Thrive In Construction with Darren Evans
'Thrive in Construction' is the only podcast that delves into the personal journeys of sustainability leaders and innovators in the construction industry across the UK. Our show differentiates by offering unscripted, passion-fueled conversations that go beyond the buzzwords to the heart of what's driving the industry forward. It's tailored for aspiring professionals, seasoned experts, and anyone with a keen interest in the sustainable evolution of construction. We're here at a time when the call for sustainable development is not just a trend, but a societal imperative, empowering listeners to build a career that contributes to a greener future.
Thrive In Construction with Darren Evans
Ep. 68 What do Engineers Get Wrong About Sustainability? CIBSE President Shares Her Secrets to Leadership
In this episode of Thrive in Construction, Darren sits down with Fiona Cousins the global Chief Operating Officer for Total Design at Arup. Fiona shares her inspiring journey from being one of the few women in engineering during the 1980s to becoming the 2024/2025 president of CIBSE (The Chartered Institution of Building Services Engineers).
Fiona discusses the challenges and opportunities for women in construction, the evolution of career paths in engineering, and the critical importance of situational leadership. She also advocates for sustainable and resilient building designs that not only ensure safety and comfort but also promote well-being, environmental responsibility, and the health of communities.
As Fiona explains, engineering is about more than just technical expertise - it’s about understanding the broader context of the problems you're solving and staying curious and generous in your approach. Don’t miss this insightful conversation about the future of construction, the impact of building performance, and the power of leadership in shaping a better, more sustainable world.
Key Topics in This Episode:
- Career journey in engineering and overcoming gender barriers in the 1980s
- Leadership insights: Situational leadership and empowering teams
- The role of engineers in sustainability and building performance
- How engineers can shape the future of the built environment
- The importance of lifelong learning and expanding your skillset
Links:
Fiona Cousin's LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/fionacousins/
CIBSE LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/cibse/
CIBSE Website: https://www.cibse.org/
Darren Evans Consultancy: https://darren-evans.co.uk/
Darren: https://darrenevans.komi.io/
So my theme has been around building performance reimagined, which is about some of the ideas we've already talked about. If you are SIBSE, then you are in some way obliged to think about the role of buildings and building services on the broadest social canvas. This idea of there is change around us and actually what buildings and building services are really for is for the health, resilience, well-being of communities and people that you build them for it's not, not really about anything else.
Speaker 1:And so if you kind of wind it all the way back to that and then you think about what needs to happen into the future and what should buildings really be like, we, we wrote a report very early on in the year right before the year actually we published it as part of the launch and said that actually, if you're thinking about buildings and you're thinking about buildings in the future, you should be thinking about creating a variety of spaces within them so that they can change either across the day or across the lifetime of the building, so you can use them for different purposes. And an example that I use is in the pandemic. How hard did your house work as a gym, office, family space I mean, it was for everything right and you used space in a very different way over the course of the day in the pandemic than we had traditionally done. A lot of people just kind of use their houses as dormitories for some part of the week.
Speaker 1:There's a piece about variety, there's a piece about connectedness. So as we move into a decarbonized world, we're very used to this idea that a utility is something that you buy and it is guaranteed to be delivered. But as we move to a more decentralized grid, perhaps as we collect water and certainly as we move into the digital world, you get more of an idea that a building is a node on a network and it might supply sometimes and it might absorb, it might use sometimes, and so if you start thinking about a building as a connected node on a network, as opposed to a leaf on a branch, you have a very different reaction or interaction with the systems that are around you. So there's a piece about connectedness and some of the things that I think we need to do are really hard to change because they're deeply embedded. They're embedded by contracts, they're embedded by custom, they're embedded by the way that we manage risk, they're embedded by the way the money comes from, they're embedded in the way in which we put buildings together. So this idea of connectedness is perhaps a way of trying to break down some of those things, and there's a piece about readiness.
