can be found in Gapminder website.

What does this have to do with green project management? A lot on my opinion. For me green means more complete in the area of projects. Both environmental, social and financial objectives, constraints and risks need to be considered. That's where ignorance is dangerous. At least when ignorant people happen to be project managers.

Green lesson # 1: Find out what the problem is

It's not necessarily the first thing that comes to mind. Neither the issue that people speak most about. Take the population growth as an example. Referring to the above mentioned ignorance survey by Gapminder total number of children (age 0-14) in the world is forecasted to be the same 2 billion for the year 2100 as it was for the year 2000 according to UN experts' estimates. 92% of the respondents in the UK survey answered 3 billion or more. Worth looking in this respect is also the one-hour long video by Gapminder's Hans Rosling,

Green lesson # 2: Do not create new problems

While solving the identified problem do not go creating new ones. I could take the GiveDirectly project mentioned in one of my previous blog posts as an example. Idea is to give money directly to the poorest people in the developing countries. Results have been excellent. 90% or more of the donated money has reached the recipients. Even better is that money seems to be used meaningfully resulting in the improvement of living conditions. However, there is not yet evidence about the effects on the environment. Without that kind of control even this excellent charity project might create new problems when solving one.

Green lesson # 3: Find out whether the problem gets solved or not

Sounds meaningful and there are good tools for that such as GPM Global's P5 standard measuring what the impacts of the project are in environmental, social and financial domains. In this framework targets are set and their achievement is tracked. There needs to be a way of measuring the degree of completion at a given point of project.

Organizations such as United Nations show an excellent example of setting and tracking millennium goals.