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.
125348823 | Our History © Jakub Krechowicz | Dreamstime.com
More than a decade ago, Penny Burns set up an AM history group in LinkedIn. Her idea was firstly to collect people’s own stories, of how they came to be involved in Asset Management.
Last year Talking Infrastructure published Penny’s own history, of how she came to create Asset Management in 1984 and her first decade working with it. (The Story of Asset Management.)
From when AM really took off in the 1990s, it’s much harder to collect all the strands, and the stories include many other people. That’s why volume two of the history would look very different.
I am still fascinated by the personal journeys – not least because it brings out what distinguishes AM from other disciplines (why do people leave engineering, for example?)
I also have things when I teach about the wider history, but these really come from the people I have met, that I have happened to meet. And what I remember of what they said twenty or twenty five years ago, that they may not even agree with (or remember in the same way).
And the internet, even with AI, doesn’t cover most of it. We erase it when we rewrite a website, unless we consciously refer to what came before (or look up old sites in an archive project). I cannot find that old LinkedIn group, even though I don’t think anyone actually removed it.
Perhaps it’s natural that some only really think about history, and legacy, as they come to the end of their working lives. When you first meet a topic like Asset Management, you just know it’s there, not where it came from.
But it seems to me that asset managers ought to be interested, because we must have a good sense of time and change to do our jobs. “If you don’t know your history, you don’t know where you’re coming from,” as Bob Marley nearly put it. Understanding what’s happened before is the base material for having any sense of what may happen next, in ideas as well as deterioration curves.
Volume 2 is not yet a project. But Talking Infrastructure is planning longer articles on key topics such as planning and risk, and how to mine SAM newsletter material. Not the final word on anything, probably, but the next word, or part of the picture. A resource that can help us remember.
Watch this site for some more notes on our collective history.
And share your own story and memories of how it evolved for you.
From script by Lou Cripps
The lifecycle-based Asset Management Plan was Penny’s solution to the issue of short-term thinking.
In particular, she wanted us all to look ahead at budget requirements for renewals – replacements and refurbishments of aging assets.
But planning and lifecycle thinking are needed for other challenges, too.
For me, the fundamental point is the importance of thinking ahead. Of being proactive rather than reactive, of exploiting what we already know about our assets to stop being surprised by things we can work out ahead of time.
In a week when many of us are trying not to think about WW3, we know we don’t know everything about the future. But we need to make better use of what we do know.
The problem, 40 years on, is that so many organisations don’t.
Here are just some of the questions I would wish – fairy godmother style – everyone to be able to give better answers to.
- 101, if we think we need to build some new infrastructure asset, what will it cost to maintain and operate it?
- What are the different realistic solution options – and what opportunities will we lose in choosing any of them?
- What’s the evidence that we have understood the problem and scoped our preferred option correctly? What else has to be considered in with the capital cost – like the cost of new facilities when we buy new electric fleet, for example?
- What costs and disbenefits should we also cost into the materials we choose, such as embodied carbon or damage to other communities?
- What costs and disbenefits will continue long after the physical asset is gone (think the loss of species or habitats, long-term damage to communities)?
- Do we really have any fact basis for the costs, risks and benefits of something new, as opposed to sustaining what we have?
All of these are elements of whole life cost modelling. Too bad many organisations still don’t even use basic lifecycle costs for their budgeting or strategies.
The underlying problem… is a system that doesn’t plan for the future. Is it lack of the right skills in the right place, or vested interests? Laziness??
One thing I am pretty sure is that it isn’t a lack of available information.
What do you think: just how bad, on a scale of 1 to 10, are our current infrastructure business cases?
Further good reading: Penny’s Infrastructure: we can afford to buy it, can we afford to keep it? Louise Hart, Procuring Successful Mega-Projects: How to Establish Major Government Contracts Without Ending up in Court. Joseph Berechman, The Infrastructure We Ride On: Decision Making in Transportation Investment.
If Asset Management is to deliver better asset planning, we have a challenge. Are we living up to it?
The most obvious thing about AM is that it’s about physical assets. And for most of its history, the assumption has been that the main quality of an asset manager is that they need a background in those areas most concerned with physical assets: that is, engineering, operations, or maintenance.
Who else knows or cares about physical assets? And without that interest, AM might be unmoored: a branch of finance or corporate planning that simply doesn’t know or care enough.
The dilemma is that we need other skills that don’t come for free with delivery backgrounds.
Worse, we need perspectives that definitely go against what we learn in engineering school, or the motivation of operations.
- How do we nurture a profession of people who really like the realities of physical assets but think in a new way about them?
- How early do we need to reach potential asset managers?
There are some good signs – Dr Monica Beedles’ Street Smarts and Biz Smarts, for example, and the Canadian Network of Asset Managers (CNAM) work on AM competences. (And shout out to pioneers of new ways of getting to undergraduates – hello, Valerie Marcolengo!)
But, as CNAM points out, we have a chronic shortage of asset managers.
And many who struggle in post without the tools of effective asset management planning.
How do we reach those with the environmental, analytical, process, culture change and bigger picture skills we need?
What is your ideal undergraduate syllabus to grow the next generation of asset managers?
Thanks to the British Columbia South Island AM Community of Practice for the opportunity to discuss competences this week!
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