Tangible assets are physical assets with known monetary value (for the most part). Company balance sheets also have a line item for ‘intangible assets’ – things like goodwill or reputation, data, or intellectual property, which have lately become a larger part of a company’s balance sheet. Yet it is so difficult to assign value to intangible things.

The future is more and more about intangibles – services, knowledge, data, reputation, clouds, and baristas.

The knowledge one interests me the most – helping people to define competence, improving knowledge transfer, and, describing experiences so that it has value. That’s intangible assets in a nutshell.

If a tree falls in the forest, and no one is there to hear it, did it make a sound?

Similarly (not really, but stay with me here), if you have an experience but don’t tell anyone about it, did it happen?

Throughout our careers, we are learning and realising and changing and growing … and we hardly even notice it. But when job hunting or looking for that promotion, experience is taken as proof of reality.

Describing your experience – telling the story of “what happened” – is essential. Yet we don’t really learn how to do that; not well, anyway.

Friction is resistance; a force preventing motion. It’s there when it’s just harder to get something moving. There’s lots of science and math around it; there’s even a coefficient of friction for use in equations.

We can also “feel” friction. It’s there in social media, or when trying to get a loan from the bank, and it can be in our personal relationships. I’m not sure there’s a coefficient for that.

Friction, though, is like conflict: there’s the bad type, and also there’s the good.

Good friction in risk management means it will be harder for bad things to happen.

I use time blocks, instead of a to-do or task list. Calendar blocks inform what to dedicate my time to each day. The calendar includes blocks for commuting, meals, and exercise. There’s a block for “Email/Admin”, and, emails with a substantial task associated get copied into a dedicated 30min appointment.

What I’m not good at – but learning to – is allocating enough time for ‘switching’ between tasks. This is the mental ‘shift’ from, say, reading a report, to, say, phoning someone about a scope of work. These are different tasks requiring a different cognitive focus. And that takes time. Switching time.

Expertise is based on pattern recognition. It develops over time by having seen it all before. But experts are susceptible to implicit assumptions, unintentionally preventing deeper or original thought.

Reviewing projects or checking designs is so important. Reviewers shouldn’t have the exact or even similar experience or background as the originator – they may have the same ‘connections’ (implicit assumptions) and won’t see an error.

It’s difficult to overcome implicit assumptions – mostly because we don’t know we’re making them. This is especially true if we’ve become very good at something: we forget to think differently or think beyond what we know.

An uncomfortable truth of diversity (of gender, background, skills, thought) is that diverse means different. And different, sorry to say, is not naturally easy for humans.

Humans default to making life as easy as possible. We use biases, heuristics and shortcuts to lighten the cognitive load on our already maxed out brains.

Be cognisant of the resulting difficulties of diversity. This does not mean ‘don’t do it’, it means: provide support to those who are the recipients of diversity.

Know that there are members of the culturally similar team who may not be ready for the difficulties responding to difference.

As the saying goes, it’s not what you know, it’s who you know.

So you need to know something, but knowing things is not enough. You also need to be known, too: be known for something.

“Hashtag” yourself. Have a definitive description of what you do, or who you are, or what interests you most.

When someone asks about you, don’t first launch into a long drawn out story. Instead, start with the hashtag, and if there is a point of connection, the conversation will carry on from there. If there isn’t a connection with that, ask them something instead.

“If you’re not sure, just ask” is an all-too-common conclusion to training days and induction materials. It’s an easy throw-away line that should be more considered. The other, similar one is concluding with, “Ask your supervisor”.

Firstly, the supervisor sometimes doesn’t know either, and that makes it awkward for everyone. Secondly, it puts the onus on the asker to come up with a clear question. If they aren’t sure, they might not even know what question to ask.

Thirdly, and most importantly, is a person shouldn’t need to be told it’s an option to ask, it should be a given.

One of the hardest parts of networking is learning people’s names. Always say your name clearly. Don’t assume that people hear your name or can read your nametag. Even if you’ve met the person before, and especially if they are a new acquaintance, do the courtesy of saying your name again. This is enormously helpful for that acquaintance if they’ve forgotten your name. And, of course, listen to their name and try try try to remember it – do word associations, repeat it back, whatever tricks you can find for remembering names. For some, this is the hardest part of networking.

Waiting for the other person to finish talking, is not listening. I don’t know where I first heard that, but I like it.

Get into the habit of asking others about what interests them. And then listen to the answers. Notice what is lighting them up, and file it away for the future, especially if it’s something you have in common. Then remember to ask the next time you meet: how did their daughter’s recital go, or if their project problem got solved to their satisfaction.

Networking is about connecting with people, and connecting means finding a point of connection.

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.