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Richard Maltzman
Dave Shirley
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Climb-it Change: Pre-Interview Connector
Climb-it Change: New Relevance for the Stepwells of India
A PATH to more equitable health - via AI project leadership
The Flip-Side of Biomimicry
A citrus fruit schools us on material science and project leadership (Part 2 of 2)
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Date
A few days back I wrote about the stepwells of India in "Climb-it Change: New Relevance for the Stepwells of India" — those extraordinary stacked, subterranean staircases descending toward groundwater, built centuries before anyone used the word "resilience" in a project charter. We’re following up soon with an interview that I promised: a conversation with someone born in Gujarat who can speak to these structures with an authority we can’t claim from a town in Massachusetts, USA. That piece is coming within the next couple of weeks.
While we wait, it’s worth sitting with what stepwells already teach project managers, sustainability people, and — let’s be honest — anyone managing something meant to outlive them.
They were never single-purpose deliverables. A stepwell’s stated scope was water access. Its lived scope, over centuries, expanded to town square, temple, marketplace, cooling shelter, and — now — tourist economy. Most of our projects are scoped to solve one problem and then quietly retired once that problem changes shape. Stepwells suggest a different philosophy – a sustainable one: design the deliverable to deliver value as the context around it shifts, rather than treating scope creep as something to fend off forever. There’s a real distinction between scope creep during delivery, which is still worth guarding against, and a completed asset finding new relevance after handover — sustainable design often depends on leaving room for the second kind.
Decentralization was the resilience strategy, not a workaround. Stepwells weren’t backup infrastructure for a central water system — in many regions, they
were the system, distributed across a landscape, each one locally owned and locally maintained. Compare that to today’s propensity for large, centralized infrastructure with a single point of failure. The stepwell model is closer to microgrids or distributed water harvesting: more nodes, more redundancy, and
failure that stays local instead of cascading.
Most of them didn’t fail structurally — they failed institutionally. The engineering held. What was lost, in many cases, was the maintenance knowledge, the community stewardship, and the reason people kept showing up. That’s a project management failure mode we know intimately: knowledge transfer that never happened, a maintenance plan that existed on paper but not in practice, an owning organization that changed hands and lost the thread. The wells didn’t collapse. They were abandoned by process, not by physics.
I’m hoping that the interview will help us understand the sustainability connection — from the engineering of these structures into the human systems that kept them serving their communities, or didn’t. My initial conversation with the civil engineer tells me that much of the design and maintenance knowledge behind these structures was never written down in the first place, passed generation to generation by word of mouth rather than documentation. It wasn’t just that institutions forgot to maintain the wells — the
knowledge needed to maintain them was never stored anywhere durable enough to survive a generational gap. That’s a lessons-learned failure mode a lot of PMOs would recognize.
Be back soon with that interview!
Posted
by
Richard Maltzman
on: August 31, 2026 10:30 PM |
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