Speaker 1:We you know people live through disasters and actually your building can support you better or worse, depending on how well that building is constructed and what you have thought about in terms of disasters coming. So when we've talked about sustainability, we kind of assume that everything's always going to be the same. But when you think about resilience it's like everything's always going to be the same and then, every now and then, you're going to have a hurricane or an earthquake, or probably not a tornado, but a hurricane or an earthquake or a flood or something, and actually it's quite predictable. You probably know, for where your building is, what is most likely, and so if you think about what is most likely, you can plan, you can design your building for that. So instead of designing solely for life safety, you might design for continuous operation after that event has actually begun. So there's a piece about readiness.
Speaker 1:That's our third axis, and then the last piece is about emergence, and for me this is about as things change. Things change so you have new ideas. So we didn't think embodied carbon was important 10 years ago and now we spend all our time thinking not all our time, but a big proportion of our time thinking about embodied carbon and the way in which moving from an operational carbon world to an embodied carbon world changes the way in which you think about design is huge. As a structural engineer, as a mechanical engineer, it changes even the sort of locus of, of real activity from the mechanical engineers, which is where it was when it was all about operational energy, to the structural engineers, which is where it all is when you're thinking about embodied carbon, because their stuff is the heavy bit of the building. So so this idea that their ideas change, so the framework that we developed connected, variety, connectedness, readiness and emergence is sort of like if you were thinking about your building into the future and you're thinking about building a new building or you're thinking about doing a retrofit. Perhaps thinking along those axes or along those dimensions would help you get a better brief. And if you can get a better brief that you can put into your capital project, then you can hold your capital project team accountable for the delivery of on-time, on-budget and all of the other things that you put into that brief, and then you should be able to get a better operational building. So those are the ideas that I was putting out there.
Speaker 1:I also really think that engineers have agency right. What are the biggest places that we use carbon? What are the biggest places that we emit carbon in operations? And it's all to do with buildings and building services. There's industry as well, but the industry is carbon and steel. It's like where's that going. Some of it's going into industry, but a lot of that is going into buildings and the built environment. So, as buildings engineers, we have massive agency, because the stuff that we use, the materials that we extract and the environments that we create impact people directly and they impact all of the things that we're worried about in our changing environment directly. So, while you might not be thinking about that as you're sizing the beam or figuring out how thick the ductwork sheet metal should be on your piece, actually there is a straight line, relatively straight line that you can draw from the decision you're making now to the broader impact that you have in the world.
Speaker 1:What I would like engineers building services engineers in particular to have is a sense of that agency, a fact that they actually can control some of the things maybe not very much, but that you can get a sense of purpose by controlling the bit that you control. So that's the sort of second thing that I wanted to get out of the presidency. And the third thing is this idea that careers are long. When I first started, people were drawing on paper and it was a pretty manual process. The whole thing was a pretty manual process and in the time that I've been working, we've moved from that yeah, it's going to be kind of like this to oh, let's do a parametric analysis against the outputs that we think that we want to have, with the factors that we think that are important. And here's 55 ways that it could possibly be and here's how we might evaluate them in order to be able to choose.
Speaker 1:Just the very way of thinking about the things that we might produce have the potential to be quite different.
Speaker 1:Sometimes they're not, sometimes it's going to be something like this, but we have the opportunity to think about things in different ways, and because things have changed that fast over my lifetime and I'm sure they're going to continue to change over the rest of my lifetime, that idea that stuff changes quite quickly, so you always have to be prepared for the next bit, is something that I would also like our engineers to be thinking about.
Speaker 1:How are you ready for what's next year, or 10 years time, or 20 years time, because it won't be the exact same as what you're doing now, and that's something that is that I think as an engineering institution, if you want to be attractive to people who want to have careers, it's like you have to position them well for the 40 years that they are expected to be in the business.
Speaker 1:So those are the things that I was hoping to get out of it, and they all come from this idea of building performance reimagined. What should the building performance be like? And then how do engineers have to be and think in order to be able to achieve that? And what I'm hoping that I'll achieve kind of as legacy is that we built some. We are building some of those ideas into the CIBSI Forward Strategy. It happens to be a strategy year, so we're thinking about how do we build in that kind of horizon scanning, thinking about the next thing making sure we're positioning for people to have good and long careers in building services as part of the building services and as part of SIBSE's kind of forward look.
Speaker 2:And so where does your influence reach as the president currently, and how does that work when you look at the other leadership roles within SIBSE as an organization?
