GPM Global · Perspectives · Project Leadership in a Polycrisis
By Hasyimah Afandi, Asia-Pacific Director, GPM Global
I have a question for all project teams around the world. How are we managing projects from 2026 onwards when the old certainties are gone?
Imagine a single week where a key shipping route gets blocked, and oil prices shoot up 40%. Then, before your next team meeting, new taxes are slapped on certain raw materials. Then a flood knocks out a small supplier for three months. Then, climate-driven moves start pushing people toward your project site, creating problems your original plan never considered.
These aren’t separate, one-off problems. They’re all connected. And they’re now the normal way of working, not the exception.
Experts call this a “polycrisis”: a tangle of pressures that feed on each other. Think geopolitics, shaky supply chains, climate shocks, people moving from place to place. All of them hit faster than most project plans can react.
Most project managers were trained to believe:
None of those old assumptions hold up today.
In a polycrisis, problems appear out of nowhere with zero warning. Countries use supply chains as weapons. Sanctions, export bans, and port closures are everyday events. Your project’s financial plan can become worthless between two weekly calls.
Risks appear and disappear faster than your quarterly review meeting. Supply chains get tangled by sanctions, export bans, or blocked routes, all normal moves by governments now. And while you still track time, cost, and scope, that no longer tells you if your project is even worth doing anymore.
The business case erodes continuously. A project that made perfect sense when approved can be a bad idea just six weeks later. But your existing tools won’t flag that until the next scheduled review, by which time it’s often too late.
Yet most companies still manage projects with methods from a calmer era. They review risk lists every few months. They look at budgets once a year. They treat sustainability as a paperwork exercise rather than a survival tool.
The biggest problem is how project leaders are trained. Most courses focus on controlling scope, schedule, budget, and quality. Risk is treated as its own separate topic.
A single logistics breakdown is also a money problem, a people problem, a regulatory problem, and often an environmental problem, all at once. A leader who can only look at one piece of that puzzle will miss what’s really happening.
The real skill today is different: holding several things in your head at the same time, deciding what’s changed, and acting on incomplete information without waiting for the next scheduled review.
You just need to change how you pay attention. Here are four shifts that help.
Old fashioned risk lists are written once and rarely updated. In a polycrisis, what matters can flip overnight.
A sustainable project leader re-evaluates priorities daily when things get shaky. You don’t wait for a monthly meeting. You ask every morning: “What’s our biggest threat today?”
Keep scanning for new signals such as regulatory changes, environmental shifts, and stakeholder moves. Set clear thresholds that trigger a real review. And when a threshold is crossed, write down what you decided and why.
Without this, your original “importance list” becomes a dusty document nobody looks at. A good leader treats reassessment as a normal part of the job rather than a special event.
The enemy of resilience is being locked-in: designing a project that only works one way, with one supplier, on one route. In a polycrisis, lock-in is a death sentence.
Regenerative project management goes further: it builds projects that not only survive shocks but actually leave things better than before. It starts with flexibility. Use modular designs. Line up backup suppliers in different countries. Create alternative transport plans. Pay a little more now so you can change course later.
Don’t hide problems behind averaged-out scores. Imagine a project where local work is fine, but its supply chain has completely collapsed. If you average those two things together, the project still looks “on track.” That’s a lie by averaging.
This isn’t just a bad PowerPoint slide. It’s a discipline failure. A leader who lets a serious failure get buried inside a healthy overall score is giving their boss information that can’t support a real decision. Break the numbers down. Have the uncomfortable conversations earlier. That’s the whole point.
Outside-in is familiar: how the world affects your project through a new law, a storm, or a strike.
Inside-out is the opposite: how your project affects the world around it, including the local community, the water table, the job market, and the wildlife. Usually, different teams handle these two views, and they rarely talk until something breaks.
But a project that finishes on time while damaging the systems it depends on hasn’t really finished. It has just shifted the cost somewhere else. That cost will come back to bite the organization later, often through a different door than it left.
Let’s be upfront: each of these changes adds some friction.
Those costs are real. So why accept them? Because the alternative is worse: a project that can only describe a world that no longer exists, and a leader making decisions on information that’s already expired.
When the next overnight crisis hits, and it will, the sustainable project leader doesn’t freeze. They don’t wait for perfect information that will never arrive. Instead, they:
This isn’t about being a hero. It’s about staying calm and following a process when everything is falling apart. And that’s exactly what the polycrisis demands.
You have a choice.
You can stick with old school project management by updating risk lists every quarter, hoping the next crisis misses you, and praying your “lean and efficient” supply chain survives.
Or you can become a new kind of project leader: someone who knows how to navigate chaos with flexible tools, regenerative thinking, and a focus on long term value. Someone who can turn geopolitical nightmares into resilient, positive outcomes for people and the planet.
About the author: Hasyimah Afandi is Asia-Pacific Director at GPM Global.
GPM Global ·
GPM Perspectives · Governance & Disclosure
Why a $901bn climate risk figure will not move what needs to move
CDP, formerly the Carbon Disclosure Project, runs the global environmental disclosure platform that companies, cities, states, and regions use to report climate and environmental data. Its latest report, Disconnected Defenses: Extreme Weather Risk Across Corporates, Cities and Financial Systems, published in May 2026, puts a number on climate risk that will get cited in board decks and quarterly filings for the next year. Companies now project $901 billion in losses from extreme weather, with nearly half landing inside the next two years. The number is real. The reporting around it is doing what reporting tends to do, which is to describe an exposure without identifying where in the organization that exposure actually has to be answered. That is where the story stops being a finance story and becomes a governance story.
62% vs. 35%
Share of subnational governments reporting extreme weather impacts, compared with the share of disclosing companies treating those same events as financially material. (CDP, 2026)
Start with the gap CDP itself identifies. Sixty-two percent of subnational governments say they are already absorbing the impact of extreme weather. Only thirty-five percent of disclosing companies treat the same weather as material. CDP frames this as a perception problem. It is not. Local and regional governments own the assets that fail first in an extreme weather event. Roads, drainage systems, water utilities, substations, transit. They see the damage because the damage is on their balance sheet. Companies do not own most of that infrastructure, so the cost reaches them later, through delayed shipments, lost production hours, and supply chain interruption. The disclosure regime asks each company to assess its own materiality in isolation, which means the layer of the system most exposed to cascade failure is the layer least equipped to report it. The gap is structural, not behavioral.
The two-year timing carries a governance implication CDP does not name. Two-year horizons sit inside the operating plan, not the strategic plan. Decisions on that timeframe are made by plant managers, supply chain leads, procurement, and operations directors. They are not made by the sustainability function or by board climate committees, both of which work to longer cycles tied to disclosure deadlines and dated targets. In most organizations, climate authority sits in a separate track from operating authority. When the risk arrives at the operating layer, the people who can respond often lack the budget authority to act, and the people who hold the budget authority are working from a different timetable. Reporting cycles do not fix this. Reassigning decision rights does.
$528bn
Projected future losses from flooding, the single largest category. Damage realizes primarily as production disruption, not as asset impairment. (CDP, 2026)
The flooding figure points to a measurement problem that explains why disclosure data underrepresents real exposure. Flooding losses materialize as production disruption. Production is measured in units shipped, orders fulfilled, lines operating, and hours of uptime. Those numbers live in operations and are tracked weekly. They do not appear in climate risk registers, which are organized around asset impairment categories and insurance valuations. A company can hold an accurate TCFD disclosure, a current insurance appraisal, and a well-maintained risk register, and still carry no instrumentation on the metric that will actually move during a disruption, which is throughput. The reporting framework and the operating framework are not aligned, and disclosure quality cannot compensate for that misalignment.
