© Channel 4 2026
People in general generally don’t want to have to think about infrastructure.
Being forced to think about it because it’s not working is a sign of systematic failure.
Trouble has been brewing in the privatised English waste water sector for many years, and it has now spilled over into a three part Channel 4 docudrama, Dirty Business. Its heroes are Windrush Against Sewage Pollution and Surfers Against Sewage; the villains including everyone in charge at the Environment Agency.
I would say that in England the privatisation of water and waste water in 1989 made everyone angry mostly because it made them think about it. Things like boil orders and droughts suddenly became unacceptable, and not simply because someone was now profiting by them. Water company CEOs became the archetypal fat cats, though they weren’t paid more than other company bosses.
Water and sewerage are just too close to the bone; we want them to work safely and reliably out of sight. We didn’t actually ask for them to be competitive.
The deal was that there would be vigilant government regulation on all fronts. Control over drinking water quality, effluent discharge, leakage and charges.
But waste water and environmental protection got relabelled bureaucracy, and someone in our last crazy Conservative government decided waste water operatives could ‘self-regulate’. They could tell the government when they broke the law with illegal sewage releases into the rivers and sea. After all, why would they lie?
Yeah, right.
That and asset stripping/ borrowing against the assets to pay out to shareholders, including to the Vampire Kangaroos.*
It turns out they quickly found it was cheaper to pay the fines than invest in fixing the assets anyway. The argument that we needed private capital to invest to solve the mess, well, that just doesn’t seem to work in England.
The companies involved have now asked for fifteen years’ grace (no fines) to not fix them again.
Not sure this is a sustainable economic model for infrastructure?
Note: England here mean England, not Scotland or Northern Ireland. The majority of the private companies are responsible for both water and waste water.
*No prizes for any Australian who guesses who they are!
145550420 © Planetfelicity | Dreamstime.com
If you were sitting down from scratch to write down what you wish you’d known when you got into all this AM stuff…
Would you wish that you had known more (pick one)
- Engineering
- IT
- Finance
- Economics
- Psychology
- Statistics
- Self-knowledge
- Philosophy
- Politics
What would you have studied at 18?
Asking what we should know is, of course, a question of what it is we do.
I am sure that, in addition to more and better about specific AM concepts and tools, I could have used more on managing managers, and infrastructure economics. And I wished I’d loved statistics!
(But I would have liked to do palaeontology at 18.) (I am not going to claim it would have made me more useful!)
174608439 | Milton Keynes © Mr Paul Hanley | Dreamstime.com
I live in an old town, Newport Pagnell, best know for two road transport icons: the second motorway service station in Britain, and Aston Martin.
Newport is also part of the first new city in England, Milton Keynes. MK is famous for its roundabouts, over 130 at last count.
Roundabouts are fascinating infrastructure. They take up more room than traffic lights but they are much more efficient.
They raise questions about what good infrastructure looks like. Someone had the technical idea for them well before MK, but they also require changes in people’s behaviour. They are hard to retrofit.
What is the role of technical innovation in infrastructure? What are all the other things that have to go with the introduction of a technical innovation? What changes have to be forced on people for the technology to work?
I have driven around a Dutch roundabout while they still ran with priority from cars entering, not the vehicles already on it. Totally biased, this seemed like a very bad idea to me.
I have driven on a brand new roundabout in a central Washington town that was also scary, because I knew many drivers wouldn’t understand how they work: they take getting used to, with plenty of warning signs about priority.
I’ve sat at US four way stops and admired the discipline – British drivers really struggle with them – but, as I waited, also calculated that a roundabout would be faster.
I drive on Roundabout City’s roads, where inhabitants know they do not have stop, and everyone knows how to judge gaps. Out of towners run the risk of being rear-ended.
Curiously, small roundabouts on housing estates slow the traffic down. But the main, grid roads with large roundabouts at every main junction can be driven at 60 miles per hour. And you can drive straight through this city of a third of a million people and never see a single house.
Milton Keynes people love their roundabouts – but have to be warned about how traffic light systems work.
What would I advise someone who wants to get more involved in Asset Management? Who would I suggest they talk to?
