Andrew Wilford: through the lens of sustainability
Professor Andrew 'Wilf' Wilford
Andrew Wilford is a professor with a passion, a really clever bloke, but he prefers to be known simply as Wilf.
Wilf, who lives with his wife Rosie in an oasis-like, three-level hill-hugging home in Brisbane, at one time had a sharp haircut and wore an air force uniform before he flew higher and eventually into the complex world of big business at Boeing Australia.
It’s been a long flightpath full of incident for Wilf who has ended up making a steep tight turn into the greener world of environmental sustainability, a place where he is able to apply and teach much of the conceptual knowledge and wisdom he has gained as a project management guru working with complex systems.
He was responsible for setting up the F-111 program for Boeing Australia, principally a defence contractor in this country. While Wilf says he is ‘not really an aeroplane guy’, he still has an afterburn of affection for the military aircraft that invaded and took over his personal universe for a long time.
He draws many parallels between his present endeavours in providing answers to save a threatened planet and that of his experience in enabling and introducing what he calls safety-critical, mission critical management systems for the swing-wing F-111.
But now he is in a larger theatre of war, a war of minds and action, where victory for him would see the earth on its way back to environmental recovery but where defeat could eventually cast the human species into oblivion.
So Wilf has important messages to put out. Now, as an associate professor at Bond University on the Gold Coast, a position he has held since 2007, he has a different way of dealing with the dangers and, as you might guess, it’s very systematic way.
At Bond he has the chance to pass on his acquired knowledge, get students thinking on a new level and to add new voices to the ultimate campaign – to save the planet while confronting the problems of climate change.
“I’ve been asked to set up a new subject that I’m going to call either ‘The Principles of Sustainability’ or ‘The Principles of Sustainable Development’,” said Wilf.
“You start with exposing students to the concept of systems – how do systems work. In the process of that I develop a new definition of sustainability and I stay away from the green stuff and talk about how any system relates with its environment and regulates its own affairs or activities to promote enduring health in the whole system. A very different approach – it comes from a systems lexicon.”
Wilf has a Svengalian way about him, but he has good rather than evil in mind. Unlike many academics, he has a hypnotic, energising effect once he gets fired up. What was supposed to be a short interview turned into a full-on discussion/debate/mini-lecture lasting nearly three hours. So necessarily, this story has to be an encapsulation of what Wilf said.
Wilf , who was born in Barnsley in the UK said he came from good pit stock. His grandfather worked as an explosive expert in the mines.
“I’ve got coal in the blood and I’m trying to get rid of it,” he joked.
“It was my grandfather who first came to Australia, working on highway projects out of Sydney. My father followed him out and we set up home in Campbelltown to Sydney’s south west.”
Wilf’s early education at Campbelltown North Primary led him to the unique and highly-acclaimed Hurlstone Agricultural High School.
“It was just a great immersion into understanding the land,” said Wilf who was a day student at what he called a ‘public selective agricultural quasi boarding school’.
“We got exposed to all sort of facets of agriculture. It was fantastic.”
It was at this time that the young Wilford, coming from what he said was a ‘pretty challenged socio-economic environment in Campbelltown’, learned quickly how to mix with different people, especially as Hurlstone was a place for many sons of the well-heeled set and all boys wore blazers and ties.
“I’d like to think that some of my growing up, my formative years of dealing with lots of different people has been really helpful in developing my character and being someone who likes to integrate things,” said Wilf.
“Not that I recognised it at the time, but clearly there was a calling for me to get involved in dealing with complexity.”
Wilf did well enough at Hurlstone to be selected for a university scholarship.
Having a father who had been in the British air force, the RAF, helped steer him into winning a cadetship in effect to go to university. The air force paid for him.
“At the time, in the early 80s, the Australian Defence Force recognised it had insufficient aeronautical engineers to cope with the next round of new aeroplanes coming into the Australian air force’s fleet,” said Wilf.
So Wilf, who had done well at maths, physics and chemistry at school, ended up at the West Australian Institute of Techonology (which became Curtin University) doing an engineering degree in electronics.
“It was hard. Many of the concepts that you needed to grasp were quite abstract, so you had to play with things that you couldn’t touch -- complex engineering, mathematics, control systems and the like,” said Wilf.
“While I was immersed in technology, my main interest was in the application of technology. It was a great environment for learning and in hindsight the subjects I did well in have maintained a common thread through my entire career and through my life.”
Wilf translates that time, when he learned to work at uni with other people on complex technical devices and systems and lived in an air force environment that encouraged creativity, to the present.