The shared infrastructure point is where the integrity question sits, and where most reporting goes quiet. Corporate resilience depends on water systems, sewerage, transport networks, and the grid. No single company controls any of them. The disclosure regime treats this dependency as an externality, named in narrative sections of climate filings without a corresponding mechanism for action. The capital that would harden the shared assets sits with public agencies operating on different planning horizons under different accountability structures. There is no governance route by which a private firm can underwrite the public asset its production depends on. Voluntary partnerships are partial. Tax revenue is not allocated this way. The CDP language about coordinated action does not describe a mechanism that exists. The honest version is that the exposure is real, the decision authority to address it is fragmented across public and private actors, and no current framework reconciles the two.
48%
Share of disclosed physical climate risks expected to materialize, at least in part, within the next two years. This falls inside the operating plan, not the strategic plan. (CDP, 2026)
The risk in how this data gets translated for a business audience is the pull toward urgency. Urgency arguments produce commitments, pledges, and revised disclosures. They rarely produce changes in who holds which decision on what timeframe with what budget. The translation worth doing for the practitioner audience specifies three things. Which decisions actually move when extreme weather hits. Who currently holds those decisions, and whether that authority is matched to the timeframe. What part of the exposure cannot be addressed by the firm acting alone, and therefore requires a different governance instrument than corporate disclosure. That last item is the sentence most commentary removes because it does not resolve cleanly. It should stay. The disclosure layer has now done what it can. The next move is at the decision layer, and the reporting framework alone will not get it there.
Source: CDP (2026), Disconnected Defenses: Extreme Weather Risk Across Corporates, Cities and Financial Systems. Based on 2025 disclosures from 11,261 companies and 1,005 cities, states, and regions across 80 countries. Full report: cdp.net.
Dr. Joel Carboni Founder, GPM · Standards Builder · Regenerative Business Advocate Joel is widely recognized as a sustainability disruptor, standards builder, and global advocate for regenerative business practices. For more than three decades, he has worked at the intersection of sustainability, strategy, and governance, helping organizations translate ambitious sustainability goals into measurable, lasting impact. As the Founder of GPM (Green Project Management), Joel introduced the P5 Standard for Sustainability and the PRiSM methodology — pioneering frameworks that redefine how projects deliver value by integrating environmental, social, and governance considerations into project delivery. These models have since become recognized standards within leading global institutions, including the Project Management Institute (PMI) and the Institute of Management Accountants (IMA). Joel also contributes to the global sustainability agenda through his work with the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), where he is involved in developing the new Pollution Standard, and through contributions related to the Paris Agreement and the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Beyond his work as a practitioner and standards developer, Joel is a Forbes contributor, a visiting professor at SKEMA Business School, and an advisor to governments and multinational organizations on how to embed ethics, sustainability, and regenerative thinking into business strategy and delivery. Recognition In 2025, Joel was recognized by Thinkers50 as a finalist for the inaugural Regenerative Business Award for his book Becoming Regenerative.
JC
GPM Founder P5 Standard PRiSM GRI Forbes Contributor SKEMA Business School Thinkers50 UN SDGs
Perspectives · Disclosure & Delivery
The European Union has reopened the rulebook that governs how companies report on sustainability. Most coverage has framed this as a compliance story for finance teams and chief sustainability officers. It is also a project delivery story, and the organizations that deliver projects have a very short window to understand why.
On 18 March 2026, the Omnibus Directive (EU) 2026/470 entered into force. From that date, the European Commission has six months to publish a revised version of the European Sustainability Reporting Standards, known as the ESRS. The deadline is 18 September 2026. The new version applies to the 2027 reporting year. Before the text is locked, there is a four-week public feedback window in the second quarter of 2026. After that, no further changes.
This is the sustainability reporting equivalent of pouring a new foundation while the building above it is already occupied.
The current ESRS were developed by the European Financial Reporting Advisory Group (EFRAG), the technical body that advises the European Commission on both financial and sustainability reporting. The standards sit underneath the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, known as the CSRD, which is the law that requires large companies operating in the European Union to report on their environmental and social impacts.
The Omnibus Directive does three things that matter. It raises the size threshold for mandatory reporting to companies with more than 1,000 employees and more than 450 million euros in net turnover. It reduces the number of mandatory data points by approximately 61 percent. And it changes the boundary used to measure greenhouse gas emissions from the operational control approach to the financial control approach, aligning with how the International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB) defines its boundary in IFRS S2.
The ISSB is the sister body of the International Accounting Standards Board, both housed inside the IFRS Foundation. It issues the global baseline standards for sustainability disclosure, known as IFRS S1 and IFRS S2. As of January 2026, twenty-one jurisdictions have adopted these standards on either a voluntary or mandatory basis, including the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, Brazil, Singapore, Chile, Qatar, and Mexico.
The IFRS Foundation has formally suspended its designation that the European framework is fully aligned with the global baseline, pending the outcome of the Omnibus rewrite. For multinational organizations that report under both, that gap is not a footnote.
Sustainability reporting is often treated as an output. Numbers go in at the top of the year, a report comes out at the bottom. The reality is that almost every number in that report originates inside a project. The carbon footprint of a new facility is set during design. The labor practices in a supply chain are determined at procurement. The water impact of a manufacturing line is locked in at commissioning. The reporting team does not generate this data. They collect it from the projects that produced it.
When the reporting standard changes, the data requirements change. When the data requirements change, the project gates that capture that data must change with them. A project chartered in 2026 against the current ESRS may be delivering against a different set of disclosure obligations by the time it is operational in 2027 or 2028. If the project does not anticipate this, the organization will be reporting on assets that were never instrumented to provide the right information.
The shift in the greenhouse gas accounting boundary is a clear example. Operational control means a company reports on emissions from assets where it has the authority to introduce and implement operating policies. Financial control means it reports on assets where it has the ability to direct financial and operating policies with a view to economic benefit. These are not the same set of assets. Joint ventures, leased facilities, and equity investments often fall into one boundary and not the other. Project sponsors who have been measuring emissions one way will need to either remeasure or rebuild their baselines.
This is not a finance department problem to solve in isolation. The data lives in projects.
The first implication is governance. Projects carry the accountability for ensuring that what a project produces aligns with what the parent organization must disclose. If the disclosure rules are being rewritten, the project team needs to know which rules will apply to the project at handover, not which rules applied at chartering. This requires a live link between the sustainability reporting function and the project portfolio, not an annual exchange. The GRI stated this in our December 2025 webinar, which as of today has 21,057 views. You can watch it and see for yourself.
The second implication is competence. Project managers working on assets that will be capitalized and operated past 2027 need to understand the difference between operational control and financial control boundaries, the role of value chain data requests, and the reason a customer or investor may suddenly ask for information the project was never designed to capture. This is a threshold competence question for anyone delivering projects in industries with material sustainability disclosure obligations.
The third implication is methodology. The principles that underpin the P5 Standard for Sustainability in Project Management are designed to integrate environmental, social, and economic considerations into the project life cycle from initiation through closure. When the reporting standard moves, the impact ontology underneath the project does not. What changes is how that impact is communicated, aggregated, and disclosed. Projects that have been managed against a discipline-grade impact framework rather than a disclosure-grade reporting checklist will adapt with less disruption. Projects built backwards from a checklist will not.
The fourth implication is the value chain. The Omnibus narrows the population of companies that must report directly, but it does not eliminate the demand for sustainability data flowing down through the supply chain. Smaller organizations that deliver projects for larger reporting entities will continue to face data requests, now constrained by what the Voluntary Sustainability Reporting Standard for Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises (VSME) permits. Project teams sitting inside contractor and subcontractor organizations should expect those requests to continue, and should expect the substance of those requests to shift as the upstream reporting requirements shift.
