Image from James Webb Telescope: Interacting Galaxies

After taking three months off – impressed how much surgery slowed me down! – I am taking stock.

I find I am almost totally not interested in Asset Management as a technical subject. Or rather, that I have no hope that something technical (like ‘AI’) will sort it for us.

And yet, there is still a large problem to be sorted, that surely requires new, and clever, thinking.

The Talking Infrastructure board is more or less convinced that we have not yet made Asset Management stick. In particular, to get where Penny saw 40 years ago: business as usual longer term planning to meet infrastructure demand. And more recently, planning ahead in a changing world.

One painful example is the retreat from meaningful AMPs in Australian councils, their first home.

Why infrastructure organisations don’t face the future has been a puzzle. Vested interests, for example in the construction industry, sure; lack of skill or vision in the decision-makers, yeah.  Is it basically that the pain of not planning adequately doesn’t fall on the people failing to plan?

Our inability as a species to think beyond a few years?

But I am not yet that pessimistic. I don’t believe it’s biological.

What most grips me is the problem of culture.  Yes, we happen to live in a peculiarly short-termist culture. But let’s, as clever people, tackle it as a Meadows-type system challenge.

In the past decade some of us have asked how we can get an organisation to plan sustainably: to have a process, a system to plan out our assets, that outlives any CEO, or any individual asset manager for that matter.  A few years ago, a network of us in North America looked at how to ensure that an incoming CEO took an AMP process as given. Useful and entrenched enough not to be their focus for change.

Did we succeed anywhere?

Watch this space…