“All along I’ve been a very people orientated person, and in my current employ at university -- I love the teaching environment – to provide students with an opportunity to see the world through a different set of lenses that might help them better understand, then make good decisions,” added Wilf.
Wilf, on attaining his degree, was soon into proper air force life as a young officer and his first posting was to Richmond near Sydney, where he was involved in looking after the C-130 fleet on maintenance, engineering and technical management
“My background has come more from the technical management side which is looking at systems and understanding how to manage. I have also learned a lot from concepts of supportability and preparedness which applies in the broader sustainability field,” he said.
Wilf’s next moves in managerial roles included taking him closer to the inner engineering sanctums of Qantas and Air New Zealand which were doing maintenance and engineering work for the RAAF.
After working in New Zealand for seven years on air force projects and later in commercial aviation he had a phone call out of the blue. It was an invitation to set up the F-111 program for Boeing in Australia.
It was one of several major life-changing calls for Wilf. It provided a great challenge.
At the peak of the $500 million F-111 program in Brisbane, Wilf had a staff of 450.
While it was a rich and challenging learning curve for him, it was also a trajectory to burn-out because of the intense stress and working hours involved.
While in that Boeing hot seat, Wilf was dealing with an array of complex projects – being, in effect, director of project management capability across the company, covering things such as looking at all the communication architecture for the entire defence force and creating systems for managing air warfare and integrating air warfare, land warfare and marine warfare.
He remembers those times well and his attachment to that special F-111 plane.
“These days I use it as an example to demonstrate the systems principles of sustainability. I’ve learnt a lot from this aeroplane,” said Wilf. “ I come at sustainability from a very different perspective to most people. It allows me to show how we get people engaged in supporting complex endeavours.”
In that three-year stint with Boeing, Wilf was sent to Canberra for three months to help the defence department develop its project management capability.
In the process, the work he was involved with was ‘profoundly important’ and led to the development of a competency standard now a universal benchmark used by many of the biggest companies in the world.
Another spin-off was the establishment of the International Centre for Complex Project Management for which Wilf helped write the strategic plan.
But it was also the time during which he had a serendipitous moment that refocused his life and led him eventually to some greener connections, to academia and eventually to Woodford.
On a plane trip back from Canberra, Wilf found himself seated next to man named Andy Lowe.
It turned out that Andy was an associate professor at the University of Queensland working in their biology area.
“He said he was an interpretive biologist looking at the impact of climate change on plant ecologies, in particular food crops,” said Wilf.
“I am just thinking this is serious stuff. We’d better understand that we have more than 6 billion people to feed. I then told him that I was involved in working on ‘complexity’ and systems engineering.
“After a while we realised, ‘hang on, we could work some stuff here’.”
Professor Lowe was in the process of moving to Adelaide University to work as the director of the herbarium and to also work on a new initiative, to set up a research institute in climate change and sustainability, which was the brainchild of environmental activist Tim Flannery .
So began a dialogue that went on for months before Wilf was invited down to Adelaide to provide an input on project managing such an initiative. Even though Wilf helped them, their bid was unsuccessful and the facility became a consortium of several other universities headed by Griffith.
All of this was happening while Wilf was still with Boeing and using leave time to wing his way into other areas. When he had finished the assignment with Defence and returned to Boeing, he found his seniors had not recognised or understood the strategic importance of what he had been doing.
“By this time I’d had a gutful,” said Wilf.
But it was also the time when he ‘had been taking an active interest looking at the bigger frame of reference for sustainability’.
“I started getting invited to talk at conferences. I was invited to a conference in Sydney and I spoke on ‘leadership and emotional intelligence in complex project management’,” said Wilf.
There were about 150 people there, mainly engineers and the controversial nature of his talk had everyone fired up so much that his talk went far beyond his timeslot and into lunchtime with question sessions.
It was that presentation that drew admiration from a significant audience member who invited Wilf to have coffee with him the following morning. It eventuated that this was man ultimately became Wilf’s new boss, but at Bond Uni.
“He said ‘We’d like to see whether you’d be interested in taking an adjunct professor’s role at Bond. Your industry experience will easily stack up’,” said Wilf.
For Wilf it was an opportune offer, especially as things for him had started to fall apart at Boeing and he had lost his enthusiasm.
As they say, the rest is history.
At Bond he is teaching project management ‘through the lens of sustainability.
“We are living on a planet where every living system is dying. We urgently need people who can manage projects effectively.”
Wilf’s final days at Boeing were preceded by a time when the work pressure was intense and he was having to handle the situation when a government decision was made to retire the F-111s. The government was looking for cuts in costs and Wilf was given the job of reviewing the entire program.
