Talking Infrastructure was created in 2016 by Dr Penny Burns and colleagues Jeff Roorda, David Hope, Gregory Punshon and Ruth Wallsgrove to address a problem that Penny and Jeff had identified a few years earlier — the need to move beyond the management of current portfolios so that decisions made today for new infrastructure will be ‘fit for the future’. (Lou Cripps and Todd Shepherd have since joined as board directors.)
In 2018, Penny and Jeff described the ‘waves’ of Asset Management: an evolutionary model based on their experiences since Penny created Asset Management in 1984.
Everybody seems to go through a data-intensive phase, that Penny and Jeff labelled Wave 1, Asset Inventory. Not everybody necessarily gets beyond this.
Penny was always more interested in Wave 2, which she called Strategic Asset Management in the late 1990s to distinguish it from either asset data collection or maintenance. SAM is about higher-level asset decision making – Asset Management as opposed to managing assets, as David McKeown and others have stressed since. The quintessential Wave 2 activity is lifecycle-based planning, the longer term Asset Management Plan (AMP) and its associated concepts of whole life costs and cost-risk optimisation.
Understanding what it will cost to sustain levels of service beyond 5 years is the foundation of asset strategizing within an organisation – but it is also vital for better infrastructure decisions by our communities.
From the 2000s Penny became increasingly interested in what she and Jeff called Wave 3, the challenge of decisions about what infrastructure is actually required.
Described by Lou Cripps as looking up and out – at the big decisions that go beyond our own organisations – this also took us to the question of sustainable assets in the larger context of climate change, biodiversity and non-renewable resources.
This Wave 4 we have provisionally labelled Planetary Health and Social Well-Being, or Ecosystem Stewardship. As stewards of infrastructure, we have a vital role to lead on how infrastructure works within the whole physical and social environment.
Our mission at Talking Infrastructure is to promote the good practices of Wave 2 and develop thinking on Waves 3 and 4.
It’s still very much an evolutionary model: you need the solid processes of whole life costing, sophisticated risk thinking, and longer term asset planning both for the sake of your own organisation’s ability to deliver and to underpin (to ground) decisions on new infrastructure and new types of assets.
We need to understand the physical and economic realities of assets and asset networks at the same time as discussing radical new technological and social approaches to infrastructure, or the latter can’t work.
WHAT WE ARE AIMING TO DO
The Talking Infrastructure board has unrivalled experience of strategic asset management from the very beginning to use as a resource base, including two decades of Penny’s Strategic Asset Management newsletter and, now, several books (see Resources). How we can exploit this for better infrastructure decision-making?
We want to continue to promote better strategic Asset Management, Wave 2, through things like re-emphasising the core AM tool of longer term asset planning (and implementing it in practice where we can) as well as Todd’s development of more sophisticated asset risk and decision-making concepts, and promoting it through the webinars and workshops we’ve run for other organisations such as CEATI and the Institute of Asset Management.
TI is considering developing a guidebook to the AMP, to restate and update Penny’s original vision for the changing contexts of the 2020s.
We would also like to see campaigning for infrastructure regulators to have more teeth through AMP requirements and audits to encourage agencies to plan ahead.
Work to date on Wave 3 includes Ruth’s work on the UK Projects and Infrastructure Project Routemap module on Asset Management, https://projectdelivery.gov.uk/library-product/project-routemap-asset-management-module/ and Lou and Ruth’s latest book Legacy: A Decision-Maker’s Guide to Infrastructure, here. There is a still a long way to go to shift from a construction delivery and short-term profit focus to planning the right assets and asset strategies in the first place. Nobody will argue against understanding the true costs, risks and benefits – but almost nobody really tries to work them out, either.
Wave 3 has to get government engagement – after all, it is mainly governments that invest in major new infrastructure. We’d like to work in conjunction with others such as Louise Hart working on how to succeed at infrastructure megaprojects (linkedin.com/in/louisehart750), and Johannes Paradza of Infrastructure Asset Management South Africa on how asset managers help meet the challenge of Cape Town’s infrastructure.
On Wave 4, our poster child is Jeff’s work as Director of Infrastructure and Biodiversity at the Blue Mountains City Council, inspired by the work of Kate Raworth on Doughnut Economics and others on physical and social sustainability. Shout out too to Ashley Barratt and Joe Inniss and their https://www.centreforassetstudies.co.uk, and their latest project on rethinking infrastructure and coastlines.
For Wave 4, we feel it’s important to showcase inspiring examples. It’s a huge area: what are the best examples you know for Asset Management involvement in radical new thinking on assets?
January 2026.
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