The few impactful successes
What I call impactful successful projects is projects that have impacts that spread outwards to other professional distributed networks, and create impacts, inspiration and innovations beyond their scope. A project includes and impacts the people directly involved, say 30 people. This impact is local. An impactful project in addition impact people outside the project circle. Its impact would show the characteristic of spreading activation in distributed networks and would be regional, national or global. Failed projects may also be impactful through spreading activation of the failed results. Not what we wanted, but in distributed networks we are not in control. I do not know if some of the normal projects had bigger impacts than I know of, and these are therefore, obviously, not included.
I have put energy and commitment into all my 225 projects, but only 10 projects turned into impactful successes. Most of these projects are found towards the later part of my career and all linked to the productive third or fourth year of an assignment. These successes are, of course, clearly highlighted in my CV.
Proactive successes. In seven of these projects, I was hands-on and directly involved in driving them forward. They were my projects, my ambitions and were ambitious planned and conscious attempts at creating success and significant impacts beyond the project scope.
The implementation of a quality assurance system in a public hospital (1992) created national attention to how best to organize health professionals, the enactment of new Sabah State Environmental Protection Bill (2003) and the Water Land Cities book (2003) created significant state and national attention to the importance of environmental protection in a developing state, the Koh Phi Phi constructed wetland wastewater management system (2006) has become a world-wide renowned project with thousands of citations in research papers, the Ekurhuleni municipal 200 kw solar PV plant (2012) became the first municipal owned renewable energy power plant in the country and paved the way for a nationwide push for stronger municipal involvement in the renewable energy sector, and my South African biogas facilities (2016 & 2018) were amongst the first in the country and put biogas on the national map as an important renewable energy and bio-CNG source.
In all these projects I put in the hours, the energy and all the experience I had at the time. These are my projects, they all have had impact beyond their project scope, and I am proud of them. They are developed with inputs from other professionals, but I know all involved will testify that they are mine.
Unexpected successes. For the last three projects the impacts were unexpected and bigger than my direct input and intentions. They positively span out of control. They all happened in my time as development counsellor at the Danish Embassy in South Africa.
In the Tsitsikama wind project (2008), the enigmatic Mike Mnizi one day walked into my office and asked if I would help establish a wind farm at his community farmland in Eastern Cape. I had never seen him before but liked him. At the time there was only one small wind farm in South Africa, funded by the Danish Embassy 10 years previously and with a poor track record. I am not sure why, but I said yes, had some spare funds and helped to set up a consortium consisting of the local community, the world’s biggest wind turbine company (Vestas) and one of the largest mining companies in South Africa (Exxaro). TATA joined later. Big and small guys in the same room with me as marriage counsellor. After the initial frictions around equity and profit sharing, the consortium was established, the national IPP tender program launched, the Tsitsikama project awarded a lucrative 20-year Power Purchase Agreement and today the project is spinning serious money for all involved.
Something similar happened for the development of the Wind Atlas for South Africa (2009). Here it was the brilliant nerdy wind researcher Jens Carsten Hansen that came through the door, and we initiated a national wind measurement and resource program that had a key impact on the national roll out of private sector owned wind farms, on national FDI and job creation. A wind atlas it like a geological gold mining map, you need to know if there is gold and if, where to look. The wind map showed that South Africa with average wind speeds of 6-8 m/s in coastal areas had one of the world’s best wind resources. We found gold in the sky.
And then I initiated and funded the first large scale municipal led solar water heater installation program with 3,000 units, which later was taken over by the Government and made into a national program installing more than one million solar water heaters for low-cost houses (2010).
At the Embassy I managed close to 400 projects, almost all without any significant results or impact, but I am proud of the ones I initiated, designed, funded, oversaw implementation of and which had a positive spreading activation impact at the national level. From decades of experience, I know it is rare for development assistance to have this kind of national impact.
The few painful failures
Seven projects turned into failures. In these failed projects I also put in the hours, the energy, commitment and all the experience I had. These are also my projects, I am not proud of them, but they are still mine. These failures are included in my CV with contactable references, but of course not highlighted. The failures appear relatively late in my career, all are construction and community projects, and all linked to increased context complexity.
The community-based Baan Nam Khem (2006) and Baan Pru Teau (2006) constructed wetland wastewater treatment facilities was constructed on time and budget and handed over to the communities in operational conditions, but both faced serious financial and operational problems after I left the projects, and today likely has collapsed. This I should have foreseen and therefore I have put them on my list of failed projects. The construction and handover of the Patong constructed wetland treatment facility for polluted river water (2006) was also constructed and handed over as planned. Patong municipality is a resource rich municipality and could easily operate the plant. However, they after a few years opted to sell the constructed wetland to a private developer for a housing development. The municipality is well known for its corruption and shadowy politicians, and with the constructed wetland located at high value land in the center of the city, I should have foreseen this to happen, and the project is therefore added to the list. The construction of the two community Food & Energy Centers or agro-villages, Lukhanyiso (2013) and Tshwane (2017) and the Lukhanyiso bio-CNG facility (2018), encountered many problems but all projects were, after many complications, at least completed and handed over. The operation, however, failed completely.
