Curiouser and curiouser

Internet meme, no credit visible – so thak you to whoever photographed and posted this!

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!

One Thought on “Curiouser and curiouser

  1. The book Curious by Ian Leslie described different types of curiosity. ‘Diversive’ curiosity – as in diversion – isn’t that useful. It’s a what question. Example ‘What actor was in the movie?, or what year did X happen?’; you can look it up on Google, and the answer quenches the thirst.

    It is epistemic curiosity (EC) that we need as Asset Managers and infrastructure decision makers. This is the curiosity that makes us want to go deep and learn about a subject area. Where the answer may lead us down a path of more and even better questions. This is what I think of when I read your blog post. I believe EC is found in people who want / need to understand the why type questions.

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