Speaker 1:So the lovely thing about being president is that you gain a platform which you can use as much as you can manage right, and I have used it. Uh, yeah, I've used it in every opportunity. In every opportunity that I have been able to use it as an opportunity consistent with having a, consistent with having a day job, um, it is my reach. As much as I would like of course not I want to change the world, um, but it but, but there are places and people that you can reach that and that we have tried to reach through different kinds of podcasts, through things that we've been writing, through presentations that we've had, through conferences that we've put on, through kind of just putting it in the water and seeing if anybody is able to kind of pick it up and run with it.
Speaker 2:What's been your biggest surprise since being president?
Speaker 1:I don't think I've really been surprised. I think that the organisation did a pretty good job of preparing me for what was going to come. A pretty good job of preparing me for, um, what was going to, what was going to come, um, yeah, so I don't think, I don't think I'm actually surprised the reason I went down the road of using the word surprise is your.
Speaker 2:Your role is is very much involved with people and, um, I know people can be predictable, but I also know people can be unpredictable, and people can surprise in a good way and also in a bad way. And so I just wondering, with the influence that you have and the platforms that you've been on, I wonder if there's an outcome to say, oh, maybe that happened quicker than I thought, or if I didn't think it would go that way. I'm surprised I met this person. I'm just wondering if there's anything more from the people side of things from the people side of things.
Speaker 1:So I think I don't think I was surprised by this, but I was really pleased to see when we were writing the report and putting the thinking together I got an enormous amount of really strong support from people within Arup and within SIBSE. People got really excited about the idea and actually gave time and thought and expertise that improved the report way beyond what I was really thinking about when I first envisioned it. So I was definitely not exactly surprised but really it was brilliant to see some of the work that people sort of helped and did, having seen the ideas and thinking that it was a good idea and thinking that that was a way forward. That was very encouraging at the time because it was.
Speaker 1:The building performance reimagined report is not a report that Sibsy would normally have put out. It says it right there at the beginning. This is not your technical guidance based on years of best practice. This is asking you to reimagine the future and I didn't know how how that was going to go and I would say that it has gone better than I. It's gone better than it might have and I've been really pleased what by what people have seen in it and then been able to take away from it, because I never had an idea that I would be able to tell people how it was going to be in the future. What I wanted people to do was to give people a little bit of agency and a little bit of inspiration for thinking about the future and then taking it in whatever direction they wanted to take it.
Speaker 2:Taking this back towards the beginning of the conversation, you mentioned your father was an engineer and you were inspired by him. The beginning of the conversation you mentioned your father was an engineer and you were inspired by him. What would you say was the best piece of advice that you've ever received from your father? What has stayed with you?
Speaker 1:So there are a few things right. I think a very good piece of advice he gave me was to go and work for Arup. He said if you're going to be an engineer, you could at least be a good one and you'll learn how to be a good one there. So that was a pretty I mean it's a pretty long lasting piece of advice. It turns out to have been good advice for me, I think. The other thing that he was always pretty good at saying and thinking through so you look forward, you deal with the situation within which you are and then you go forward from that point and it's a pretty engineering kind of point of view. It's like whatever the problem is in front of you, that's the problem that you're solving, because that's the problem that's there to be solved. And I don't think he ever quite put it that way.
Speaker 2:but I think that there was a really clear kind of attitude of mind that you know you look forwards, not backwards, but you look broadly, because actually that's the, that's the right thing to do when I have listened to you and heard your story, and especially when you were speaking about developing your career, starting your career off in the 80s, and the females that I've had come onto the podcast and talk about their own journey Some of it has been within the M&E side of construction and some of the other sides, you know it's really apparent to me that there is a lot of people that stand on your shoulders metaphorically as opposed to physically, and so I'm just wondering now what advice you would have to those people that are benefiting from the path that you have forged in your early career, as they are forging their own path for, for the, for the next generation coming on. What advice would you have for them?
