The Invisible Gorilla in Australia’s Infrastructure System

Alex Afshar

Abstract

Australia continues to invest heavily in infrastructure, with policy and governance frameworks strongly oriented toward project delivery, procurement, and capital efficiency. Yet research in human attention and organisational behaviour shows that systems often miss critical signals when focus is narrowly directed elsewhere, a phenomenon popularised by The Invisible Gorilla. This paper argues that a comparable blind spot exists across Australia’s infrastructure system after handover. Fragmented responsibilities, growing volumes of operational and compliance data, and reliance on episodic assurance mechanisms combine to obscure emerging risks and performance issues during the longest phase of an asset’s life. While compliance can often be demonstrated, confidence is frequently inferred rather than continuously assured despite international asset management principles emphasising whole-of-life value, risk, and decision-making (e.g. ISO 55001).

Keywords: Infrastructure Governance, Asset Management, Infrastructure Assurance

Infrastructure Performance, Lifecycle Management, Public Infrastructure, Infrastructure Risk, Infrastructure Oversight

Introduction: The Gorilla in Plain Sight

In the late 1990s, psychologists ran a now-famous experiment. Participants were asked to watch a short video and count how many times a basketball was passed between players. Midway through the clip, a person in a gorilla suit walked straight through the scene, stopped, beat their chest, and walked off. Remarkably, most viewers never noticed it.

They were so focused on the task they had been given that they missed what was plainly visible.

Australia’s infrastructure sector is facing its own invisible gorilla.

We are deeply focused on delivery on cost, schedule, procurement strategy, and headline announcements. We track milestones obsessively, debate business cases rigorously, and measure progress with ever more sophisticated tools. And yet, quietly and consistently, something fundamental is being overlooked: how infrastructure actually performs once it is handed over.

Not in theory. Not in contractual promises. But in day-to-day operation, against obligations, risks, service outcomes, and long-term value.

This is not a failure of intent or intelligence. It is a consequence of attention. The system rewards focus on what is visible, immediate, and politically legible. The gorilla, meanwhile, walks through operations, maintenance, compliance, and assurance mostly unnoticed until something goes wrong.

Australia’s Infrastructure State of Play

By almost any measure, Australia is a success story in infrastructure. Investment pipelines remain among the largest in the world relative to population. Governments continue to commit billions to transport, energy, health, and social infrastructure. New delivery models, private capital (slow but is flowing), and risk-sharing mechanisms (there is a lot of talk about this) are well understood and gradually being deployed.

The dominant narrative emphasises delivery excellence, accelerated time to market, improved allocation of procurement risk, and the successful resolution of complex engineering challenges enabled by digital engineering.

These are genuine achievements compared to other countries, and they matter.

But they represent only one chapter in the lifecycle.

What receives far less attention structurally, institutionally, and culturally is what happens next. Once the ribbon is cut and the project team disbands, infrastructure enters its longest and most consequential phase, which is operations. This is where value is either realised or eroded. Where safety is tested repeatedly, not once. Where contractual obligations accumulate year after year. Where maintenance decisions compound quietly into resilience or fragility. And where public trust is earned or lost through everyday performance, not announcements. The uncomfortable truth is that much of our system still treats operations as a downstream concern, rather than the primary reason infrastructure exists in the first place.

The Invisible Gorilla: System Performance After Handover

Handover is often treated as a finish line. In reality, it is a starting point. At the moment of transition from project delivery to operations, something subtle but significant occurs. Accountability fragments, knowledge disappears, and assumptions embedded in contracts, specifications, and risk registers become operational realities, often without a clear line of sight back to their original intent. Performance is no longer assessed holistically. Instead, it is inferred through proxies:

• Periodic audits

• Static compliance registers

• Discrete KPIs

• Issue-driven reporting

What is frequently missing is continuous visibility, a clear, integrated understanding of:

• What obligations exist

• Where risk is emerging

• Whether controls are actually effective

• How performance today affects outcomes tomorrow

This gap is rarely obvious at first. Assets may operate “well enough.” Incidents may be isolated. Costs may still be within the budget envelope. But over time, the absence of joined-up assurance creates blind spots. Risks accumulate quietly. Decisions are made with incomplete context. And by the time problems surface, they are framed as surprises when in reality, they were simply unseen.

This is the invisible gorilla of Australian infrastructure: not a lack of investment, not a lack of effort, but a lack of sustained, system-level visibility.

For Ministers, Boards, and Asset Owners, the implication is profound. The question is no longer whether infrastructure can be delivered but whether it can be governed, assured, and optimised across its full life with the same discipline applied at the front end.

