Will Goode is the Resilience Shift’s Programme Manager. He’s an experienced project/programme management professional and Chartered Civil Engineer with a background in major programmes and events. He is particularly interested in change management in complex situations – at the heart of the challenge of creating resilient infrastructure.

You can find Will on LinkedIn.

Increasing resilience when delivering major projects

Will Goode, Programme Manager of the Resilience Shift, is presenting a session at the Major Projects Association Annual Conference 2018, taking place over 19 and 20 September 2018. Will explains the questions he will be exploring.

In their own words the Major Projects Association is a membership association for organisations engaged in the delivery and the development of major projects, programmes and portfolios. Membership comprises organisations engaged in a wide variety of commercial and public enterprises. They operate in a wide variety of fields including: manufacturing, construction, defence, transportation, IT, government departments, consultancies and law, as well as those engaged in the academic study of major projects.

The desire from members is to hone their skills; to improve best practice; and to investigate innovative solutions for the many problems encountered during major projects, programmes and portfolios.

I first encountered the Major Projects Association while I was working on the HS2 project and took part in their course ‘The Challenge of Major Projects’.

The course was excellent. I was introduced to new perspectives of an industry that I thought I had a good handle on, hearing from a variety of major project professionals and stakeholders including HM Treasury, delivery partners, infrastructure clients, civil servants, management consultants, lawyers and more. All of whom view and understand major projects slightly differently, or put another way, get different types of value from major projects at different points in their value chain.

My big takeaway from the course was the insight that I gained from a brief introduction to the Project Initiation Routemap. This is a tool developed between government and the private sector. It aims to improve the initiation phases of the major projects, primarily in the UK and the highest level messages of which are: assess complexity, assess capability, plan enhancements then deliver enhancements.

I’m delighted to have been invited to speak at this year’s MPA Annual Conference about the link between major projects and critical infrastructure resilience. We’ll be exploring; what can we do at the various stages of major projects to increase resilience, both for the project itself, but most importantly for the asset or system that the project is focussed on delivering? What do we need to consider to be able to do this? and why should we bother at all?

I look forward to exploring these questions with the same variety of people that broadened my horizons on the challenge of Major Projects course a few years ago.

Practising what we preach – how to make things happen

You’re involved in critical infrastructure resilience in practice. How should we help you to make decisions differently so that critical infrastructure continues to function under ordinary and extraordinary circumstances? Find out some of the ways you can get involved below.

We aim to do work, and support others to do work, that will shift the approach to resilience in practice.

To this end, our project leads and grantees continue to be busy scoping and delivering projects through to the end of 2018 and beyond.  At the same time, we are looking towards 2019, and exploring how we transfer learning between sectors, and continue to work towards our outcome statements across all work streams.

Accelerating resilience in practice, sector by sector

We started 2018 with a focus on the water sector. This work stream has been progressing well, over the past month, finalising plans for our forthcoming Global Knowledge Exchange, an event jointly hosted with the City Water Resilience Framework involving stakeholders from our five fieldwork cities – Amman, Mexico City, Cape Town, Hull and Miami. We’ll be sharing our water governance work at World Water Week this August with our partners SIWI and We Are Telescopic. Global collaboration in the water sector also continues following the joint letter to the UN, and our planned participation in the UN’s High Level Programme Forum on “Transformation towards sustainable and resilient societies”.

Partnering with pioneers

At the same time, we know we need to look across other sectors than water, and seek to develop a common understanding globally. One of our key ways of working is to engage with pioneers in the field. The EIS Council has made some truly transformative steps towards raising awareness of black sky hazards, and creating tools, products and guidance, aimed at influencing collaborations between stakeholders to create a shift in resilience. Their 2018 summit showed us how much work there is in this space for us to learn from. The Earth Ex resilience exercise, taking place on 22 August this year has the potential to really unlock interactions and interdependencies between sectors, in a much more powerful way than simply talking about it.

Shifting the needle on resilience practice

How can we shift the needle on resilience practice so that all organisations embed it into their decision-making? We believe that key incentives or other levers exist for all industries and that we must articulate the value that resilience can bring. This month we’ve just put out our latest call for expressions of interest from potential grantees to develop practical, industry-specific primers.

We want to engage directly with industry stakeholders and with those responsible for incentivising resilience for critical infrastructure. Interested collaborators should therefore have existing contacts, both with end-users of the primers and with organizations that incentivise resilience within specific industries.

 Storytelling about resilience value

We are also exploring how stories will help us articulate to those all along the critical infrastructure value chain the value of including resilience in their decisions. We believe that success stories can influence different decision makers, and are a simple but effective means of making resilience tangible, practical and relevant. We started scoping this activity to gather and curate stories in June, so please watch this space, or contact us if you want to help with this.

Such stories are almost inevitably based on ‘now’ or the very recent past.  Given the volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous nature of the world that our infrastructure needs to serve, learning from the past, even the recent past, is not enough to create a lasting and effective change in practice. We need to continually be looking to the future as well.  KPMG’s Emerging Trends in Infrastructure 2018 report is one (excellent) example of the many horizon scanning publications that need to inform our work, to ensure that it is, and remains, relevant.