At that time in 2004 he and Rosie were planning to get married and life was full-on with working hours more than 90 hours per week. The writing was on the wall soon after they returned from their honeymoon and Rosie treated him to a session at a yoga retreat.
“I hadn’t done things like this before. We did a lot of meditating and I really switched off,” said Wilf.
At one session Wilf said he ‘disappeared off the face of the universe’, and they had to wake him up because he had started to convulse because he had been so wound up.
“The release of that was phenomenal, I didn’t realise how significant that was,” said Wilf.
He was soon back at work where he found that everything he had left behind had only got worse.
“After 10 days back I was rat shit. I imploded and ended taking three months off work. Boeing didn’t know what to do with me.
“But when I returned I realised the Boeing hadn’t done this. I’d allowed it to happen. At that point freedom came.”
That’s when Wilf started reading more and turning his mind to the complexities of saving Planet Earth. Part of that mission is winging in to the Woodford Folk Festival to spread his message. And it’s a festival that has won him over.
“It’s the ideal social laboratory. It’s an example of how we could all live if we wanted to. It’s a quantum leap towards the humanity that’s worthy of us,” he said.
“For me, from here it’s to try to engender that vibe in everything I do.”
He thought the Woodford project management was pretty good, too.
Words of Wisdom
TAKEN FOR GRANTED: These days I have lots of discussions with people who take for granted systems that we have in western society – quite happy to jump on an aeroplane but not really understanding the complexity, the layering, the interdependencies of all of these systems that come together to ensure a level of technical and operational airworthiness. In other words safety and risk management. All of my career has been involved around this sort of stuff.
TEACHING TROUBLES: At a time when every living system on this planet is in decay, I think most tertiary education needs to step up to the mark. Many students arrive at university knowing bugger all about sustainability. In order to practise something in an applied way you need deep conceptual understanding.
BIG PICTURE: We need to take a whole systems view. I always come from the biggest picture view I can before I start going to the detail. For instance – what are the pattern of dynamics in the system? Is it moving in the direction of pathology or towards a state which is promoting health in the system?
MARS BOUND: If the universe had its way in its expansion phase it would turn the earth into Mars or Venus – that’s its driving force, to dissipate energy and matter. This is a pattern dynamic called entropy. The only thing that is forcing that back, as far as we know, is life. Life is pushing back on that entropic engine. Without life on this planet, the universe would drive us to Mars.
LOVE LIFE: Life has capitalised on every niche you could imagine – holding back the tide of the universe. So while we’re here let’s try to maintain a set of operating conditions on the planet for life to continue. It’s my view that it’s our highest responsibility as human beings to cherish life, not just human life, but all life.
KEYSTONES: When it comes to resilience systems there a several characteristics. One is diversity, another is modularity which means you can take something out of a system and the whole system doesn’t fail. There are things you can take out of an F-111 and for it still to operate. And there are things you can’t take out. Also, in an ecologies perspective there are things you can’t take out – they might be a keystone species for instance. You take that species out and the whole ecology suffers.
When we look at planes we understand its tree of functional building blocks. Through modelling, durability and damage tolerance tests before we even go and fly an aeroplane we determine what the consequences would be if any part breaks in terms of a safety-critical, mission-critical system. What if that breaks before something else or the other way round or if they break at the same time. We use all that stuff as a set of baseline information to see if the plane is getting healthier or less healthy. A hell of a lot of stuff that we can use and transfer that knowledge in an ecological sense.
CATASTROPHES AHEAD: Whether natural or whether caused by an inability for people to understand what we’re doing and in a world where resources become more scarce – we only have to look back in time to see what our natural behaviours are. To find a big stick!
FLESHING IT OUT: Going back 150 years, if we had gathered all of the planet’s mammalian flesh in a big pile, weighed it and then worked out the proportion of it from human and domesticated animals and pets, it would have amounted to 15 per cent. If we were able to perform that exercise now the figure would be about 90 per cent.
TIGHT CONTROL: The operating conditions that have been around since mankind has grown from a few to a lot of us have had some variability but within a fairly tight control band.
WATCHING PATTERNS: While, as an engineer I am interested in numbers, I am much more interested in looking at the pattern of systems and saying ‘if this pattern continues where does it take us’. Very few people do that. Most look at the numbers. Are these patterns of behaviour converging, what are the potential futures that will result from that. Are they futures that are worthy of our highest humanity or are they actually taking us to places where we have no other option but to fight.