Speaker 1:So I don't think the advice is particularly gendered and I don't want it to sound like follow your passion, because I don't think that that's quite the advice that I want to give. But I think you should do the thing that you're interested in and you should get really good at it. And then, when you've got really good at it, you should understand or start thinking about the fact that having that one sliver of knowledge, capability, mastery, doesn't actually allow you to solve the whole problem. So you need to find the adjacent thing that allows you to do a little bit more. So, as an example, you might start as a mechanical engineer and you might realize that actually you have to understand a bit more about electrical engineering in order to understand something. And then you might realize that you need to know a little bit more about controls engineering. And then you might realize that actually, although you're now really competent across all of the pieces that you need to operate your equipment, actually if you want to win the battle with somebody about why you should spend more money for the better thing that you know is better because you've got this expertise, you actually need a whole bunch of persuasion and social skills that are they're a whole extra body of knowledge. It's not a natural thing. They're learned experiences, so you have to actually then figure out, okay, so how do I get that bit of skill and how do I get?
Speaker 1:So I think the advice that I would get is get really good at the thing that you start out out at, because it it will give you the confidence, because you will prove to yourself that you can get really good at something and then start adding pieces to it.
Speaker 1:Because, although that may always be the thing that you are deep in, actually the thing that allows you to get things done in the world is the breadth that comes from having a good understanding of what other people are trying to do and some of those things you might actually go quite deep on, because it turns out to be a useful skill for you in delivering your core, but in all cases it will help you get the thing that you're deep in done much, much more easily if you are curious about and curious enough about the things that other people do to acquire enough expertise that you can actually have a sensible conversation with them and understand what it is that they're trying to do and how that kind of works. So you know the language and you can. My hands is really about T-shaped people, but I don't think that you should only have one leg for your capital T. I think actually you need a series of them, and some of them may go really deep and really narrow, and some of them may be a little fatter and wider.
Speaker 2:What would you say is needed for a leader to be really effective in a leadership role?
Speaker 1:I think it does depend a bit on what it is you're trying to lead and where you're trying to go and what the situation that you're in is. So if you're in a place that's pretty messy, then I think that what a leader needs is a really clear sense of direction and the optimism stroke, realism stroke, sense of direction to the optimism stroke, realism stroke, sense of direction to head in a in a single direction and, in many cases, in in many cases, it's the decisiveness that is needed, not necessarily the correct direction, although it's good to have the correct direction as you, as you go forward in really high performing teams that are already heading in the right direction. I think that the question of leadership is how do you add value to valuable people? So there's a sort of what are the things that I need to do or can enable in order to get these people more empowered? If you're in a situation of crisis for some reason, it's like what needs to be resolved in order to reestablish confidence amongst the people who are there. So I would say that leadership is essentially situational.
Speaker 1:I think that my thoughts about it are that the answer may be in the room and not in your head, that listening to other people is often a really good way of figuring your way through a particular problem, and that at some point, decisiveness and clarity is needed, whether that's for empowerment or to give people structure or to set the direction that you want to head in. There are, you know, there are some things that you kind of have to do to actually be leading, but how you get there and what you know the core things that you think and believe about people, I think, become important, and for me a lot of that is people are, generally speaking, capable and people are generally speaking, enthusiastic to do the right thing, and if you start from there, actually you can usually have a pretty productive conversation with somebody about the next step or the place that they wanted to go or what it is that they want to do.
Speaker 2:I love that point that you've made about leadership being situational, that you are the only person I've spoken to that has that view and I love that view. The reason I love it is because it aligns for me with the leadership of Winston Churchill in a very unique situation during.
Speaker 2:Second World War. As soon as the war had finished, his leadership was not the type of leadership that the country needed and to me that speaks to that type of situational leadership. And the seasonality maybe not seasonality, maybe it's a cycle, I'm not sure, sure but there are different seasons, different situations that come up where you see leaders become extremely effective under in certain conditions and really less effective in other conditions. Yes, I think that's right.
Speaker 1:uh, I think that you. I think leadership is situational and sometimes what happens to Churchill happens to other people. Right, that they're living in an environment, their head is in an environment that may not be the environment that they are actually in, but I think that people who can see and think through what is needed for this group of people right now, that actually is a skill in and of itself, and actually it's something that I learned kayaking.
Speaker 2:How did you learn that lesson?