The four-week consultation window in the second quarter of 2026 is the last formal opportunity for any organization to raise technical concerns before the European Commission locks the text. Project delivery organizations with material exposure should monitor that window through the Commission's corporate sustainability reporting page and engage either directly or through their professional bodies.
Beyond the consultation, three actions are reasonable for any organization that delivers projects against material sustainability obligations. First, identify which projects in the current portfolio will be operational in 2027 or later, and treat those as exposed to the revised standard. Second, audit the greenhouse gas boundary used in those projects against the financial control approach that will apply going forward. Third, confirm that the project gates capturing sustainability data are aligned to a methodology that can absorb a change in the disclosure standard without requiring the project to be re-baselined.
The PMI-GPM Project Sustainabilty Reporting Guide was developed to help organizations identify and report materiality at the project level, in a way that feeds the disclosure obligations sitting above it. The guide is built on principles, not on a specific version of any one standard, which is why it remains usable as the rules around it move. We are watching the rewrite closely. If the revised text requires changes to the guide, we will make them quickly so that practitioners can continue to rely on it through the transition.
Project impacts are business activity. Most organizations are not capturing this at the project level and are not feeding it into their corporate reports. The materiality assessment stops at the boundary of the head office and never reaches the portfolio of work that is actually generating the impact.
That gap is becoming financially dangerous. Under the CSRD enforcement regime, member states have set penalties that can reach into the millions of euros for incomplete or misleading disclosures, and equivalent regimes are taking shape in ISSB-aligned jurisdictions. An organization that omits project-level materiality is not making its report shorter. It is making a statement about the completeness of its disclosure that an auditor, a regulator, or a litigant can test. When that statement is tested and found to be wrong, the organization will not be defending a methodology choice. It will be defending why a material category of impact was excluded from a regulated filing.
The reporting floor is being repoured. The projects standing on it need to be ready when it sets.
Dr. Joel Carboni
Founder, GPM · Standards Builder · Regenerative Business Advocate
Joel is widely recognized as a sustainability disruptor, standards builder, and global advocate for regenerative business practices. For more than three decades, he has worked at the intersection of sustainability, strategy, and governance, helping organizations translate ambitious sustainability goals into measurable, lasting impact.
As the Founder of GPM (Green Project Management), Joel introduced the P5 Standard for Sustainability and the PRiSM methodology — pioneering frameworks that redefine how projects deliver value by integrating environmental, social, and governance considerations into project delivery. These models have since become recognized standards within leading global institutions, including the Project Management Institute (PMI) and the Institute of Management Accountants (IMA).
Joel also contributes to the global sustainability agenda through his work with the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), where he is involved in developing the new Pollution Standard, and through contributions related to the Paris Agreement and the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
Beyond his work as a practitioner and standards developer, Joel is a Forbes contributor, a visiting professor at SKEMA Business School, and an advisor to governments and multinational organizations on how to embed ethics, sustainability, and regenerative thinking into business strategy and delivery.
Recognition
In 2025, Joel was recognized by Thinkers50 as a finalist for the inaugural Regenerative Business Award for his book Becoming Regenerative.
Perspectives · Knowledge & Practice
Most discussions of project team composition start with roles or skills. Both are the wrong starting point. Roles are titles, and titles vary by organization. Skills are capacities, and capacities are only meaningful once you know what the team is accountable for delivering. The durable question is accountabilities: which decisions must be made, who answers for them, and what happens when the answer is wrong. Roles and skills follow from that. Reversed, they tend to produce teams that look complete on an org chart and fail under pressure.
The confusion is common enough to be structural. A team is assembled by pulling named roles from a template: sponsor, project manager, business analyst, technical lead, team members. The template is populated, the kickoff runs, and the governance gap only surfaces when a decision has to be escalated and no one is clear who owns it. At that point the project has a role chart but not a decision structure.
The PMI Process Groups Practice Guide and the GPM P5 Standard both treat this the same way, though neither states it as plainly as it deserves. They describe accountabilities that must exist somewhere on or around the project. They do not require that each accountability sit with a distinct person. A small project may collapse several accountabilities into one individual without harm, provided the individual understands which hat they are wearing when. A large project usually cannot.
The accountabilities that consistently appear across standards are these. Someone must own the business case and the authority to continue or stop the project. Someone must own day-to-day delivery decisions within the approved scope. Someone must own the technical integrity of what is produced. Someone must own the relationship with the people affected by the outcome. Someone must own the measurement of whether the project is doing what it said it would do. On AI-involved projects, someone must own data quality, model evaluation, and ethical assessment, per frameworks like CPMAI.
Sustainability belongs in this list, and at this point it is not optional. The PMI®GPM® P5 Standard for Sustainability in Project Management and the GPM Sustainability Competence Standard treat sustainability as an organizational commitment that the project inherits rather than a team-level preference.
The team does not decide whether to consider environmental, social, and economic impacts; the organization has already decided, and the project is accountable for acting on that decision. This cuts in two directions. The organization must state the commitment in terms a project can act on, which means policies, standards, and decision rights that survive contact with delivery pressure. The team must assign the accountability to a named person who owns the assessment of impacts across the lifecycle, including the authority to raise issues that affect scope, schedule, or cost. An accountability without that authority is decorative.
In practice this is where most projects fail the test. Sustainability is named in the charter, referenced in the kickoff, and then quietly deprioritized when a delivery decision conflicts with it. The failure is not a failure of intent. It is a failure of accountability assignment. No one was given the authority to stop or reshape a decision on sustainability grounds, so the decision gets made on other grounds and sustainability becomes reporting language rather than governance.
These are accountabilities, not roles. The sponsor role typically holds the first. The project manager role typically holds the second. The rest vary. What matters is that each one is held by a named person who knows they hold it, and that the decision rights and escalation paths are explicit. When a team cannot answer "who decides X" within two sentences, the accountability is not assigned; it is assumed. Assumed accountabilities fail quietly until they fail loudly.
Katzenbach and Smith argued that every team needs three skill categories present in some combination: technical or functional expertise, problem-solving and decision-making capacity, and interpersonal skill.1 Their position on skills is weaker than it is sometimes reported. They treat skill completeness as less determinative than mutual accountability and common purpose, and note that teams often acquire missing skills in the course of the work. PMI's Talent Triangle adds business acumen as a fourth category, reflecting the concern that teams without it tend to deliver outputs disconnected from the decisions the sponsor needs to make.
The reason skills come after accountabilities is that the required skill mix is a function of what the team is accountable for. A team accountable for regulatory compliance needs deep domain expertise and weaker creative problem-solving. A team accountable for exploring a new market needs the inverse. A team accountable for sustainability outcomes needs the competence areas described in the GPM Sustainability Competence Standard, which overlap with but do not duplicate standard project management skill sets. Listing skills without first defining accountabilities produces generic lists that look complete and do not guide hiring or assignment.
Edmondson's work on psychological safety adds a constraint that matters here. Skill inventories on paper frequently overstate what a team can access in practice. A team member with expertise who does not feel able to surface disagreement functions, from the project's perspective, as if the expertise were not present. This is not a soft concern. It is a measurement problem. A team's accessible skill is lower than its listed skill, and the gap is determined by conditions the project manager controls more than by the skills themselves.
Structuring a team around accountabilities has costs. It takes longer to set up. It requires conversations that many organizations avoid, particularly about who has authority to stop work and who answers when a decision goes wrong. It exposes gaps in sponsorship that a role-chart approach hides. It often reveals that the nominal sponsor does not actually hold the authority the project assumes they hold. On the sustainability accountability specifically, it tends to reveal that the organization's public commitment is not backed by decision rights anyone can exercise.
The alternative has its own costs. Role-based team design is faster and matches how most organizations staff projects. It works adequately for routine work where the accountabilities are understood by convention. It degrades as projects become less routine, as stakeholder complexity increases, and as the consequences of unclear decision rights grow. Most practitioners have seen the failure mode: a project that ran for months before anyone noticed that a core decision had no owner.
