Some of the more Interesting ideas arising from commentary and communication this week.
Kathy Dever Todd commented on The Third AM Revolution and in subsequent conversation spoke of her work in New Zealand on Resilience. This has caused me to rethink the third transition which I had previously positioned as ‘from risk to uncertainty’. Resilience, however is a better word for the goal of dealing with uncertainty for it has positive connotations (as well as a developing literature), so, thanks to Kathy, I am repositioning the third transition as ‘From Risk to Resilience’.
The Third AM Revolution also drew thoughtful comment from John Falade who acknowledged that plant asset managers aimed at 95% efficiency for critical assets but argued that “Whilst we can celebrate the emphasis on critical assets as a paradigm shift from the pre strategic asset management era mindset of ‘all assets must be maintained’, it still stops short of asking the questions: What do I or my organisation want to achieve with our assets? What assets re really critical towards the achievement of our objectives? Do we need 95% reliability or availabilit of these assets to achieve our objectives. In other words, do I need so much efficiency to be effective? (my emphasis) See his full comment.
Milos Posavijak commented on A Strange Business, providing a link to manufacturing process and product life cycles and contrasting manufacturing plant and community infrastructure in terms of variety and standardisation. See comment and link. In his comment on Is There Still a Role for Common Sense? he put forward the intriguing proposition that ‘the model is not the predictor of future reality, but a JIT factory for future scenarios from the most granular asset information to the overall network’ Definitely worth further consideration, see comment.
In email discussion over Do Efficiency and Effectiveness conflict? Sandy Dunn referred to the Transport Department that, with the appointment of a new Head, realised that their function was not to build and maintain roads, but to minimise traffic congestion. This brought on quite a bit of work in analysing and resequencing traffic signals – and they have achieved some good results. This led me to think how many of us have ‘process determined’ objectives such as ‘build and maintain roads’ when we would be better served with ‘outcome determined’ objectives such as minimise traffic congestion. Your thoughts?
In conversation with Ron Riegel-Huth over Understanding the Objective, he queried whether ‘reduce road accidents’ or ‘improve road safety’ was really the main determining objective of the government. Surely, he suggested, the real determinant was ‘how do we get this road accident public pressure off our backs? And, he added, unless we start with the real objective, our research and analysis will be ineffective. Again, your thoughts?
Enjoy the weekend. Penny
Regarding the objective of minimising congestion by the transport department: I wonder if there will be an unintended consequence of this. If it becomes easier for people to drive their own car (because there is less congestion), then public transport, walking and cycling will decrease and overall the community becomes less healthy and by some measures less efficient/effective?
Regarding the objective to reduce public pressure (I would say ‘respond to public need’): Yes that is the underlying drive of a democratic government system, which also creates our legislation, regulations, strategies and so on. The objectives of reducing crashes or improving road safety are subsets of responding to a public need. I don’t think that the ‘public need’ is like the elephant in the room that no one acknowledges. It is more likely that everyone is ok with the elephant and happy to get on with feeding it (and taking out the manure…).