Asking questions and being curious should be part of any problem solving. Here are five essential questions to ask often, especially when faced with difficult problems.

1. “Wait, what?” Approach problems with inquiry over advocacy.

2. “I wonder if…?” or “I wonder why…?” Always stay curious and avoid getting stuck.

3. “Couldn’t we at least…?” This approach might help to get past disagreement to consensus.

4. “What truly matters?” – gets to the heart of your conviction.

5. “How can I help?” – enough said.

These are from a 2016 Harvard graduation speech by Dean James Ryan; source link in the comments.

“Those who can’t do, teach”. We know this is a little generalised, and not entirely true.

Anyway, there’s another view on it too: “those who excel at it, can’t teach it”. There are examples of this: Einstein was apparently a poor teacher, and one of ice hockey’s greatest players, Wayne Gretzky, was not a very good coach.

The exertion of learning was different for those who it comes easy to, or if they learned it a long time ago. Also, teachers need to communicate material with the student in mind, not with the goal of showing how much they know.

Risk registers are a common method of recording and tracking risk items for safety-critical assets.

They are a valid strategy for a ‘business as usual’ view of “we’ve recognised this risk” and “we’re doing this to control it”.

But when they get long and cumbersome, they aren’t that useful for prioritisation of tasks.

It’s valid to use it as a tracking tool to show what’s been recognised and what’s being done about it. But using solely the risk register for prioritisation and deciding where to allocate resources, usually doesn’t take into account the difficult judgement around the effectiveness of controls.

Australian Standards (the ones I’m familiar with anyway) provide a requirements-based framework to keep products, assets and services safe, consistent and reliable.

Australian Standards are written to meet Standards Australia’s protocols and procedures. One benefit of the coordinated Standards Australia approach is the consistency of the outcome.

Working with Australian Standards does often raise questions about how to apply them, especially those that are performance based.

Performance-based standards tell you what needs to be done (requirements), and not how to achieve it.

This approach allows innovation and efficiencies to develop, rather than dictating and restricting how requirements can be met.

There are many times that a product, project, contract or children’s toy is limited by its declared exclusions (batteries not included).

Exclusions are declared to identify what is not included, in case a buyer, manager, lawyer or parent misinterprets and thought that really important, make-or-break, linch-pin part might have been included.

In knowledge work, being clear about what is not included in your thinking, strategy, dissertation or project report is almost as important as what is included.

Done thoughtfully, exclusions are not passing the buck, but rather it is narrowing the focus to allow clear thinking on a limited topic.

Anyone who cycles as transport should automatically get a gold star: for being organised, and for being persistent. The logistics behind commuter cycling can be remarkably complex.

Being organised and persistent are the key, as it is with most new endeavours (which may or may not have coincided with the turning of the calendar).

When a new task gets hard, think it through, and don’t give up. It’s almost impossible to be flawless on the first go. Learning how to do it right takes time, effort, and repetition. In the end though, it might be just like riding a bike.

A vexing problem for any knowledge worker (i.e., a person whose job involves handling or using information), is the corralling, filing, finding, structuring, reading, retaining and otherwise accessing and using that information.

There is a lot to that sentence: there’s the 'organising' and 'storage' of information and knowledge; the 'using' of it, and the 'temporaneous-ness' of it (I just made that up. I mean timeliness, or, right information, right time).

Faced with the overabundance of information, many will skim through information. Some though, will read thoroughly, question it, nit-pick, and basically tear it apart. The world certainly needs all types.

I heard a statement the other day that is, for those of a certain age, remarkably accurate: “Sometimes I feel like an old-timer and a newcomer at the same time”.

There comes a point in a career trajectory – particularly if you haven’t significantly changed industry or specialty – when you realise you’re no longer the newcomer or the ‘young’ one. There’s a point – I think it’s around age 45 – where you’re no longer *looking for* information, but also *looked to* for information.

But some (perhaps many, these days) keep taking on new work, new tasks – and that’s where the old-timer/newcomer collide.

There’s no ‘shoulder season’ in building and infrastructure projects, particularly in the contracting sector: you’re either going full-out and are frantically looking for staff to fill the gaps, or you’re cutting back staff, cutting back overhead costs, and cutting back non-essentials.

So it’s difficult to commit consistently to staff training: a business either hasn’t got the steady income to indulge in the money cost of training, or, the business has so much work on that while there might be profits being made, the managers have difficulty with indulging the time cost of letting their staff out for a day’s training.

Projects are usually tracked by spend rate, among other things. Project managers measure how much work has been done to date, and how much it has cost.

This is particularly fraught with inaccuracies when measuring and predicting time spent, in comparison with money spent.

A commodity is something tangible, like raw material, that can be bought and sold, such as copper or coffee. For managing projects, expenditure on ‘things’ – concrete, steel, bricks or cabling – is easier to trace than expenditure on ‘time’.

