© Airam Dato-On – Viewing Vermeer’s Milkmaid
A great book on the importance of maintenance is titled The Innovation Delusion. Asset managers know only too well the ‘dynamic tension’ between building shiny new and keeping our existing systems going.
But a recent book – Peak Human, by Johan Norberg – bangs the drum for innovation in an interesting way. Given one proviso – that we fully acknowledge the horror of human slavery in the past – he suggests we know a golden age when we see one.
“A period with a large number of innovations that revolutionize many fields… in a short period of time.”
Its characteristics, he suggests, are creativity, science, technical achievements, economic growth, better average standard of living. As opposed to stagnation in thought, lack of optimism, lack of tolerance.
The book is a great romp through the usual suspects – Athens, Roman Empire, Renaissance Italy – along with the less familiar, at least to me: Abbasid Caliphate, Song China. The golden age Dutch Republic of trade, non-conformity, great painters, the middle class. The ‘Anglosphere’ from the Industrial Revolution onwards.
Times of curiosity – and a lack of crippling fear of others?
Innovation can’t just mean what the tech-bros say. Revolutionary innovations include doing without kings. With human, women’s and animal rights, and caring for the environment. I am very, very glad we finally understood about germs – and the importance of basic sanitation for everyone.
If innovation Is coming up with better ways of doing things, I am all for it.
But it can’t just be about technology.
- Can we embody a spirit of learning and sharing which isn’t predatory capitalism, instead includes caring for others and sustaining the assets we depend on?
- For feeling in our bones that sustaining is a triumph as much as inventing?
*Happy birthday to my niece Natalie, named in remembrance of the storming of the Bastille this day in 1789
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The Institute of Asset Management (IAM) Global Conference June 2026 refreshed me.
It wasn’t just the small but growing community of asset managers who want to discuss (and do) Wave 3 and Wave 4. The conference theme was ‘Connected World – Shaping Our Future’, and several speakers addressed future friendly-infrastructure. Shout out to Miriam MacLennan and Will Adeney for their presentation on regenerative AM, going beyond doing no harm.
It was also refreshingly sophisticated. Not just consultants talking about their projects, unless those projects were instituting Asset Management from scratch at one of the giant airports to be (Jeddah in Saudi Arabia) or managing the M25, nickname The Road to Hell.
Several speakers talked about AI realism – what can it and what can’t it usefully do for AM – and the limits of standards. We cannot afford to be naïve.
There was more discussion off-line about organisations going backwards. One cause is complacency, believing everyone now understands and can do AM, so there’s no need for an AM team. (Let the poachers control themselves?*) On a bad day, I am not sure this is a question of recovery to good Asset Management, so much as proof that some organisations never really understood it in the first place.
There is still work to be done on Wave 2.
But watch out for more on networking around Wave 4!
*From a phrase coined by Jim Kennedy at NSW RailCorp long ago
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…
At least the pet duck enjoyed it
When we moved into our house, we first realised the problem when the mortgage company said we needed flood insurance, and discovered that would cost ten times the normal building and contents policy.
Until a smarter insurance company here sold us a cheaper policy based on postcode (in other words, by group of two or three houses), not Environment Agency flood areas: they spotted a market opportunity for a more precise risk assessment. Smug us!
Until six years later, and the house actually did flood.
And four years on, in late 2024, the water came to our front door twice, and overtopped the sand bags the second time.
And the risk of flooding in England is predicted to increase five-fold in the next decades under current projections for global warming.
However, Newport Pagnell is not Miami.
To be clear, our flooding is due to rain, and living next to where two rivers meet. Unfortunate timing of river surges – or someone getting the timing off on floodgates. We are nowhere near the sea and don’t get hurricanes, and so far the extent of our flooding is a few inches of water at the front of the house.
A few houses flooding a bit: you start thinking about resale values, and whether getting wet every year or so will do the brick walls and wood floorboards any good.
In South Florida, they face losing whole towns to the sea and the swamps. Many people live only a few feet above current sea levels, and the infrastructure is similarly low and at risk. They have to worry about overwhelmed sewerage systems and nuclear power plants.
Florida has such a tax-averse politics that it will come down to money for school education versus money for flood action soon for some towns. They continue to build right up to the sea and in areas only just above sea level, even as they watch the hurricanes track towards them. And of course the ruling Republicans also mostly deny climate change.
It would seem a perfect storm of human inability to face the facts.
But it is striking just how much of an issue it is for infrastructure. And that involves use of tax dollars, national insurance schemes, building codes, politics and Politics: so much more than simply technical questions.
Do we speak the right language/s to manage this?
Among my personal highs and lows of 2024, the standout experience was going to Japan.
I am sorry to say I have never encountered a Japanese Asset Manager, but thanks to GFMAM I got to hear a rep from the Japanese maintenance societies at the IAM UK conference in London last month.
Despite what we hear about its economy, the country is still doing very well on total maintenance and quality in manufacturing. Some days it seems every other car on our roads is a Toyota.
And my overriding sense of Japan? That along with the incredible food and gardens and manufacturing, it’s simply the most sensible society I have ever seen.
Starting with the toilets at Tokyo airport when we arrived.
