Railways: Black & White, or 50 Shades of Grey?

Of the many amazingly interesting things I've done in my mixed-up career, I'd say that Asset Management was near the top. On the face it, it looks dull and easy: make a list of your assets and the state they're in (which ends up being a very long list indeed for a whole railway, invariably incomplete and inaccurate to an unknowable extent) and work out how and when to maintain and replace them. Spreadsheet work. But it's not like that at all (although there are plenty of lists and spreadsheets). So I was happy to read this excellent article on the subject by Stephen Plumb who was an entertaining and insightful counterpart on the Tube Lines side of the fence during the Metronet/LU PPP years. Let me quote from it:

“empowered to be curious”. Exceptional results can be delivered by curious people who are given permission and some headroom to explore “what is really going on” and challenge traditional thinking and decisions in their organisation. I recommend it to you and your teams – it is immensely satisfying and actually fun

Interesting as it is, I'm going to write about Asset Management another time, because I've been thinking about Stephen's thought all week in a broader context. Have I been 'empowered to be curious' during my career? Have I empowered my teams? Is curiosity in any case a good thing?

As a relentlessly curious person (I can't help it, it's just the way my neurochemistry works, I'm not saying that's good or bad) I was curious about curiosity in our industry. I have to conclude that, as a sweeping generalisation, my innate curiosity has not been helpful, at least to me, except in limited circumstances at certain times and places. This varied according to who my boss was, her or his mood, the general ethos and culture of the organisation, and what was happening outside. As I found, it also greatly mattered how I expressed my curiosity and particularly challenge. I will offer this as a tip for others who, like me, find themselves being curious (and thus challenging) at work: find safe, calm, gentle, quizzical ways to challenge the status quo - and be careful with whom you do so. Do not, like me, tilt at windmills.

To take a step back, and work out whether curiosity is a good thing or not, let's apply it to management custom and practice in the industry, and management ideas, initiatives and fads that come and go, sometimes like pendulums. When I first started, as a green graduate engineer at BREL in Derby in the 1980s, the industry was about to embark on the massive upheaval of privatisation. Indeed, BREL itself was one of the first bits on the blocks, being sold to ABB in 1989. That was an early insight into another subject that has long fascinated me, international management culture, since this traditional English Midlands railway factory was suddenly being run by Swedes, who in my experience really did empower people to be curious, provided the curiosity was expressed in the right way (through respectful discussion and debate and ideally with facts and numbers). Another subject for another day.

In general though, through the 1990s and beyond, there was no point at all being curious about whether private was better than public, or if there weren't some ways of working that British Rail/BREL had that were worth saving. Like Brexit, the question been decided, and all that was left was to get it done. For example, despite having perfectly good workshops, machines and people at Derby, York and Crewe, the mantra was that outsourcing was good and doing things in-house bad. In fairness sometimes the outside suppliers were better, but at other times they were rubbish, and the cumulative effect over time was that the once proud and vast workshops were narrowed down just to a corner of Derby Carriage Works, which became really just an assembly site. It's great to see that it has survived and thrived since and I guess it is adding more value to trains now than twenty years ago.

The newly privatised former BREL soon rushed to import outside ideas, for example Six Sigma, and jettison old ones. This is probably where I first came up against my curiosity being problem, not a useful, endearing characteristic. The Six Sigma process has American/Japanese production line origins and seeks to minimise variability in component production processes. The company decided to invest heavily in it and we were sent to endless workshops with consultants. At first I had an entirely open mind, and was keen to learn new things, but as the years passed and no discernible improvements arose as a result, my curiosity (some might say scepticism) began to kick in. The problem was, I thought, that there was a category error. We were in manufacturing, certainly, and still made some components like wheelsets. Six Sigma could be applied there, perhaps. But we were trying to apply it to all the other messy processes of train-building: sales, design, procurement, assembly, testing, warranty support, modification, overhaul. Much the same happened with visualisation, about which I have previously posted.

For me, it wasn't black or white: there were things to be learned from these outside rituals, and they were helpful in certain circumstances, if applied thoughtfully. But that wasn't happening, and neither Six Sigma nor Viz were any help at all in working out why train toilets were leaking, no matter how much the black belts assured us they were. 50 Shades of Grey. It wasn't helpful to express doubts about their usefulness in different scenarios. You were either a believer, or a trouble-maker.

Later I spent a couple of enthralling years in Paris, working for Alstom Transport. I was one of a handful of expats whose job it was to fly around the world trying to get to the bottom of failing projects, which were mostly in 'Anglo-Saxon' countries like the UK, the US, Australia and Germany. I will write about international management culture later, and I promise there is proper academic research to support what I found, which I hope nobody interprets as national stereotyping, for example the ground-breaking work by Hofstede. Anyway, I discovered that there was no tolerance for curiosity in Paris. There was only one way, Alstom's way, the French way, which gave rise in France to truly wonderful flamboyant pieces of railway engineering such as the TGV (which as I recall at the time was 40% cheaper than the equivalent ICE largely because of its elegant engineering). Unfortunately this méthode did not easily translate to Washwood Heath, Birmingham or Hornell, Upstate New York. There was no room for curiosity as to why the problems were happening: if Hornell was losing money building trains, or Washwood Heath couldn't kick out the red trains on time, it was because they weren't doing things the Alstom way.

