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
ID 48941664 | Crumbling Wall © Pzaxe | Dreamstime.com
Talking Infrastructure has been discussing why organisations do not make better use of longer-term Asset Management Plans (the AMP).
One challenge we have identified is that the decision makers – in the C suite, council, board – are not promoted for their ability to make tough decisions, but for their skills at keeping people happy.
I have nothing against informed compromise: after all, good practice Asset Management depends on trade-offs. On balancing performance, cost and risk, short term and longer term, different kinds of service against each other.
But do many senior decision makers feel that facts may hamper their room for negotiation?
The ‘fact’ we’ve discussed is not pulled out of big data, but the reality that assets wear out, or otherwise have time-limited lives.
Penny Burns’ original lifecycle model was focused on estimates ( from SME and local experience) of when we ought to replace assets. You might argue about the exact date, of course, and there’s room for investigation of optimal costs. But in practice executives don’t generally deny that things need replacing – if they think about it.
What I feel happens is the people who make the budgets try not to think about it, because that’s largely in the future. There are enough immediate problems!
Our experiences suggest executives understand there will be future costs, and risks, if this is put before them. A good graph of risk against expenditure, or a summary of replacement peaks and troughs for the next twenty five years.
One challenge is whether there is anyone to continue to put this in front of them. And in front of the next CEO or CFO or council members, when they come in not thinking at all about the fact the physical assets will need action, sooner rather than later, and someone has to think ahead about the money and resources to carry them out.
Because thinking about it might force hard choices – like to increase budget or lower standard of service.
What are you experiences with promoting the longer-term, lifecycle understanding of physical assets?
Does regulation and audits on AMPs help?
ID 172387461 | Bridge To Nowhere © Saltat007 | Dreamstime.com
Lou Cripps and I were pushed to write a book for infrastructure decision makers from our experiences.
Experiences of senior people – C suite, council and board members – who don’t think enough about what it means to make decisions about physical assets in particular.
Legacy attempts to capture the fundamentals. What do you think? What have we missed?
‘There are some universal features of physical assets that we ignore at everyone’s peril.
- Physical assets degrade over time: they do not get better with more use. And, if you stop maintaining them, they don’t stay as they are now, but get worse.
- Physical assets do not do what they are told – what we want them to do – just because we want them to. Authority and status don’t impress them. Wishful thinking has no place in successful infrastructure management; only careful understanding of the physical realities, built up through experience. So we are all dependent on people with experience, the people who actually work with them.
- We should not let ourselves, or the people who work for our organisations, get focused on physical assets for their own sake. The assets exist to deliver a service to the communities we serve. It has to be about building up our collective knowledge of the connection between the work we do on the assets and the levels of service that they deliver, which is rarely that easy to see, especially from the outside.
- We cannot manage our assets proactively – to stay ahead of them – if we do not continuously learn from them. This, we feel, absolutely demands openness about past performance. What really happened, and why.
For us, the right attitudes for managing complex, often dangerous, and expensive physical infrastructure must include:
- Respecting that none of us knows enough on our own.
- Realising that no asset decision in isolation makes sense.
- Always asking, if we do something – build this new railway, for instance – then what? What happens next?
Legacy: A Decision Maker’s Guide to Infrastructure
What is your legacy to infrastructure? Not the concrete you pour, but the quality of your decision-making.
Here’s an article on better decision thinking from Talking Infrastructure board member Lou Cripps for the Institute of Asset Management magazine.
https://publications.cplone.co.uk/portfolio/IAM/202507/0010.html
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…
Legacy: A Decision Maker’s Guide to Infrastructure is published!
It’s a slim, elegant book aimed at councillors and C-suites to convey the realities of infrastructure, and the vital support a good Asset Management can provide to them.
Available as ebook or print on demand through Amazon.
‘Legacy: A Decision-Maker’s Guide to Infrastructure is not another technical manual. It’s a clear-eyed, call to rethink how we lead and make decisions about the physical assets that shape our daily lives – from water systems and roads to hospitals, parks, and transit networks.
Written by respected infrastructure thinkers, Ruth Wallsgrove and Lou Cripps, Legacy distills decades of frontline experience into practical guidance for those who carry the weight of stewardship. This isn’t about technology or buzzwords. It’s about responsibility. Clarity. Purpose. And asking better questions.’
