Governments Get The Advice They Pay For

As my quest to obtain reimbursement of not insignificant travel expenses owed to me by the European Commission enters its seventh month, a couple of things have occurred to me: not only are governments of all descriptions and flavours completely out of touch with small business, but they undoubtedly also get the quality of expert advice that they pay for.

Back in the early part of the year I gave up two and a half days, unpaid, to attend a European Commission Science and Technology foresight workshop in Brussels, organised by Anne Glover, the EC Chief Scientific Advisor. The aim of the workshop was to scope the potential impacts of disruptive technologies so that European funding could focus on areas that would create the greatest benefits for European society. This was surely a worthy aim, but I believe that the execution reveals a fundamental flaw at the heart of such policy consultations.

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At least I got to travel on lovely Brussels trams, even if the EC hasn’t made good on its promise to pay expenses.

Originally I was invited to address the gathering on developments in smart and sustainable cities, which was to be a short scene setting piece along with contributions from other experts from a wide variety of fields. In the end however, the workshop format was changed and I ended up, along with the other invited experts, merely contributing to discussion groups where we were outnumbered about 6 to 1 by euro-apparatchiks of one form or another.

This was a moment of revelation for me: The people who advise governments through such consultations are either from other institutions or from large businesses, not the people who really know about the issues; the pioneering small businesses. The average small business leader generally has more pressing concerns, such as ensuring continuing revenue and the ability to pay staff, to participate in unrelated, unpaid activity. Thus, unless policymakers are prepared to pay for the time of experts, the vast majority of people that they hear from will be those either paid to push a particular agenda or otherwise seeking influence.

This issue becomes increasingly problematic when it comes to trying to anticipate the impacts of new and potentially disruptive technologies. Disruption occurs when innovation leads to a revolutionary way of doing things, replacing the current business, social or policy paradigm. Disruption is impossible to predict from the viewpoint of the current paradigm which is embodied in current policy and established business practice. What I noticed in particular during the foresight workshop, was that many participants were simply regurgitating received wisdom, but the real insights came from the independently thinking small businesspeople, often from alternative fields.

The UK Technology Strategy Board (now rebranding as Innovate UK) does pay experts to help in seeking out innovation, at least through evaluating bids for public funding. The pay rates offered don’t actually cover the opportunity cost of the time commitment, but at least they allow us to convince ourselves that participation is not to the entire detriment of our businesses. The fact that we are paid experts also, I believe, engenders goodwill when it comes to our giving pro-bono support to help scope future competitions and contribute to the organisation’s wider aims.

On another tack, UK Government is regularly heard to lament the lack of innovation in publicly procured projects. It often blames this on the failure of SMEs to engage in public procurement, whilst continuing to set barriers to entry that preclude many SMEs based on finances and size of business. Looking at this picture as a whole, is it any wonder that so many small businesspeople are entirely disengaged from the public sector?

So, my message to governments and other policy organisations is that, if you want to receive meaningful advice and support from the expert small business community then you need to engage meaningfully with us, rather than simply expecting to be able to exploit us when it suits you and ignore us otherwise.

Maybe one day the European Commission will finally cough up my travel expenses and I’ll be so grateful for small mercies that I will be flooded afresh with goodwill towards governmental institutions. On the other hand, maybe the offhand way in which they have repeatedly dismissed my concerns mean that I might just continue to feel that my goodwill has been callously exploited.

Curating Place 2 – Reflections

Last week I was happy to join several teams of architects in a site visit to Fall Hill Quarry in Derbyshire, the location for the first project to be imagined by Curating Place. Old, abandoned industrial sites such as quarries always make me feel somber, mainly for the loss of the skills and productivity that they represent. I am also desolated by the impact we have made on the natural landscape and invigorated by the restorative power of nature in about equal measure. I believe that channelling such emotional responses will be key to the success of any development at Fall Hill.

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All architecture is designed to be experienced, but it seems to me that in commercial architecture this is so often reduced to a narrow palette of visual appliqué. Yet we all know what it is to be moved by truly great architecture.

I often refer to architecture as requiring a ‘business plan’. By this I don’t mean a bald accounting of rental income versus construction cost. Instead, I mean designers must understand and empathise with their public to create an offering that will be genuinely attractive. To do this the design must expand beyond the simple physical stuff of building and engage with social and humanistic issues to deliver both service and a truly meaningful experience. Only this rounded approach will lead to the architecture enduring. Vitruvius had it right all along, we just seem to have forgotten it in the rush to simple commodity.

