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
My last post examined Thomas Kuhn, who gave us the language of paradigm shifts, here, I’d like to look at a book by Michele Wucker* who gave us the image of the Gray Rhino: a massive, obvious threat we can see coming but still fail to confront.
Where Kuhn focused on how systems break and are replaced, Wucker draws attention to the crises we recognize but still choose to ignore.
Asset Management exists at the intersection of these two frameworks.
Asset-intensive organizations are surrounded by gray rhinos. Infrastructure gaps, aging systems, climate vulnerability, workforce attrition, regulatory pressure: these are not surprises. They are slow-moving, well-documented challenges that, if left unaddressed, will overwhelm the system we rely on.
Yet for all their visibility, these threats rarely trigger the level of change they demand. Instead, they are absorbed into routine. Budget cycles roll forward. Work orders are prioritized by urgency rather than consequence. The language of Asset Management is invoked, but its paradigm is never fully adopted. We name the problem but struggle to act on it.
Asset Management offers an approach precisely designed to engage these looming risks. It asks us to plan, to prioritize, to see beyond the emergency response. It invites organizations to realign their values, moving from reactive service delivery to deliberate, long-term stewardship.
But as Kuhn would note, this requires a change in the underlying logic, a shift in how organizations understand value, success, and time.
Until that shift happens, Asset Management remains vulnerable to reinterpretation. The system continues to operate within the old paradigm, where short-term efficiency trumps long-term value, and where the urgency of today erodes the preparation for tomorrow.
This is not a failure of awareness. It is a failure of transformation. We see the gray rhino, and we have a framework for responding to it. But our systems, both technical and cultural, are still optimized for a different reality.
So, what do we do with this tension?
We start by recognizing that paradigm shifts don’t come from force. They come from readiness.
And readiness grows in moments of discomfort, when the cracks in the current system become too wide to ignore. When organizations feel the weight of the gray rhino pressing closer, they become more open to doing things differently.
Asset Management must be positioned as more than a practice. It must become a way of seeing the world around us. Using a lens where the familiar takes on new meaning and is a guide for what to do when the warning signs are no longer abstract.
Most importantly, Asset Management needs its champions. People who can not only name the gray rhino and frame the conversation but offer a path forward that is both pragmatic and bold.
Change can be slow, but it is also inevitable. Those that prepare will be the ones best positioned when the shift finally takes hold.
The gray rhino is here. The question is whether you will continue to ignore it or finally take action to avoid being trampled.
*The Gray Rhino: How Recognize and Act on the Obvious Dangers We Ignore, Michele Wucker, 2016
This is a follow-up to Julie’s and my first post. This comes from discussions with Ruth, as we are both fans of Kuhn and approaching Asset Managment from a Systems Thinking bend.
Asset Management isn’t failing, but it is struggling. It’s struggling because it asks for something most organizations aren’t ready to give: a change in worldview.
In his seminal work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn argued that progress in science doesn’t move forward in smooth, logical steps. Instead, it lurches forward through upheaval.
An existing model, what Kuhn calls a paradigm, organizes how people understand and act in the world. When that model starts to break down under the weight of anomalies it can’t explain, a crisis forms. Eventually, a new model takes hold. Not by refining the old one, but by replacing it entirely.
Asset Management isn’t a toolkit upgrade. Asset Management is a paradigm shift.
The prevailing paradigm in many organizations see assets as cost centers. Value is measured in terms of budget variance, performance is gauged by how fast we respond to failure, and success means keeping operations running despite broken systems and shrinking resources. This is the logic of firefighting, not foresight.
Asset Management offers a radically different frame. It suggests we treat assets as value-producing systems. These decisions should be based not only on today’s conditions but on long-term impacts. That success means reducing failure, not merely reacting to it quickly. And that the ultimate responsibility of an organization is to deliver reliable, sustainable service—not just to manage budgets.
But here’s the problem, and Kuhn would recognize it: paradigms don’t go quietly. The existing mindset fights back. Asset Management is often taken in and translated through the old lens. We say we’ve adopted Asset Management, but we’re still rewarding short-term fixes. We talk about lifecycle value, but we still plan one year at a time. We build dashboards and risk models, but we still defer investment until failure forces our hand.
This is normal. According to Kuhn, when a new paradigm first appears, it doesn’t make sense within the old logic. People struggle to see its relevance. They may accept some of its tools, but not its worldview. The old questions remain, and the new answers seem off-topic.
Real change happens only when the organization starts asking new questions. Not just, “How do we save money this year?” but “What will this decision cost us over the next 30?” Not, “How fast did we respond to the outage?” but “Why did the outage happen at all?”
That’s when a shift begins.
A true Asset Management transformation doesn’t begin with data, or systems, or even leadership mandates. It begins with discomfort, when the old paradigm can no longer explain the failures piling up around us. When firefighting becomes too exhausting, too expensive, too visibly ineffective. Then, and only then, do people become open to a new way of thinking.
So, the task isn’t just to implement Asset Management. It’s to create the conditions where the old worldview can be questioned. That means:
- Telling stories that expose the cost of reactive practices
- Measuring success in ways that reward foresight
- Giving voice to people who see the long game
- Protecting Asset Management from being reinterpreted as just another compliance exercise
Paradigm shifts are hard. They are political, cultural, and emotional. But they are also the only way real progress happens. Asset Management doesn’t need to fight harder. It needs to be ready to lead when the cracks in the old system finally become too big to ignore. It needs to be there to offer a better forward.
Link to Ruth’s article: AM, Capital-ism and Shifting Paradigms | Talking Infrastructure
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
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?
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