Fires devastated Australia and California earlier at the year 2020. The 2020 Atlantic hurricane season became one of the most active in history, with the most named storms. Several hit the southern USA, but two devastated Central America. Major cyclones also hit areas in Asia. Climate change is causing more extreme weather everywhere.

How has the project management professional world reacted to these events and crises?  What should we be thinking or, more importantly, doing in response? In the pandemic, PM organizations simply seemed to have retreated into “virtual mode” conducting activities online. There seem to have been no policy changes, few guidelines issued, no new projects launched to help solve these problems.

Project Managers are and should be at the forefront of responses to crises. But where is the PM professional world? It seems to me that little is happening in the PM profession, which seems to be moving slowly if at all on global problems. Is the subject of climate change or a pandemic just too big? What about all the other big problems where solutions will require big projects and where project management could obviously be so helpful. What was I missing?

Enter the Black Elephant

Then I read an article by Tom Friedman, Pulitzer-winning author (The Earth is Flat and Hot, Flat and Crowded) and commentator for the New York Times on June 3rd, 2020. His article introduced me to Black Elephants. I did some quick research, found a few other extremely interesting articles, but only a few. I’ve never read or heard of anyone in the project management community mentioning black elephants.

The term Black Elephant was apparently coined in 2010 in a meeting in the UK between two change agents, Dougald Hine and Vinay Gupta. Here is what I found.

“Friedman noted the use of the term ”black elephant”, which is a cross between “a black swan” (an unlikely, unexpected event with enormous ramifications) and the “elephant in the room” (a problem that is visible to everyone, yet no one still wants to address it) even though we know that one day it will have vast, black-swan-like consequences. He was quoting investor and environmentalist Adam Sweidan, who said, “there are a herd of environmental black elephants gathering” – global warming, deforestation, ocean acidification, mass extinction and massive freshwater pollution. ‘When they hit, we’ll claim they were black swans no one could have predicted, but, in fact, they are black elephants, very visible right now.’” (York. 2014)

“The Black Elephant is an unholy union of two boardroom clichés: the Elephant in the Room, the thing which everyone knows is important, but no one will talk about; and the Black Swan, the hard-to-predict event which is outside the realm of normal expectations, but has enormous impact. The Black Elephant is an event which was quite foreseeable, which was in fact an Elephant in the Room, but after it happens, everyone will try to pass off as a Black Swan.” (Hine 2010)

The current coronavirus pandemic is a black elephant. So is climate change. The social unrest that rocked the US, UK and even Australia is based on several black elephants, incl. income inequality, social injustice, poverty and racism: it was just a matter of time until those blew. The black elephants are stampeding and we can see them.

So what…?

It seems these questions and issues are relevant to project management in multiple ways. First and most obviously, from a risk management perspective, black elephants are bigger and potentially more significant than any other risk. They represent existential threats – as the pandemic is clearly demonstrating. They can devastate resources, supply chains, communities, markets, businesses, economies etc. How many risk management plans take black elephants into account?

For any mega project or program the probability of serious crises with widespread impacts increase dramatically. Project models and templates for addressing black elephants are needed. The PM academic and professional worlds could take the lead but I think PM professional bodies need to get more involved. As Peter Morris exclaimed in the title of his 2017 paper, “Climate change and what the PM profession should be doing about it” (Morris 2017), the PM profession has the knowledge and experience to achieve big projects. Don’t we have an obligation to try?

Crisis after crisis

Why are we just responding to crisis after crisis? It’s time to take a step back, see the forest for the trees, understand the bigger picture and consider the longer term. What are the elephants in the room? Which ones are black? They are easy to see. And why isn’t anyone in the project management world doing anything to stop or at least slow them down?

This article is an excerpt from a longer editorial by the author published in the June 2020 edition of the PM World Journal. See the original at https://pmworldlibrary.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/pmwj94-Jun2020-Pells-black-elephants-and-maybe-project-management-editorial3.pdf

About the Author

David L. Pells is Managing Editor and publisher of the PM World Journal and Managing Director of the PM World Library. He is an internationally recognized leader in the field of professional project management. A senior program management advisor to the National Nuclear Security Administration in Washington, DC. and to several national laboratories in the U.S. David has a BA in Business Administration from the University of Washington and an MBA from Idaho State University. He has published widely and spoken at events worldwide.

Pells has been serving on the board of directors of the Project Management Institute (PMI®) twice. He was founder and chair of the Global Project Management Forum (1995-2000) and been awarded PMI’s Person of the Year award 1998 and Fellow Award, PMI’s highest honor 1999. He is also an Honorary Fellow of the Association for Project Management (APM) in the UK, Project Management Associates (PMA – India), Istituto Italiano di Project Management (ISIMP) and the Russian Project Management Association (SOVNET). He is an honorary member of the Project Management Association of Nepal.

To view other works by David Pells, visit his author showcase in the PM World Library at pmworldlibrary.net/authors/david-l-pells.

References

1. Friedman, Tom (2014). Stampeding Black Elephants. New York Times, November 22nd. Link to article.
2. Hine, Dougald (2010). Black Elephants and Skull Jackets: A conversation with Vinay Gupta, May 1. Link to article.
3. Morris, P.W.G. (2017). Climate Change and What the Project Management Profession Should Be Doing About It: A UK Perspective, Association for Project Management, November. Link to article.
4. York, Suzanne (2014). Black Elephants: Ignorance, Extinction and Human Impact on the Planet. Populationgrowth.org, November 26th. Link to article.