Without a way of understanding the nature of a ‘better question’ this is mere tautology.  If we get a better answer then it must have been a better question!   However, since we will not know until after the event, this is not a useful way of determining the nature of a ‘better question’.

I asked Talking Infrastructure Vice Chair, and Technology One Super Star, Jeff Roorda, for his view.  This was his response.

1. Better questions are those that explore the future possible impacts of today’s decisions.

2. Better questions are those that recognise that the future is uncertain and do not seek to provide false comfort by claiming certainty in the assumptions we make and the outcomes we predict.

3. Better questions look at the things that could happen, and their costs and consequences, so that we can develop scenarios that act as a guide to the way we need to react as the world changes and as we get more information and more feedback.

4. Better questions recognise that we can choose the futures we want, and provide us the means to achieve them.

5. Better questions enable us to put in place a future accountability for present decisions.

These questions have 2 types of power and  here Jeff focuses on the constructive power.

If we view the universe as a place of abundance and love then these 5 questions engender hope, gratitude and joy.  These are the thoughts of creativity, invention and collaboration.     The opposites are scarcity, greed and fear and both joy/gratitude and fear/scarcity are perceptions that are real in ones mind.  They are a choice.    Leadership is a choice for creativity, invention and collaboration, therefore joy/gratitude.  Control and desire for power is the opposite and also a choice.These 5 questions shine a light of truth on perception so we can see what is in error.

If someone says “this infrastructure project will provide these benefits” then this must be tested now and in the future.    In a spirit of joy/gratitude we recognise that our understanding is imperfect so we are not afraid to admit the uncertainty of our project/solution.  We invite better ideas.  Criticism and attack have no meaning – if someone has a better idea we welcome it and test it in the same way our idea was tested.

How does this square with your idea of ‘a better question’?   We not only invite better ideas – we warmly welcome them.   Your thoughts help us to do a better job.  Please comment.

An idea worth exploring.

Two suggestions:

1. Read Tina’s article in Fast Company,   “How Reframing a Problem Unlocks Innovation,”
2. And watch for our forthcoming podcast where we will have fun – and you will too – exploring questions.

How hard can it be to make a podcast?  Surely, all you have to do is choose a theme. find someone who is willing to talk on this theme, and then ask them questions. The guest then provides the answers. Job done!  Many podcasts have used this answer providing format. 

But what if you don’t want answers? What if, instead of providing your listeners with opinions or ready made solutions to a given inquiry, you would really like to support their ability to generate inquiry itself?  

Asking better questions is a skill we all need to develop for all areas of our life, and for long-living infrastructure decisions in a rapidly changing world it is critical.  These decisions impact the lives of many thousands, if not millions, of people and for many decades to come. Once built, they often cannot be un-built except at incredible cost, damage to the environment, and waste of resources. Moreover the ongoing costs of such structures are, as we know, determined by actions taken at the very earliest stages of decision making, when knowledge is lowest!

Some existing solutions will continue to be relevant as the world changes and others will not but how can we tell which is which?  Only by asking questions.  New questions.   Different questions.   Lots of questions!

If we ask the same questions we have asked before, we will get the same answers. And if we ask the same questions – blindly – simply because we have always asked them, we will not even be aware of the mistakes we may be making.

But question asking is hard.   

Surely not!  Any parent knows that young children ask questions naturally – and inexhaustibly!  However,  at some stage, parents get worn out with continual questions, many of which they do not find themselves capable of answering –  ‘why is the sky blue?’ ‘why do people die?’ etc.     So mothers start to say ‘Ask your father!’  and fathers say ‘Ask your mother!’  and both say ‘Not now, I’m busy’.  In other words we actively discourage question asking at home.  

This is compounded at school, where ‘teaching to the test’ has taken hold and teachers know that they have to instill a certain number of facts in their pupil’s heads lest they, themselves, receive a failing grade! In this grading environment, even well intentioned teachers may feel that time out for answering pupil’s questions let alone encouraging more questions, is time that they just cannot afford.

By the time students reach secondary school, they have learnt two things about questions – one, that it is not their job to ask them, and two, that they are to be feared!  Studies have shown that in a typical class teachers ask about 90 questions to one or two by students. And the teacher’s questions are designed to test whether what they have taught has been absorbed.  Such questions do not lend themselves to the fun of exploration, only the embarrassment and humiliation of wrong answers.