Speaker 1:There's a piece in learning to coach kayaking where there's an acronym which is called CLAP, right. So what are the things you need for leadership? You need communication. You need line of sight, which makes more sense on the water than it does in an organization, perhaps literally, but actually line of sight is can you see what's actually going on on the ground? Avoidance it's like, okay, is there a pitfall that I actually need to make myself move around? You know, is there something that we're trying to avoid? And the last bit is the position of maximum usefulness. So where is the place that you put yourself?
Speaker 1:And again on the water, this makes a lot of of sense where's the position that you put yourself that you can actually see and manage the situation as you go through it, and that actually, to me, is kind of a not all of it applies in day-to-day leadership, but the the general ideas you know. Make sure people know what it is you're trying to do and what you're doing, make sure you actually have a proper understanding of the situation, that you avoid the pitfall that is just around the corner and then put yourself in a place that you can continually adjust, is actually a pretty good leadership strategy attitude there's, you know, quite a lot of chat at the moment about psychological safety, so that in order for somebody to be able to learn to do something new which applies to all of the new employees in an organisation or anybody who's still learning a thing, whatever that thing is, is you have to have room to fail. You have to have room to fail safely, both safely for the organisation, as in if you're designing a beam, the beam can't break. You have to have room to fail safely, both safely for the organization, as in if you're designing a beam, the beam can't break. You have to have the environment within which you don't make that kind of mistake. But also, when you don't get it right, how do you use that as a you know?
Speaker 1:I think that the language is a learning experience as opposed to a complete failure experience, so that you can have the opportunity to actually grow, because if you're too afraid of getting it wrong, you're never going to get it right. You're going to go through. You know, in that example of steps one through five, you're going to fail at step three and then you're going to be so scared that you're never going to do steps four or five or when something goes wrong at step four and the situation looks a little bit different and step four doesn't work. You don't know how to respond to it. So I think that that idea about how do you create environments within which people have enough around them so they're not going to fail catastrophically, but have the room to fail in a way that allows them to gain that full mastery- so how do you implement that then?
Speaker 2:and isibsy as an example. So there, are certain things that you really don't want to get wrong, because people's lives are attached to failure, catastrophic failure. But then, like you were saying, that does need to be this place, this place for discovery, and the only way to discover is to make mistakes or get things wrong, because that's part of learning, isn't it? So, within an organization like sibsy, how do you um in in? Your position influence that type of environment yeah.
Speaker 1:So I think, um, the sibsy as an organization has a ceo and it runs, and that's actually not really the role of the president in, not really the role of the president in the organization. The role of the president in the organization is to figure out which is strategic direction. What are the things that the industry is interested in? What are the things that we need? What are the things that we should be talking about in order to make sure that people have long careers? What are the things that we should be talking about in order to make sure that we are to your point and it matters very much to SIBSE making sure that we're building buildings that are safe. Is it that we're trying to create as a profession and for SIBSE, it's about comfortable, safe buildings. In the context of climate change, in the context of other environmental change, in the context of different kinds of social equity and needing to make sure that we achieve it, in the context of biodiversity loss you know there are a series of things and then again in the, in the context of rapid digital change. So there are many things that are kind of changing in the world and the sort of core bit of a of a sibsy piece of work is something you know, something safe and comfortable. But actually safe and comfortable change that safe and comfortable don't really change. But that idea about what you have to do in order to be able to achieve it depends very much on the context, and safe and comfortable may not be enough on their own. It may need to be safe, comfortable, zero net carbon, have some orientation to the community in some way, provide a healthy environment that allows for the promotion of well-being of the people who are inside it. So there's a whole series of other criteria. I think that CIVZE is a great place to advocate for them, because I don't think that clients some clients are brilliant, but many clients want a, you know, a mechanical system or electrical system that you know provides the bare minimum, perhaps if they're a little bit more forward thinking at zero net carbon, and that's actually not enough, right? That doesn't serve society properly, it doesn't get the best value out of the building for people. So there's a piece I would say within the kind of the way in which we design and operate buildings, that doesn't really kind of get to. Buildings are really there to support the health of the people who are within them and the well-being of the societies and communities within which they are. Right that that would be the well-being, resilience of the communities within which they are. That's a kind of five levels deep.