I could start with a negative: don’t look to AM if you are really a techie. Or want clear role definitions and a well-trod career path.
Don’t look for certainty.
On the other hand, I am one of the chosen who, having found AM, I never looked back. It was just the right combination of middle-chunking for me: not swamped in technical details, not airy abstractions. Grounded (in physical realities) but exploratory. Always learning, thinking new thoughts, using different parts of my brain and experiences. And in asset world, somewhere up the food chain: creating strategies rather than delivering them.
Maybe not quite high enough, when dealing with short-sighted CEOs? But I personally didn’t want stupid organisational politics. There is something idealistic about the right people in AM.
Who I would listen to – apart from Penny Burns, of course (go to source)?
Who would you suggest?
More than a decade ago, Chris Lloyd and Charles Johnson wrote in the Seven Revelations of Asset Management that we must “embrace uncertainty”.
This year we want to build on good practice to help our profession do this.
Let’s cut to the chase: our role as asset managers is to develop plans for the future, and yet the future, even next week, is uncertain. (Particularly at the moment.) We can’t not plan because we don’t know everything. In fact, uncertainty makes it even more essential to have plans.
Chris and Charles were right: we have to leap in.
It’s better to be roughly right than perfectly wrong. And there is no other option. Aiming for certainty is how we would ensure we are adding little value to asset decisions.
Board member Todd Shepherd has worked in North American power and water to develop a better approach to infrastructure risk and uncertainty, based on good practice in other professions and sectors. It’s not about a new tool, not software, but a more fundamental understanding of what managing uncertainty requires.
It requires not even trying to get a perfect answer.
Because the cost of perfect information is infinite – impossible. And good decisions don’t need it. What’s needed from us is practical ways to reduce our organisations’ uncertainty.
We’re currently drafting a much longer piece about how we make better decisions through better estimating and grasp of probabilities. And how it is, in the end, easier to deal with uncertainty than some of the weird things we do in infrastructure at the moment.
Are you in with us?
(We’d love to hear from you on risk.)
Our mission at Talking Infrastructure is to promote the good practices of Asset Management Wave 2 and develop thinking on Waves 3 and 4.
It’s an evolutionary model: you need the solid processes of whole life costing, sophisticated risk thinking, and longer-term asset planning both for the sake of your own organisation’s ability to deliver and to underpin (to ground) decisions on new infrastructure and new types of assets.
So we plan to:
- Continue to promote better strategic Asset Management, Wave 2, through re-emphasising the core AM tool of longer-term asset planning as well as development of more sophisticated asset risk and decision-making concepts
- Develop a guidebook to the AMP, to restate and update Penny’s original vision for the changing contexts of the 2020s, with case studies such as Grant County PUD
- We would also like to see campaigning for infrastructure regulators to have more teeth through AMP requirements and audits to encourage agencies to plan ahead
Plan for work on Wave 3, infrastructure decision making especially on new and renewed assets includes:
- Promote work already done, such as the UK Projects and Infrastructure Project Routemap module on Asset Management, https://projectdelivery.gov.uk/library-product/project-routemap-asset-management-module/ and our latest book Legacy: A Decision Maker’s Guide to Infrastructure
- There is a still a long way to go to shift from a construction delivery and short-term profit focus to planning the right assets and asset strategies in the first place. Shout out to Louise Hart working on how to succeed at infrastructure megaprojects (linkedin.com/in/louisehart750), and Johannes Paradza of Infrastructure Asset Management South Africa on how asset managers help meet the challenge of Cape Town’s infrastructure.
Resources on Wave 4, starting with Jeff’s work as Director of Infrastructure and Biodiversity at the Blue Mountains City Council
For all of these, we aim to build on friendly alliances with like-minded people and organisations.
Your input, please, on:
- In your experience, in what ways is Wave 2, strategic Asset Management, still not yet where we should be?
- Anything you already know of on Wave 3, better infrastructure decision-making in our communities?
- Inspiring examples on resilience, biodiversity, radically sustainable thinking on assets – away from grey assets?
What’s in your plan for 2026?
