By Berend Booms | Associate Editor | Future of Assets
In the latest episode of Assets UNSCRIPTED, “Crossing the T’s and Dotting the I’s,” I sat down to recap my experience at IFS Unleashed. The T’s I covered were trust, time, tempo, talent, and teamwork. The I’s I discussed were intelligence, investment, integrity, insincerity, and innovation. Between them, they captured most of what I heard on stage: IFS CEO Mark Moffat declaring that everything has changed, the launch of IFS Intelligence, Chamath Palihapitiya warning us about AI and energy, and Tom Brady on what it takes to win as a team.
For one of the T’s, time, I quoted Badi Narasimhan of William Grant & Sons. On the main stage, he said that time is a concept, and as such, it’s endless, and I just love that perspective so much. He was talking about whisky: some of what William Grant & Sons produces sits in a cask for years, or sometimes decades, waiting for the moment it is at its absolute best. In their line of business, time is something you have to plan around and build into the product: you have to give it room.
In discussing “time,” I also noted how the IFS x Siemens partnership positions AI as a way to save time, taking repetitive administrative work off the plates of operators and engineers. That’s much closer to how our industry usually looks at time, in that we measure it relentlessly: mean time to repair, mean time between failures, time to value, time to fix. Time is very much treated as a KPI that we have to deliver against, and usually one that we’re under pressure to bring down.
Of all of the ten concepts I discussed, time is the one I keep coming back to. The idea of time as something endless creates this fascinating tension with the way our industry has been trained to treat it. My own experience of time only makes that tension sharper.
Waiting for a cry
Both of my sons were born six weeks premature. With our first, we were caught completely off guard, and what ensued was a roller coaster of medical care, taking place in a highly pressurized bubble. After rooming in with our son in the hospital for two weeks, we were discharged and went home, and I remember feeling like time had stood still for two weeks, and reality hit me in the face really hard. When our second son was also born six weeks early, things were a lot different.
When a baby is born, the medical team checks its vitals using the Apgar score, a scale that runs from zero to ten. Our second son scored a one. He wasn't breathing, and he wasn't responding. Within the very first seconds of his life, he had to be resuscitated.
The time between him being born and him being resuscitated was roughly forty seconds. Those forty seconds felt like an eternity. I didn't know what was happening, or why it was happening, or what was going to happen next, or what to tell my wife, who was asking me the same set of questions nonstop. After what felt like an eternity, I heard the most beautiful sound I have ever heard: my son’s cry. Five minutes later, at the second Apgar measurement, he scored a nine. I understood what had happened, but I wasn’t ready to deal with what I felt. With the roller coaster of neonatal intensive care starting all over again, I blocked it all out. It took months before I started opening up to the reality of what had happened in that room.
When time stops making sense
After those first forty seconds, time lost all its meaning. What followed was a strange, hyperbolic stretch in which minutes and hours slowly turned into days, weeks, and months, while those same weeks and months seemed to pass a few minutes and seconds at a time. There was the moment I expected to hear him cry and heard only silence. There was the rush to get him to intensive care, and the unplanned ambulance ride to a specialized hospital an hour from our home. There were the hours I spent next to his incubator in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), watching the heart monitor he was hooked up to. Then there was the time it took me thirty minutes to get his car seat fitted to the Isofix in my car for our first drive home. After that came every little step, baby steps, one at a time. Someone else could probably plot all of this neatly on a timeline; in my mind and memory, that’s impossible.
Measured time and lived time
Narasimhan’s idea of time as a concept made me realize there are two kinds of time at play, and we tend to manage only one of them. There’s measured time, which is the kind of time that shows up on a dashboard. Forty seconds is forty seconds. Then there’s lived time, which stretches and compresses depending on what’s at stake and how ready you are to let yourself feel it.
On a very different order of magnitude, I’ve grown interested in trying to apply these concepts of time to our perception of downtime. There’s a numerical value that will tell you how long an asset was down, but it won’t tell you what happened in those minutes, hours, sometimes days, and what it felt like for the operator standing next to a halted line, or for the planner on the phone trying to source the right spare part, waiting without knowing when the waiting will end. Much of what we’re investing our time and money in these days comes down to shrinking that uncertainty, so that we’re better informed about what’s happening and what comes next.
And then there’s time as a concept, as something endless. Some things need time to become what they’re going to be. Assets that run for decades and technicians who take years to learn what “good” sounds and looks like cannot be rushed into existence. An industry that is used to treating time as pressure runs the risk of missing what time can give back.
Endless, and fleeting
For all my exploring, time remains a mystery to me. It’s endless: forty seconds can hold a lifetime. And it’s fleeting all the same, because somewhere in all of those seconds and minutes, that small, fragile baby in the NiCU has grown into a boy. He now runs into my room in the morning to wake me up. It’s time.