(This was much nearer the start of Alstom's rise to being a global train builder, I am sure it has become more open to different approaches now, or perhaps better at transferring its native excellence overseas, and I wish it great success as the new custodian of my spiritual railway home, Derby Carriage Works.)

Since then there have been any number of issues with similar characteristics. There would be an idea or a mantra, that may well have a lot of sense in it, but soon became over- or mis-applied. A key warning sign was that it would be given a name. This would then attract legions of powerful prophets. A new religion would form. Consultants would arrive en masse. Before long, a whole infrastructure on which livelihoods depend would emerge. Then there would in reaction counter-emerge a bunch of sullen sceptics, usually not the ones in leadership roles (which being a sceptic would in any case debar them from) but nevertheless usually numerous and important and knowledgeable enough to stop anything completely daft happening, and who'd perhaps already seen the idea before for better or worse in a previous cycle. A black and white situation would evolve, as with George Bush: you're either for XXX, or you're against it. The sceptics would find themselves outgunned and forced to defend what had often been an unsatisfactory status quo ante, or just stay silent, and maybe would find their careers suffering as a result. Examples in recent times that come to mind are:

• devolution (versus centralisation);
• digital railway (versus upgrading conventional signalling or other train control alternatives);
• Schedule 8 (versus scrapping the whole performance measurement process);
• franchising (versus renationalisation);
• driverless trains (versus sticking a near-redundant person in the cab forever);
• Business Critical Rules and Bow Tie Diagrams (versus sticking with old risk management processes);
• decarbonisation (electrification versus far-off hydrogen);
• vegetation management (razing every embankment in country versus doing nothing more than keeping the branches out of the gauge); and
• national performance (prevent asset failures versus everything is a complex system issue)

In all the above cases and countless others there are no black or white answers but instead choices and compromises which can and should be analysed, debated and discussed from situation to situation. Too often this does not happen, and indeed is discouraged.

If I've learnt anything in railways it's that no issue is black and white. The rails are four feet eight and half inches apart, but that's about it. Everything else, when looked at with curiosity, will reveal many shades of grey, but no certainty. This can happen even on exotic engineering subjects about which few people know or care - Traction Gel Applicators just to take a random example. To some they are critical to run the railway in autumn, to others they merely distribute gunk onto the railhead and at best make no difference and worst cost loads or money, put lives at risk as people go lineside to refill the gunk, and cause trains to slide around. But I don't think anyone has done enough thorough analysis to be able know, one way or the other. Probably as usual the truth's messy - TGAs may help in some situations but not others.

Maybe this happens more in railways than other industries because there are so many aspects and disciplines involved, and few people these days really see the 'whole railway'. It is often nearly impossible to gather solid evidence. Custom and practice persists out of habit, not efficacy. Like Covid, there are endless opinions and not enough hard data even though it is a scientific question. Opinions fill the void (I'm certainly guilty of this, and sometimes we need to use good engineering judgment, but evidence would be better). A mantra looked at one way, from the perspective of one organisation, might make perfect sense but be completely unhelpful at the railway level.

If I'm perfectly honest I've sometimes pushed ideas too far myself, and over-simplified things or implied certainty even when I know the reality is complex or ambiguous. When, on looking further into the matter, or collecting more data (perhaps by listening more carefully to people on the other side of the debate), I've invariably found that a more nuanced reality exists. There are no 'silver bullets' in railways. That's why I've come to place so much weight on talking to different people from different disciplines on complex subjects, and if possible really stress-testing ideas with them. It is always helpful to have different sources and sets of data. If they're coherent, great, but usually on closer investigation and challenge they're not. Anomalies need to be investigated and understood. The more discussion, analysis and debate, informed by as much evidence as possible, the better the final outcome. Tiresome and time-consuming as that can be.

I don't argue that there shouldn't be settled policy. It would be impossible to run the railway properly if everybody was empowered to be curious all the time. This would be dangerous and a recipe for inaction and witless debate. There must be rules, and they need to be adhered to. Initiatives are usually good and can be an effective way to improve. But the counterpoint is important too. If we create a black & white culture in which the zeitgeist is right and everybody who disagrees is wrong, probably a bit slow, and should keep quiet or leave (which I have encountered fairly often) then maybe the situation is even worse. There can be no progress, and worse - there were warning signs before Clapham, Kings Cross, Ladbroke Grove, Hatfield. The signs, blindingly obvious in hindsight at the inquiries, indicated dangerous structural problems which people could see but not talk about let alone do anything to fix. For this reason many railway organisations have the word 'challenge' in their people values and job descriptions. My experience has been, however, that few railway organisations do enough (or sometimes anything) to make people who are challenging and curious feel empowered to express their misgivings about the orthodoxy, or to come up with better alternatives. Perhaps in the odd set-piece workshop, but not on a day-to-day basis, and especially not in decision-making forums. It's as if we're afraid of debate.

Sadly society in recent years has been characterised by this polarised black & white worldview with progressively less room for thoughtful discussion and analysis. We can, and must, do better on the railways. After all, as Stephen says, good challenge and discussion is 'immensely satisfying and actually fun'. I believe in 50 Shades of Grey, even though I may not read the book.