There’s an expression, ‘you can’t un-ring a bell’.

It applies to many work and life situations: it’s hard to stop an established process or expectation.

Once the document has been created, it’s likely that someone will expect it in the future.

Once a safety procedure is in place, it’s very difficult to cancel or remove it from the process.

More good advice: don’t remove a barrier or task until you’re certain of its purpose.

But sometimes, when clearing clutter, it’s nearly impossible to get past the “this isn’t needed” thought.

But the bell has been rung, and it’s been heard.

Behaviour changes over age ranges, regardless of what year you were that age, regardless of your generational label.

From 0-25 there are obvious changes: we’re growing, learning, and are, well, selfish.

Between 25-45 it’s about career, growth, opportunities, and perhaps being a parent.

The thing is, if you were 40 in 1970, 1990 or 2010, or will be in 2040, those important things don’t change.

It doesn’t matter if you’re Gen X or Next Gen, at 40 you’re thinking about your career and opportunities.

After 45, well, there’s a hill. But it’s not necessarily downhill. It’s just a different hill.

Those who struggle with decision-making might not even realise they are avoiding it. The difficulty may be associated with the responsibility that comes with deciding an outcome.

All decisions have consequences. Even the answer to ‘what’s for dinner’ has a cascading series of consequences. A roast beef needs more time than a stir-fry. If you don’t have pasta in the pantry, that decision was ‘wrong’. If you burn yourself steaming the vegetables, then your decision has induced pain.

Decisions have consequences. And the decision-maker wears the responsibility for those consequences.

Decision-makers are excellent at accepting responsibility. They have to be.

It’s difficult for knowledge workers to ‘prove’ expertise in a concise and simple manner. We might agree it’s more obvious for a chef, or a cabinet maker, or a tennis player.

A consistent approach to this might help demonstrate ability and competence.

Competency has aspects of knowledge, skills, and experience. If we agree those are a basis for competency then:

• Knowledge is assessed by review of training/education; outputs/documents; and an end result.

• Skills are assessed by repetitive demonstration; interactions with others; and feedback.

• Experience could be assessed through exposure to situations; stories told about those situations; and reviews from others.

There are deep benefits of having routines and sticking to them as much as possible.

Not “set in stone, thou shalt not change” routines. Just something or a few things you try to stick to as much as possible. Or something you do every week. For example, I like(d) to swim lengths at the pool every Sunday. I’m missing that, and that’s because it was a routine.

Ironically, there is freedom in the routine. Just knowing, for example, every Sunday I swim, means one less decision to make. Without that routine, I’m now having to make one more decision each week.

It’s been suggested that universities should add more ‘soft skills’ courses to engineering and technical degrees.

It’s not new, and 100 words here isn’t going to solve it. There’s an ongoing conundrum with whether universities should teach skills, or knowledge.

But it’s relevant to recognise that the job of today’s engineer is more than design or delivering an elegant solution. Engineers today spend time influencing outcomes, navigating emails, and attending meetings.

Employers want deep technical skills when hiring technical and engineering personnel, and rightly so. But on top of that, employers also want the negotiator, leader, writer, and first responder.

Since we are benefitting now with the long-term possibility of remote working arrangements, perhaps another disruption could be coming in the training budget model.

Some employees have a very high expectation that the employer should cover all training costs. Others see professional development as their own cost. It’s the trainee that benefits most. And there’s every possibility that the employment arrangement might change in the future.

Perhaps distributing the training budget directly to employees, with incentives to use it on recommended training, has merit.

When you get trained, you get to keep the knowledge, even if you leave the company.

Collaboration is required almost every day of our working lives. For projects to be successful, we will always need to be able to work with others.

In addition to mainstream teachings on teamwork and leadership, there are some overarching basics that, if managed well, provide reliable platforms for collaboration.

Good teamwork can be made great when conditions, structures, and processes, as well as basic personnel attitudes and behaviour to the project, are aligned with the end goal.

When two-way information flow, work routines and project control systems and structures are set up to meet the project needs, collaboration is easier.

The project management triangle is familiar: scope, schedule and budget. And the meme that goes with it: Pick two, and only two. Cheap, good, fast. But you can’t have all three.

There’s another project triad I use which allows choosing any one of them, and the other two will follow: quality, risk and competence.

• Improve quality, and you are managing risk and raising competence.

• A good risk culture requires high levels of competence, and the quality follows.

• With a highly competent workforce, managing quality and risk fall into place.

Now we’re not stuck with ‘two out of three ain’t bad’.

It’s enjoyable to be in a discussion in which everyone agrees within the topic. There’s furious agreement, and there’s no tension or discomfort.

Contrast that to when there is a dissenter or two amongst the party. The mood is different when someone in the discussion has a unique view, a different interpretation, or a contrasting conclusion. Then it becomes awkward and fraught.

A dissenter isn’t necessarily trying to be difficult, rather, they just have a different view.

The setting matters (social or professional), but the feeling is the same.

