What is a better question?
The tag line for Talking Infrastructure is ‘generating better questions’. Ruth’s brilliant last post reminded me that I had never defined a ‘better’ question. So let’s do that.
Very briefly, a ‘better’ question is one where the answer creates new information, or in the words of Michael Port (Heroic Pubic Speaking) it’s a question that Google can’t answer!
More than that, it generates new capability, allowing us to do new things, or old things in a better way.
Are these ‘better’ questions?
The first volume of our story of Asset Management, ‘Asset Management as a Quest’ consists of a search for the answers to the following series of questions. (You can read Part One of this volume – and our search for answers to the first two of these questions – here)
1: How much does it cost South Australians to get their water services?
2: What is the likely cost and timing of renewing water assets?
3: What is the cost and timing of renewal for all state infrastructure: Public Housing, Hospitals, Schools and Colleges, Highways,Transit, Power and Water?
4: What can be done to contain costs?
5: How do we instill an AM mindset?
6: How do we spread the word about asset management and its benefits?
7: What are the consequences if AM is not understood?
8: Are our tools and data up to the challenges we now face?
9: How do we advance the narrative but also keep it focused?
10: How did NSW move the story forward and what can we learn from its actions?
Your View
Q: Are these ‘better’ questions? Why or why not?
Q: What other questions were being considered in this early perid of our history (1984-1993)?
Asking Questions
And, if you would like to know more about question asking, here are two great books
‘Questions are the Answer’ by Hal Gregersen, and
‘Curious’ by Ian Lewis (recommended by Lou Cripps after reading Ruth’s post)
I teach people about Asset Management – up to 1000 a year – and I get to see a wide range of reactions. Best is when someone in class decides Asset Management is what they have been looking for their whole career, its mixture of technical and people and business challenges exactly right for them. Or the maintenance guy who, by the end of the course, was explaining to everyone else to “do the math” for optimal decisions.
For some, on intro courses, it’s mildly interesting, at least as long as their leaders tell them it is.
Sometimes, however, people resist.
I taught a class of design engineers a few years ago, who argued the toss on everything, and failed the exam afterwards. I think we can take it that they didn’t get it because they didn’t want to. (I have also taught a class to project engineers who had understood AM was the way forward for them personally and had got together to sign up for it.)
Recently, I was working with an organisation – an early-ish adopter in the USA – where they were keen enough on AM to create a series of jobs for ‘Asset Manager’. Not necessarily what I, personally, would call Asset Managers, but rather engineering roles to develop priorities by asset class for replacement capital projects.
The way we teach AM, following the lead of Richard Edwards and Chris Lloyd (two very smart UK pioneers) is top down. If strategic AM is aligned to organisation priorities and levels of service targets, we start with what those targets are, with external stakeholders interests, the role of top management, and demand forecasting. In other words, context and goals. I warn everyone about this right at the start – and also make it clear that nothing else matters if we don’t understand what we want the assets for in the first place.
I was struck, this time, by the lack of curiosity the class had. No-one knew what their level of service targets were, they stumbled to think about who their key regulators were, where demand was heading, even who might have a legitimate interest in what assets were being replaced, outside of engineering and operations. It wasn’t just that they didn’t know, they also didn’t much care. They were not stupid.
I was struck by how weird it is, really, that we have to teach anyone about alignment. That smart people working with assets don’t stop to ask what their organisations are really doing with those assets.
What a good Asset Manager really needs more than anything is curiosity – asking all the questions about why and how and how we can do it better in future.
But some people just aren’t very curious, for some reason. They are not much fun to teach!
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