What Could Possibly Go Wrong, and the Undo Button

My team makes use of premortem thinking: as part of planning action, immediate or long term, consider how it might go wrong. We think ourselves into the future looking back at a project (or a meeting). Humans are surprisingly good at this time-travelling.

For me, this is part of a principle Asset Managers should embrace: the principle of reversibility.  It’s not just about understanding the consequences of our decisions, but also about planning for the ability to undo or reverse their effects if needed. Sure, you can’t un-ring a bell, but we can find ways to get as close as possible to the pre-action state and minimize the impact if we think about it right from the start.

Do our plans have exit strategies or an undo button? None that I have seen, why not?

This is especially crucial in infrastructure projects, where large investments and long lifespans magnify the potential impacts. How would they be delivered differently if that was required?  Would that requirement cause us to better maintain the infrastructure we currently have? I think so. 

Let’s face the hard questions: Can we put rare earth metals back in the ground? Can we undo the energy consumed in building something new?

By embracing the principle in Asset Management and infrastructure decision-making, we can strive for resilient and adaptive systems that serve the present while safeguarding the future of generations to come.  We navigate challenges with eyes wide open.

We ask tough questions, anticipate consequences, and face the answers with truth – and then we create our plans and strategies.

2 Thoughts on “What Could Possibly Go Wrong, and the Undo Button

  1. Penny on July 16, 2024 at 2:10 pm said:

    An exit strategy! Lou, this is such an important issue. You are right that we cannot put rare earth metals back in the ground, nor can we undo the energy consumed in building something new. BUT, we can recognise that change at the planning stage comes at the lowest cost, and thus to think more carefully before we commit.
    I was once assigned a fascinating project. My task was to choose five major infrastructure projects, recently completed, and to identify their major decision points – and how the agencies went about them.
    One of the projects was a new railway signalling project. Even before the department committed to the new signalling system, it knew that there was a far better system available to it, one that was much more reliable and also cheaper. But it did not adopt it. Why not?
    Because it had taken about 18 months to get acceptance through the Parliamentary Public Works Committee and they did not want to delay any longer! If there had been a way for the department to gracefully back out of the earlier proposal and change to the better system, we would have an improved signalling system today.

  2. Kim Geedrick on July 30, 2024 at 8:09 am said:

    I would liken this type of thinking as “scenario thinking”. It is about mapping out the possible future outcomes under different decisions….and importantly then reflecting on these outcomes to tailor an optimal outcome….and hopefully avoiding the need to undo or reverse a decision.
    The challenge here is to avoid our many biases and include all possible decisions in the analysis.

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