There is also a measurement tradeoff. Accountability-based team structures are harder to audit from the outside. A role chart can be reviewed at a glance. A map of accountabilities, decision rights, and escalation paths requires reading. Organizations that value visible governance over functioning governance tend to default to role charts for this reason.
The integrity risk in team composition is not usually visible at setup. It shows up later, as decisions made by people who did not have the authority to make them, or as decisions deferred because no one was sure who owned them. By the time this surfaces, the cost of re-assigning accountabilities mid-project is higher than the cost of assigning them clearly at the start. The team adapts by routing decisions informally, which works until it does not, and which leaves no audit trail when it fails.
Sustainability is the accountability where this risk compounds fastest. An organization that states a sustainability commitment and then assembles project teams without assigning the accountability to anyone with authority produces a predictable outcome: the commitment appears in reporting and does not appear in decisions. The gap between the stated position and the delivered work becomes auditable from the outside. This is a governance failure before it is a sustainability failure.
For practitioners, the implication is narrower than it first appears. When assembling a team, resist the instinct to start with the role template. Start with the list of decisions the project will require and the accountabilities those decisions imply, including the sustainability accountabilities the organization has already committed to. Assign each accountability to a named person with the authority to act on it. Then identify the skill categories required to discharge those accountabilities, and check whether the assigned people carry them. Roles, in this sequence, become a secondary question: what title to give each person for purposes of the organization's conventions. Most of the time, the conventional titles still fit. Occasionally they do not, and the mismatch is information worth acting on.
This does not resolve the composition problem. It relocates it to where it can be worked on.
1 Katzenbach, J. R. and Smith, D. K. (1993). The Wisdom of Teams: Creating the High-Performance Organization. Harvard Business School Press. Reissued 2015 by Harvard Business Review Press. Condensed in "The Discipline of Teams," Harvard Business Review, March–April 1993. https://hbr.org/1993/03/the-discipline-of-teams
Dr. Joel Carboni
Founder, GPM · Standards Builder · Regenerative Business Advocate
Joel is widely recognized as a sustainability disruptor, standards builder, and global advocate for regenerative business practices. For more than three decades, he has worked at the intersection of sustainability, strategy, and governance, helping organizations translate ambitious sustainability goals into measurable, lasting impact.
As the Founder of GPM (Green Project Management), Joel introduced the P5 Standard for Sustainability and the PRiSM methodology — pioneering frameworks that redefine how projects deliver value by integrating environmental, social, and governance considerations into project delivery. These models have since become recognized standards within leading global institutions, including the Project Management Institute (PMI) and the Institute of Management Accountants (IMA).
Joel also contributes to the global sustainability agenda through his work with the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), where he is involved in developing the new Pollution Standard, and through contributions related to the Paris Agreement and the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
Beyond his work as a practitioner and standards developer, Joel is a Forbes contributor, a visiting professor at SKEMA Business School, and an advisor to governments and multinational organizations on how to embed ethics, sustainability, and regenerative thinking into business strategy and delivery.
Recognition
In 2025, Joel was recognized by Thinkers50 as a finalist for the inaugural Regenerative Business Award for his book Becoming Regenerative.
Perspectives · Knowledge & Practice
Project management has always organized itself around types. There are project types — defined by scale, complexity, sector. There are delivery approaches — predictive, iterative, hybrid. There are tools that support analysis and execution. There are organizational functions that govern and coordinate. Each of these categories has a role in how projects are defined, resourced, and run. None of them carries sustainability inside it by default.
That distinction matters because sustainability is frequently sorted into one of those categories. It gets treated as a sector concern, a reporting obligation, or a specialty credential for people whose work happens to touch environmental or social factors. The data does not support that framing.
The gap between stated priority and operational integration is structural, not incidental. And it has a competence dimension. The same study — conducted by Ecosystm and commissioned by Kyndryl and Microsoft across 1,286 enterprise leaders in 20 countries — found that 46% of organizations classify as “legacy-centered,” meaning sustainability is treated as a side activity or compliance task, disconnected from daily operations.
Only 16% qualify as “integration-focused,” with sustainability embedded across strategy and people. The difference between those two groups is not intent. Integration-focused organizations run proactive sustainability initiatives at 72% versus 47% for others, and 76% accelerated their sustainability goals in the past year compared to 31% of the rest.
Sustainability — understood as the assessment and management of environmental, social, and economic impact across a project’s full lifecycle — is not a variant of project management. It is a layer of knowledge that applies regardless of project type, delivery approach, toolset, or organizational structure.
The knowledge required to work in this space includes impact assessment methods, materiality frameworks, lifecycle thinking, ESG disclosure requirements, stakeholder accountability structures, and the ability to connect project-level decisions to enterprise reporting obligations. These are not incidental skills. The barometer found that 48% of organizations identify lack of clear ROI and difficulty measuring impact as their primary barrier to execution. That is a measurement and governance competence problem, not a commitment problem.
The driver data is also worth examining. The top motivators for sustainability action in the 2025 study were reducing operational costs and improving efficiency (54%), meeting regulatory requirements and avoiding legal or reputational risk (45%), and meeting customer expectations (38%). Regulatory compliance has become more influential, not less — EU standards continue to extend globally through supply chain pressure and disclosure requirements, while US states like California enforce their own climate and disclosure laws.
Practitioners who cannot assess or respond to these requirements in the context of project decisions are not operating outside a niche. They are operating with a gap.
The PMI-GPM joint venture has formalized this through a certification structure, a competence standard, the P5 impact framework, and a practice guide — not as parallel sustainability content, but as infrastructure intended to sit within existing project management knowledge. The structure assumes practitioners working across project types, delivery approaches, and organizational functions require this knowledge. The data confirms why. The practitioner who cannot connect a project decision to a supply chain disclosure, a materiality assessment, or a Scope 3 accountability structure is missing knowledge that 85% of their clients and employers now treat as a strategic priority — whether or not it appears on a credential list.
Dr. Joel Carboni
Founder, GPM · Standards Builder · Regenerative Business Advocate
Joel is widely recognized as a sustainability disruptor, standards builder, and global advocate for regenerative business practices. For more than three decades, he has worked at the intersection of sustainability, strategy, and governance, helping organizations translate ambitious sustainability goals into measurable, lasting impact.
As the Founder of GPM (Green Project Management), Joel introduced the P5 Standard for Sustainability and the PRiSM methodology — pioneering frameworks that redefine how projects deliver value by integrating environmental, social, and governance considerations into project delivery. These models have since become recognized standards within leading global institutions, including the Project Management Institute (PMI) and the Institute of Management Accountants (IMA).
Joel also contributes to the global sustainability agenda through his work with the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), where he is involved in developing the new Pollution Standard, and through contributions related to the Paris Agreement and the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
Beyond his work as a practitioner and standards developer, Joel is a Forbes contributor, a visiting professor at SKEMA Business School, and an advisor to governments and multinational organizations on how to embed ethics, sustainability, and regenerative thinking into business strategy and delivery.
Recognition
In 2025, Joel was recognized by Thinkers50 as a finalist for the inaugural Regenerative Business Award for his book Becoming Regenerative.
Perspectives · Strategy & Governance
Most organizations still understand sustainability through the discipline of reduction. They count what they emit, consume, waste, and disturb, then compare the numbers to an earlier baseline and call the difference progress. That work is necessary, but it has become over-authoritative because it fits the architecture of modern management. It is legible to finance, useful to reporting, compatible with governance, and easy to defend in public. A smaller footprint can be audited, charted, benchmarked, and disclosed. It sits comfortably inside systems that already know how to reward measurable movement. What it rarely does, on its own, is force a reconsideration of what the organization is actually building, enabling, financing, normalizing, or locking in.
