by Berend Booms, Associate Editor, Future of Assets

If there is one topic that has steadily moved from the periphery to the center of asset management conversations, it is ESG. Environmental, Social, and Governance considerations have moved from external reporting requirements to shaping how organizations approach risk, performance, stewardship, and long-term viability.

The complex environments our assets operate in make this shift particularly visible. How we design, operate, and maintain our assets is deeply intertwined with environmental impact, worker safety, and the social responsibility toward the communities we operate in. Decisions that were traditionally evaluated primarily through the lens of cost and reliability are now being revisited in a broader context, because the consequences of ignoring that context have become far too significant to overlook.

Unfortunately, the conversation about ESG becomes abstract very quickly. It usually turns into a discussion about frameworks, compliance thresholds, metrics, disclosures and reporting standards. While these elements matter, this focus risks creating distance from what ESG is fundamentally about for me: responsibility.

Seeing the Full Picture

My understanding of responsibility and responsible living has always been closely tied to perspective. From a young age, my grandfather taught me a simple lesson that has served me well ever since: there are two sides to every coin.

In learning to understand what he meant, I found a way to navigate everyday situations. If something didn’t go my way, if I felt wronged, disappointed, angry, frustrated – his advice was to pause and contemplate the other side of the story. This has helped me move beyond my own experience and understand that whatever I am seeing is part of a larger whole.

It also helped shape how I approach challenges, how I interpret situations, and how I handle myself when things do not go as planned. It introduced a level of balance that is not always easy to maintain, especially in moments where emotion takes over. Above all else, it created the space that allowed me to adopt a more grounded way of thinking, one that acknowledges complexity and adversity rather than reducing and dismissing it.

Coming back to ESG and looking at it through that same lens, I think my grandfather’s lesson is one worth exploring. Many of the decisions we make in asset management have more than one side to them: increasing throughput and uptime may come at the expense of environmental impact; cutting costs may introduce risk elsewhere in the operation; extending the lifecycle of your assets may delay necessary investment. Simply put, optimizing one dimension often creates tension in another. When we look at ESG this way, it is clear that it forces us to recognize those tensions and engage with them deliberately.

Beyond Compliance

It is very tempting to approach ESG as a structured exercise. You start by defining the right KPIs, you make sure you align with reporting standards, you look after compliance, and you communicate your progress consistently. There absolutely is a lot of value in doing this correctly; in fact, for many organizations, this is a necessary starting point. In practice, however, ESG starts to become meaningful when it begins to influence behavior, when it directs how decisions are made, as part of the daily trade-offs that operators, engineers, technicians, and leaders navigate.

These trade-offs are often very visible in asset management. How do we balance production targets with energy consumption? How do we prioritize maintenance when safety, compliance, cost, and uptime are all competing for attention? How do we make the right investment decisions at the right time – not just financially, but in a way that holds up socially and environmentally as well? These questions are not straightforward or easy to answer; they require a good understanding of the complex ecosystems in which assets operate. In order to understand those broader systems, I’d like to come back to empathy.

Empathy as an Operating Principle

Empathy is often associated with human relationships and understanding how the “other” feels and treating them with care and respect. Daniel Goleman identifies empathy as a core component of emotional intelligence and a critical interpersonal competency in professional contexts. What my grandfather taught me all those years ago has shaped my take on empathy: I think that in its simplest form, empathy is the ability to see beyond one’s own immediate perspective. To me, it means you consider the impact your actions will have on others, and you understand that the decisions you make are part of a larger system that extends beyond your own being or function. This understanding has led me to consider empathy as a deeply embedded element in asset management, shifting from being a personal value to an operational principle.

When you come up with a maintenance strategy, you do so on the assumption that your maintenance team will be able to execute it. When you implement a system, you influence how others will experience and execute their tasks and day-to-day work. When you make a decision about an asset, you are shaping outcomes that affect operators, technicians, planners, leaders, departments, sites, communities, and future generations. Approaching these decisions with a willingness to look beyond your own perception and consider outside perspectives does not make them easier, but it does make them more complete and considerate.

I make a conscious effort every single day to try and carry this thinking into my personal life, and I hope to pass this on to my children. The same lesson my grandfather taught me continues to guide me in that effort. There are always multiple sides to every story, multiple perspectives to every challenge – taking the time to understand them matters.

From Intention to Impact

I started this piece by mentioning what ESG is fundamentally about for me: responsibility. I’d like to close it by mentioning that empathy is what allows that responsibility to take shape in a meaningful way.

You can do everything right by the book: you define the right policies, set the correct targets, and build meaningful reporting structures. Still, if you lack a genuine understanding of the people and systems affected by those policies, who need to meet those targets and operate within those structures, you risk undermining the success of your ESG strategy. Empathy bridges that gap by connecting intention with impact.

Looking at the Future of Assets, this connection is becoming increasingly important for our industry. Many of the challenges we face are not isolated incidents; they are interconnected, often global in scale and impact and shaped by a wide range of stakeholders and contingencies, each with their own priorities and perspectives. Navigating this landscape requires us to look beyond technical solutions, and focus on the ability to hold multiple viewpoints at once, to understand trade-offs, and to act with a sense of responsibility that extends beyond immediate outcomes.

Shaping What We Leave Behind

Beyond sharing the same letter, ESG and empathy have something else in common: they both force us to think about the kind of impact we create, and who we create it for. A key component of why I think asset management matters is stewardship. We ought to look after what exists today, while making decisions that ensure these same things will be around for the future. What I see changing is the scope of that responsibility. It is no longer confined to the boundaries of the traditional asset-intensive manufacturing or utilities organization; it extends into the environment, into society, into the communities and into the systems that connect them. 

Seeing both sides of the coin does not remove the complexity of this responsibility; if anything, it makes it more visible. It does, however, provide a way to navigate it with more awareness, more understanding, more nuance, and ultimately, with more care.