I went bungee jumping over twenty years ago in Ottawa at the Great Canadian Bungee Jumping site at Wakefield, Chelsea Quebec. During that memorable experience I was reminded of several important lessons that I believe are valuable for change initiatives. For context, “Visualize an amphitheater of solid limestone, 200 ft. high, surrounding a 160 ft. […]
Pollution – Why we replaced horses with automobiles
Henry Ford never said people wanted faster horses, “what they wanted was less horseshit” (Flowers, 2014). It was a little more complicated than that, but you get the general point. The lesson of this post is that too much of anything can be bad, and we need to look at the whole asset life-cycle system […]
Two Technologies that Could Regenerate Our Planet
“Hope is being able to see that there is light despite all of the darkness.” Desmond Tutu With all the conflicts and problems and noise these days it is healthy to dream about how better our future will be. This post comes from a vision of our sustainable / regenerative future from the 1960’s courtesy […]
An Approach for Sustainability for Everyone – The Scout vs. the Warrior
“A new idea is first condemned as ridiculous and then dismissed as trivial, until finally, it becomes what everybody knows.” William James, 1879 For those who have accepted and endorsed the importance of sustainability and social responsibility issues like the importance of dealing with anthropogenic climate change, livable wages, the problems with waste etc., there […]
PRiSM is much more than an “eco-friendly” method.
As our Project Management Methodology PRiSM or PRojects integrating Sustainable Methods is turning 10 years old this year, we are proud that it enjoys success in a multitude of industries; and project types. There is one area though that is commonly misunderstood as evidenced by the blog-o-sphere. We often get emails and requests to mention […]
Projectors, We need rethink a few things.
“The true definition of a project, according to modern acceptation, is, as is said before, a vast undertaking, too big to be managed, and therefore likely enough to come to nothing.” – Daniel Defoe, An Essay upon Projects (1697) This is one of my favorite quotes for a couple reasons. One being that it is […]
Why Your Sustainability Report Might be Awful?
If you parse through the thousands of sustainability (non-financial reporting) online either direct from websites from major brands such as Coca-Cola, Nestle, or Nike, or even the mid-major companies that are trying to do the right thing, you will see something missing; and it is glaringly obvious once you start looking for it. A common […]
The Playbook Series: Global Warming
This is a follow on post to “Keep on scammin’ on: The evil brilliance, success and recurrence of The Playbook.” The strategies from The Playbook have been employed by industries that are under threat of losing profits when scientific evidence proves that their product causes significant harm to the public, society or planet in some […]
A Warning about Models
Due to the complexity of sustainability and social responsibility, we use a lot of models. One of the key lessons learned though is that “colouring by numbers does not guarantee success”. It is important to realize the limitations and constraints of models, and the fact that they should always be re-evaluated, particularly when new information […]
How our Perception & Politics impacts our Understanding of Sustainability
Perception is reality. We have heard that many times. One definition of perception “is the organization, identification, and interpretation of sensory information in order to represent and understand the presented information, or the environment.” The key with perception though is that people generally believe perception is fact, and not just an opinion or option. This […]