Design by the wonderful Matt Miles – much gratitude again
see Resources
The Board of Talking Infrastructure wants to thank Penny – wants to make a big, big fuss over Penny – for the immensity of what she means to us and to Asset Management.
All of us had our lives and careers changed by Penny. Without her, we wouldn’t be calling ourselves asset managers, for a start. We are doubly blessed that she is also a great friend to each of us individually.
I first knew of Penny when another important AM person in my life, David Ford, came back from a trip to Australia and New Zealand in 2001 clutching a copy both of the International Infrastructure Management Manual and an issue of Penny’s Strategic Asset Management newlsetter. Saying there were some things we therefore would not have to make ourselves, and anyway could never have done so well.
I already was sure when I met Penny in person in 2004 at ICOMS we would be fast friends, going to stay with her and Bob in Adelaide on the MESA ‘eminent speaker’ tour that summer. My life certainly was never the same after that, as the next year I went back to work with her on a job for NSW Rail Corps… and the year after to live in Sydney. Where she and I could plot some more, ending up eventually with Talking Infrastructure itself.
Of course, the price I paid for her continuous inspiration was knowing I would always been running to catch up – sometimes several large steps behind her thinking. But that was always so much fun.
One thing I am most proud of is spreading her words around North America, making sure new assets managers knew who she was and her vision for infrastructure Asset Management. She has quite a fan club of younger women around the globe, including the USA. I would like to claim I am fan #1, but there are many pioneers in the queue ahead of me.
Talking Infrastructure would like to publish your memories and appeciation of Penny. When did you first come across her? Where did you take the ideas she inspired?
Platypus Clothing UK sticker
On March 31 I retired from my job. No more salary paypackets! No more hours owed to anyone!
This is not quite the same as Penny’s retirement. Penny is not retiring from thinking, working as she is on ‘Penny’s Place’.
I don’t intend to retire from AM either, and reserve the right still to take on interesting paid assignments. I am not quite sure yet what I am retiring into, as I managed to get a diagnosis of stage 1 cancer a few days after I formally left AMCL.
I do know that I have been distracted by that and will need to take at least a few weeks of doing very little to recover from major surgery.
If I do not manage a regular blog for a while, apologies. Please don’t go away!
From script by Lou Cripps
As infrastructure organisations start to make use of large language models (LLM) – popularly labelled artificial intelligent, though they are not actually thinking – do we know where we want them to take us?
Talking Infrastructure members are involved in some experimentation here. Blue Mountains City Council, for example, is trialling such technology to automate rural road inspections from LLM interpretation of videos of defects.
Lou Cripps is training models with curated Asset Management information. That is, instead of letting something like ChatGPT loose on all sources, weighting scripts to focus on known and reliable material like SAM newsletter articles. (Otherwise, they are biased towards financial AM, since there’s much more of that material around.)
As Talking Infrastructure looks at how such tools can help make good AM practice more accessible, and what principles we need when, not if, organisations try using LLM in decision processes such as where to schedule road maintenance:
What have you used so far? Where do you think we can make best use of LLM?
From script by Lou Cripps
Infrastructure schemes tend to suffer from optimism bias: assuming everything will work as planned.
Focusing on benefits and forgetting some costs is one reason infrastructure projects tend not to be as good as their business cases.
But there’s a parallel problem with risk and time.
Hofstadter’s Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.*
The UK TV programme Grand Designs comes to mind in relation to projects. It doesn’t seem to matter how many years the programme has been running, or the presumption that people who appear on it will have actually watched previous episodes.
In ambitious projects for houses, there seems to be a McCloud Law at work. People will always plan to be in by Christmas, unless they are expecting a baby (in which case they want to be in just before it is born).
In the UK, that means they are probably rushing to weatherproof the house in November, so they can get to work on the interior. And this in turn means they are invariably dependent on it not raining until the roof and windows are installed.
So the question is, is it likely to rain in the UK in November?
There is a technical corollary to this: that the glass for the windows will be delivered late, in any case. Apparently all builders know this.
*Coined by Douglas Hofstadter in his book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (1979). McCloud after Grand Designs’ presenter Kevin McCloud.
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