Fragmentation by Design

Australia’s infrastructure system did not become fragmented by accident. It was designed that way. Projects are procured to deliver assets. Operators are contracted to run them. Maintainers are engaged to keep them safe. Regulators oversee compliance. Advisors assess risk. Auditors provide assurance. Each function performs its role competently, often exceptionally, within its own remit.

The problem is not capability. It is a connection.

Contracts draw boundaries that make sense commercially, but those boundaries also fracture accountability. Information flows vertically within organisations, not horizontally across the system. Decisions made during design and delivery are rarely traceable once operations begin. Lessons learned remain local, not systemic.

For asset owners, this creates a structural paradox: they retain ultimate accountability for safety, performance, and public value yet rarely have a single, coherent view of how the system is actually performing end to end.

Fragmentation hides risk not because people are careless, but because no one is tasked with seeing the whole picture continuously. The gorilla walks freely through the gaps between silos.

Data Everywhere, Insight Nowhere

Modern infrastructure is saturated with data.

There are asset registers (which mean different things to different people), maintenance management system (we have a CMMS and is it the same as a maintenance system?), incident logs, compliance trackers, audit reports, dashboards, and performance reviews. In theory, asset owners should be better informed than ever. In practice, many struggle to answer fundamental questions with confidence:

Are we meeting all our obligations today, not just on paper, but in reality?

Where is risk increasing quietly, even if KPIs still look acceptable?

Which issues matter most over the next 12–36 months?

The issue is not volume. It is a signal.

Most data are collected for reporting, not decision-making. It is retrospective, fragmented, and static. It describes what has happened, but rarely explains what it means or what should be done next.

As a result, Boards and executives are often presented with reassurance rather than insight.

This creates a dangerous comfort. When everything appears compliant, attention moves elsewhere. But compliance is not performance, and documentation is not assurance. Without synthesis without intelligence that connects obligations, controls, risks, and outcomes data becomes noise. The gorilla remains invisible, buried under reports.

Assurance Without Visibility

Assurance is meant to provide confidence. Too often, it provides only confirmation.

Periodic audits, reviews, and certifications are essential. They demonstrate due diligence and satisfy regulatory expectations. But they are snapshots taken at intervals, not a continuous view of system health. Between those moments, risk evolves.

In complex, long-life assets, this matters. Controls that were effective last year may degrade quietly. Operating conditions change. Interfaces multiply. People rotate. Assumptions embedded years earlier are rarely revisited unless something fails.

The result is assurance that is structurally lagging, always looking backward, while risk moves forward.

For policymakers and regulators, this creates a false sense of security. For asset owners, it means surprises are framed as unforeseeable events rather than governance blind spots. And for Boards, it raises a difficult question:

What exactly are we being assured of, and what are we not seeing?

True assurance is not about ticking boxes. It is about maintaining visibility over what matters most, all the time.

Why 2026 Is the Inflection Point

If these issues have existed for years, why does 2026 matter?

Because multiple pressures are converging simultaneously and irreversibly.

First, assets are aging. Much of Australia’s infrastructure is moving from early-life performance into maturity, where maintenance, renewal, and operational decisions dominate outcomes. Latent design and delivery assumptions are now being tested in real conditions.

Second, climate and resilience expectations are rising. Assets are being asked to perform under stresses they were not originally designed for heat, flood, fire, and extreme variability. Regulators and communities are less tolerant of failure, regardless of contractual boundaries.

Third, regulatory scrutiny is intensifying, and you can see this by looking to the Audit Plan for each Audit office across Australia. Safety, environmental performance, and governance expectations are sharpening, not easing. Accountability is moving upstream, closer to Boards and senior executives.

Finally, digital intelligence are changing what is possible. The question is no longer whether we can see across complex systems, but why we still choose not to. As technology lifts the ceiling on insight, tolerance for blind spots will diminish.

By 2026, the gap between what asset owners are accountable for and what they can genuinely see will no longer be defensible.

References

1. Infrastructure Partnerships Australia (2024). Australian Infrastructure Budget Monitor 2024-25 - Infrastructure Partnerships Australia. [online] Infrastructure Partnerships Australia. Available at: https://infrastructure.org.au/policy-research/major-reports/australian-infrastructure-budget-monitor-2024-25/.

2. Chabris, C. (2010). Invisible Gorilla, The: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceiv.

3. Australian Infrastructure Audit Our Infrastructure Challenges Report -Volume 1. (2015). Available at: https://www.infrastructureaustralia.gov.au/sites/default/files/2019-06/australian-infrastructure-audit-volume-1.pdf.

4. ISO (2024). ISO 55001:2024. [online] ISO. Available at: https://www.iso.org/standard/83054.html.