So, uncertainty theory. And I know hopefully you’ve been exposed to a little bit of that. If you haven’t, Dr. Henning will be no doubt pleased to point you in the right direction but you can use uncertainty theory and statistics as a planning tool with infrastructure.
And it assists in going, so what I’ve just described very briefly there, you go, huh, I don’t know. What’s going to happen? Who knows? You know.
And so your temptation when you don’t know is, oh what do I do? Or you can get this analysis, paralysis by analysis, so I don’t know this and this and you do nothing.
But you’ve got to be able to step beyond that. And so right, well hang on, it’s just a range of scenarios and I have a range of uncertainties and I can model that uncertainty, and I can model uncertainty with my best guess around the scenarios.
And that produces strands or strings of likely actions and group those together and that provides a story. And I say hey look, given the range of scenarios, this is still a good course of action.
We’re not going to lose anything by doing this course of action. Be it a rail line or a massive road or a bridge or a whole new city or town or whatever.
You know, you can come up with those sorts of conclusions and quite confidently build the infrastructure. And then that building infrastructure leading towards the behavior patterns as a result of that as well.
The best decision is to make a decision. And there’s been a lot of research with big American Fortune 500 companies and they often, the Apples, the General Electrics and these size companies and people see them as, you were here two years ago, now you’re way over here. How did you make that huge leap? And how did you know that you’re going to be right?
And I read a series of papers on that, it was on the Fortune magazine a few years ago. To a man and woman, the CEOs came back and said we didn’t make one big decision. That’s a myth. This myth of, I go bang and I turn the company around and there I am.
What they did was that they put in place decision-making processes that allow them to rapidly make a series of high-quality small decisions all that time.
And by making lots and lots and lots of high-quality small decisions, you end up with one big leap over a period of a year or two years, it looks like a very big decision.
And the same thing applies to infrastructure, and it certainly applies to asset management strategic thinking. And this is the uncertainty theory as well, lots and lots of good quality small decisions equal one big decision.
And it takes the risks of big decisions. Because if you’re making lots and lots of small decisions, and you test that decision and you test your assumptions, you test uncertainties, and then you get a quality big decision, plus you’ve got a trail of decisions.
If one of the decisions didn’t quite work out, you can go back and then say hey, how did we get that wrong and rework your analysis and theory.
So that’s something to be aware of, that lots of small decisions are a lot better than one big decision. And the one big decision is a myth anyway, in terms of business practice worldwide.
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