CHAIRS’ CORNER | BTS & BTSYM
enable innovation, in my opinion, are as follows: ● Trust – It takes time to build but is fragile can be destroyed due to evolutionary reasons. We build systems/silos to eliminate the need for Trust by reducing vulnerability, but these silos prevent us from engaging with others and above all taking a leap of faith and perhaps fail. Trial, error and re-calibration is how real innovation happens, in my experience. This is even the next frontier of Machine Learning models, to move away from the statistical mimicry of Large Language Models (LLMs) to the trail-error approach of Reinforced Learning Models (RLMs).
● Tenacity – Whenever I failed in my attempts to innovate, all seemed lost and I felt like an imposter who has bitten more than they can chew. Resilience helps us get back on our feet, the capacity to “keep calm and carry on”, under pressure. It’s checking our fortitude through facing physical, mental or emotional challenges to grow stronger, as long as they don’t break you permanently with trauma – as per the concept of Anti-Fragility coined by Nasim Nicholas Taleb. Unlike materials which grow weaker when stressed, we humans grow stronger when pressured.
BTSYM CHAIR: ASIL ZAIDI While a tough act to follow, what our last YM Chair, Arabel, achieved in the past year brings challenge - which inspires me. To quote the author Pear S. Buck - “The young do not know enough to be prudent, and therefore they attempt the impossible — and achieve it, generation after generation.” Arabel did a great job getting the YM gang together and
binding us into a family by not only maintaining the legacy YM subcommittees of Professional Development, Socials & Media, and Schools & Universities but also establishing those for Diversity & Inclusion, Industry & Partnerships, and Sustainability & Innovation.
VISION It’s my responsibility to build upon Arabel’s theme - ‘People’ - and take it a notch further with ‘Enabling Innovators’. A decade old echo in my head of an innovation engine from a TED talk by Prof Tina Seelig of Stanford University. A neuro-scientist and author of ‘inGenius: A Crash Course in Creativity’, she inspired this vision and it resonates in congruence with the current YM team values of Trust, Tenacity and Throughput to make an inclusive impact in- sync with guidance from the main BTS Committee.
VALUES: ● ensure a membership network we can Trust – “to break out of our SILOS”;
● establish subcommittees to test our Tenacity – “to try and fail in a safe SPACE”; and,
● Encourage events that rev our brains’ Throughput – “to upskill with new SOLUTIONS”.
I believe it is essential to have values to achieve a vision rather than just priorities. The non-negotiable values to
● Throughput - Our people are our most indispensable assets, their ideas fuelling our innovation engine. The throughput of our brains depend upon the velocity of sharing our thoughts, with trust and tenacity, to develop solutions. As demonstrated by Tin Seelig’s framework for innovation, there are three internal factors to innovation - Imagination, Knowledge, and Attitude - and also three external factors - Habitat, Resources, and Culture. All six factors are interconnected.
STRUCTURING THE CHALLENGES: ● Underground Space - Let’s face it most of us would not have joined this industry if we were straight thinkers apart from a few who might have just rolled the dice instead. In my opinion, this divergence of thoughts arising from the diversity of our membership is our biggest strength if focused on the right direction. Therefore, the first order of business in my term is to spread awareness about neurodiversity within our tunnelling industry as well as the wider underground space industry, and to make people comfortable with it. The presentation by our Diversity & Inclusion sub-chair, Tasnia, at World Tunnel Day 2025 - Mini- Conference: Bespoke Tunnels, Unique Solutions, was the first act towards this objective.
● Artificial Intelligence - The excitement of uncertainty of the underground attracts colourful characters to our industry, and this chutzpah is essential more than ever. We stand on the Rubicon with the coming age of artificial intelligence (AI) tools. Human-machine interactions with will be our next area of focus, wherein we will educate our membership to future- proof against this good chaos within our professional lives. We took the bull by the horns at the first lecture organised by our team at the BTYM’s AGM, hearing of ‘Human-Centred Digitalisation in Tunnelling: Practical
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