People will pay handsomely to create memories that will last them a lifetime. Think about your own experiences and what you are prepared to pay. It could be enduring a night in the rain and mud to hear your favourite band, or a month’s salary for a meal in a Michelin starred restaurant. On the other hand, no-one would consider MacDonald’s or Burger King as providing a great experience and so they are reduced to competing with each other over price. If our creations fail to provide memorable experiences they will simply become commodities to be traded at lowest cost, but otherwise ignored.

The reality is that all buildings need a purpose and, more often than not, a large part of that purpose is to generate revenue. True, there are examples of grand 18th Century follies, which apparently have no purpose, but that is of course far from the truth. Follies were built with the specific purpose of creating experiences. If the conjunction of architecture and business in the modern world can offer experiences that exceed expectation then customers will not only return in the future, they will tell their friends, thus ensuring the success of the business and the architecture.

I have come across many developers and developments that labour under the misapprehension ‘build it and they will come’. This is a disastrous fallacy, as has been demonstrated by numerous Millennium Commission funded projects from the National Centre for Popular Music to the Millennium Dome. No, we must only build what we know will prove to be attractive and enduring. This actually requires some long, hard thinking about the people who will use our designs, what they need, what they want and what might surprise and delight them. Once you have identified and designed the means to delight your customers then you will have developed a ‘business plan’ that will sustain your architecture.

Curating Place

I had the pleasure recently of being invited to help out at the formation of a new social enterprise: Curating Place. Curating Place aims to support young construction professionals with a platform to both work and learn their crafts. This platform will cut across the traditional divisions between conceiving and making and will be funded from any means except the traditional development finance model.

The first activity organised by Curating Place was a design charrette to re-examine the idea of Country House in relation to a site at Fall Hill Quarry in Derbyshire. The scale of the ambition to do things differently, set out by Ashley and Darren, founders of Curating Place really got me thinking about how things could be, rather than how things will continue to be in the absence of visionaries like these two.

One of the requisites for new country houses under present planning controls is to do something exceptional in the sphere of sustainability. Ashley and Darren have stated an ambition that the development at Fall Hill should be Off-Grid if possible, meaning of course some degree of self sufficiency. However the conjunction of ideas contained in the overall ambition of Curating Place really got me thinking about what could it mean to be truly Off-Grid in the 21st Century.

I believe that we often bandy terms such as Off-Grid without really stopping to examine the true meaning and implications of such terms. To me the term Grid implies any rigidly structured network. Traditionally a grid is comprised of perpendicular elements and so convergence is impossible. Recently, Grid has come to mean the central delivery of services such as electricity and water or the interconnectedness of central financial systems. So I wondered what other grids could affect future development?

Here then are some grids that I believe we really should think about a bit more deeply in relation to future development:

The Energy Grid

By Energy Grid we mean the centralised supply of fuel and power. Going Off-Grid is of course quite different from simply going Carbon Neutral which, typically, relies on the Energy Grid to absorb surplus generation and deliver new energy to meet our peak demand. Clearly therefore, going Off-Grid requires local energy storage to deliver the necessary temporal shift. The expense of storage technologies requires a complete re-think about how we actually use energy, rather than using Carbon Accountancy to simply gloss over our continuing energy profligacy. In the future we will need to be much more aware of, and tap into, the natural energy flows around us.

The Water Grid

To be Off-Grid means that we must also address how we use water, where it will come from and how we will dispose of sewage. Traditionally we would tap the water table with wells to supply us with fresh water and utilise the biology of the land surface to treat effluent before it reaches the water table once again. Developing within a quarry, below the level of the general land surface and closer to the water table raises intriguing questions about water management, which are directly relevant to cities which have little green land surface to absorb effluents. Clearly we will need to be much smarter in creating closed loops of water and nutrient flows in future development.

The Resource Grid

The network that serves the extraction, processing and transportation of building materials and components has a substantial, mostly hidden impact. We are starting to learn about these impacts through measurement of the embodied Carbon, but this is only one small aspect of the total impacts which may include toxic emissions, environmental persistence or land degradation. As a first step, perhaps we could incorporate the concept of material miles alongside measures of embodied carbon to encourage the use of locally found materials and the preservation of the traditional craft skills to convert them.

The Financial Grid

We are all now confined by a Grid of debt which keeps drawing tighter. Debt enabled the rich to become richer whilst distracting the poor with instant gratification consumerism. Without the need to pay bankers’ bonuses, we could probably still exist on the basis of trading what we have for what we have not. Skills and materials are both tradable commodities and some Transition Towns are establishing their own currencies to promote such trading within their local economies. Peer to Peer lending represents the ultimate disruption to the traditional banking system, and ordinary individuals can now become business angels, as communications technology allows us to connect with far wider opportunities.

