Daniel Armanios - Inaugural Lecture

Building Major Programmes for Tomorrow

Tackling our grandest challenges, whether concerning climate change, health & well-being, all the way to equitable access to food, energy, and education, necessitate initiatives of adequate scale and global impact. Our prevailing perspectives largely restrict major programmes to “megaprojects”, whereby achieving scale is presumed to occur through a centralized convening site. This does not adequately address current and planned distributed rather than centralized initiatives. The technologies powering this trend include cloud computing, microgrids, and global sensing networks and forecasting, along with the diversity of people and expertise who confront, undergird, manage, and lead these initiatives. These increasingly capture the imagination of leaders in every sector and industry worldwide: the promise for addressing the existential challenges of our time via portfolios of interconnected projects that cumulate and interact across geographies and time zones.

In this inaugural lecture, I propose a working framework that combines expertise and research agendas from engineering and social sciences to better match the conditions of these distributed major programmes. This framework proposes three key analytic factors: scoping, scaffolding, and sensing. Scoping (the “where”) maps a major programme to identify those components most vulnerable to specific disruptions and where there are opportunities to innovate. Scaffolding (the “how”) discerns and develops technologies for coordinating across the programme to identify needed and existing expertise (who knows what), roles (who does what), and specifications (who requires what). Sensing (the “who”) enhances long-term resilience and reliability through identifying and including those who have been historically marginalized in standard approaches to major programmes. Each “S” component of this “S3” targets a particular challenge in building and leading these future (distributed) major programmes. Each draw core insight and envision distinct research agendas from across the engineering and social sciences. Finally, each advances a set of tools to ignite action, create value, and advance policy and practice.