Just because it reminded us of the computer in the original BBC Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
This year, Asset Management turns 42. And we all know what that means…
Is there one, main thing we can do in organisations that will lead to good Asset Management?
On the one hand, 39, now 40 subject areas, ISO 55000 clauses, and AM maturity assessments with tens if not hundreds of questions all suggest there are many things we have to do.
On the other, some of us suspect AM is a paradigm which may only need one assumption to be thoroughly overturned to flip the system.
If I had to bet, it would be the concept of an asset lifecycle model – a model not really about money, but what we need to do to an asset, or an asset class, to effectively manage it over time to meet demand.
However, the evidence for this is more, as they say, in the breach: most infrastructure organisations haven’t yet got explicit whole of life models. Have not tried this switch.
But watch this space…
Next comes a blog summarising what Talking Infrastructure needs to do in 2026. How about you?
Happy New Year from the Talking Infrastructure Board!
In our ongoing campaign to educate everyone about platypus tails: forget Perry the Platypus, they do not look like beaver tails!
Platypuses have furry prehensile tails, in other words they can grasp objects with them. This still from a reel isn’t very clear, but she is carrying twigs.
“When female platypuses are making nests, they will grab bunches of vegetation with their flat little prehensile tails and drag the foliage into their burrows.”*
Yet more platypus versatility.
Another reason they are my totem animal and symbol of Asset Management at work.
Seasons’ greetings and a very happy 2026 to all platypuses & Asset Managers
*See podcast Ornithorhynchology (PLATYPUSES) by Alie Ward for more platypology
ID 26212151 | Child In Shallow © Pavla Zakova | Dreamstime.com
When we look back at the history of Asset Management, there is one curious feature.
In a world in which many people go on about data, many act like the revolution of AM is the discovery of asset data.
Why?
Penny many years ago made the point – well, that the point is making better long-term decisions about assets. Wave 1, ‘asset inventory’, only has any value when we use such data to make better decisions, in Penny’s Wave 2: strategic asset management. As Penny says, when you focus on the decisions, you have a much clearer idea of what data you actually need. Wave 2 improves Wave 1.
But there must be some kind of reason why organisations seem to have to go through Wave 1, collecting and organising data, first.
Cynically, we might think it’s because it’s easier than questioning decision-making: something middle level asset managers can do without challenging business at the top level. Or, and/or, there are plenty of suppliers willing to sell you help in collecting data or implementing the transactional IT systems to put it in. Few that actually know how to make better decisions.
But I come to suspect that, weirdly, asset-centric data is more radical than it sounds. What suggests this is how hard other teams kick and scream about collecting and handing on asset inventory, the very basic data on what assets we have where. (Capital projects, IT, even some maintenance teams.)
It doesn’t seem to help to stress that we cannot manage what we don’t know we have. Is the problem that they don’t understand that we do have to continue to manage assets into the future?
Or is it – back to basics – that the whole concept of an asset is the first revolution?
Other people manage projects, budgets, sites, even value on the balance sheet. Only Asset Management believes the fundamental unit of management is the operational asset.
Can we rewrite the advice on implementing Asset Management to get us to decisions faster?
Are too many organisations still not making that very first leap into the water?
Memorial to Jules Verne, Amiens, ID 381624172 © Linda Williams | Dreamstime.com
One way to put my life in context is: when I was born, Robert Heinlein was king of science fiction.
Not that I knew this until ten or so years later, when I started to read my family’s collection of sci fi Penguins. We, naturally, also favoured British writers, who, if not noticeably more female or non-white, were at least less American gung-ho.
Now, the world of the future is very different, with some ‘non-binary’ writers, Afrofuturism, and radical ecologies. And good aliens, my favourite.
Between then and now, there have been a lot of post-apocalyptic dystopias, which I tend to keep away from. Post-scarcity anarchism is much more my thing (see Ursula K LeGuin, and Iain M Banks’ ‘Culture’, for example).
And hope.
If one defining feature of good Asset Management is developing longer term planning, and infrastructure urgently requires a future vision, can hopeful science fiction help us?
What’s your most inspiring example of a fictional future?
And a vision of future infrastructure?
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