The Social Grid

Peer to Peer services, such as crowd funding, shared ownership and social networks, are rapidly undermining the rigid Grid of the capitalist social structure. Owning a car or a lawnmower is becoming almost pointless as you can now borrow these (or rent them at low cost) whenever needed, without incurring the cost of ownership. The construction of traditional housing is one of the most fundamental demonstrations of society based upon exchange and barter. In past times when a family needed to build a house their neighbours would all help, knowing that the favour would be returned, thus engendering community. Real life social networks, when individuals strive towards a common goal, are even more valuable than currency.

The Eco Grid

The Eco-System is the essential network that sustains life, providing us with oxygen, water and food whilst absorbing our waste (mostly). For generations we have pillaged the Eco-System with little thought for what appeared to be an infinite resource. Now we realise that our profligacy will haunt us for generations. We need to get off our rigid Grid of thinking about development on the one hand and environmental protection on the other and aim for convergence between human activity and the Eco-System. As designers, we must put biodiversity, natural resources and waste management at the forefront of our thinking, and I don’t mean just the odd bit of green roof green-wash.

So, perhaps, we could take Off-Grid to mean 21st Century development that is not reliant on centrally delivered services or pre-conceived intelligence, which matches people with opportunities outside the conventional socio-financial structure and which allows convergence of ideas and outcomes between traditionally conflicted spheres.That sounds to me like a proper ideal for the establishment of a new enterprise such as Curating Place.

What I Learned This Week

This week, well actually over the last few weeks, I have learned that the UK construction industry is incredibly conservative, even more than I previously realised. I’ve also learned that the younger generation of professionals appears to be conditioned by received wisdom without necessarily examining the issues for themselves. Any challenge to the sacred cows of construction is seen as an affront and not an opportunity to learn and improve. I find this very worrying for the future of our industry.

Those that follow my blog or tweets will know that I am not afraid to express my opinions. In fact it is one of the main reasons that Building Design included me in their ranking of influential people a couple of years ago. But I am finding that activism for change is falling on increasingly deaf ears in construction. The mainstream construction industry seems to be losing the ability to think about the issues, particularly when these involve unwelcome truths or wicked problems.

It started a couple of weeks ago, when I found myself in dinner jacket and black tie in the debating chamber of the Cambridge Union, which is modelled on the House of Commons, as part of a team arguing against the suggestion that “BIM is the Answer”. I chose to challenge two BIM dictums: that it will lead to more innovation and that it will generate greater collaboration. Lets be clear, I believe that BIM will be immensely helpful to the industry, but not in those ways.

Firstly, innovation is disruptive. Innovations come along and change the paradigm. Therefore it is not possible to model any innovation within the existing paradigm. That is why BIM cannot possibly stimulate innovation. A building information model can only be built from the existing paradigm and therefore true innovation is excluded from the modelled environment by its very nature.

Secondly, any technology that requires people to spend more and more time behind computers is a natural barrier to creative collaboration. Collaboration requires quality face to face time. Innovative businesses such as Apple and Ideo structure their teams to provide as much face to face contact time as possible to spark ideas which lead to innovation.

Counter arguments from the audience simply reiterated the cliches that BIM provides a less costly environment for innovation than bricks and mortar and that working on a common model equals collaboration.

I think that this reveals the complete misunderstanding in construction of what innovation really means. At The Atkins Christmas Debate on Innovation and Education it was clear that innovation was being defined by engineers as incremental improvement, not disruptive change. It is true that BIM will help deliver incremental improvement for construction, but that is not enough to be called innovation.

Construction teams are divided in order to drive down what is perceived as unnecessary expense. This is a barrier to collaboration so we invent management structures (of which BIM is one) to overcome it. As the management structures become more onerous we need to deploy staff simply to fulfil their demands. BIM is already the preserve of specialists that may never even meet each other. That is not collaboration.

Then last week we had the online Saint Gobain debate on whether there is a useful definition of a sustainable building. The discussion was wide ranging and should have provoked some genuine reflection on what it means to be sustainable in the 21st Century. In the end, the audience voted that there is a useful definition of sustainable building, even though nobody had been able to identify what it was. Once again the debate audience appeared to reject the opportunity to re-examine the issues but cleaved to the status quo.

I was on the losing side in both cases, but that is not what has made me sore (well only a little). No, rather, it is the retrenchment in the face of argument that concerns me most. As with climate change, we have almost reached a point where BIM and sustainability have become ideologies. The supporters and opponents of these positions become retrenched in response to any contrary argument and real debate about the issues is suppressed.

