Your plans don't fail because your strategy is flawed; they fail because your team lacks the conviction to execute them. Welcome to the paradox plaguing all but the very best teams: organizations invest millions in the master plan, but nothing in the "structural ambition" required to bring it to life.

Based on rigorous research into 200+ transformative leaders, Russell Raath introduces The Science of Ambition™. We will explore the science and learn how leaders can apply these lessons to their own teams - systematically engineering the three true drivers of competitive advantage: Conviction, Audacity, and Energy.

Most organizations have a strategy. Very few have the conviction to execute it. Russell Raath has spent his career understanding why. After a decade leading Harvard Professor John Kotter's global consulting business and earlier years in industry and consulting, Russell founded The Ambition Company to tackle what he calls The Strategy Paradox: teams invest heavily in planning but lack the foundational belief, boldness, and energy required to follow through when it gets hard. His research into over 200 transformative individuals throughout history explored The Science of Ambition™, a framework that identifies the measurable, developable characteristics behind breakthrough execution. Today, Russell works with corporate leadership teams to unlock the conviction and competitive energy required to make bold strategic moves and sustain them. His clients are leaders who are tired of strategies that stall and teams that default to safe when the moment demands something bolder. He brings a direct, no-nonsense approach shaped by experience across six continents and a deep respect for the people who do the real work.

Many organisations begin a reliability journey with energy, but struggle to sustain momentum once leadership changes, budgets tighten, or operational pressure returns.

This session shows how Cargill has kept Maintenance & Reliability visible, relevant, and supported across multiple locations for more than two decades.

Using real examples, Walter will explain how four simple plant-level indicators help translate maintenance performance into business language, engage senior leaders, and move sites from reactive firefighting toward proactive reliability.

Attendees will leave with a practical approach they can apply in their own business.

1. How to secure and sustain senior leadership support for reliability
2. How to measure plant reliability with four practical indicators
3. How to use KPIs to shift culture from reactive to proactive

In the field, we are faced with quick decisions especially when the equipment fails. We need to troubleshoot and determine if something is inherently wrong with the equipment or if there is another factor. Typically, the lubricant gets blamed as this is the most common element to the system.

In this session, we will diagnose early warning signs of oils failing, some basic tests which can be done to monitor the health of the oils and other preventive measures which can be implemented to keep your oils clean and your equipment running.

1. Easy tips and tricks which can be implemented in the field to diagnose lubricant failures.
2. Basic understanding of an oil analysis report and the importance of condition monitoring.
3. Storage and Handling techniques which can be implemented immediately.

We’ll explore how combining the right techniques and technologies can improve monitoring of critical assets. In batch-based manufacturing environments, significant gaps in monitoring data can emerge for some of the most critical assets.

We’ll discuss how traditional condition-based monitoring (CBM) approaches fell short in addressing these gaps, leading to the development of hybrid solution that integrates both online and route-based monitoring.

By layering in complementary technologies, coverage was extended across all stages of operation, effectively eliminating blind spots. With these gaps closed, higher-quality data enabled timely interventions that align with business needs and schedules.

1. Online monitoring systems are one tool in the solution, not the complete answer.
2. Good data strengthens engineering decisions but cannot substitute for sound first principles.
3. Reliability is a continuous journey of improvement, not a fixed destination to reach.

Implementation and operation of human spaceflight missions is challenging and complex requiring support from the crews in space and Earth-based operations and engineering teams. Responding to the dynamically changing environment and mission in and beyond Earth orbit, as well as managing the risks inherent in those missions, requires high performing, highly reliable teams.

This discussion will explore the subject of leadership within the context of NASA’s Mission Control based on personal experiences of the presenter with the International Space Station, Commercial Crew Program, the lunar Gateway, and NASA’s future lunar surface programs.

Learn to anticipate failures, build organisational excellence through intentional culture, empower leadership at every level, and transform potential problems into pathways for success. When failure isn't an option, preparation becomes the mission.

Mature, asset-intensive organisations often say they want innovation, but govern every kind of uncertainty as though it carries the same risk. That is appropriate where failure is physical, safety-critical or irreversible. It becomes limiting when applied to data, digital tools and process experiments, where small failures can create useful learning. This session explores how leaders can distinguish catastrophic failure from intelligent learning failure, avoid sunk-cost commitments, and ask better questions before scaling ideas. The remedy is not less discipline, but more proportionate risk: protecting what must not fail while creating space to learn safely.