That is the limit of the footprint frame. It treats sustainability as a question of reduction inside an existing model rather than as a question of whether the model itself remains acceptable once all consequences are counted. A company can reduce energy intensity while still deepening its total resource dependence. A project can lower operational emissions and still extend the life of an extractive system that should be in managed decline. A product can become more efficient and still intensify total demand. None of this is anomalous. It is what happens when governance privileges what can be reduced over what must be redesigned. The footprint gets better. The system does not.
A handprint is not a positive version of a footprint, nor is it a branding term for impact. It is the system effect of a decision — what becomes more likely because of how you operate.
The handprint enters at that point, although it is often introduced too casually. Properly understood, a handprint is not a positive version of a footprint, nor is it a branding term for impact. It is the system effect of a decision. It refers to what your organization causes beyond its reporting boundary through procurement choices, design logic, capital allocation, contractual requirements, product architecture, policy influence, and project selection. It is not about what you emit less of. It is about what becomes more likely because of how you operate. That is why it exceeds footprint in strategic importance. Footprint tells you whether you are reducing measurable harm within a defined perimeter. Handprint tells you whether your decisions reproduce the conditions of harm or alter them.
That distinction becomes important the moment sustainability is treated as a decision problem rather than a communications exercise. Strategy is not a statement of direction. It is a pattern of authorization under constraint. It determines what will be funded, what will be tolerated, what will be delayed, and what will be refused. Once sustainability is viewed at that level, handprint becomes the more important category because it reaches the structure of choice itself. A footprint can improve while decision logic remains unchanged. A handprint worthy of the name cannot exist unless decision logic changes first. It appears in the standards imposed on suppliers, in the conditions attached to investment, in the projects allowed into the portfolio, in the business models ruled out because their economics depend on displaced harm. That is a harder threshold, which is why so many organizations prefer to remain inside footprint language even while talking expansively about transformation.
There is, however, a reason to be suspicious of handprint language, and it should be named directly. Once organizations start talking about positive system effects, they acquire a vocabulary that can be used to rationalize present harm in the name of future value. They can claim that broader benefits offset localized degradation, that innovation later justifies extraction now, or that a strategic contribution elsewhere compensates for what remains unresolved here. This is not a fringe misuse. It is the predictable tendency of institutions seeking the legitimacy of long-horizon purpose without the discipline of near-term constraints. Handprint, in other words, can become a very efficient way to launder trade-offs that would look unacceptable if presented plainly.
Handprint exceeds footprint in strategic importance only after the footprint is functioning as a hard boundary. Without that prior discipline, handprint is just the more elegant language of an institution that still wants the freedom to explain rather than the obligation to change.
That is why the hierarchy has to be defined carefully. Handprint exceeds footprint in strategic importance only after the footprint is functioning as a hard boundary. If ecological and social thresholds do not operate as actual constraints on what can proceed, then handprint loses credibility immediately. It becomes another executive abstraction that floats above the operational terms of harm. The organization can then describe itself as a system shaper while continuing to approve work that exceeds the limits it claims to respect. At that point, the language is not merely weak. It is structurally dishonest. A positive system narrative layered over unconstrained externalization is not advanced sustainability. It is a more articulate version of the same problem.
This is where most sustainability writing becomes unhelpful because it tries to harmonize what is actually a conflict. Organizations want a footprint because it is measurable and protective. They want handprint because it is expansive and strategic. They want both without accepting the tension between them. But the tension is real and productive. Footprint imposes limits on what can be justified. Handprint imposes pressure on what must be changed. One without the other produces familiar distortions. Footprint without handprint creates a culture of managed insufficiency, where organizations become better at doing less damage while avoiding the deeper question of whether the work remains defensible. Handprint without footprint creates a culture of strategic permission, where organizations speak in the language of contribution while still operating beyond thresholds they would rather not have to treat as binding.
The place to test all of this is not the sustainability report. It is the project portfolio. Projects are where organizations stop speaking in aspirations and start converting preference into consequence. If handprint is real, it will appear in project selection criteria, in the rejection of proposals that extend degenerative dependencies, in procurement conditions that shift value chain behavior, and in design requirements that build resilience or reduce structural harm beyond the asset boundary. If it does not appear there, then it is not strategic no matter how often it is described that way. The same is true of footprint. If footprint data does not alter go-no-go decisions, then it is operating as disclosure rather than governance. In both cases the issue is not whether the organization has the right language. The issue is whether the language has any authority over what gets approved.
That question leads to an older and less comfortable one. What does the organization treat as non-negotiable when real tradeoffs arrive — not in principle, but in budget review, in timeline compression, in supplier selection, in design change, in contract negotiation, in capital planning. Most institutions already know the answer. Cost and speed are hard constraints. Ecological and social thresholds are usually advisory unless regulation, litigation, or reputational exposure make them expensive to ignore. This is why footprint often remains subordinate even when it is well measured, and why handprint is so often displaced into future-facing narrative. The organization has not decided that sustainability governs. It has decided that sustainability will be managed around the governing variables already in place.
Handprint exceeds footprint in strategic importance because it reaches the governing variables themselves. It asks whether the organization is changing the terms under which value is pursued — or merely reducing visible damage while pursuing it.
Once that is understood, the argument sharpens. Handprint exceeds footprint in strategic importance because it reaches the governing variables themselves. It asks whether the organization is changing the terms under which value is pursued or merely reducing visible damage while pursuing it. That is not a moral distinction. It is a design distinction. A footprint can improve under almost any system, provided the metrics are narrow enough and the incentives are aligned around efficiency. A meaningful handprint cannot emerge unless the organization is willing to alter selection logic, authority structures, investment thresholds, and the distribution of acceptable risk. That is why it is strategically more important. It does not describe incremental improvement. It reveals whether the organization is capable of structural choice.
Still, the claim should not be allowed to become clean. There is no virtue in saying handprint is more important if the institution continues to treat footprint breaches as tolerable, temporary, or negotiable. Nor is there much value in defending footprint as the foundation if the result is a professionally managed form of decline. The difficulty is not choosing which concept sounds more advanced. The difficulty is building a governance model severe enough to let footprint stop what should not proceed, while also being ambitious enough to require handprint where simple reduction only stabilizes the existing order. Most organizations want one of these conditions without the other. That is why they can talk fluently about sustainability and still produce so little of it.
So the claim should be read narrowly and without comfort. Your sustainability handprint exceeds your footprint in strategic importance because it says more about what your organization is authorizing in the world. But it only becomes credible when your footprint already has the power to invalidate decisions that cross hard ecological and social limits. Without that prior discipline, handprint is just the more elegant language of an institution that still wants the freedom to explain rather than the obligation to change.
Dr. Joel Carboni
Founder, GPM · Standards Builder · Regenerative Business Advocate
Joel is widely recognized as a sustainability disruptor, standards builder, and global advocate for regenerative business practices. For more than three decades, he has worked at the intersection of sustainability, strategy, and governance, helping organizations translate ambitious sustainability goals into measurable, lasting impact.
As the Founder of GPM (Green Project Management), Joel introduced the P5 Standard for Sustainability and the PRiSM methodology — pioneering frameworks that redefine how projects deliver value by integrating environmental, social, and governance considerations into project delivery. These models have since become recognized standards within leading global institutions, including the Project Management Institute (PMI) and the Institute of Management Accountants (IMA).
Joel also contributes to the global sustainability agenda through his work with the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), where he is involved in developing the new Pollution Standard, and through contributions related to the Paris Agreement and the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
Beyond his work as a practitioner and standards developer, Joel is a Forbes contributor, a visiting professor at SKEMA Business School, and an advisor to governments and multinational organizations on how to embed ethics, sustainability, and regenerative thinking into business strategy and delivery.