Handling difference is a skill for all of us to embrace.

In amongst changes and uncertainty and upheaval, it’s reasonable to feel a little ragged at times. It can leave us tired and empty. While all that might be going on, there’s a truism that is always true: be kind.

When it comes to interacting with others, just be kind. We don’t know what’s going on in the other person’s life. So be considerate that their life might be ragged too.

The ironic thing is, being kind requires more strength and courage than the word implies. It is not naïve or weak.

Be kind. It can’t be any easier than that.

There’s a term in several industries referring to a ‘high-reliability organisation’. The obvious industries are aviation and the chemical process industry. As the label implies, these are businesses that are striving to be highly reliable.

Formally, the characteristics of HROs could be summarised as:

• preoccupation with failure;

• reluctance to simplify explanations;

• sensitivity to operations;

• deference to frontline expertise; and

• commitment to resilience.

I look at that list and think, they’re all pretty good themes for any business to strive for. Considering failure helps prevent it. Simplifying makes sense. Knowing your operations, check. Expertise and resilience. They’re good strategies overall.

“Expectations” are rarely considered as something to be worked on for self-improvement.

When we’re faced with challenges, we look to our abilities in decision making or leadership or time management or habits or organisational skills. But not expectations in the first place.

Expectations set the scene for our daily lives and achievements. Constantly falling short is detrimental to health and happiness.

It’s time to look at our expectations, too, and recognise when they could be taken down a notch. We’re always expecting so much from everything and everyone, and ourselves. Maybe instead of expecting more, consider if it’s good enough.

Alright, I know, no one wants to remember back to school days when we had to identify the noun, verb, adjective, and everyone’s favourite, the dangling participle.

However, re-learning a little bit about grammar and paragraph structure will help your readers.

Here are two hints that can make anyone’s writing better:

• Avoid the passive voice. It’s overused and weakens your point.

• State your argument/thesis/point clearly and succinctly first. Only then should you go on to support it. Don’t leave the point to the end.

There’s no doubt that writing well is a dominant factor in the quest to “improve communications”.

Clutter accumulates when we’re not looking. It’s the untidy collection of things, ideas, or thoughts that can weigh us down, if we’re not careful. Sometimes we don’t even realise it’s all that clutter putting us in a bad mood.

In the same way, clutter can accumulate in a business in the form of documents, procedures, forms and paperwork. The paper-less offices remains a myth, twenty years after it was predicted.

Clearing away the clutter is cathartic. Decluttering a room, an inbox, or a busy mind leaves us with additional cognitive space to take something else on, or, even better, relax.

The study and understanding of habits have been in the current media lately with books such as Atomic Habits and Tiny Habits being well-known in that arena.

Habits can be good or bad, and we can want to form a habit or break a habit. All very valid.

I’ve become interested in the difference between doing something because it’s a habit or doing it because we must, in order to comply with something – a rule, a law, an expectation. And when a habit is done for compliance, it might be different than if it is done because we want to.

Surveys asking for our opinions land in our inboxes often.

The question type can be literal or abstract; the responder might not understand the intent of the question. And there’s no way to measure if the responder has understood.

The form of the answer can be multiple-choice, a yes/no, a scale, or freeform. With the first three types, I often find I want to use an option that’s not there.

Designing a questionnaire for research purposes has many variables. When doing your next one, spare a thought for the designer of the questions: there’s more to it than you think.

Being bureaucratic equates to being overly concerned with procedures, which may overlook efficiency or common sense. The lack of flexibility results in inefficiencies and delays.

Humans have the cognitive ability to organise groups, add structure and develop processes for repetitive tasks: this is a positive. Where it becomes negative is when those systematised arrangements and fixed hierarchies become more important than the ultimate goal of them.

In the main, society wouldn’t function without some bureaucracy. Neither would companies. Knowing who makes decisions and what comes next means we have the brain space to think about how to do it better.

In doing some reading about machine reliability, and risk-based predictive maintenance, I came across an interesting theory: the Resnikoff Conundrum.

The theory comes from a mathematical study into reliability-based maintenance in 1978. I think the theory also applies to quantitative risk management, exposing an issue with statistical risk management.

In order to collect failure data, there must be failures. But serious failures are designed out, so, there’s no or very little data. Failures of critical items causing injury or death are unacceptable and are therefore designed out.

So: we are trying to prevent failure, based on data that requires failure.

Awhile ago I took part in a group forum with fifteen young engineers to discuss ‘evolving technical and skills requirements’. They were asked “what one skill is most important in your mind?”

The answers were: communication, compromise, versatility, listening, teamwork, adaptability, technical competence, anticipation, stakeholder engagement, accountability, time management.

Recall the group topic: “Evolving technical and skills requirements”.

I expected responses like “design review techniques”, “charpy test interpretation”, “reading material certificates”, “weld design”.

So, either they are comfortable with their technical skills and therefore they don’t need a mention, or, only one of them was actually exposed to technical work.