Is it too hard to work in a water business?
A healthy organization is one that possesses the internal resources and capabilities to effectively manage the variety of problems and challenges it encounters. When a company has the necessary tools to address these challenges, it creates a productive and satisfying work environment.
Imagine a water utility tasked with supplying drinking water from a single dam, treating it, and delivering it to customers. If this utility has the right engineers, scientists, managers, and resources, the operation might seem straightforward. However, the reality is far more complex.
Even in this seemingly simple scenario, there are numerous challenges that could arise—challenges that may not be immediately apparent to an outsider. Ensuring water quality, managing infrastructure, and responding to environmental factors are just a few examples of the intricate issues a water utility must navigate daily.
It's a testament to modern human organization that water utilities function effectively at all. In many countries, the fact that drinkable water is readily available from our taps is nothing short of a miracle. But this raises an important question: What happens when a water utility faces more problems and challenges than it has the capacity to solve?
NSW 3Cs Water Regulation Framework
Consider a scenario where a water utility is guided by a framework of 12 principles such as the New South Wales framework shown above. Each principle demands a different outcome, and the complexity of managing these demands could make the task of providing water significantly more challenging.
Water utilities strive to minimise the variability in water availability and quality. When we turn on the tap, we expect clean water to flow out. However, adhering to a framework with multiple principles introduces new challenges. Can a water utility achieve meaningful outcomes across all these principles with the resources it currently has? Or will it need to:
Access additional resources to develop solutions for each principle, leading to increased costs (and potentially higher prices for consumers)?
Risk failing to meet these principles, which could result in regulatory pressure?
Defer and delay by requesting more time from regulators?
The burden of this complexity often falls on middle managers, who are responsible for day-to-day decisions that align with these principles. When faced with a set of potential solutions, how should they decide which principle to prioritise? For example, should a new pipeline be built to meet customer expectations, or should it be deferred to balance risk and long-term performance?
The challenge lies in quantifying how each potential solution contributes to the 12 principles. With so many factors to consider, it's easy to see how decision-making might become bogged down. Middle managers might defer decisions or escalate them to higher levels, causing delays and uncertainty throughout the organization.
This raises a critical question: Are the people within these water utilities able to juggle all these principles while still ensuring that clean water flows when we turn on our taps along with the other services that need to be provided? How would we know if it has become too difficult to meet all these principles, turning work in a water utility into a constant game of deferral and delay?
Only time will tell.