Recognition
In 2025, Joel was recognized by Thinkers50 as a finalist for the inaugural Regenerative Business Award for his book Becoming Regenerative.
Perspectives · Leadership & Practice
Projects are where change becomes real. Strategies are written in boardrooms, but they are delivered through projects. Infrastructure is built through projects. New technologies are deployed through projects. Organizational transformation happens through projects. If we want to understand how leadership shapes the future of our institutions, we have to look at what happens inside project work.
This is where regenerative leadership becomes visible. Regeneration is often described in broad terms — restoring ecosystems, strengthening communities, and creating long-term resilience. Those outcomes are important, but in practice, regeneration is not a slogan or a mindset. It is a property of how systems are designed and governed. In project environments, regenerative leadership shows up in specific decisions about how work is structured, how impacts are evaluated, and how trade-offs are handled when pressure rises.
Understanding those decisions is the difference between sustainability as narrative and sustainability as practice.
Traditional project management was designed for a world that prioritized efficiency and control. The profession emerged during the industrial era, when the primary question was how to deliver work reliably within defined constraints. Scope, schedule, and cost became the dominant framework for measuring success. That framework is still useful. But it is no longer enough.
Projects now operate in environments shaped by climate instability, digital transformation, supply chain complexity, and heightened stakeholder expectations. Under these conditions, success cannot be measured only by whether the project delivered what was planned. It must also consider what the project leaves behind. Does the project strengthen the system it operates within, or does it quietly deplete it?
A regenerative project does more than complete its deliverables. It increases the system's capacity to adapt, respond, and create value in the future. That capacity may take many forms:
| Ecosystems restored rather than degraded |
| Communities strengthened rather than displaced |
| Supply chains stabilized rather than strained |
| Teams that leave the project more capable than when they entered |
These outcomes rarely appear on the original project charter. They emerge from leadership choices made during the life of the work.
One of the defining traits of regenerative leadership is systems awareness. Projects rarely exist in isolation. Every project interacts with environmental, social, and economic systems. Decisions that appear local inside the project often have wider consequences outside it.
A procurement decision that reduces cost may also increase emissions in the supply chain. A schedule compression decision may increase strain on workers or contractors. A design decision may determine whether infrastructure is resilient to future climate conditions. None of these outcomes are accidental. They are structural.
Regenerative leaders learn to see those interactions early. They treat projects not as isolated tasks but as interventions within larger systems. Frameworks like the P5 model — People, Planet, Prosperity, Process, and Product — exist precisely to make those interactions visible and help teams evaluate impacts across the full system of work. When leaders adopt this perspective, project planning changes. Trade-offs become explicit. Decisions that once appeared efficient are reconsidered in terms of their broader consequences.
The project becomes a tool for shaping systems rather than merely delivering outputs.
Projects operate under pressure. Deadlines tighten. Budgets shift. Stakeholders change priorities. Under these conditions, teams often face decisions in which the fastest or cheapest option conflicts with longer-term responsibilities. This is where leadership integrity becomes structural.
Regenerative leadership introduces an integrity threshold for decision-making. It requires leaders to test major decisions against three questions:
This approach does not eliminate trade-offs. Projects will always involve trade-offs. What it eliminates is the ability to pretend that those trade-offs do not exist. That clarity changes how teams operate. When impacts are visible, responsibility becomes harder to diffuse across roles or departments.
Regeneration is often described as a leadership trait. In practice, it is a property of teams. Projects succeed or fail through collective behavior. Decisions emerge from interactions among sponsors, engineers, analysts, contractors, regulators, and communities. No individual leader can hold every dimension of a complex project alone.
For regenerative leadership to function, teams must be designed to hold complexity. This means building project environments where:
| Dissent is permitted and protected |
| Risk information can surface early |
| Different perspectives are intentionally included |
| Operational pressure does not suppress ethical judgment |
When these conditions are absent, teams serve as shock absorbers for organizational pressure. They absorb strain silently, allowing the system to continue moving even when warning signs are present. Teams that can challenge assumptions early are far more likely to prevent costly failures later.
Projects are not simply mechanisms for implementing strategy. They are the mechanism through which the future is built. Every new facility, infrastructure system, technology platform, or policy initiative created through project work alters the conditions under which people and organizations operate. The cumulative effect of thousands of such decisions shapes the trajectory of industries and societies.
This is why the project profession occupies a unique position in the sustainability conversation. Organizations may set ambitious sustainability targets, but those targets become real only when translated into project decisions — design specifications, procurement standards, operating procedures, and governance frameworks. When regenerative leadership is present, projects become catalysts for systemic improvement. When it is absent, projects often reproduce the same patterns that created today's challenges.
Project professionals are no longer responsible only for delivering outputs. They are becoming stewards of outcomes that extend beyond the project itself.
At its core, regenerative leadership changes how we evaluate project outcomes. Instead of asking only whether we delivered what was planned, regenerative leaders also ask what the project did to the systems it touched.
| Did it leave ecosystems stronger or weaker? |
| Did it expand opportunity or shift burdens elsewhere? |
| Did it create resilience or embed new vulnerabilities? |
These questions do not replace traditional project management. They extend it. And in a world facing complex environmental, social, and economic pressures, that extension may be one of the most important contributions the project profession can make. Projects shape the future whether we acknowledge it or not. Regenerative leadership simply asks us to take responsibility for that fact.
Dr. Joel Carboni
Founder, GPM · Standards Builder · Regenerative Business Advocate
Joel is widely recognized as a sustainability disruptor, standards builder, and global advocate for regenerative business practices. For more than three decades, he has worked at the intersection of sustainability, strategy, and governance, helping organizations translate ambitious sustainability goals into measurable, lasting impact.
As the Founder of GPM (Green Project Management), Joel introduced the P5 Standard for Sustainability and the PRiSM methodology — pioneering frameworks that redefine how projects deliver value by integrating environmental, social, and governance considerations into project delivery. These models have since become recognized standards within leading global institutions, including the Project Management Institute (PMI) and the Institute of Management Accountants (IMA).
Joel also contributes to the global sustainability agenda through his work with the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), where he is involved in developing the new Pollution Standard, and through contributions related to the Paris Agreement and the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
Beyond his work as a practitioner and standards developer, Joel is a Forbes contributor, a visiting professor at SKEMA Business School, and an advisor to governments and multinational organizations on how to embed ethics, sustainability, and regenerative thinking into business strategy and delivery.
Recognition
In 2025, Joel was recognized by Thinkers50 as a finalist for the inaugural Regenerative Business Award for his book Becoming Regenerative.
Perspectives · Standards & Practice
Somewhere up there, Bill Duncan is smiling. I channeled my inner Duncan while writing this.
Search the internet for “project management methodologies” and a familiar list appears: Agile, Waterfall, Scrum, Kanban, Lean, Six Sigma, Critical Path Method. Sometimes even A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK Guide) is included. Most of those are not methodologies. They are useful practices, tools, frameworks, or philosophies. But they do not define how projects are governed. When they are described as methodologies, several different types of project practices get collapsed into a single category. Organizations then try to run projects using tools that were never designed to provide governance or decision structure.
This article covers three things:
| Explain the structural problem |
| Define what a project management method actually is |
| Provide a practical test for determining whether something qualifies as a method |
Project work happens inside layered systems. At the top are governance structures that determine how decisions are made. Beneath them are delivery systems that determine how work is executed. Supporting those are frameworks, tools, and improvement practices. When those layers are confused, people begin describing any recognizable practice as a “methodology.” Over time the word becomes a marketing term rather than a structural one.
Several forces perpetuate this confusion:
A project management method is a complete system for governing and executing projects. It specifies how projects move through their lifecycle, how decisions are made, who holds authority, and what information must be produced.