• Recognise when safety discipline becomes blanket caution.
• Distinguish catastrophic failure from useful learning failure.
• Ask better questions before scaling digital ideas.

Following a period of rapid growth through acquisition, the business faced increasing operational complexity across its manufacturing network. Multiple legacy information systems, an ageing asset base, inconsistent engineering capability, and historically tactical capital investment were driving reliability issues, rising maintenance costs, and variable production performance.

As Head of Asset Reliability, my role was to develop a group-wide reliability strategy that standardised maintenance practices, improved asset criticality and lifecycle management, and established a more data-driven approach to investment prioritisation.

This included aligning engineering standards across sites, strengthening capability within local teams, and creating a roadmap to improve equipment reliability, operational resilience, and long-term manufacturing efficiency.

1. Reliability is everyone’s job
2. Prioritising long-term strategy objectives whilst managing short-term challenges
3. Understanding your target audience when delivering the message

With over 70,000 physical assets, with different vintages and like many industries, we faced growing pressure to find better, safer, and more efficient ways of working.

We hear a lot of familiar terms and buzzwords within the industry:

• digital roadmaps
• AI
• digital twins
• big data

It can become a bit overwhelming and lead you down multiple different paths…The real challenge isn’t availability of the systems out there — it’s relevance.

So rather than asking “What technology should we adopt?”, we asked:

What problems are we trying to solve — today and in the future? What was right for our business. What was right for our Asset Management Strategy and long term strategic thinking?

3 Key Learnings:

1. Bring the people within the business along the AM and technology journey with you – do not do it in isolation
2. Some systems will fail – it’s what you learn from these failings that will enhance your future strategy
3. Treat your data as Assets!

This presentation explores the transformation of a maintenance organisation from a reactive, breakdown-driven culture to a structured reliability-focused operation. The journey included CMMS enhancement, planning and scheduling, in-house condition monitoring, defect elimination, precision maintenance, FMEA application, and restructuring of maintenance and reliability functions.

The session will demonstrate how reliability principles were progressively embedded as organisational maturity and culture evolved. Attendees will gain practical insight into using reliability maturity assessments, structured roadmaps, and cross-functional engagement to reduce reactive maintenance, improve operational performance, and build sustainable reliability excellence.

3 Key Learnings:

1. Key lessons and challenges encountered during five years of implementing reliability principles and driving continuous improvement
2. The value gained from clearly separating maintenance execution and reliability engineering responsibilities
3. The critical importance of maintaining strong feedback loops and engagement with frontline and shop floor engineers

Capital project turnover effectiveness serves as the cornerstone for life cycle reliability within asset management. Capital project turnover refers to the process of transitioning assets from the construction and commissioning phase to operational use; a critical hand off point that can significantly impact an asset's long-term performance. Best practices will be discussed, ranging from thorough documentation processes, robust commissioning, maintenance function build and seamless communication between project teams and operations staff. Effective turnover lays the groundwork for optimised maintenance strategies, accurate asset data management and proactive reliability engineering.

Through case studies and practical frameworks of early integration of reliability principles during turnover will be shown to prevent future failures, reduce unplanned downtime and increase asset productivity. Key themes include the importance of setting up maintenance technicians for success, so they can hit the ground running as systems are handed over to them from the project team. The role of digital tools in facilitating data transfer and standardising turnover processes will also be emphasised. Recommendations for organisations seeking to strengthen their turnover protocols, highlighting the link between meticulous project completion and sustained asset value will be shown.

Many asset-intensive organisations are DRIP: Data Rich, Information Poor. Across the asset lifecycle — design, commissioning, operation, condition monitoring, maintenance, and renewal — data is abundant and increasingly inexpensive to collect. As a result, “more data” has quietly become the default objective. Yet cost volatility, reactive work, unstable planning, and investment misalignment persist. Data accumulation is not value creation.

The core issue is architectural. Asset data is rarely structured around the economic outcomes it is meant to support. Instead, organisations move forward from data and hope insight emerges.

