Expectations
A hundred years ago, a neighborhood’s expectations of safe infrastructure was less than it is now. By that I mean, there was an understanding that things around us back then might not be entirely safe.
Some may say we were less fragile back then, because when disasters occurred, they were resolved, cleaned up, and everyone got back to business. At least that’s how it seems it was. With humanity’s desire to strive for better, we started to look back and assess what happened, and put things into place so that ‘this will never happen again’ and ‘no one else’s family should have to go through what I’ve gone through’. So expectations of safety and ‘being looked after by others’ has grown, and it is natural to look for blame in others, when something goes wrong.
In amongst this shift, is the shift away from ‘at the coalface’, for those responsible for those assets. Those responsible are remote from the asset, and are most likely managing them from a computer screen. This is very different than during the time when those responsible sat at the site and could see the asset, hear the creaks and groans, and were integrated with the physical, tangible location.
Those days aren’t coming back, so there’s no need to lament it any further, or try to postulate how to recover that knowledge. It’s time to look ahead and change our expectations as managers of these high stakes assets. Remember its people just like you and me who are responsible for these assets, and charged with making decisions on how best to keep them operational.
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No money is made being safe. High stakes decisions that help keep assets operational simply cost the company more. It is a rare maintenance process that doesn’t cost money (or time or resources). It is an ongoing effort to prevent an unknown and probably non-existent future costs.
We are burning out our executives and young managers with such high expectations on the high stakes responsibilities given to them, given also that no money will be made and these are just a cost center, not a profit center.
We need to be completely aware of the realities of the costs of safety, which we as a society have brought on ourselves, in the interest of keeping others safe so that they don’t have to be concerned about keeping safe for themselves.
These costs for safety do not look good on a balance sheet. As far as I know, there is no palatable way to quantify costs to prevent an unknown possible future cost. Sure, cost-benefit-analysis (CBA) is a useful tool, but quantifying the benefit is fully dependent on so many assumptions and estimates.
However, the high stakes consequences are worth it.
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It will help to shift the thinking to controls (systems), records (data), and judgement. Underpinning that, which is most important, is trust, and how any situation with risk will inevitably be met with trust. In some ways, the opposite of risk is trust. You can’t have risk without trust.
There are plenty of theoretical, mathematical, and esoteric approaches to risk already available. Many of them are sensible and useful. Many others require so much speculation and estimation so as to make them less that useful, but yet still they force the persons involved to think deeply, or maybe differently, about how the asset behaves or responds (or not) to a threat or hazard.
Systemizing the methodology of managing risk has helped, but has not solved the basic issue: society’s expectations are only getting more lofty.