A true method typically defines:
| Lifecycle phases |
| Governance structures |
| Roles and responsibilities |
| Decision gates |
| Management processes |
| Required artifacts |
| Escalation paths |
Examples of genuine project management methods include:
| PRINCE2 (Projects In Controlled Environments) |
| PRiSM (Projects integrating Sustainable Methods) |
| CAMMP (Capability Maturity Model for Project Management) |
| PM² Project Management Methodology — European Union |
A method defines how projects operate as controlled systems — not just a philosophy or a technique, but an operating system for the entire project.
When structural tests are applied, most commonly listed methodologies turn out to be something else entirely.
Instead of debating labels, practitioners can apply a simple structural test. A genuine project method must answer five questions.
If these elements are absent, the artifact likely belongs to another category. Only some practices define the full operating system of project governance and delivery.
In the early decades of modern project management, most environments relied on structured project methods that emphasized governance, stage control, documentation, and formal decision authority. Beginning in the late 1990s, the software industry began challenging these approaches. Many teams found that highly structured methods were poorly suited to environments where requirements changed rapidly. This led to the creation of the Manifesto for Agile Software Development.
Agile did not attempt to create a single method. It introduced a set of guiding principles intended to shape how work was approached. Frameworks such as Scrum and practices such as Kanban emerged to operationalize those principles. Over time, however, because Agile minimized formal governance structures, many organizations began treating frameworks and practices as if they were complete project systems. The terminology spread through training materials, blogs, and search engines until the idea that Scrum or Kanban were “project methodologies” became common language.
The irony is that Agile itself never claimed this. In many environments, Agile frameworks operate most effectively inside an existing governance method, rather than replacing it entirely. Project governance answers questions such as who authorizes a project, how decisions are escalated, and how accountability is maintained. Delivery frameworks answer a different set of questions: how the team organizes work, how frequently increments are delivered, and how feedback is incorporated. Both are important. But they operate at different levels of the system.
When the two are confused, organizations lose clarity about authority, decision rights, and accountability. Teams may deliver work efficiently, but the project itself lacks a coherent governance structure.
Project management has matured significantly as a profession. It has developed standards, bodies of knowledge, governance models, and increasingly sophisticated delivery practices. Yet one of its most basic concepts — what constitutes a method — remains widely misunderstood. This confusion is harmful.
When tools are mistaken for methods, organizations attempt to govern projects using practices that were never designed for governance. Delivery may improve, but authority becomes unclear. Decisions drift. Accountability weakens. The project becomes a collection of activities rather than a controlled system.
Frameworks, philosophies, and techniques are valuable. Scrum helps teams organize work. Kanban improves flow. Lean reduces waste. Six Sigma improves quality. The Critical Path Method improves scheduling. But these tools work best when they operate inside a coherent method, not when they are mistaken for one. If the profession is to continue maturing, it must become more precise in its language. The difference between a method, a framework, and a tool is not academic. It is structural. It determines how projects are governed, how decisions are made, and how organizations manage risk.
Dr. Joel Carboni
Founder, GPM · Standards Builder · Regenerative Business Advocate
Joel is widely recognized as a sustainability disruptor, standards builder, and global advocate for regenerative business practices. For more than three decades, he has worked at the intersection of sustainability, strategy, and governance, helping organizations translate ambitious sustainability goals into measurable, lasting impact.
As the Founder of GPM (Green Project Management), Joel introduced the P5 Standard for Sustainability and the PRiSM methodology — pioneering frameworks that redefine how projects deliver value by integrating environmental, social, and governance considerations into project delivery. These models have since become recognized standards within leading global institutions, including the Project Management Institute (PMI) and the Institute of Management Accountants (IMA).
Joel also contributes to the global sustainability agenda through his work with the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), where he is involved in developing the new Pollution Standard, and through contributions related to the Paris Agreement and the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
Beyond his work as a practitioner and standards developer, Joel is a Forbes contributor, a visiting professor at SKEMA Business School, and an advisor to governments and multinational organizations on how to embed ethics, sustainability, and regenerative thinking into business strategy and delivery.
Recognition
In 2025, Joel was recognized by Thinkers50 as a finalist for the inaugural Regenerative Business Award for his book Becoming Regenerative.
Perspectives · Climate & Systems
The atmosphere does not negotiate with narratives. Carbon accumulates according to physics, not corporate baselines. Yet much of today’s climate discourse is built around precisely that — narratives of progress measured against internal baselines, operational boundaries, and accounting conventions that bear little resemblance to the physical system they are meant to stabilize.
Organizations declare net zero targets. Roadmaps are published. Progress charts show declining emissions against a baseline year, often somewhere around 2015. Operational emissions fall. Purchased energy becomes cleaner. Sustainability reports describe steady movement toward long-term climate commitments. Inside the organization, the story feels responsible. Outside the organization, the climate system continues to move in the opposite direction.
This tension does not exist because organizations are indifferent to climate risk. It exists because the structure of the net zero narrative allows institutions to optimize a small portion of the system while leaving the larger system largely intact.
In systems terms, this is reductionism. Reductionism occurs when improvement in one part of a system is mistaken for improvement of the system itself. It allows institutions to focus on what they directly control while treating the rest of the system as external context. That pattern is visible in the way corporate emissions are measured.
Under the accounting structure established by the Greenhouse Gas Protocol, emissions are divided into three scopes. Scope 1 covers direct emissions from an organization’s operations. Scope 2 includes emissions associated with purchased energy. Scope 3 encompasses the wider value chain: suppliers, logistics, product use, and end-of-life impacts.
When organizations pursue net zero strategies that focus primarily on Scopes 1 and 2 while leaving Scope 3 largely outside the operational boundary, they are not solving the system. They are narrowing the frame of measurement until success becomes possible. Data collected by CDP, a global environmental disclosure system used by thousands of companies and investors, shows that Scope 3 emissions account for roughly three quarters of total emissions on average across reporting companies. A strategy focused primarily on Scopes 1 and 2 addresses only a minority of the problem.
Part of the justification is familiar. Leaders argue that most Scope 3 emissions occur outside the organization’s direct control — in supplier operations, logistics networks, product use, and disposal. But absence of control does not mean absence of influence. Organizations shape their value chains through purchasing power, contract terms, capital investment, and product design. Influence exists. It requires investment.
Researchers at the Stockholm Resilience Centre describe climate stability as one of several limits within the Planetary Boundaries Framework that define the safe operating space for human activity. Their work suggests that atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations above roughly 350 parts per million represent a departure from that safe zone. That threshold was crossed decades ago. Today atmospheric concentrations exceed 420 parts per million.
This changes the baseline for what progress means. If the system is already outside the safe operating space, measuring improvement relative to recent corporate baselines does not tell us whether we are moving back inside that space. It only tells us whether the rate of overshoot has slowed. Reducing harm is not the same as restoring stability.
An intervention that improves efficiency while still exceeding ecological thresholds may represent progress relative to the past while remaining fundamentally unsustainable in absolute terms.
This distinction is central to what sustainability practitioners increasingly describe as context-based sustainability. Performance must ultimately be measured against the carrying capacity of the system being affected rather than merely against an organization’s historical performance.
None of this means measurement or reporting should be dismissed. Measurement is essential. Without it there is no accountability. Organizations must quantify their impacts, disclose them transparently, and track progress over time. At GPM we do exactly that — publishing annual emissions reporting and measuring our own footprint using the same frameworks we advocate for others. We are also close to fully quantifying our Scope 3 emissions. That work matters because measurement exposes the real boundary of the system. It shows where influence exists and where investment must follow.
