Cindy Wallis-Lage on indigenous wisdom, the power of asking why, and why the water sector's greatest shift might be moving water from a need to a want.

Cindy Wallis-Lage has spent 39 years in the water industry - across Black & Veatch, public and private sector partnerships, and nonprofit leadership. She now serves on several company boards and co-leads ReSoLve, a nonprofit focused on empowering and retaining women in water. When she drew the Wisdom card in this episode of Meaningful Conversations, the image of waves and flowing water took her somewhere unexpected: not forward to the next technological breakthrough, but back to an older, deeper understanding of how water and human life are woven together, and what gets lost when we forget it.

"Wisdom is foundational. We have to stop assuming we can do whatever we want and water will simply be there. We need to understand the whole cycle and how we live within it."

Rediscovering what indigenous communities never forgot

The Wisdom card prompted Cindy to reflect on something the water sector has been slow to reckon with: that indigenous communities held, and in many cases still hold, a far more sophisticated and integrated understanding of water systems than modern engineering has historically acknowledged. They lived in relationship with the land and water around them, made decisions that centred community and environment together, and understood - intuitively and practically - that Mother Nature is not a system to be overcome but a set of conditions to be worked within.

The evidence of ignoring that understanding is visible everywhere. Attempts to redirect rivers. Watersheds altered beyond their natural carrying capacity. Populations in the American Southwest living as though they were somewhere else entirely, drawing on water resources that were never designed for that scale of demand. These are not failures of technology. They are failures of wisdom, of the kind of long-horizon, systems-level thinking that asks not just what we can do, but what we should do, and what the land and water will ultimately allow.

Through the US Water Alliance's One Water Framework, tribal communities have been brought into planning conversations in ways that are beginning to shift how utilities and planners approach their work. For Cindy, this is not about nostalgia or romanticising the past. It is about recognising that some of the most sophisticated water knowledge on earth has been present all along and that bringing it into conversation with modern engineering produces something neither could achieve alone.

"Mother Nature is going to win. Every time we have tried to move a river or redesign a watershed, it has worked - until it hasn't. Understanding that is the beginning of real wisdom."

The most underused tool in engineering: asking why

One of the sharpest observations in this conversation is about the habit of assumption. Engineers, Cindy notes, are trained to see a problem and move toward a solution quickly and logically. That is a strength. But it carries a risk: that the problem being solved is not the actual problem, because nobody stopped to ask why enough times.

When someone from outside the sector, or outside the team's usual frame of reference, walks in and asks a genuinely naive question, it can feel disruptive or slow things down. In practice, Cindy argues, it accelerates everything that matters. The question "why do you do it this way?" forces a team to surface embedded assumptions that may have been true once and are no longer. And when those assumptions are examined honestly, the problem often turns out to be something different from what everyone assumed - which means the solution set changes entirely.

• Redefine the problem: Asking why repeatedly often reveals the real issue is different from the assumed one
• Surface assumptions: Embedded beliefs that were once true, but no longer are, drive many poor decisions
• Dissolve, not just solve: Not every problem needs a solution - some just need the assumption beneath them removed
• Invite the outsider: The person who doesn't know the "obvious" answer is often the most valuable in the room

Cindy and Annyse land on a reframe of the DEI acronym that is worth sitting with: perhaps Inclusion should come first. Diversity at the table means nothing if the environment does not allow those diverse voices to genuinely question and contribute. Inclusion is the precondition. Without it, diversity becomes decoration.

Cindy draws this from direct experience. As president of Black & Veatch Water, she deliberately brought people onto her leadership team who had no background in water - people who would keep asking why, who had no history of the assumptions everyone else had stopped questioning. The effect was transformative, not just for the team's thinking but for the culture of permission it created: anyone could question anything, respectfully, regardless of seniority. That environment, she found, is where the best solutions emerge.

A lesson from Australia — and the power of many data points

One of Cindy's most formative professional moments came early enough in her career to shape everything that followed. Working as a technical expert on a project in Australia, she arrived with a clear sense of what she knew and what she was there to contribute. What she found was that the solution the group arrived at together - drawing on a dozen different professional and cultural perspectives - was far better than anything she could have reached alone, or without considerable struggle.

The lesson she took was simple and lasting: her view was one data point. One good data point, but one. When you put twelve good data points together, everyone becomes smarter. The individual expertise is not diminished - it is amplified. And the solution belongs to the whole group in a way that makes it stronger, more durable, and easier to implement.

She carries a principle from that experience that has guided her ever since: if two people on a team are always the same, then one of them is not necessary.

"I need a team that will question me, see around corners I cannot see, and help me be wiser - not one that simply blueprints what I already think."

From need to want — the mindset shift that could change everything

The water sector has always positioned water as a fundamental human need. That framing is true and important. But it may also be limiting.

Needs, in human psychology, carry a quality of entitlement - we expect them to be met, we notice them mainly when they are not, and we do not tend to invest emotionally in their fulfilment. Wants operate differently. We prioritise them. We make choices around them. We advocate for them. We feel their absence as loss rather than merely inconvenience.

What if water were understood not just as something we require to survive, but as something we genuinely want - for the quality it adds to community life, the recreation and restoration it enables, the spiritual dimensions it carries across almost every human culture, the economic vibrancy it brings to the places it flows freely and cleanly? That reframing would not diminish the essential nature of water. It would deepen it and unlock a very different quality of human investment in protecting and stewarding it.

Indigenous communities, Cindy reflects, understood this intuitively. They made decisions about water and land as community decisions - not just practical infrastructure choices but expressions of who they were and what they valued. The wisdom the water sector most needs right now may be to find its way back to that understanding, and carry it forward into the complexity of the world we actually live in.

Thirty-nine years in water have given Cindy Wallis-Lage a clarity that only depth of experience produces. The answers the sector needs are not always in front of us - many of them are behind us, in the knowledge systems that modern infrastructure quietly set aside. Wisdom, in her framing, is the courage to ask why, the humility to hold our assumptions lightly, and the vision to see water not just as a service to be delivered, but as a connector of communities, of generations, of the human spirit to the earth it depends on.