Speaker 1:Why question about why you build a building? But what actually gets surfaced in the market is can you buy me a system at the lowest possible price that just about ticks these boxes? So there's a sort of and those kinds of problems. It's like this is what we're really trying to do, and buildings exist for a really long time and they're really important and they are very expensive and they impact everything we do, because we spend 90 of our life indoors, but at the same time, everybody wants to produce them at the lowest possible cost, as fast as possible and so on.
Speaker 1:So that those are, those are proper design constraints too, but we sometimes miss some of the longer term ones or miss some of the kind of second order effects, because you can't obviously connect um the design of a mechanical system to the health of the people within a building, because lots of other things will impact the health of the building, the health of the people within the building. Did they exercise? What did they have for breakfast? Did they get drunk last night. Too many other things are in that mix, but there are still impacts from the building itself on the health of the occupants within it that we can help design to be better.
Speaker 1:So that was a long and rambling answer. To basically say sibsy's position in the market is is such that actually, because we're not in a contractor situation, we can actually advocate for the full set of design constraints or design criteria for buildings and for buildings in their future context, and so that's really what I've been thinking about in my presidential year I'm just wondering how you advocate for that, because as you're speaking there, I'm reminded of two elements of cost or value that appear to collide with one another to produce something which is a bit messy and confusing.
Speaker 2:So one of them is capital expenditure and the other is operational expenditure, and when those two collide together you get something called value engineering, which in layman's terms is cost cutting, Because the real value is in the operation of the building, it's not in the capital expenditure of the building.
Speaker 1:At least that's the way I view it anyway right so, but when you design a building, there's there's a piece that happens and it's a very high value. It's at the time that you're doing it, it's everything right you're not necessarily even thinking about your operating expenses.
Speaker 1:so I said that you know the the base requirements for a mechanical system are comfortable, at a price the owner can afford sorry, comfortable, carbon efficient. And the third criterion is at a price the owner can afford right. So those become the three things and there's a lot of emphasis on first cost. When you're doing a capital project. Of course there is what else. You know. There are people running those projects who are being held to account on did I bring the building in on time and on budget. Those people are being held to account on did I build the building, did I bring the building in on time and on budget and to some extent, and does it meet the future needs. But they never really get called to account on the future needs because they finish.
Speaker 1:There's a whole set of skills, there's a whole industry there and you hand over and you're in a different set of skills. You're in the facilities management, you're in the operations of the building. You're in a place where you've got whatever you got through this capital process and now you have to operate it and of course, in the capital stage you do analysis to see whether the operating costs are going to be higher or lower, and sometimes you can buy a better bit of kit because its operating expenses are lower, but only sometimes, because sometimes that barrier between capital and operating expenses is so hermetic that you can't actually get the organisation to consider costs before and after. And that's particularly the case when the people who are building the building are not the people who are going to operate the building. So for universities, hospitals, for people who tend to build and then operate, there is a connection between capital and operating. For people who develop and flip, you build something good or not so good and you sell it on and that's your. Your deal is done, it it's all finished. You don't super care about what happens in the next bit. So I would say that there are gaps in the way that we specify building in the capital stage, about the way that they're operated, and there's something in the way that we contract with each other, in the way that we think about buildings, in the way that we you know, the way that we think about buildings, in the way that we you know that capital piece is often the biggest expense that an organisation has for a pretty long period.
Speaker 1:It's not surprising that you bring that very strong cost control, time control elements to it, and I'm really not saying there's anything wrong with that. I think it's absolutely key. It's just if you haven't built in all of the design criteria that you want that it's safe, that it's comfortable, that it promotes the health of people inside it, that it is zero net carbon, that it promotes biodiversity If you haven't built all of that into what the person on the capital side is delivering, you haven't got any of it in the operations phase. So how you make that bridge is, I think, an issue.
Speaker 1:I think the other thing that is an issue and it's not just building services, engineers, it's everywhere in the industry is you design something and you has been in bringing, trying to get those feedback loops into the, into the capital stage and into the design stage, so you actually know whether it's good not not just whether it's good on day one, but whether it's good on day two or day 10 and that there is a there is a feedback loop missing in the industry which I think is kind of important to begin to build, and that there is a there is a feedback loop missing in the industry which I think is kind of important to begin to build. And again, it is easier to talk about these things from the position of sibsy, where I'm not under contract with anybody to do anything, than it is to talk about it from a position within any firm, at any part of the organization, because you're under contract. So you, you're not, you're no longer a kind of seen as an honest broker and that is there's.