 Other progress to share:

• We held a framing workshop in June for our work on Tools and Approaches with our appointed grantees.
• Our team and partners from Arup and SIWI have completed a packed few months of field visits to the five cities we are working with as part of water governance tool work and are now busy processing and evaluating their findings to share at several events this summer.
• Alexa Bruce and Fred Boltz attended the Water Security conference between 17 and 20 June, hosting a panel session on behalf of the Resilience Shift.
• Fred continues to represent the Resilience Shift in the global arena attending the UN HLPF to participate and influence the water sector’s global collaboration towards a resilient future.
• It was interesting to read this report on the insurance industry’s development goals for cities, and consider how the SDGs might change insurance of critical infrastructure.
• We’re always thinking about impact and how to disseminate and share our work.  Our friends in California shared this useful resource for climate-resilient infrastructure material.
• Although it was originally posted in March 2018, we only recently stumbled across this very useful list of global and regional initiatives that either have a focus on resilience or cover some aspect of resilience so it deserves a mention now!

Bringing Safety to Life at the Lloyd’s Register Foundation conference

On the 9 and 10 May 2018 Lloyd’s Register foundation hosted their second international conference at the Institution of Engineering and Technology in London. Richard Clegg’s opening address described the purpose of the conference as to pull together the Lloyd’s Register Foundation grants community to interact and forge collaborations. On day two, the Resilience Shift hosted a high energy workshop with that objective in mind.

Our interactive exercise used a value chain approach to explore how tools, approaches and frameworks can create opportunities to deliver resilience value for critical infrastructure, drawing on the fresh perspectives and insights of the Lloyd’s Register Foundation grants community.

We asked participants to think about the services delivered by critical infrastructure, the shocks and stresses it might be exposed to and its vulnerabilities. We then asked for suggested frameworks, tools and approaches that could be used by various actors to influence decision makers towards a more resilient outcome. Participants focused on critical infrastructure in terms of the services that they help to deliver – as opposed to the physical assets themselves.

The feedback session at the end of the exercise revealed the following ideas about how we might approach critical infrastructure from diagnosis through to service provision:

• A ‘servicization’ approach should be used where the service provided is tested for resilience at each stage of the value chain, this means asking what the user is attempting to achieve through the critical infrastructure which may result in an alternative infrastructure solution
• Consideration of both ‘soft path’ – behavioural change, as well as ‘hard path’ – physical infrastructure when determining infrastructure solutions
• Considering natural systems as a key part of infrastructure, leading to greater overall resilience
• Adopting a ‘whole systems’ approach
• Using simulations and scenario techniques to test critical infrastructure service resilience
• Engaging widely with institutions and governance organisations who may not be directly responsible for commissioning the physical infrastructure but who may be an indirect stakeholder
• Actively seeking diverse solutions that maximise redundancy within the system
• Introducing investment/financing models and incentivising green over grey infrastructure
• Adopting ‘upstream thinking’ through novel economic measures e.g. Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) which would drive consideration of the wider systems impacted by infrastructure users
• Consideration of the internet of things (IOT) as part of maintenance and monitoring plans

Thank you again to everyone who participated in the workshop, your inputs and ideas are greatly appreciated and will be considered by the team leading our work on Ways to make resilience tangible, practical and relevant.

Register with us here to keep in touch about our latest developments and opportunities – we’d love to hear your thoughts.

Note: Defining Critical Infrastructure Services

Our research suggests that critical infrastructure is a common term used broadly by different organisations and countries, thereby reinforcing the significance of infrastructure in society. A clear majority of the critical infrastructure definitions focus on the services that are enabled by critical infrastructure, highlighting that they are considered critical based on the consequence of its failure, which would create a significant impact to human life, economic activity and/or national security. A failure in this context should be understood as a system which is prevented from continuing to perform its function – as opposed to the failure of a physical asset, which is understood as a damage or loss.

Join us at the Lloyd’s Register Foundation conference 9-10 May

Nancy Kete, Executive Director of the Resilience Shift will be speaking at the Lloyd’s Register Foundation (LRF) conference 2018 and leading a special workshop on tools and approaches to enable critical infrastructure resilience. Join us there.

Tools and approaches to enable critical infrastructure resilience
An interactive workshop by the Resilience Shift and Arup Foresight

Take part in a high-energy, collaborative exploration and review of emerging and future tools, frameworks and approaches (TFA) that contribute to enhancing the resilience of critical infrastructure.

Participants will get the opportunity to hear about, review, prioritise and add to the latest research by the Resilience Shift. The interactive exercise will map and review emerging and future tools, frameworks and approaches along two axis: maturity (Now / New / Next) and the value chain. This will allow us to identify priority areas along a timeline and their level of importance, and will reveal and fill gaps where additional innovation/ action is required.

The session will be run with two groups working in parallel to generate insight on priority areas from two perspectives and to stimulate discussion in a shared report outcome. Groups will first review and add to the pre-populated matrix, and then switch and prioritise the other group’s work according to impact and importance.

Duration: 30min
Team: Host: Nancy Kete, Facilitators: Will Goode, Felicitas zu Dohna;
Date / Time: 10th May 2018, 12:30-13:00

More about the event:
The two-day event brings together LRF grant holders, academia, industry and members of the public, and is a fantastic opportunity to learn more about the work and impact of the Lloyd’s Register Foundation. The event will feature keynote speakers, presentations and early career ‘master classes’ spanning all areas of LRF grants funding, and will showcase the excellent work done by grant holders covering four strategic themes – promoting safety and public understanding, advancement of skills and education, supporting excellent scientific research and accelerating the application of research.