Our communities have delegated the management of physical infrastructure assets to us – including the worrying about the systems, the future, and change.
A key AM principle is not to kick the can down the road. For example, if you can see you will have a shortage of resources to manage the assets in ten years’ time, you have to start to deal with that now. (It will take you ten years to sort out.)
In the world of physical assets, things generally only get worse when you ignore them.
Assets degrade, and what is a small risk one day becomes a bigger risk simply through time. A failing asset that you don’t deal with becomes a more seriously failing asset.
However, human beings in general are not very good about time.
- We focus more on present benefits than future benefits
- We are not naturally good at understanding risks
- We are poor at noticing and paying attention to anything that changes relatively slowly, as opposed to immediate crises.
Generally, the people in the communities we serve won’t always have a great understanding about physical assets anyway, and are not good at thinking ahead for their future.
Communities need to be able to delegate the responsibilities to people who are good at it: who specialize not only at the engineering and maintenance of physical systems, but at managing through time, for the future as well as today.
We need to tool ourselves up, flex our through-time mental muscles. What will the decisions we make now look like to ‘future us’?
We will not always get it right, but with physical infrastructure we need to be the ones who can start to think about risk and benefits in four dimensions.
It is not obvious who else is ever going to do this!
What tools have you successfully used to manage the future?
Summarised from Legacy, our latest publication
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