Speaker 2:There's so many things in there that I can dive into.
Speaker 2:I I just want to talk about the feedback loop and just bring that back to the kayaking passion that you have.
Speaker 2:Feedback loop when you're kayaking is pretty, pretty short.
Speaker 2:You know if you're on course or not, especially if you're in a rapid, and that feedback loop is super helpful to help you get to where you want to get to safely.
Speaker 2:But not having that but where feedback loops are really long not just buildings but health wise my gorging of all of my easter eggs and a chocolate addiction that I may or may not have is is not helpful for me because the feedback loop is so long that I'm probably not going to feel the effects of that until maybe I'm over the age of 60, maybe, or you know, and I guess what I'm saying is that the shorter the feedback loop is, the more valuable it feels and the more urgency comes up, but the quicker corrective action can be taken. So I'm interested to know if SIBSE are doing anything to try and shorten that feedback loop or if you think that there's something that could be done in the industry to shorten that feedback loop so that, again, using the the kayaking analogy we can steer the course straight instead of going off on a on a tangent which is taking us maybe to the point of no return.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So I think that it's hard to speed up the feedback loop right. In my career the average kind of time from hey there's a new project to the ribbon cutting is about seven years, and that's just for the design and construction phases, not for any of the operations phases. So let's say it would be 10 to get the full feedback. So I think in the kind of capital construction industry it's more difficult to get that feedback.
Speaker 1:The places that you can get that feedback, of course, are if you're doing renovations Is this working and is this working quickly, and actually you're fully in an operational stage at that point. So I think that as we enter a period where building new buildings is not necessarily going to be the thing we're going to do, you begin to see conversations about well, what's the embodied carbon for that? And a lot of that is pushing us to how well and how much of the existing building fabric can we use and how long can we use it for, and I think that that begins to shorten the feedback loop. So I think that you get quicker feedback in the sort of facilities operation, facilities management, operations and maintenance kind of arena. We actually probably need to learn a bit more from that back in the major capital project space.
Speaker 2:need to learn a bit more from that back in the in the major capital project space, the. The thing there that I've just um that's prompted me in that response, is this feedback loop when it comes to things like embodied carbon and working in the new build space versus the retrofit um space. So I'm wondering and and I don't know if you know the answer to this question, I don't but if when we look at the new build that the embodied carbon is built into or the effect is built into the green space that's being built on, and I don't know that that is.
Speaker 1:So there are beginning to be more protocols for how you do the calculation for carbon, especially in the embodied space. But I mean the operational space we've been working through for a little bit, right, and you know where the electricity is coming from and you know what gas does when it burns. So you've got actually a fairly clear idea about what the operational carbon is. And as the grid decarbonizes which it is being, I mean it sounds very passive as we are decarbonising the grid, which in the UK is happening pretty rapidly the embodied carbon becomes. And as buildings electrify again, something that is happening more and more the embodied carbon becomes the huge deal. So SIBSE has been doing work. It worked with a number of other organisations and we were one of the preliminary backers of something called the net zero carbon building standard and that's a kind of set of protocols for what does it actually mean to be net zero? And it includes the embodied carbon and it includes things like the UK metric when does the UK have to be, and what does that count as zero, and what happens if you go slightly better than zero. So that's a piece of work, the other piece, and and that looks at the whole whole building, the other piece of work that SIBSE has specifically done is on TM65, which is again a standard for how you calculate the embodied carbon of building services, which has actually been very successfully rolled out worldwide. So those protocols for how you do that calculation are beginning to be put in place.
Speaker 1:What is still missing a little bit is the data. So what is the embodied carbon of the concrete as delivered to site? Who knows? And it depends on where was it made? How far did it come? Was the cement produced in a low carbon cement type process, of which there are beginning to be some? If it's steel, was the steel produced in a low carbon, a low operational carbon kind of steel plant? So there are many, many variables where you know what was the source material, where did it come from? How was it manufactured? How is it material? Where did it come from? How was it manufactured? How is it delivered? Where was it made? How many times did it move around, wherever, in order to get from different places? Those kinds of pieces of data are hard to get to, but people are becoming more and more interested, because that's where the carbon is at this point that's where the carbon is.
