Futureproofing rail
Running a rail company has never been easy, but an added challenge for today’s rail leaders is knowing how to prepare for potentially disruptive and transformative change.
How might RSSB’s Futures Lab help? asks Vaibhav Puri, RSSB’s Director of Sector Strategy.
We live in a world full of rapid change – from the technology we use every day, to the increasing frequency of once-unusual weather events. In the face of such disruptive challenges, RSSB’s Futures Lab is working hard to identify, assess, and model the emerging issues and opportunities for rail.
Glance at the headlines on any given day and you’ll see at least half a dozen significant drivers of change, all of which have the potential to transform our lives.
These could include:
climate change and extreme weather events
moving to net-zero technologies, and finding the global resources they require
the advancement of artificial intelligence and machine learning
accommodating different ways of working and retaining talent
global interconnectedness and supply chain insecurity.
We know that the future holds challenges, opportunities, and risks. What we need is a way to prepare for them. But climate change, AI, and the other drivers of change are dynamic, uncertain, ambiguous, and complex by definition.
When complex trends make contact with complex systems – like Britain’s rail network – it pays to be agile, resilient, and prepared for change. That’s why RSSB’s Futures Lab is putting so much effort into scanning, exploring, and modelling ideas on what the different potential futures for rail may be. We believe this will help increase the network’s resilience in the face of uncertainty.
In recognising this need, we’re part of a wider movement towards resilience. The Covid pandemic prompted wider consideration of future risks and resilience, but there are other risks to be aware of too, as the Government’s newly released 2023 National Risk Register shows. These range from the UK Government’s first Resilience Framework to efforts from the likes of BSI, the National Infrastructure Commission, and the House of Lords Select Committee on Risk Assessment and Risk Planning.
RSSB isn’t new to this field. Over the last decade, we’ve carried out horizon scanning that’s been instrumental in improving rail asset utilisation, helped put the industry at the cutting edge of fatigue risk management, and started rail’s journey towards considering biosafety and future public health issues.
So, what are the approaches and methods that Futures Lab uses? Futures Lab has been founded on three core capabilities, each of which contributes to an integrated approach when working with clients, RSSB members, and wider industry partners and stakeholders.
The capabilities are:
foresight and horizon scanning
systems modelling and complex systems risk management
simulation and forecast based modelling.
Each capability draws on recognised approaches and ‘toolkits’, and actively explores new techniques and methods being developed by academia and other institutions, organisations, and sectors outside of rail. In combination, these enable Futures Lab to identify, assess, experiment, and innovate with responses to a range of different strategic challenges, possible opportunities, and emerging risks involving a variety of different timescales.
In these activities, Futures Lab draws from across RSSB’s expertise and resources but is additionally informed by different examples of best practice already well established in industry. Its evolving emerging risks framework draws on work from the International Risks Governance Council, the Institute of Risk Management, and Deloitte. It is also guided by national and international standards in this area: the forthcoming ISO 31050 Guidelines for managing emerging risk to enhance resilience, BSI 65000 Organisational Resilience, and AS/NZS 5050 Managing Disruption Related Risk.
As a key mode of transport, rail is part of critical national infrastructure (CNI) and so one of 13 sectors identified in the UK as essential for the day-to-day functioning of society and the economy. Rail is expected to be resilient to the many challenges it does, and may, face, and to provide continuous and safe services even in very difficult circumstances. Accordingly, Futures Lab is developing a ‘resilience foresight’ focus so it can support organisations in rail to engage with and understand these critical longer-term challenges even more effectively.
Since the beginning of the year, the team has undertaken a series of innovative participatory projects working in collaboration with several industry groups, including the National Freight Safety Group, Asset Integrity Group, and Train Accident Risk Group. A series of in-person group workshops were designed to enable participants to express their ideas and thoughts from their own perspectives, informed by their own wide-ranging professional knowledge and experience.
While responding to the specific needs and different remits of each group, collectively these projects exhibit three common themes:
requests to support the group in adopting a longer-term perspective
helping them co-develop strategic insights
helping start a dialogue on emerging risks and future vulnerabilities.
In doing so the team have been successful in offering a responsive and dynamic strategic foresight capability to provide clients with the adaptability and flexibility necessary to meet the challenges of an evolving and uncertain future environment.
Although planning for rail in a volatile, dynamic, and disruptive environment may seem an unwelcome or overwhelming challenge, Futures Lab has the approaches, methods, industry knowledge and experience to help businesses throughout rail. Through its dedication to staying ahead of the curve, the Futures Lab is paving the way for a safer, more efficient, and more resilient rail industry for years to come.
Find out how Futures Lab can help your business.
Contact the team
