Any successful undertaking will have a definitive champion. And that champion will be a person. An individual person with a name, not some enigma or amorphous committee.
This is my conclusion after many years of wishing something would get done about things I thought needed fixing: in my industry, my community, or my home life.
Whether it is a company initiative, a community project, or family event: if it’s got momentum, then I guarantee there is a person, an actual person, behind it. Not the corporate name, not the committee, but an individual person.
And they are a real champion.

A writing prompt in a class I’m taking asked us to write about “the single most important lesson you’ve learned (in your industry)”. I was surprisingly stumped finding an answer, nothing came to mind. And anyway, what defines a ‘lesson’?

Then I got a bit meta and countered that it depends on the granularity of the question. Does ‘industry’ mean “engineering”, or “pipelines”, or, more specifically, “pipeline safety”?

If I was going to write about lessons, these might be them:
· communicate well,
· understand where your contribution fits into the pipeline system, and,
· effective controls are more important than risk assessments.

The photos from the ever-awesome APGA annual convention are now available to the attendees. I love seeing all the happy smiling colleagues.

I eagerly anticipated, and dreaded, going through the albums, looking, of course, for myself.

Huh: only 3/778 published photos have me in it.

I was there, at every event. Did I avoid the camera? Not really. Though, I also didn’t seek it out.

The weak side of me thinks ok, I’m not photogenic so mine were binned. The strong side of me says: doesn’t matter, I had a great time, great memories, and can’t wait for next year.

I recently introduced an American colleague to the children’s cartoon “Bluey”. Most out there with young children would know about Bluey. I was introduced to it via my extended family, which includes a 4- and 6-year-old.

Adults often remark on how good, as a parent, it is to be so “seen”. The writing reflects real life experiences, exasperations, and euphoria of raising children. It’s clever, thought-provoking, funny, and insightful.

Wouldn’t it be fun if we pipeliners, technical regulators, constructors, inspectors, and product suppliers could have our own cartoon, so that we are seen for what we face, like Bluey’s parents.

Some colleagues (friends?) in my industry (you know who you are) can’t help but when we catch up, clink glasses and yell “STANDARDS!...are we raising them or lowering them this time?”
It’s a funny insider joke, but there’s an underlying truth.
We all have standards, whether we talk about them or not. Standards are everywhere: how clean your kitchen is, how organised your finances are, how diligently you do the detailed work.
I’m known for the Australian technical pipeline standard, and perhaps, for holding myself to a fairly high standard. And I like that we can joke about it too.

For years I’ve been exploring the concept of credibility, along with respect, competence, principles, and self-awareness.

Credibility is subjective, and, it’s contextual.

I can say I’m an expert in pipeline safety, but someone who doesn’t know me might think, hmmm not really. Also, credibility has a wide range of context/interpretation: I can address pipeline safety from my context (civil engineer with 30 years of project experience), but not from the context of a process engineer with 10 years of intricate design experience.

The key factor with credibility? Experience. Action. Tangible evidence that you’ve actually done something related to that topic.

It’s a cliché because it’s true: ‘every life has its ups and downs’. There are highs and lows in everyone’s life.
It’s how we navigate them, though, that’s personal; and can’t be simplified into a cliche. Recognise when you’re up. And down.

Since my highpoint in June (endurance event followed by a caravan trip), I then experienced the lows of losing a family member, dementia in another, and responsibility for clearing out and selling their house, in a city five hours’ flight away.
It’s all part of life unfolding.
I’ve been in the valley; now, I’m looking to another summit.

In June, I achieved my high-water mark of 67km run in the backyard ultra (BYU) format. During the following 3 months, I only managed a few training sessions.  The October BYU was meant to improve on that 67km, but the lack of training meant I couldn’t expect much of myself.
I set out to run as far as I could, and stunned myself with a still-far 50km total.
All this humble-bragging is a reminder that muscle memory is a thing.  I’d never recommend the ‘no-training’ approach to goals, but, having long-embedded historic repetition of your skills or strengths has benefits.

I found a page in my files showing a hierarchical organisation chart for the topic of “pipeline engineering”. I don’t know what the origin of this document is, unfortunately.
It was in the file-folder titled ‘development of PECS (Pipeline Engineering Competency System)’, so someone in the development committee back in 2006ish must’ve created it.

I like the visuality of it. It gives us a picture of where to start with the topic, and how levels of knowledge can be ‘peers’ or can be ‘subordinate’ to other knowledge.
And any item listed could be the header of its own topic chart.

Very early in my career I learned about ‘time-blocking’: setting time to be focussed on one thing.  This is how to tackle hard work: regular blocks of intense focus to achieve one thing.  They happen because I ‘have meetings with myself’, to block off that time.

I’m on Cal Newport’s newsletter list. He’s a computer-science professor and prolific writer and thinker. Recently, he mused about work-life balance, cleverly differentiating between hard work (having grit, focus and determination over a long period of time, outcome focussed) versus hard-to-do work (14hr days, unfocused freneticism, and, ‘performative busyness’).

