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78 • Green Project Management

So she dutifully wrote down “polar bears” on the flip chart. “Next?” she says.
A few more ideas come out, and they move to the next state.
The next stage of brainstorming is to go through the ideas and one by one,
following them through with “how to implement.”
When they got to “polar bears,” the moderator dutifully said, “OK, Jim,
you had this one, how are polar bears going to help?” Jim shrugs and says, “I
dunno, we have polar bears shake the towers, knocking the ice off the wires.”
The moderator says, “Okaaaay, how do we get the polar bears to be attracted
to the towers, Jim?” He shrugs again and says, “Um, how about we, just put
big pots of honey at the top of the towers, I guess.” So the moderator says,
“And how are we supposed to fill those pots of honey, Jim?” Jim says, “Hmmm,
I guess just fly some helicopters out and they can ...” Suddenly, an engineer
named Tom interrupts. “Wait!” he exclaims. “Don’t helicopters have a huge,
vibrating downdraft from their blades?” Everyone stopped to consider this
point, because they realized that this was the solution to the problem. To this
day, this company clears their lines by flying helicopters over the lines—not
to fill honey pots, but to directly solve the problem—via a downdraft that
shakes the ice free.

What is the moral of the story? You want people like Jim in your meeting,
and if you are brainstorming, write down all of the ideas.
It is therefore important that the group participating in the exercise have
a “green advocate” who will represent green thinking. Those ideas gener-
ated by the advocate will inevitably lead to others in the group consid-
ering and voicing additional green ideas. Until green thinking becomes
ingrained, an advocate will have to be used.

reverse Brainstorming

Because it is sometimes difficult to make decisions on green components
for a variety of reasons, reverse brainstorming is a good alternative to regu-
lar brainstorming. It is similar to reengineering in that instead of solving
the problem, you determine how to create the problem. Once all of the
ideas are generated as to how to create the problem, or make it worse, then
the effort begins as to how to mitigate or reverse the damage. In this case,
we would try to come up with all of the ideas that would make the project
or its project create as much environmental havoc as possible—and then
use that to come up with ideas of how to prevent those things. Influence
diagrams are very helpful tools when doing any type of brainstorming (see
Figure 5.3).