Now the students get a job and it is not long before they come to recognise that asking questions in this environment brings even more problems – asking a question may reveal how much you do not know, or asking a question, particularly of a senior, may seem as a challenge to ‘the way things are done around here’.  Better to keep quiet. By this time we have learnt how not to ask questions.

So if ‘not to ask questions’ is a learnt skill, how do we unlearn?

Those of you who are parents might like the story of Isidor Rabi who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1944 for his discovery of nuclear magnetic resonance.  He credits his success to his mother who, whenever he returned home from school, would ask ‘Did you ask a good question today?  (from Hal Gregerson ‘Questions are the Answer’)

And we can do the same. 

We can ask ourselves – did I ask a good question today?

This is what our forthcoming podcast is designed to encourage.  Infrastructure decision making urgently needs good questions

– but so do we all!

[et_pb_section bb_built=”1″][et_pb_row][et_pb_column type=”4_4″][et_pb_text]

Last week I suggested why asset management – at its early and basic level – is unstable. Getting your data reliable and customised so that you get credibility with your community is time consuming.  But it pays!  It not only protect your assets – it  also protects your staff!

Let me tell you a story

This is a true story about a certain council in New South Wales. In June 2007, during a wild storm, a section of the road collapsed causing a vehicle with 5 people to plunge into the flooded creek below.  A mother, a father, their two children and another woman, a family friend all died.

The cause turned out to be an unlined culvert that had given way. In the subsequent coroner’s investigation it was revealed that:

• The council had been aware of the problem with the road as early as 2002 and had prepared an estimate to reconstruct the entire culvert but that details were never entered into the record management system.

• In 2004, pavement repairs triggered a request by the council’s asset manager to ask for quotes for concrete lining of the culvert with tenders called. But again, the information was not entered into the record system and no follow-up action was taken.

• Emails with quotes for roadwork that may have averted the collapse were not considered official records and were not recorded.

• A key finding of the review was ‘that at the time of the road collapse council’s inadequate reporting practices led to a failure to identify the critical need to upgrade some of its key road infrastructure’

Internet comment on the report of the accident was savage

“Too little too late. Good to see our rate money going towards incompetent council workers who hide behind their computers pretending to be busy. And when the accident did happen they actually had the nerve to try to pass the blame to the state /federal government. This accident should not have happened. For the lazy workers who didn’t do their job properly, how do you sleep at night?”

Is it a case of ‘lazy workers’ or did the system fail them? Unless your system is sound,how would you know? More especially how can they demonstrate their diligence to the outside world?

A poor asset management system puts your staff at risk!

The Central Coast’s ‘Express Advocate’ reported the mother of the young woman whose family perished as saying that she hoped the people who made the human error think about it every night. ‘We certainly do. They have destroyed our family’.

No member of your staff should have to live with this responsibility!

And, although reported as ‘human error’, if you look at the numbers of different people involved in this story, you have to ask yourself whether it is really ‘human error’ or actually ‘system error’.

Now the Coroner’s report was covered in both of the local papers. The reporting was noteworthy for two reasons: One: because both journalists actually used the term ‘asset management’ in their reports, and Two: because both reported that whilst asset was not good at the time of the accident, it was now ‘best practice’.

I was curious.  

What had happened to improve asset management so much between the accident in June 2007 and the Coroners Report in March 2009? (less than 2 years) And what was it that impressed the journalists so much that they both reported that the council was now ‘best practice’ in asset management.

I decided to visit the council and find out. When I walked into the foyer, on the wall facing the entrance was their ‘mission statement’. It said simply “We aim to be a council that the community is proud of” and underneath it said “We are not there yet!”

That told me a lot about the current attitude of that council and their determination to get better.

Then I met with the Asset Manager and his Director of Information Services. Both were extremely open, articulate, knowledgeable – and very enthusiastic about asset management. They knew they had to improve their asset information and had taken serious steps in this direction.

But they also knew that improving asset information alone is not enough. They knew  they also had to understand and improve their processes. And this is where they really shone. They analysed and streamlined each of their processes. There were dozens of these processes, each reproduced in large A3 size – and laminated, indicating that these were for constant use. They were bound in sections relating to different functions.