FOR HIGH FLYING POLITICIANS: You jump on an aeroplane knowing, or may not even know, that the guys up front are the biggest danger in aviation. It’s not technical failure, it’s complacency in the guys up front. They should be one step ahead of what could go wrong, you’re not flying now, but in five minutes time. For someone with a career in aviation it’s in their subconscious. They also train in high-fidelity simulators where instructors throw problems at them, a sequence of failures imposed on the aeroplane, and debrief them over what could have gone badly wrong in a real life scenario. We need that sort of stuff at the top level of our country – especially when we’ve got issues like climate change, energy, food, water, social unrest all at a time when the population is rising.
SUMMIT’S WRONG: At a recent Queensland climate summit I soon realised it was more an economic summit about climate change, not about climate change. It was irking me. No one was talking about the super ordinate system pattern dynamic, and that is to get as many people in here to keep the economy crunching. The over-arching system is growth and we’ve not done any work, any fidelity about carrying capacity. It’s like getting on an aeroplane without knowing the fatigue load, sticking more passengers on, not knowing how much fuel you’ve got and just go. This is wrong.
RUNAWAY MACHINE: The political response out of the summit was to find ways to get ‘good, green infrastructure’ to catch up, catch up because we have got more people than the infrastructure can deal with. And so on – building more infrastructure to catch up. And what does that do. It creates more debt. So more debt, and how do we pay it off? We’d better get more punters in to pay more rates to pay off the debt. Now we’ve got more people, more infrastructure – oh dear, more debt, need more people – this is a perpetual runaway growth machine.
POPULATION PUZZLE: Australia’s endemic population growth is low, so where is the balance of the extra 13 million (government population target by 2050 at 35 million) coming from. Obviously, from immigration and primarily from third world and developing nations. We’ll give them an opportunity to make a go of it here, but if they had stayed in their countries and procreated there, per capita many of those countries consume less than a planet’s worth of their ecological footprint share. They come to Australia where the figure is 4 to 5 times planet’s worth per person. We’re bringing them up to a standard of living that we’re all quite happy to live with. Very tough personal things in all of this stuff as well, because you have to look at yourself. It’s pretty hard. We are taking here is a person who will be have 10 times his previous impact on the planet. So Australia maximises its own prosperity at the expense of the whole system which is the earth. That’s dumb. From a systems view of it, that’s wrong. It’s accelerating the collapse. As we continue to bring ourselves up at the same time, all we are doing is liquidating our natural capital and consuming all of the natural income derived from that natural capital. It’s not sustainable. I use those big systems dialogues, get on the white board, paint them, show them, have You Tubes and explain this is where we are going.
FEVER: This idea of 2 degrees C -- what does it really mean? Let’s not go beyond 2 degrees C above over pre-industrial average global temperature. Let’s look at another system – the human body is a system – it has its own thermal engine, our own body core. It has the capability for oxygen transfer, and to convert glucose so we can operate as human beings. We have an average core body temperature of 37 degrees C. The average surface temperature of the earth is about 15 degrees C. For analogous purposes, if we increase our core body temperature to 39 degrees C and keep it there, we get incredibly sick with serious fever – on the road to death. That’s more than a six percent increase. Adding 2 degrees C to the planet’s average temperature is more than a 13 per cent increase and proportionately much bigger on a varying finely balanced system. What if with our patterns of behaviour on the planet, with our use of resources, our inability to step off the growth and energy intense ways in which we live plus the earth’s climate inertia etc, we have induced in the system not a 2 degrees C but a 4 degrees C increase. Raise the human body’s core temperature by 4 degrees C and you’re dead. On the planet, 4 degrees C would represent a 25 per cent increase and it’s on a very tightly balanced system where there’s great sensitivity in all of our living ecosystems and our terrestrial, atmospheric and marine ecologies. The 2 degrees C is just an average figure – at the poles there would be an increase of 6 or 6 degrees C. So once we take this bigger systems frame of reference and see where our behaviours and our ideas, which we hold so dearly, are taking us. Is that where we want to be taken? I don’t want to be taken there so I try to be as outspoken as I can to ask the deeper questions about our systems.
DEALING WITH SCEPTICS: I would take them through a systems dialogue using F-111 systems analogies. I talk about uncertainty, and the ultimate safety-critical system (our planetary conditions) and challenge them though a systemic critique. I also carry around in my bag four coloured whiteboard markers and I say ‘ OK, here are the pens – draw up how you reckon this works, and then have the discussion’. I tell them they’re picking little bits out of the system and taking a scalar view rather than a systems view. Then I say ‘Write it up, draw it, show me how you think it works and then let’s examine the logic in it and the ethics in it’. As a starting point I come from a place of biophysical reality.
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