The few difficult to implement projects
Twelve of my projects became tricky to implement and ran into difficult implementation issues. One encountered serious technical problems, four unsolvable people conflicts, three conflicted with underlying power structures and four was implemented in wicked contexts.
Technical issues. It is my experience that technical problems and issues can be solved. Or they can be mitigated so that they do not stop a project from being completed. But not always. In 2013 I choose to get involved in the construction of alternative building technology (ABT) low-cost houses. The existing brick and mortar housing technology had not changed in centuries, and I thought there was space for a new technology in the market. I partnered with a renowned European high strength concrete developer and put a million Rand of my own into getting the technology to market. Permit and license requirements drove me up the wall, but finally arrived, and we were ready to go. We managed to build 70 low cost ABT houses, but our ABT technology proved to be clumsy, costly and could not compete with brick and mortar. Like most other ABT attempts, I failed. I had to close the manufacturing facility, lay off all staff, say goodbye to my investment and call it a day. The technology and diffusion challenges proved to be too hard to overcome.
People issues. And then there were the projects that became difficult or impossible to implement because of people. Going through my list of 225 projects I found that I had run into four of these. These projects are stressful to handle and is always remembered vividly and for (way too) long.
The first project came early in my career when I as a management expert got the task to make an analysis of the quality of management in a psychiatric department (1992). It quickly showed that the head doctor had no management qualities, the top management already knew this, but he was strong, arrogant and no one dared confront him. He did not like me, I was a hired gun, and he made it impossible to implement any analysis. This was not a task for me, or any consultant for that matter.
The second project came when I was appointed joint manager to help get a Thai Danish National Parks project back on track (2007). The project had been going on for 3 years and I in my first week made site visits to the locations where the project had spent most of its 1,5 million USD budget. I found some mangrove trees planted on a beach but that was pretty much it. They did not like me being there, or my suggestions, and the national project manager and an Embassy officer complained about my lack of professionalism to the national ministry, my foreign affairs ministry and my home office, but never said a word to me. I was out of the project almost before I landed. And I was not replaced. Someone somewhere decided that the project could be managed directly by the national project manager and the Embassy officer without any need for supervision or assistance.
The third project was similar to the second. We were appointed as transaction advisors for the City of Johannesburg’s Waste-to-Energy program (2017). I had assembled a group of both experienced and young upcoming black professionals, we were committed and ready to go. From the first meeting it became clear that the municipal officer managing the project did not like us. None of us had ever seen her or her colleagues, but they clearly did not want us on this project. We carried on for a couple of months, but the environment was so hostile that the funders decided to stop the project. We lost R7 million in fees, still we were relieved to get out. The project was later relaunched, and this time with a company that could deliver what the municipal officer wanted. In hindsight the mechanism behind these two projects is obvious, but at the time they became very painful to try to implement. When we run into people with motives other than the technical professional, we get bruised. They play the game of intentional questioning our professionalism and competence. Normally not to our face, but through the upper-level management structures that backs them. And in both these two projects I had too little experience in how to play their game and lost.
At least these experiences helped me in the fourth project where I have encountered people problems. I got appointed as a technical expert to prepare a national biogas renewable energy feed-in tariff strategy for Botswana (2018). The thing with biogas is that it requires organic materials as input to produce biogas, which then can be used to power a generator to produce electricity that can be feed into the national grid. Already on my first visit it became clear that Botswana had no organic materials to power any biogas facility of a size required for electricity supply to the grid. I prepared an inception report laying out the situation with different options and presented it at the first project meeting in Harare. The project director told me the inception report was in the wrong format, had spelling mistakes, did not use the right logo, and so on and could not be approved. I now knew better the game of people scared of losing money and I left the room and project there and then. Despite the project making no sense, the 4-year UN project continued to its end. At least I only got insulted for a couple of hours.
Power issues. My experience is that it is rare that we as professionals clash with underlying power structures. Our projects are initiated or funded by parties that has clear aims and purposes and it is seldom that we in implementation clash with or go against prevailing power structures. If we do, does implementation become stressful and tricky. I have experienced three of these projects.