Mapping is a great way to understand your processes – and a great way to show others  that you understand them! My guess is that it was these graphics that so impressed the  journalists!

Taken together, 

1. greatly improved information +
2. A positive, action-oriented, attitude – as expressed by the foyer plague and the confidence and knowledge of the Asset Manager and his Director of Information Services +
3. Understanding of Asset Management Processes – as illustrated by the process maps,…

all added up to a situation where two different journalists from separate papers, in reporting the story of council failure, would both modify their criticism by making it clear to their readers that the council’s asset management was now ‘best practice’.

But there was an even better result.

After the coroner’s findings had been handed down with all the attendant publicity, the Sydney Morning Herald reported on yet another culvert in poor condition in the council area. In ordinary circumstances you would have expected the press to have a field day with this.  But it didn’t happen.

Despite the obvious cracks and poor condition of the culvert, the Sydney Morning Herald’s journalist provided very balanced and moderate coverage. He quoted the consulting engineer’s findings, made some criticisms of the council but then tempered the report with the recognition that the cost to repair the problem was high relative to the annual budget; actually quoted figures, and comment by other councils about this problem and recognised that a large part of the problem was that the roads were handed over to councils by the State Government, who had previously had responsibility for them, with insufficient maintenance funds attached.

What price would you pay for fair media coverage?

Next week I look at why even good asset management is not enough.  Why we have to ‘go beyond’.

[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][/et_pb_section]

Data, Facts and Evidence

What makes a ‘fact’ a fact?  What makes evidence, evidence?

The fictional detective Joe Friday is famous for something that he actually did not say – “Just the facts, Ma’am”.  Many a CEO used to request the same.  But is it possible to lift ‘facts’ out of context and for them still to be meaningful?  Take Julius Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon in 49 BC.  Many others crossed the Rubicon both before and after but their crossings are not recorded as ‘facts’. So why Caesar?  Caesar’s crossing with his army became a historical ‘fact’  worthy of remembering only because it is considered to have led to the Roman Civil War, which ultimately resulted in Caesar becoming dictator for life and the rise of the imperial era of Rome. In other words, it is the ‘context’ that makes this particular crossing of the Rubicon a ‘fact’.  

Data is meaningless, until…

Data, by itself, is without meaning.  It is mere blibs – on paper or on screen. It only yields meaning when interrogated.   Ask the wrong questions and we get wrong answers. In his presentation to the IPWEA  Congress in July, Jeff Roorda observed that when Copernicus proposed that the earth moved around the sun, the data that had been collected about the movement of the stars and the sun did not change.  It was just that it was interrogated through a different question.   

Not all data is created equal

While natural data may remain constant (although perhaps not well understood), the same is not true of data that we use today in our management systems. That data has been selected, chosen and shaped by the questions that we have asked of it in the past.  For example, if the focus of our questions has been on the current value of our asset portfolios, we may have calculated, and recorded as data, the depreciated value but have failed to record the age distribution without which we have no way of knowing what that value means in terms of renewal timing.  If we recorded our assets in historical cost terms, we may be able to account for their accuracy by referral to the invoices of the time, but it yields no management information.  If we recorded our maintenance expenditures by site but not by what was done on that site, we may know where it has gone, but we won’t know what was done and so what we may have to do later.  

Today, our ability to access and analyse data enables us to answer old questions with more precision.  This is exciting.  The easy thing to do is to collect more of what we have collected in the past and to address the same questions.   In other words we can use new data to answer our old questions, questions that were themselves shaped by the data limitations at the time.

So, an even more important question might be – are we prepared to ask new questions that cannot be answered simply by inserting more data in our current current data frameworks?

Are we prepared to rethink our data frameworks? Our thinking models? 

With new technology we can now create an abundance of data very cheaply, not only historical but real time data.  In fact, we may well argue that anything we can think of we can now collect data on.  To take advantage of this, we cannot let ourselves be hamstrung by the assumptions that have ruled in the past and the questions that these assumptions have generated.  But having – at great expense – assembled the data we now possess – how do we ask questions that move beyond the models we have already developed?

This is one of the areas that we will be examining in our future podcast – “Talking Infrastructure: creating better questions”