Insights

June 2025

Building a stable equilibrium for turbulent times

Elaine Hart

Thank you and good morning, everyone. I’m very grateful for the opportunity to talk to you today and I’m especially grateful that this meeting is in Portland so I didn’t have to get on an airplane to be with you all. I’m going to overshare for a second and admit that I really don’t enjoy flying. I don’t like the feeling of being tossed around in turbulence when I’m just trying to get somewhere. But I married someone with a degree in aerospace engineering. And the first time we flew together she said, “you know, when this plane is flying, it’s in a stable equilibrium.” And I’m an engineer, too, so I know that that means when the plane tilts, there are forces on it that bring it back to center. It wants to be at center. That’s how it’s designed. And I probably should have already known that, but it had never occurred to me, and it did bring me some comfort.

The reason I bring this up is that we are living in pretty turbulent times. Over the last 5 years, we’ve had the pandemic, supply chain shortages, inflation, fuel price shocks, wildfires, extreme weather, new state policies, big changes in the federal policy landscape, and now the promises and the threats of AI. And while all this has been going on, you all have still had to make decisions. Some big decisions. Amidst all this turbulence. And I hear that’s been hard.

I work in long term planning. And in our field, we’re pretty used to long-term uncertainty. There’s very little we can say with certainty over the next 20 years. And we’ve built planning analysis frameworks that deal reasonably well with that reality. But I think we’re less equipped to plan amidst what we’re experiencing now, which is not just long-term uncertainty, but quite a bit of short-term volatility and uncertainty.

Some of the things going on today are the beginnings of new paradigms for our world. Wildfires, probably AI, though I’m skeptical of the projections. And some of the things going on today are going to turn out to be transient shocks. The problem is that we don’t know if a big shock is going to be transient or persistent until it plays out. And that takes time. In the meantime, we don’t know if it’s just turbulence, or if we need to change course.

As planners and as decisionmakers, who are really focused on infrastructure that is big, expensive, and long-lasting, I think we have to harden ourselves against some of the turbulence. We need to make our own stable equilibriums, so we can continue to move forward. Stability isn’t about staying still. It’s about moving forward with intention. The last thing we want to do is overreact to a temporary reality. That type of reaction actually turns a transient shock into a long-term problem.

So how do we avoid that? There are a lot of things we can do on the technical side and I’d be happy to talk with you about that at a break, but because I only have a few minutes with you today, I’d rather talk about some of the things we can do to harden our minds amidst all of this turbulence. So we can keep doing our work and hopefully keep making good decisions while the plane is bouncing all over the place.

My first tip is to confront your salience bias. Salience bias is our tendency to over-weight information that is attention-grabbing or sensational. The big scary or exciting headlines, which seem to pop up about every couple of days. This information gets more space in our brains than it deserves. Most of what we do and most of what’s going on in our industry is actually pretty boring, not worth reporting on, and it’s just as true and just as important as the messages we’re seeing in the news, or on LinkedIn, or from our favorite consultant.

To counteract my salience bias, when I read a big scary or exciting headline that could affect my work, I go look for the boring counterpoint. And this is much harder and more time-consuming. It usually means going to the source data, doing independent analysis, and forming my own independent conclusions. It’s a little old school. But in this age of echo chambers and group think, I think it’s really important. And it’s even more important in the age of AI.

We’re all using AI and AI can help us do good work more efficiently, but it also makes it really easy to create content without using our minds. And notice I say content, not information. The effect of that over time will become more clear, but my worry, is that it will further amplify the loud and shocking narratives because that’s what it does – it doesn’t tell us what’s true. It tells us what we’re talking about. So if you’ve got analysts in your organization, here’s my pitch: give them the space and priority to do independent work. We don’t often make time for this in today’s working environment. But we don’t need more people regurgitating the narratives that are flying around – we’ve got a great tool for that now. What we need is to be fiercely protective of independent analysis and independent thought. We need to learn to use these tools, not be replaced by them.

The second tip I’d offer is to embrace inertia. And I say this as someone who has spent my whole career working toward reform and modernization. But in turbulent times, inertia is a feature, not a bug, of the system. Precisely because things take a long time in our industry, we have a little more time to make sure we’re doing the right thing. Tech companies probably aren’t used to that. They’ve had more latitude to follow their whims. But big energy infrastructure has big consequences… and so the wall they’re hitting in what they are trying to do, it serves an important purpose. It’s there to protect customers and the community, and increasingly the environment. And these are things worth protecting.

And while constraints are frustrating, they can also be fuel. When we hit a constraint, when we can’t build as fast as we want, that’s actually when we get creative. We find operational solutions. We create markets. We reform our processes. The work that people are doing right now all over the West to enhance coordination and collaboration, to modernize our processes – we won’t regret doing it, but we probably wouldn’t have even tried some of it if we could just easily build our way out of our problems. From my perspective, these constraints that we’re hitting are both stabilizing and they can spark innovation.

Now there will be a lot of different perspectives in this room about which constraints are filling important roles in our society and which are just relics of an outdated system that requires modernization. That’s good. That difference in opinion, that diversity of perspective. That’s helpful to our work. Because most constraints are probably a bit of both. And successful reform requires that we both appreciate why things are the way they are and that we are open minded and creative enough to find reforms that (probably) won’t break the system.

So if you find yourself feeling really strongly in one way or the other on any of the topics of the day - you really want to bank that plane to the left or to the right or maybe you really want to stay the course – my biggest advice is just to talk to one another. Find the people who disagree with you or who disagree with each other, and really work to understand why. Because the more narratives we have access to, the more independent thinking we have engaged in these conversations, the heavier the plane is, and the more stable it will be.

I know I’m speaking to the choir, because you’re all here. And presumably, you’re here to talk to one another. So I hope you have a lot of fun this afternoon and that you embrace this opportunity to seek out some different perspectives.