The first project was when I was team leader for program impact evaluation of the Danish assistance to Eastern European countries (1999). 2 years after the program had ended, we visited and evaluated 52 projects in 5 different Eastern European countries. The results were shockingly poor, and we had trouble to find any positive impact of the funds used. In fact, we mainly meet disappointed and disgruntled counterparts. 90 % of the funds went to fees for Danish companies, the rest was used on expenses controlled by the same Danish companies. No aid money flowed to the counterparts in the recipient countries. I wrote our observations and conclusions as we found them, project by project, factual and detailed, and submitted the report to our Ministry of Foreign Affairs. I had not received comments to the report before I was on the road again for my next assignment as a member of a European team evaluating the EU TACIS program. I travelled to Kazakhstan to meet the team leader, an Italian professor. In my hotel room in Almaty, I got a phone call from a Danish journalist asking if he could get my comments to the frontpage story for the next day, The disastrous Danish Assistance to Eastern Europe, based on my evaluation report. He was checking some of the facts and I confirmed. The following day my boss called and said he had received a phone call from the CEO (5 levels above us, this was a big company), who had received a call from the boss of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. My boss asked if I was sure the conclusions were correct, I mumbled yes, and we agreed to talk when I came back. On my return, I was called to explain. The problem, they said, was not only the high-level direct communication with the Ministry, a Ministry that provided the biggest share of the turnover in our international department, it was also that the implementors of the program was all our competitors, all the largest consultancy companies in the country, and this looked like we were giving them a cheap shot. This was the first time I was team leader of a major evaluation, had only been in the company a couple of years, had never meet any of these high-level bosses. I said I was sure of the methodology and the conclusions I had documented, and I never heard anything on the matter from anyone again. I respected them for that. I was not the only one that had come under pressure.
(And unrelated, I found my Italian professor on the third day of my stay in Almaty. We stayed at the same hotel, but he did not take the phone and I could not locate him, so I had to start the evaluation on my own. On the third day, I again knocked at his room door, and this time the professor opened. He asked who I was, I told him and said: ‘You will not believe it, but on my first day here I found out that when you call the reception you can have a lady brought up, and yesterday they told me that in fact they could bring five ladies to my door, and I could just choose the ones I found most attractive. It is amazing’. He closed the door and I never saw him again. True story).
The second project was an USAID project in Zambia (2017). I was appointed as team leader to develop the national renewable feed-in-tariff policy. The un-spoken intension was that Zambia should start to roll out large scale PV solar and wind projects (there has been a strong drive from the rich countries to get African countries to implement such projects, but there are layers in this drive as the aim does not always make sense or is used as a cover for something else. Rich countries are leading technology developers, and orders will typically be sourced and delivered by companies from these countries). During the implementation of the project, I found that Zambia had no need for these solar or wind technologies. The country had an energy consumption of less than 3,000 MW which was covered by hydropower, a green sustainable, appropriate and un-complicated energy source. We visited the hydropower plants the British had built in the 1950s, all still running, operational, and 70 years later basically providing free electricity to Zambia. I could not dream up a better green energy source, and the country even had many options to expand the hydropower capacity. I could not find a reason for Zambia to invest in more expensive and complicated solar or wind power facilities. And I could not find a way out of the problem that private renewable energy projects had to be underwritten by 20-year state guarantees, which the Zambian National Treasury was not in a shape to do. I wrote a draft policy with a small cap of 10 MW and without consultation presented the draft directly to 150 international and national stakeholders. All international participants, including the funder, found the draft lacked ambition, but the representatives from the national ministries agreed on the targets in the draft. And because of the participatory game international funders play, there was no away around having the meeting approve the draft (which was enacted into national policy a few years later).
The third project clashing with power was when I was appointed by the South African Ministry of Environment as team leader for a national solar water heater industry localization study (2018). The Government wanted to launch a 1-million solar water heater roll out program and wanted to use this roll out to build a local black-owned solar water heater manufacturing sector. I found that the roll out with specific localization requirements would be extremely expensive compared to imports, would benefit mainly the two existing white owned companies, and that after the program ended it was unlikely that a sustainable manufacturing sector would have been established. I wrote a conclusion that recommended that the solar water heater program should be rolled out without localization requirements as these in this case would have detrimental national impacts. This did not go down well, the national policy is to localize, and some unpleasant meetings with representatives from five different ministries were held where it was stated that the findings could not be accepted. When specific findings go against general policy approaches and power structures, the process of implementation becomes hard. After some negotiations we were paid, it was only a study after all, and studies are easy to put away in a file somewhere.
Complex or wicked context issues. The last type of projects that have been difficult to implement are the projects that are anchored in highly complicated contexts. These are like the difficult implementable technical, people and power projects rare, but they are tricky and complicated on another level. I have encountered wicked contexts in four of my projects. These are projects I wish I never have been involved in.
All my four wicked projects were anchored in tricky community contexts. They were the Lukhanyiso Food & Energy Center (2013), the Lukhanyiso bio-CNG facility (2015), the Tshwane Food & Energy Center (2015) and the Tshwane vegetable processing facility (2017). Four failed projects all in the same type of wicked context.