Time is not a traditional commodity. Knowledge workers are tasked with demonstrating value rather than cost or time.

There are many advice articles on how to ‘future proof’ ourselves, in the face of advancing technology. The conclusion of the advice in those articles mostly seems to be some derivative of these themes:

• Network

• Don’t fear change, embrace it

• Build your skills (including soft skills)

• Identify gaps in where you want to be

One of the definitions of competence is “a combination of knowledge, skills and experience”. The advice in the articles follow those aspects, too:

• Networking develops knowledge;

• not fearing change is demonstrated by building relevant skills, and

• the best way to fill gaps is through relevant experiences.

It’s well understood that in order to improve, there must be some associated exertion. This is obvious with exercise, or fitness. If you want to lift heavier weights, then, start lifting heavier weights. If you want to run faster, you have to, well, run faster.

The same is true for learning. Active effort is required in order to learn; passive learning does not work, or at least isn’t as effective. This is difficult to accept for students, and more particularly, for those of us mid-career or later. We simply don’t learn unless we’ve had to put some exertion into it.

A hundred years ago, it was 1920. Back then, there was less established infrastructure. And less expectation of being looked after by a third party. Infrastructure was less complex back then, too.

Expectations of ‘being looked after by others’ has grown, especially when something goes wrong.

Fortunately, now we assess what happened, and put things into place to aim for ‘this will never happen again’.

Some may say we’re more fragile now than a hundred years ago, but that’s just one perspective. Now, as was then, when disasters occur, they are resolved, cleaned up, and we get back to business.

There’s an emerging (or perhaps already established) sense around “engineering” which is different to “how it was”.

Now it seems we are “engineering” code, which is all about ones and zeroes, rather than engineering buildings, bridges, railways, roads and viaducts. I guess that’s all been done before and so there’s no thrill in it anymore.

The investment – where the money is going - is now in ones and zeros (systems engineering, IT and data analytics), not so much in bricks and mortar. So, this is the new engineering. It’s not like the old engineering, where a tangible thing was built.

The 2min30s comedy skit by Clarke and Dawe, back in March 2017, is still astute today. They remind us that in Australia, we don’t have an energy system, we have an energy market. And that is the difference.

As per usual, Clarke and Dawe describe it humorously well and there are a lot of gems there (link in the comments below).

A system is defined as “a set of things working together as parts of a mechanism or an interconnecting network; a complex whole.”

A market is “an area or arena in which commercial dealings are conducted.”

Very astute indeed.

There is no shortage of advice and information out there about time management skills. Time management is a whole industry, and there is an abundance of hacks and tips to help with managing time.

In the context of time management, there is a logical expectation that meetings or conference speakers or training sessions will finish on time. And so often, they don’t.

I often wonder what the talker is thinking of as their allotted chunk of time whizzes past. I wonder if they worry about it, and if they are at all concerned about the other people in the room.

There is undeniable richness in the content of a training session, workshop, or even a meeting, when it is delivered in person, by someone you know or, even better, someone you like. The interaction, questions, and stories discussed in person are difficult to capture in written material, databases, or even on video.

Humans prefer personal interaction – we are by nature social beings. The stories, examples and legends told in person make issues real and more relatable. Personal interaction is a crucial tool in knowledge transfer.

Exchanging information in person also makes follow-up questions and other future interactions so much easier.

Perhaps one of the difficulties with describing or measuring "competency" in technical / knowledge workers, is that we tend to have trouble explaining what we do, or, we have trouble establishing (proving?) the value behind what we do.

One way people communicate is through stories. In fact, it may be the best way to communicate amongst humans: stories. So I've been reading about how to tell stories, and probably the best hint I've come across is this: Stories (to be compelling) must reflect change of some kind. It’s too easy to tell what happened, but not how it changed us.

Change management is recognised as a key activity, especially after, and especially if things have gone wrong. And here I don’t mean changing people, or organisational change, although that’s part of it. There’s a whole industry for that.

This is about changing “things” or “situations” on a project design, or operational procedure.

Deserving more attention is recognition of change in a process or a project.

But crucially, the step that’s often missing when planning for it, is defining what constitutes change.

The top of the change management flowchart is often labelled “Change Identified”. Well, yikes. Sometimes that’s the hardest part.

Money isn’t made by doing it safely; rather, future unknown costs are saved.

Being in a role that includes the word “safety”, “quality”, or “risk” in the title, automatically is a cost centre role and not a profit centre. Any old-timer will tell you; those roles don’t make anything go any faster (I don’t agree, but I’ve certainly heard it).

When the going gets tough, the cost centres are where the accountants look to save money.

It is very hard to put a line item in the P&L to cover “money that we saved because the disaster didn’t happen”.