Speaker 2:at this point, can you talk to me, or do you know much more about the involvement that Sibsy have had with defining what net zero is?
Speaker 1:I would say it was probably the beginning of the pandemic, so around about 2020, a few people began to say you know, we're seeing a lot about net zero carbon, but actually the protocol is so weak that it is pretty open to greenwash. And one of those people was somebody who was very active within SIBSE and one of those people is somebody who is very active within LETI, and they kind of got together and started talking about how would we do this? And they pulled together a coalition of ISTructE, sibse, leti, riba, ukgbc, istructe did I say them at the beginning A group of institutions who were very interested in this, and we worked out at the beginning what should the governance be in order to actually make this happen and what kind of consultation process do we need to do. So they they basically put together the organizations, put together an organization that had a governing board, a technical board and a whole series of kind of working groups for different parts of it, and that group then appointed David Partridge to lead it and he helped organize all of these people and efforts into a sort of coherent whole so that there was a lot of industry consultation.
Speaker 1:There was a lot of pretty deep thinking done by the technical committees and the technical steering committee in the background. It probably took about two years of pretty full on work, much of which was funded by the organisations who put people into the technical steering groups, but a lot of which was done through volunteer work of people in the industry who are interested, and all of that was published sometime in the middle of last year and is now being published and rolled out and talked through elsewhere and we're now looking. So there's a standard and there's a method for doing the calculation and now the next piece is how do you actually then get people to measure and verify against that standard?
Speaker 2:and will that be linked to um a future kind of uh part zed of building regulations in the uk? Do you think?
Speaker 1:I don't know the answer to that. I mean, I think the goal of that particular piece of work was to make sure that there were accepted methods and data sources for doing that calculation and things to aim at. Of course, the more that you pick it up and put it and sort of institutionalize it within other organizations or within things that people are required to do, the better it gets because it becomes strengthened.
Speaker 2:And does it have relevance or does it have any potency outside of the UK in terms of its definition?
Speaker 1:It's not currently used anywhere else, but I was at a conference in the US where actually there was a presentation of the US version, the European version and the UK version of this and it was a fairly lightweight comparison because it was a conference panel proceedings, conference panel proceedings. But it was clear that the UK net zero carbon standard is actually probably the most complete of those solutions you know, end to end operational and embodied with some idea about how you would update the data and a really clear sort of setting of the targets and how you might deal with offsets.
Speaker 2:Or you know alternative methods of you know, if you can't get the carbon any lower, what, what kind of an offset is appropriate if any uh is all actually considered by that standard, and the other standards were not so deep I'm just wondering now if you have a message or anything that you really wish that your members would really understand, either with more clarity or with more passion, or with more focus than what they do at the moment, in order to to bring about the change. You mentioned that you want to change the world in order for that change, because I think everyone at the heart of it wants to, wants to change the world for the better right as opposed to for anything else. But but is there anything that comes to mind that that you wish that SIBSE members would just understand with more clarity, with more passion or with more determination?
Speaker 1:yeah, so I think, um, sibse members, but engineers actually, they put the blinders on and they sometimes solve the problem that's in front of them, and I think the thing that I would say is the problem that you're solving needs to be put in a bigger context and you need to be curious about that context and generous with people who don't understand why you're nerding out on that particular bit of it. Do nerd out out, that's what we need you to do, that's part of the job of being an engineer. But but be a little bit generous and a little bit curious around the pieces around you, because those are the things that I think will have you in a career for the rest of your life and they, even if they don't have you in a building services career for the rest of your life, they're all things that you learn about yourself, about design, about problem solving, that become your perspective on how bigger problems are solved, whatever you end up doing that's a fantastic note to end on.
Speaker 2:I've really loved speaking with you and learning from you. I appreciate you coming onto the show and, yeah, just excited to um, yeah to to share the message that you have with the, with the audience that we have.
Speaker 1:Thank you for having me.
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