Is it too hard to work in a water business?

An organisation is healthy if it has the internal resources / capability to handle the variety of problems and challenges that it faces.

Having less problems than internal resources /capability can handle is, understandably, a pleasant place to work.

For instance, if a water business has to supply drinking water from a single dam down to customers via treatment plant, and it has appropriate engineers, scientists, managers and other resources to do this – perfect.

Likely it takes alot more than that even with that supposedly simple example.

But it is possible, even to an outsider to think about the problems and challenges that may occur as the organisation seeks to supply drinking water to its customers.

It is a miracle of modern human organisation that water businesses exist, and that, in many countries, that water is drinkable and available at all.

The question then is, under what circumstances would a water business find itself with problems and challenges that have more solutions than they are capable delivering.

Perhaps under the framework below.

If it came to be that a framework involved 12 principles for the delivery of water and those principles invoked a range of different outcomes, it may be that the business of providing water would become a lot more difficult.

A water business lives to reduce the variability of water availability and quality for people. Turn on the tap and we expect clean water to flow out of it.

The framework above has principles that water businesses have to achieve and it is not clear that there is a shared solution zone.

Can a water business actually achieve material outcomes across those principles with the resources that is has access to?

Or does it:

• access additional resources to develop solutions for each principle with increased costs (increased prices)
• fail to meet the principles and face regulatory pressure
• defer and delay by asking for more time from regulators.

But the greater impact may be on middle managers in water businesses? Those with the delegated responsibility to make decisions relating to the day to day alignment with these principles.

If a decision on a set of potential solutions for a problem comes up for a middle manager, which principle should apply? Should a new pipe be built as it reflects customer expectations or deferred because it balances risk and long-term performance?

Which solution is optimal in the image above? Can each solutions contribution to each principle by quantified so that the ‘optimal’ solution is found? There are 12 principles so even the image above doe snot likely cover the number of solutions, let alone show 12 principles.

So middle managers defer decision making or let the decision be escalated so that even more senior people are doing decision making that should be done lower down.

While people under the middle managers wait for direction.

Why have so many principles?

Are the people in the water businesses able to hold all of these principles in their head and still make decisions that ensure that clean water comes out when I turn my tap?

How would we know if it has become to hard to meet all of these principles and working in a water business is a game of deferral and delay?

We will see.