3 Ways to Navigate Barriers to Environmental Success
We prefer biking analogies to car analogies for obvious reasons. :) Image courtesy James Toose @portablepeopleproductions
Evaluating your environmental work can help you find the root of impediments to progress and get you back on track.
There you are, smoothly riding your bike along your favorite trail (the Atlanta BeltLine) with eyes on your goal ahead (the beautiful park), when BAM! A trail closure appears ahead.
If you’re lucky and smart, you have good information from your mapping app: you hang a right and create your own detour rejoining the trail on the other side. You ride on ahead, wind in your helmeted hair, revelling in your ingenuity and navigational abilities.
If you’re unlucky or your phone is dead, you end up lost, checking your watch, taking turn after turn trying to navigate around the impediment by feel.
No matter how well we plan our projects, impediments will arise.
When we’re in the planning phase, we map out our intentions, and we also consider external factors that could affect our work or results. These factors may be predictable but frustrating, like slow-moving new federal funding incentivizing solar power investments, or they may be impossible to see on the horizon, like the Covid pandemic bringing us to a screeching halt in March 2020.
Program evaluation tools work like investigative research tools. They help us to understand impediments and mysteries and teach us the best ways to navigate around them back toward making a positive impact on the planet.
GeoLiteracy specializes in solving complicated problems, and they make us excited to get to work. Here are a few I’ve worked to resolve in my career:
Solving the mystery of a disappearing and reappearing lake in central Florida.
Nailing down the geology and chemistry explaining what caused someone’s drinking water to catch fire in Texas.
Figuring out why environmental programs in the Virgin Islands couldn’t meet federal standards after decades of trying.
Identifying the root causes of the Flint, Michigan, drinking water crisis.
Here are three of the tools we use to help identify and understand an impediment:
Image by Juan Encalada @juanencalada
The Five Whys
This is what we like to call The Toddler Method. Frequently, we think we understand what’s going on but our proximity to the day-to-day of a program or a problem can give us a bit of confirmation bias. We see what we expect to see. So, we begin by asking ourselves why we’re seeing what we’re seeing. “Z occurred because of Y.” Then, we work backward five (or so) times to investigate whether we’re really seeing the true cause of the impediment: “Y occurred because of X; X occurred because of W; etc.” This process does not provide us with answers, necessarily, but it helps us to hone in on the areas where challenges lie.
Portion of a system diagram (GeoLiteracy)
System Diagrams
Engineers, ecologists, physicists and others use system diagrams to understand how interconnected systems work together to achieve an intended result. Implementing an environmental program requires understanding a system that typically involves people and places. When we start mapping out the sources, sinks, feedback, and feedforward loops, we begin to clarify leverage points. This helps us to see where our work may be swamped by another source or amplified by a feedback loop.
Image by Eco Warrior Princess @ecowarriorprincess
Anonymous Input
The people you’re working with are smart. You know this already. But do you know if they are comfortable letting you in on all of their smart ideas? When you run into problems, there is a good chance that someone you’re working with has more clarity on the source of the challenge that you do. And when all of this clarity is combined, you may have a clear way of understanding and resolving the challenge already waiting for you.
We’d love to help you navigate the challenge so you can get back to making a difference.
Asking someone outside of your organization to take a close look at where you’ve been and where you want to be can get you back on track and even streamline your work to reach the goal more efficiently.
Do you have a program that has stalled out or slowed down?
Is your work going slower than you expected?
Let’s find out if we can help you get back on track!