Hard-to-do work is not sustainable.

My early engineering experiences seem to have pushed me towards being a “doer” over a “manager”.  My evidence is simple: even now, when faced with a task that needs to be done, I’d rather do it myself over asking someone else to.
It’s an important distinction to be aware of while progressing through a career: not so much “are you doing or managing?”, but rather, which one do you enjoy more?
Even in my early days, I could sense that I was happier being responsible for the task itself (doer), over being responsible for the person doing the task (manager).

I had lunch out today, complete with wine, and expensive food. And, completely solo. Not planned that way though: defiance prevailed.
A colleague(friend?), who’d booked the catch-up afternoon, had cancelled.

I’d eagerly anticipated the great banter, laughs, and lighthearted arguments about semi-non-important things. I’ve always really enjoyed conversations with this colleague/(friend?).

But: they’ve cancelled 5+ times on me over the past two years, I’ve lost track. I keep anticipating fun catch ups…and keep being stood up.

It does nothing to get mad at them, I know how life gets in the way.

I do wonder though, who’s the fool here?

I spend a lot of time in my head. And I like it there. It took a while to learn to like it, but now I do. Although, while I like being in my thinking, it’s actions that people see.

So, I spend time thinking about things like backyard ultras, being Gen-X in the resources industry, how to demonstrate competence, credibility beyond credentials, and ethics and self-governance, and, and, and… but thinking about these important topics isn’t enough: it’s just as important to share them.
What I can’t figure out is where.
LinkedIn? Substack? A newsletter? All of the above?

Long ago, I was introduced to the Day-Timer brand of time management.
Now, I have 25 years of Day-Timer planner pages in boxes. The past 5 years I’ve been less loyal to Day-Timer; I now use a bespoke design via Agendio.

In 1995, I started out tentatively, only writing down a few things, a few names. Then, I became a prolific recorder of tasks, events, meetings, to-do’s, names, contact details, and notes of all sorts related to work.

Once, I tried not using a written work diary, tried to do it all online, and that lasted, oh, about a day.

I’ve recently started a ‘career review’, looking through my 30 years of work, to get a handle on who I am and what I do. It’s time to re-live some of the memories, time to re-connect with some of the people, and to remember the learnings, challenges, mistakes, successes and, the mundane day-to-day tasks and topics that have influenced me and my development.
A summary is how LinkedIn (and AI) sees me: job titles and company logos. But the magic is in the stories, experiences, and interactions I've had with people and problem-solving. There’s so much of that to share.

I’ve experienced the shift from sympathy to empathy. We experience sympathy when we imagine the feelings and experience of someone else. There is an arm’s length with this, because, by its nature, when we’re sympathising, we haven’t been through it ourselves.

I’ve grown in the last few weeks, and my heart has now expanded to have deep empathy for those experiencing dementia in the family. And also, on discovering how much one in the partnership covers for the other, how bad it was/is. My aunt, I now know, had a tough life in the last few years; RIP Patricia B.

We all inhabit a place in the world. Currently, I’m in Mandurah, south of Perth. It’s not my permanent place, but it’s important I’m here. The person I’m helping is experiencing his place being in upheaval. He is confused and distressed, because his place has changed. He wants to stay in the same place, but he can’t.

My place in the world, for almost 30 years, has been Brisbane. But more than that, I’m learning that our place in the world must include people.
I’m learning through this experience that cultivating place with people is more important than physical place.

The phrase, “I can’t see anything”, for me, is a code-phrase to identify when communication has failed. I love telling my parent’s story about it, often as a safety share.
My parents shared the safe-driving responsibility at intersections, with the passenger helping by advising the driver if the lane was clear of traffic.

One time, the passenger said, “I can’t see anything”, so the driver went into the intersection, nearly causing an accident.

The passenger meant, their view was blocked, not that the lane was clear.

This is a real-world example of poorly chosen communication. The whole family learned quick!

In the 1900s, “work” evolved from a majority working in the fields, to a majority working in the office. In the 1980s, I, like many GenXers, started “going to the gym” and ‘having gym memberships’. This was an attempt to stimulate the muscles that were no longer stimulated ‘at work’.
The same thing will happen with our brains. It’s been a slow march to lazy brains, but with calculators, GPS, and now, AI, we have less reason to use our brains. Just like we had less reason to use our muscles.
The next evolution will be gyms for our brains.

I’ve recently been thinking through my 30+ year career in the gas pipeline industry. It’s been a fun trip down memory lane!
I’ve listed out all the engineering projects I could remember; then tried to figure out what made it memorable. And I made notes about those experiences. And also, the people! Oh, the people of this industry (you know who you are), you’re what made those experiences (mostly) so enjoyable.

Meanwhile, we’re evolving into not needing to do calculations anymore, AI will do that. Identifying ‘competency’ will be about application of knowledge (experience!).
So, get out and do stuff.