So the other thing is, at a strategic level and particularly if you’re doing a whole of the region, a whole of the city, a whole of country stuff is that you’ll get scrutinized and challenged.
It’s as simple as this, most countries in the world the is the developed countries spend between 2-4 percent of GDP on infrastructure and then developing countries 5-10 percent. It still depends on where they are in the cycle.
A country as big as China can spend 7 or 8 percent of GDP on infrastructure. And you think about their GDP, that’s a massive amount of money. If you go up to China, there’s just been so much building in the last decade and a half as a result of that.
Now excepting the USA, if you go on the working say hey how much the people spend on their military, the Americans are an exception.
They spend 4 percent of GDP but the worldwide average is about 2 percent of GDP is spent on the military in any given country.
Some countries are more, some are less, there are a few anomalies but the average is 2 percent. So roughly, twice the amount of money that’s spent on any country’s military is spent on infrastructure across the whole country.
And so it’s a lot of money and it’s a lot of the national wealth and it’s a big enough chunk. So that when you put these plans up, when you’re involved in writing them, you can expect them to be scrutinized and challenged.
Politically, because somebody wants the money to be spent over there when you’re saying it should be spent over here. But also, it’s just a lot of money and it’s a lot of people involved in it.
So when you’re doing the work in this area or if you’re do end up doing work in this area, you’ve always got to do it with the mind that it is going to get challenged politically or managerially or professionally.
Okay, it’s just part of the turf because it’s large amounts of national wealth can be committed to it. Even if you’re working within a sub-sector like transport or utilities, it’s still a large amount.
So you can expect the scrutiny and challenge on your strategies, on your key issue definition and on your scenario development. Basically on everything you’re doing.
Because other people have different views of reality and because it’s all projections, they might believe their views are just as valid than yours. So that just happens.
You can’t get away from it when you’re spending that much of a national economy’s wealth on a particular thing. So just be aware that it is part of the territory.
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