Early in her career, Kym Murphy FIEAust CPEng EngExec made mistakes that were hard to miss – including a set of skewed culverts still visible today. But those missteps became formative lessons in accountability.
As told to Joe Ennis
I still laugh, and sometimes cringe, when I think about the skewed precast culverts we installed on the Roma-Taroom Road.
You can still see them today, poking out like misaligned LEGO blocks. They were meant to make things easier for the drainage crew. Instead, they became a very visible lesson in thinking things through.
Back in the late 1990s, I was a young civil engineer managing a 7.3 km greenfield deviation to upgrade a section of a 150 km key freight route that was predominantly unsealed. It was a big project, working across tough blade-ploughed country, incorporating earthworks, safety improvements and major drainage works. I was leading a young team, many of us new to large-scale earthworks.
I’d never worked with scrapers before, so I leaned into learning on the job. Cycle times, cut-and-fill balancing, haul distances – all new. We set the project up and it was going well. The crews were hitting performance targets, but something didn’t add up. We were ticking all the boxes on paper. But we just weren’t shifting enough material.
I made the unpopular call to stop production. That gave us space to figure out the issue. Turns out, I hadn’t accounted for the difference between bank or cut cubic metres, loose and compacted volumes. A small oversight, but it meant we had under-allocated how many scraper loads of material we needed to shift to build and compact the embankment. Just a couple of numbers, but they had a major impact.
That wasn’t my only misstep. To reduce the labour intensity of installing numerous drainage culverts and keep ahead of earthworks production, I ordered precast headwalls, forgetting they’re made perpendicular to the pipe. On a skewed alignment, that meant every culvert headwall stuck out at awkward angles. Higgledy-piggledy is the best way to describe it. We made it safe, but it’s still there. It still makes people laugh. And maybe it still teaches new engineers what not to do.
What stayed with me wasn’t just the technical learnings. It was the importance of vulnerability, of owning your mistakes. Excellence isn’t perfection; it’s being the best version of yourself in everything you do. It’s about being accountable and creating the kind of space where people can fail safely and learn from it.
That’s the environment I had that supported my professional growth – and that’s the environment I now try to foster within my teams.
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Key lessons
- It’s okay not to know. Lean into learning and ask for help.
- Don’t be afraid to stop and reassess, even when it’s unpopular.
- Excellence is not perfection. Own your mistakes and grow from them.
Kym Murphy FIEAust CPEng EngExec is Director, Infrastructure Management and Delivery, Queensland Department of Transport and Main Roads, and a member of the Engineers Australia College of Leadership and Management.
This article was originally published in the November 2025 edition of create.
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