In safety-critical industries such as the airlines, trucking, mining, and the hydrocarbon/petrochemical industry, significant resources are expended to deliver safely. And as long as those products and services continue to be in high demand, the people in those industries will continue to deliver them safely.

Workers’ safety is, of course, extremely important. Just as important is the protection of the ‘innocent bystander’: that person who doesn’t work for the company or the industry, but who is affected should something go wrong with the plane, the truck, or the pipeline.

Kudos to those whose daily efforts keep the innocent bystanders safe.

There appears to be two competing afflictions in the workforce affecting our ability to be productive: either we’re disconnected and disengaged with our work (i.e. presenteeism), or, we’re working so furiously without stopping that we are completely stressed and forgetting to look after ourselves.

The juxtaposition of those two afflictions is puzzling, especially if it purports to apply to the same person or work team. I don’t think it can. Either you’re disengaged and uninterested and it doesn’t matter, or, you’re completely stressed by the pressure of performance because it does.

It’s probably better to be somewhere in the middle.

When you go to work, how about you do.

Today I watched as the brick house next door was demolished to make way for a new modern house. This is progress, and as has been said before, “You can’t stop progress”.

I enjoyed watching the brute force of the hydraulic-powered claw as it ripped down walls and roof, whereas of course, I couldn’t have pushed it down if I tried.

These jobs are tangible, obvious, and honest. There is clear evidence when progress is made - and when it is not. When construction workers go to work, they really do.

“Many kids today will live to see the year 2100”.

This is a comment from Tim Urban’s website “Wait but Why”, which, by the way, is a site infested by many rabbit holes to get lost in.

It is daunting to think that 2100 is only a lifetime away.

The other striking observation I heard recently was this: compare being a teenager for the moon landing (now a baby-boomer), where it seems there was hope and striving and working together for a goal, versus being a teenager for 9/11/01, which brought fear, distrust and malaise about a lot of things.

Recently here on LinkedIn, there was a question posed about what a leader/manager should provide so a person comes to work ready to contribute. One of the answers was “trust’, and this was supported by others. Fair enough.

Trust and risk are on opposite sides of the same coin. If you are asking someone to trust you, then there is risk involved. Recognise that expecting to be trusted means they have accepted a risk.

Similarly, if you are managing risk – for example, you are responsible for key infrastructure – then always remember that others are trusting you to keep them safe.

In the struggle measure competence, I have been wondering about the engineering degree itself.

I’m trying to work out if maybe there is a difference between having an engineering degree (a hard-won degree to be sure), and being an engineer.

“I’m an engineer” is an awkward statement for those who spend our days going to meetings, replying to emails, and administrating project or contractual documents. Certainly I have spent most of my career in Outlook, Excel and Word, rather than MathCAD or HYSYS.

With everything being disrupted as it is, perhaps it’s time to refresh the perception of ‘an engineer’.

The problem with writing it down is that it takes so much effort. But yet, deep down, we know the importance of recording stuff for future use.

The purpose of records are obvious: communicate information, justification for decisions made, track performance and trends, enable verification of the assessment, provide an audit trail.

But we know all that; yet we generally don’t like paperwork or checklists or documentation (ok, well, I do, but that’s beside the point).

It’s so important to review procedures and processes for efficiency, usefulness, and relevance. If a document or procedure isn’t being used, figure out why.

In the risk world, “consequences x likelihood” is a familiar equation. But perhaps this isn’t a useful measure. Consequences aren’t predictable. Also, consequences can be cumulative: if the concern is power outage, the length of that outage is a factor to be considered.

Likelihood has the same problem: if something hasn’t happened, its likelihood is unpredictable.

Complicating the risk equation is the complexity of it and the language around risk. Risk, in many ways, has become overintellectualized.

For example, “not enough staff” is not a risk, but could rather be a certainty.

Some “risks” are just circumstances to be managed.

It’s impossible to exist in Australia at the moment and not have our minds turned to the awful fires. Brisbane, where I am, is basically unaffected, but we’re unable to avoid the news, and hearts are breaking.

In other thoughts, I recently heard the title 1989 Billy Joel song. It is a list of all the crazy newsworthy stuff from before then, that the Billy Joel aged people (ok Boomer?) observed happened before their time. The song tries to promise a better future. “We didn’t light it, but we tried to fight it”.

Humans tend to strive to be better.

#100wordsaday is back for 2020. Like in 2019, these will be posted daily (except Saturdays), and will be 100 words exactly.

Last year, I made a conscious decision to never use the words “I think”. I was also careful to not ask questions, and avoided rhetorical questions especially. In 2020, I might loosen my grip on “I think”, allowing a bit more leeway to be opinionated here. Though, really, there still might not be much “I think”; I’m generally more interested in what (I think) I know.

I’ll still avoid rhetorical questions, because really, what’s the point of them anyway?