This session introduces a reverse, value-driven logic for fixing the DRIP. Rather than starting with data, we begin by defining the value desired: cost stability, uptime reliability, capital efficiency, and controlled risk exposure. From there, we work backward through the chain: the actions required to deliver that value; the decisions required to enable those actions; the insights required to support those decisions; the information required to generate those insights; and finally, the data required to produce that information.

This disciplined inversion — the foundation of the Data to Dollars (D2$) framework — shifts the objective from data expansion to economic alignment. It clarifies which data matters, which KPIs predict value, and which analytics roles must exist to convert asset performance into financial predictability.

Most organisations have documented maintenance strategies, sophisticated systems and well-defined processes. Yet on the shop floor, the reality often looks very different.

Maintenance teams continue to lose significant time waiting for parts, chasing information, responding reactively and working around broken processes. In many cases, leaders know exactly what needs to happen — but struggle to create the operational discipline required to sustain it.

This panel discussion examines why execution remains one of the biggest unresolved challenges in maintenance and reliability. Why do organisations continue to compromise planning disciplines under pressure? Why are accountability structures often unclear? And why do so many digital transformation programs fail to improve frontline execution?

Drawing on real operational experience, panelists will debate the cultural, behavioural and leadership factors driving the execution discipline gap — and explore what it actually takes to build organisations where reliability practices are not just documented, but consistently lived every day.

United Utilities (UU) are on a Maintenance Excellence journey moving from a reactive maintenance environment to a more proactive and preventative way of working. This is to align more closely with an Industry Best Practice model.

UU undertook an independent maintenance & reliability assessment of the organisation’s operations, maintenance and reliability practices relating to the assets within the water, wastewater treatment, and bioresources facilities.

The outcomes and recommendations are part of our Maintenance Excellence strategy and plan, and we have delivered a blended approach to Asset Condition Management (ACM) to achieve two of our objectives:

• Increase our use of asset condition management techniques to deliver proactive ways of working.
• Visualise asset health and performance of our critical assets and use data to determine when to proactively repair or replace assets.

New technologies and capabilities have been implemented, along with improving knowledge and competence our people across multiple roles in the organisation.

Traditional approaches to improving asset reliability in the water sector are often slow, complex, and reliant on extended programmes that struggle to translate theory into operational practice. They get bogged down in FMEA and RCM analysis.

This session presents a different approach: a pragmatic, condensed, sprint based model for rapidly implementing reliability improvements at scale.

Delivered through a collaborative partnership between Southern Water and Binnies, a six month “Reliability Sprint” redefined how reliability frameworks can be developed, tested, and embedded within operational environments.

The initiative combined executive sponsorship, specialist reliability expertise, and frontline operational involvement to co create a practical, ISO 55001 aligned framework.

At the core of the approach was the use of agile sprint principles and digitisation - tools such as asset criticality models, failure mode analysis, and optimised maintenance strategies to be deployed in real time alongside those responsible for their delivery. This ensured immediate applicability, strong ownership, and sustained adoption.

The results challenge traditional assumptions about the pace of change in asset management. Within six months, the programme delivered improved asset insight, strengthened maintenance practices, and a robust foundation for more consistent, data driven decision making. Fundamentally, it implemented risk based maintenance strategy and a site reliability review process, from scratch, within 6 months, across more than 400 sites and 100,000s of assets.

This presentation explores how sprint-based delivery and pragmatism can accelerate reliability maturity, bridge the gap between strategy and operations, and provide a scalable model for utilities facing increasing performance, regulatory, and environmental pressures. It offers a practical blueprint for organisations seeking to move from reactive maintenance to proactive, resilience focused asset management—at pace.

Kick off your MAINSTREAM experience at the Jumpstart at the Millennium Point Thinktank Science Museum, sponsored by OneRiver. Pick up your name badge, enjoy complimentary drinks and canapés, and connect with your fellow delegates and speakers before the keynote begins the next morning. It's the perfect way to ease into MAINSTREAM and start making meaningful connections — don’t miss it!

Join us in the networking area for our closing session! We'll wrap up with thanks, and announce the exciting MAINSTREAM Australia trip winner, plus other partner prizes. Drinks and canapes included! DJ sponsored by I-Care Reliability.