But measurement alone does not change the outcome. Our own goal is not simply net zero. It is net positive. The objective is to contribute more to the systems that sustain life than we extract from them. That standard forces a different set of decisions. It requires looking beyond operational emissions and into the structure of the systems we participate in. It requires asking whether our work restores capacity or simply slows decline.
Organizations can produce detailed sustainability disclosures while continuing to invest in infrastructure, supply chains, and products that lock in emissions for decades. When reporting is connected to intervention it strengthens governance. When reporting substitutes for intervention it becomes narrative management.
This is where the concept of an integrity threshold becomes useful. An integrity threshold is the point where what an institution claims and what its system produces begin to diverge in structural ways. Leaders describe progress while the underlying system continues to generate outcomes inconsistent with those claims. Net zero commitments often sit precisely on that line.
Organizations say they are pursuing decarbonization while continuing to expand production systems that depend on fossil energy. Emissions decline within operational boundaries while the wider system producing the majority of emissions remains unchanged. Reports describe responsible action while atmospheric concentrations continue rising. Where that gap exists, sustainability becomes theater. The emissions will enter the atmosphere whether the report calls them progress or not.
Net zero functions so effectively as a comfort story because it allows institutions to demonstrate responsibility without confronting the full scale of structural change required.
None of this means net zero targets should be abandoned. Reducing emissions matters. Efficiency improvements matter. Renewable energy matters. These actions are necessary steps in a broader transition. The problem is treating them as the whole solution when they represent only part of the system. A transition that addresses only the emissions an organization directly controls while leaving the wider economic system unchanged cannot deliver climate stability on its own.
The question therefore is not whether organizations should pursue net zero commitments. The question is whether net zero, as it is currently practiced, represents genuine system change or simply a more sophisticated form of reductionism. If the strategy works only when the boundary is kept small, the system has not changed. Only the story has.
Dr. Joel Carboni
Founder, GPM · Standards Builder · Regenerative Business Advocate
Joel is widely recognized as a sustainability disruptor, standards builder, and global advocate for regenerative business practices. For more than three decades, he has worked at the intersection of sustainability, strategy, and governance, helping organizations translate ambitious sustainability goals into measurable, lasting impact.
As the Founder of GPM (Green Project Management), Joel introduced the P5 Standard for Sustainability and the PRiSM methodology — pioneering frameworks that redefine how projects deliver value by integrating environmental, social, and governance considerations into project delivery. These models have since become recognized standards within leading global institutions, including the Project Management Institute (PMI) and the Institute of Management Accountants (IMA).
Joel also contributes to the global sustainability agenda through his work with the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), where he is involved in developing the new Pollution Standard, and through contributions related to the Paris Agreement and the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
Beyond his work as a practitioner and standards developer, Joel is a Forbes contributor, a visiting professor at SKEMA Business School, and an advisor to governments and multinational organizations on how to embed ethics, sustainability, and regenerative thinking into business strategy and delivery.
Recognition
In 2025, Joel was recognized by Thinkers50 as a finalist for the inaugural Regenerative Business Award for his book Becoming Regenerative.
Perspectives · Standards & Integration
There is a growing narrative that P5 and the PMBOK® Guide represent competing philosophies within the profession. The reasoning usually centers on differences in terminology, framing, and historical development. That conclusion confuses origin with opposition. I want to explain how we are not at odds at all — and how we are closing the gap even more.
The PMBOK® Guide – Eighth Edition organizes how projects create and deliver value within complex environments. P5 examines the consequences of that value across social, environmental, and economic systems. One defines disciplined execution. The other evaluates systemic impact. They operate at different layers of the same system.
One defines disciplined execution. The other evaluates systemic impact. They operate at different layers of the same system.
When PMI and GPM formed the joint venture, GPM had not adopted PMBOK’s precise vocabulary. That was a function of lineage, not misalignment. PMBOK evolved from delivery science. It consolidated principles around governance, performance domains, value realization, and adaptive lifecycle management. Its emphasis is on structured execution in complex settings.
P5 emerged from impact science. It was designed to measure how projects influence human systems, ecological boundaries, economic durability, and long-term resilience. Its emphasis is on capital systems, lifecycle accountability, and materiality. The frameworks were not attempting to solve the same problem. They were addressing adjacent responsibilities within the same profession.
When examined at the level of operational domains, the alignment is direct. PMBOK 8 defines performance domains and governance structures through which projects deliver outcomes. P5 extends those domains into measurable impact categories that assess durability, exposure, and long-term consequence.
The Eighth Edition moved the profession beyond the traditional constraint model toward a broader understanding of value creation. It emphasizes governance, stakeholder integration, and adaptability. P5 introduces a structured method for evaluating that value across ecological thresholds, social equity and workforce conditions, economic resilience, and lifecycle externalities.
A project can meet cost, schedule, and scope targets while increasing long-term systemic risk. PMBOK provides the governance framework within which such decisions are made. P5 provides the measurement discipline to determine whether those decisions enhance or erode system capacity. Neither framework diminishes the other. One strengthens execution discipline. The other strengthens consequence visibility.
A project can meet cost, schedule, and scope targets while increasing long-term systemic risk. PMBOK provides the governance framework. P5 provides the measurement discipline to determine whether those decisions enhance or erode system capacity.
As organizations operate within increasingly complex regulatory and disclosure environments, the convergence between governance and impact has accelerated. PMBOK 8 situates governance at the center of project performance. P5 situates lifecycle accountability within governance decision-making. Both frameworks recognize that project choices influence institutional resilience, risk distribution, and long-term value sustainability. The distinction is not philosophical. It is functional.
The forthcoming P5 Version 4 further tightens integration with governance structures, materiality assessment, and disclosure frameworks. The direction of travel across the profession is toward integration, not divergence. The assumption that P5 and PMBOK are incompatible rests on the idea that performance and impact are separate responsibilities. In contemporary practice, they are inseparable.
The profession now has frameworks capable of holding both responsibilities within a single system of practice. This is the way.
Dr. Joel Carboni
Founder, GPM · Standards Builder · Regenerative Business Advocate
Joel is widely recognized as a sustainability disruptor, standards builder, and global advocate for regenerative business practices. For more than three decades, he has worked at the intersection of sustainability, strategy, and governance, helping organizations translate ambitious sustainability goals into measurable, lasting impact.
As the Founder of GPM (Green Project Management), Joel introduced the P5 Standard for Sustainability and the PRiSM methodology — pioneering frameworks that redefine how projects deliver value by integrating environmental, social, and governance considerations into project delivery. These models have since become recognized standards within leading global institutions, including the Project Management Institute (PMI) and the Institute of Management Accountants (IMA).
Joel also contributes to the global sustainability agenda through his work with the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), where he is involved in developing the new Pollution Standard, and through contributions related to the Paris Agreement and the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
Beyond his work as a practitioner and standards developer, Joel is a Forbes contributor, a visiting professor at SKEMA Business School, and an advisor to governments and multinational organizations on how to embed ethics, sustainability, and regenerative thinking into business strategy and delivery.
Recognition
In 2025, Joel was recognized by Thinkers50 as a finalist for the inaugural Regenerative Business Award for his book Becoming Regenerative.
Making projects sustainable on a global scale since 2009.
© 2009–2026 GPM Global. All rights reserved.
GPM®, Green Project Management®, and Sustainable Project Management® are registered trademarks of GPM Ltd. PRiSM™, the PMI-GPM P5™ Standard for Sustainability in Project Management, the PMI-GPM Practice Guide for Sustainability in Project Management, CSPP™ (formerly GPM-b™), CSPMs™, CSPMx™, CSP™, CSF™, Certified Sustainable Project Manager (Expert)™, GPM360°™, GPM360°™, and PSM3™ are trademarks of GPM Global and the PMI-GPM Joint Venture as applicable. Use requires written consent.