I have long suspected the most important thing about Asset Management is that it is sensible. Don’t spend where you don’t need to, but do what you must to sustain what we need to thrive. Don’t preach growth for its own sake, and be wary of ‘innovation’ (think of ‘the Maintainers’ and their 2020 book The Innovation Delusion*). What does the evidence tell us? What risks are we really running with our assets? Cut through the lobbying and classical economics – and make sensible decisions.
Sensible is not necessarily glamorous; AM is not glamorous. It doesn’t pander to fantasies, of engineering or entrepreneurs.
As several Western countries seem to lose the plot, even caught up in what can only be described as fascist dreams, it was wonderful to experience somewhere that has a much stronger sense of its limits. A lot of people in a limited space, and some of that physical space quite dodgy: how can we organise food, rub along with millions of strangers without pulling guns on each other, love nature (trees!), create beautiful things? Value education, and don’t take our gods too seriously.
Take what we need, and reject what we don’t.
Yes, I am hopelessly romantic about Japan, ever since my father worked there when I was a child. But I didn’t expect to come away with sensible.
PS not sure I will ever be happy with cold toilet seats again.
* The Innovation Delusion: How Our Obsession with the New Has Disrupted the Work That Matters Most
Note: Japan, like many countries including the UK, USA, China and France, not to mention Germany and Russia, has some dismal history. Unlike some of those countries, it appears to be able to learn from its past, but this is not to excuse its treatment of Korea and China and prisoners of war in the past.
My team makes use of premortem thinking: as part of planning action, immediate or long term, consider how it might go wrong. We think ourselves into the future looking back at a project (or a meeting). Humans are surprisingly good at this time-travelling.
For me, this is part of a principle Asset Managers should embrace: the principle of reversibility. It’s not just about understanding the consequences of our decisions, but also about planning for the ability to undo or reverse their effects if needed. Sure, you can’t un-ring a bell, but we can find ways to get as close as possible to the pre-action state and minimize the impact if we think about it right from the start.
Do our plans have exit strategies or an undo button? None that I have seen, why not?
This is especially crucial in infrastructure projects, where large investments and long lifespans magnify the potential impacts. How would they be delivered differently if that was required? Would that requirement cause us to better maintain the infrastructure we currently have? I think so.
Let’s face the hard questions: Can we put rare earth metals back in the ground? Can we undo the energy consumed in building something new?
By embracing the principle in Asset Management and infrastructure decision-making, we can strive for resilient and adaptive systems that serve the present while safeguarding the future of generations to come. We navigate challenges with eyes wide open.
We ask tough questions, anticipate consequences, and face the answers with truth – and then we create our plans and strategies.
If you are planning to attend our Sydney celebration, please RSVP to: amis40@talkinginfrastructure.com so we can keep an eye on numbers – limited to the first 60! Event is free, includes food and discussion with Penny Burns and Jeff Roorda and a whole heap of old friends and colleagues.
Full update of the 40th year celebration events shortly!
Join us at the Harbour View Hotel in the Rocks and help celebrate with finger food and drinks – plus Penny and Jeff on what we have learnt from the last 40 years to help us meet the challenges of the next 40.
Many thanks to Richard Edwards, Lynn Furniss and Matt Miles of AMCL
Penny Burns and Talking Infrastructure will be on the move in April to celebrate 40 years of Asset Management, and look forward to the next 40.
Adelaide April 15 & 16, Penny and Ruth will be celebrating at AM Peak.
Brisbane events April 17-19
Sydney April 24, venue TBC: Asset Valuation in a time of Climate Crisis. Including Jeff Roorda on how Blue Mountains City Council is taking a radically new approach, as well as Penny on how we must rethink our AMP modelling.
Melbourne April 30, IPWC. Penny speaking on the opening morning of IPWEA conference
Wellington May 4-6, events to be announced
Let us know if you are interested in meeting up in any of these cities.
See you in April! #AMis40
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I love a friendly alien. Some of us – possibly the less military minded – have long preferred stories of good contact experiences, from ET and Close Encounters of the Third Kind to Arrivals. Indeed, the grandmammy of them all, The Day the Earth Stood Still, which is about the shortcomings of militarism.
There’s a new generation of sci-fi with what can only be described as positively cuddly species from other planets. The close encounter in A Half-Built Garden, by Ruthanna Emrys, echoes The Day the Earth Stood Still in that the aliens have come to save humanity from itself. But the ‘dandelion networks’ are already saving the planet through direct democracy based around watersheds, to them the natural way to organise.
And it could not be more cuddly: the first human to meet the aliens is woken by water pollution alarms in the Chesapeake in the middle of the night, and hurries out to check what is happening taking her baby with her. Turns out the aliens don’t trust anyone who would not bring their babies to a key negotiation.
The principle the dandelion networks use in decision-making about infrastructure and other technology is: will what we are building be at least as benign as a cherry tree? With evident, multiple benefits and few costs, and a net positive impact on the environment?*
If not, don’t build it.
Is there anything we are building today that would pass the cherry tree challenge?
*Ruthanna borrowed the metaphor from Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things by William McDonagh and Michael Braungart, 2009.
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