By LinkedIn’s count, this is article number 100. A good time to pause the effort, and take a break, at 100 posts of 100 words. It’s been a worthwhile and enjoyable challenge. Of course, it just means that writing precisely 100 words has become a skill – and it’s not quite clear to me if that’s a good skill to have. Sometimes writing 100 words daily has been a chore, and sometimes I’ve had to cut out some excellent prose, to meet the 100-word barrier. I’ll (probably) be back again in the future with some other writing gimmick like this one.

Competence. Credibility. Frameworks. Thinking. Skills. Known for. Known self. Character. Personality. Assumed abilities. Project start up. Black boxes no more. Too many. An experience. Experienced. Thoughts. Behaviour. Risk. Trust. Habits. Workflows. Show your work. Decisions. Inductions. Consequences. Principles. Incompetence. Exploring experience. Do the work. Better off. Please review and comment. Let’s go see. Topics. Approved. Context. Expectations. Task. Thought. Purpose. Respect. Check. The other leader. Behavioural. Changes. Switch. User. Invisible. Likeable. Productivity. Budget. Scope. Schedule. Other people’s writing. Knowledge transfer. Technical. Performance. Prescriptive. Productive managers. Human Factors. Antidote to uncertainty. Minimal effective documents. Document control. Deliverables. Training. Education. Word salad.

A 3x3 credibility matrix can provide a pathway from credentials to credibility.

There is more to competence than just having a credential.

The horizontal axis recognises the path of ability, from the categories of ‘develop’, ‘demonstrate’, and ‘be’. The vertical axis recognises the aspects of competency: knowledge, skills, and experience.

This 3x3 matrix results in nine intersections, starting in the bottom left and going vertically: credentials or potential; practise; exposure. The last column is what we are “being” – student, proficient, and finally achieving wisdom or expert. The middle column is where the action is at: documents and outputs; interactions; stories.

Industry conferences are a well-known way to interact with colleagues, make new connections, and get known. Sometimes they can be hard work, and sometimes they can be mostly fun. Networking is a skill, which some find easy, and some find exhausting. Regardless of your view on networking, it is a key part of any business.

Networking is not about showing off or doing all the talking. Share stories, but listen, too. Listen to what is going on in other people’s lives, so that you can understand them better.

Use the opportunity to meet new people and find out about them.

The role of a leader is to lead others, motivate others, and inspire others.

A key part of a business (in a capitalist environment, anyway) is to make a profit. The profit comes from money exchanging hands. Money exchanges hands because something with value has been produced.

When leading, a leader isn’t producing, they are motivating others, to produce that thing of value. 

Motivating, leading, and inspiring others is important, as long as those others are producing something of value, something someone else wants.

The world needs all types, and so does a business. 

Businesses need leaders, but they need doers, too.

It’s a hard truth in business, but likeable people go further than unlikeable ones do. It doesn’t feel right to promote or reward someone who is unlikeable.

And being ‘likeable’ is subjective too. If the right person likes you, then you are in a far better place than if the right person doesn’t like you.

On a technical competency assessment, there’s no line item for being likeable. Someone who is technically excellent may very well be not very likeable. And asking them to become more likeable is like asking the CEO to design the interconnect piping for a new tie-in.

Good work is often invisible.

And this is especially true in the infrastructure space: if nothing goes wrong, we’ve done it right. It’s a case of ‘no news is good news’. But if no one is talking about the good work being done, it’s easy to forget that it is going on.

In 2015, John Oliver did an entertaining piece called “Infrastructure” – including a fake movie trailer* that highlights how boring yet essential infrastructure maintenance is. It’s a cost on the balance sheet that is easy to cut out. There is, apparently, a fine line between appropriate maintenance, and gold-plating.

*The image is from the John Oliver item… it’s on YouTube. The movie trailer is at about the 17minute mark of the 21-minute spot.

There is an enormous amount of good work in documentation, websites, wikis, ‘bodies of knowledge’ and other attempts to get knowledge out there.

Always consider the user. Understand what would cause a user to visit your site or read your book or document. They probably have a specific question in mind that they are trying to answer.

Similarly, for documents, quality management, risk or competency, or anything that might need a framework developed, remember that the typical frameworks seem to be developed for the managers or contributors, not the users.

Keep the user in mind, when putting information out there.

Multi-tasking is not as effective as we might think. Cognitive load is impaired by the effort needed to concentrate on one thing, let alone concentrating on more than one thing. We now know that both things suffer.

The other hidden cost is the time needed to switch between tasks. It is underestimated in time management and productivity hacks. There is little recognition of switching time.

The effort to switch banks, or to switch health insurance funds, perhaps doesn’t directly compare to switching between responding to emails, to knuckling down and writing a technical report. Not really, but maybe almost.

Project delivery has changed. It used to be that projects were completed by large in-house teams who had been with the company or government entity for many years. Junior members in this team environment had consistent and informed expertise above them to learn from and progress with.

Organisational changes have resulted in outsourcing, reduced middle management, just-in-time hiring, shrinking training budgets, and little scope for on-the-job training of new and not-so-new personnel.

Outsourcing and privatisation (shareholder focus) have demolished this critical aspect of infrastructure development and management: consistent and repetitive exposure to someone more experienced, which naturally leads to learning.