There have been other instances recently that have reinforced my jaded views. I can’t reveal confidential information but suffice to say I was invited to offer my opinion on a scheme only to find that the designers were not willing to discuss the issues, only to assert that their solution was sustainable despite evidence to the contrary.

Labelling buildings or construction tools as something they are not (or may be only a little) as pre-emptive defence against antagonists seems to have become prevalent. Has our industry become so beaten down that we now see every opportunity as a threat?

BIM has enough going for it already without making inflated claims to its capability. Sustainability is so wide ranging as to enable us to improve performance in so many ways, yet we still label buildings on the smallest justification. The fact that we have these tools and capabilities shouldn’t prevent us from striving to do better. Lets call a thing a thing and not pretend that it is more or less than it actually is.

(Actually politicians seem to think that they have magical powers that allow them to change the nature of something by calling it something else. This can be the only reason why the new Part L, which is to be enacted in April 2014, is called Part L 2013.)

The construction industry has been an amazing place to work for the last 25 years. It could be even more amazing in the future, but we need to stop hiding our heads, address the difficult truths and get on with making a real difference. Or am I just getting old and grumpy?

Saint Gobain Debate Final

This is it. The final arguments are up on the Saint Gobain Debate Site, along with guest comments from Jon Bootland. The voting is still neck and neck so please make up your own mind.

I believe this debate has been really helpful in flushing out issues that we in construction must address. The debated question is somewhat ambiguous and the arguments deliberately provocative. We’ve received terrific contributions, which have extended the argument beyond what the debaters could have managed. The voting has been neck and neck throughout, which suggests that opinion really is divided.

Re-reading the arguments and contributions, there is one thing that stands out for me: the confusion over what sustainability actually means. We have debated various sub-sets of meaning but still have reached no useful definition of what a sustainable building is.

We’ve discussed rating systems which focus on impacts of constructing and/or operating a building. But these don’t address whether a building will be a benefit or a burden to society. Whether it will be loved and endure, or be hated and demolished. Whether it promotes wellbeing amongst its occupants and users. Local plans address some social and economic issues, but do not address indicators such as ONS’s national wellbeing or BRE’s societal cost of poor housing.

It is hard to evaluate these intangible, checklist unfriendly, issues. But we must confront these truths if we are to make the transition to a sustainable construction industry.

Most certainly we need to improve our understanding of building performance and the prediction models so that they better reflect actual outcomes. We must improve the education and skills of construction professionals and equip ourselves to tackle these issues. Then we must improve our communications in order to present truthful information about building performance in a useful way.

These however, are simply the business improvement actions required of a progressive 21st Century industry. Merely doing what is necessary will not transform us into a sustainable construction industry.

We should not delude ourselves that the transition to genuinely sustainable construction will be easy or cheap. It will require conviction and commitment.

Would a simple definition of a sustainable building be useful anyway? I think not.

Sustainability does not arise from a label applied to buildings. Sustainable is not something you do, sustainable is something that you are. Sustainability is an ethos, a thought process. Sustainability informs everything you do.

Creating ‘sustainable’ labels incentivises us to strive towards that particular goal, often at the expense of other significant issues. As long as we persist in labeling buildings using checklists, we will promote cherry-picking from a limited range of issues, glorifying a few good features to conceal the bad.

Delft University compared environmental rating systems and discovered that it was toughest to get a high score under BREEAM. This should be a mark of excellence. Instead it means that LEED has become the system of choice as it is simpler to gain the highest rating. The effort that should go into sustainable design has been diverted into effort to find the lowest hurdle.

To become a sustainable industry, we need to apply our professionalism and our imagination to eliminating all which is damaging or degrading.

We need to identify all possible harms that could arise from construction, operation and inhabitation of buildings and work to eliminate them.

We need to strive for Zero Harm. Zero Harm to the biosphere that makes life possible on this planet. Zero Harm to our fellow humans, including those as yet unborn. Of course my dream of truly Zero Harm construction is practically unachievable. But surely it is our duty as 21st Century professionals to get as close as we can.

Construction is good at managing risk. Why can’t we apply the same processes to managing harm?

Rather than using sustainability checklists that only address the common features of buildings, we would create harm mitigation plans bespoke to each building project. The development team could clearly demonstrate their understanding of the true range of possible impacts and the measures that they have taken to mitigate them. Such an approach also provides the essential flexibility required for design compromise, which is lacking in some of the checklist ratings.

If Sherlock Holmes were alive today, I am certain that he would concur: “When we have eliminated all possible harm, that which remains must be sustainable”. Isn’t that worth striving for?