As sustainability becomes a necessity for humanity at large and for business in particular, it poses tremendous opportunities and challenges for the project management community. How can project managers embrace these challenges and opportunities?

For quite a long time the thinking and practice of management was dominated by a rather rationalist approach. The feelings and energies of individuals and teams were by far left aside. The professional behaviour was one of emotional self-control and composure. The humanist approaches of 1960s, including Human Relations and Organizational Development, brought the human motivations back into the managerial consideration. More recently, the concept of the organizational energy was pioneered by Bernd Vogel (University of Reading, UK) and Heike Bruch (University of St. Gallen, Switzerland). In their take, organizational energy is the driving force behind all business actives that involve individuals and teams. Positive energy will take organizations to the peaks of success. Negative energy will eventually burn an organization inside out.

You might have heard of the Earth Overshoot Day (EOD). This is the day each year by which the humanity starts using the resources of the following year. It is calculated by dividing the world’s biocapacity by the global ecological footprint and multiplying this by 365. The biocapacity is understood as the amount of natural resources generated by the planet in a given year and the ecological footprint is understood as the humanity’s consumption of those natural resources in that year.