P3

Collaboration is a big buzzword here. Public-private partnerships, or "P3" as one fellow dubbed it. These words are all over the program, and were mentioned many times today.

Quite a few of us have been doing this for years, I'm not sure how certain kinds of projects could succeed without it. It's just that the jargon is finally catching up with the practice. Those who study and describe things are finally catching up with those who do things.

Another topic was perhaps a little fresher. David Vigh of the Corps talked about retaining corporate knowledge. His point is that as baby boomers retire, a lot of information will go with them (us). The issue has always existed, but because of demographics, and because so much of current restoration knowledge developed just in the past 30 or 40 years, it's now becoming a more serious concern. So Mr. Vigh is encouraging us to develop mechanisms for intellectual succession, and also to maintain connections to those we learned from.

I think he's right. Of the group I was with in the 1990s, the TAMS Consultants group that designed a 200-acre bottomland hardwood forest restoration in southern Illinois, and learned a lot in the process... only two of those people are still with the now vastly larger entity which acquired that firm. Everyone else is scattered from Virginia to Hawaii. We still talk to each other, and we're all still working, and will be for a while yet. Then, in 10 or 15 years, a few of those people will reach retirement age. Within a relative handful of years after that, the rest will follow.

I've published two articles on that project, on relatively specialized aspects, and presented on it a couple of additional times. Others have done similar things. But there hasn't been a plan, there's no coordinated mechanism to pass that information along, or any of the other things we've learned since then. other, smaller projects are still locked up in one or two heads.

Winzler & Kelly is the first place I've worked that has a formal mentoring program, so perhaps this will address the issue in part. Most other companies aren't dealing with the issue at all though.