Fifth root problem: We continue to do business as usual but change accelerates
About taking personal responsibility and becoming a agend of change to break the pattern and avoid business as usual.
Many people I talk to admit to not being comfortable with how the industry works and how we impact the environment but, like me, at the beginning of my career, focus on something else and postpone any action. Including myself, it seems we live in an introverted time - in German, it’s like the Zeitgeist of the Biedermeier - focusing on the family, domesticity, and shying away from the complexity of our world. When we change, we take small steps and ignore second- or third-order consequences.
Some of my friends recently bought a Tesla, not because they think it’s a nice car, but because of their ecological consciousness. At least, this is their rationalization. A view of them looked more holistically at it and bought a solar panel to charge the battery. Depending on the country you live in, the electricity mix is different. E.g. in Switzerland, 76% of the electricity comes from renewable sources. Still, having this information is not enough. We need to know which renewable sources. Can it be adapted to the demand, or is it only available during the day? Is nuclear power considered renewable or not? And quickly, we have a complex situation with no easy and fast answers. It is much easier to do the mental shortcut. Cars with gas are bad, and cars with batteries are good. The main question of do we need a car, or is a car with one to two tonnes the best option to transport an 80 kg human, is mostly not asked.
The same happens with a timber building. Because wood grows in the forest, it’s automatically green, a suitable material. Ignore where the wood comes from - ignoring how it’s glued and, most importantly, why the building was built in the first place.
Change happens or needs to happen on two levels. Firstly, we need to consider why and what we build. Secondly, on how we design and build. It sounds banal, but worth repeating. We build because somebody wants to do something with the building - the empty space between the walls and slabs. We build for the user, and because every building is a part of our social space, there is always a tradeoff between the user's needs and society’s needs. Till now, the go-to option to build was a new construction. But in the future, we need to explore the two other solutions of not building at all and finding organizational solutions as well as reusing, refurbishing, and renovating existing buildings. A new construction can’t be the go-to solution anymore.
Working as a client rep, we had to renovate a building for university use. The team that won the competition to refurbish a storage building from 1920 wanted to demolish the slabs after learning that the norms for static and acoustic can’t be fulfilled with the existing ones. The project manager on the client’s side used a lot of his energy to question the architect’s solutions. He rightly asked: “How can it be that this was a storage building with a 1000kg/m2 load, and now it won’t be able to support even 300kg/m2? Something with the norms must be wrong, we need a different approach to calculate it. And he was right. By doing some tests and using a more accurate calculation method, the structural engineer could show the fitness of the construction. Secondly, he asked if we need to fulfill the norms for impact sound insulation in a university building. Would it not be better to have a good acoustic room? Because of asking these two bold questions, we could keep the existing slabs and prevent 1500m3 of concrete waste as well as avoid 2400m3 of newly poured concrete. That equals 480K Kg of C02 or roughly driving a distance of 3.2 M km by car.
The third question he asked was: How can it be that the building is protected, that we have more of a cooling problem due to the internal loads, and we still should do an insulation with Expanded Polystyrene (EPS) on the outside of the building? And he was right again, by using simulations, a natural cooling concept and a aerated concrete as internal insulation in combination with the right facad coating that let’s steam out it was possible to build.
The easy way for him would have been to follow the architect's recommendation and do business as usual. Their proposal followed the norm and was “right”. Nobody would have questioned a building with new concrete slabs, state-of-the-art insulation, and impact insulation. Instead, the project manager chose the difficult way, questioned the solution, took personal responsibility, and found a better, more sustainable solution. Here, the question emerges: How can we scale this approach of taking personal responsibility? It’s not enough to do one building more intelligently; we need to find ways for all of them. I don’t have a final answer to this. Especially in light of the trend of lawsuits and risk avoidance.
A partial answer could be in the clever use of digitalization. When engineers can more easily and faster calculate the physical impact of decisions with simulations instead of relying on technical norms that are simplified and generalized models of reality, it could become easier to do “daring” projects. We will look at this aspect in Chapter Step 4: Simulating Performance for Better Buildings.
Key takeaways
To summarize the status quo in the words of my wife, who works in the pharmaceutical industry: "Your industry already talked for (at least) 20 years about BIM; what you have to understand is that BIM is not the future anymore - it's the present. The future will look different. We live in interesting times. On the one hand, we know we need to change for long-term survival; on the other hand, we don't know how and we don't know how to leave the resulting paralysis behind. To visualize the extent, look at these facts:
Currently, almost 60% of all residential buildings in Switzerland have a fossil heating system. To replace all these systems by 2050, we need to increase the yearly replacement rate from 10K to 30K. That's a ⅔ increase while it becomes harder to find qualified personnel, and the bureaucracy for the permits increases. This varies in different countries, but the overall principle is the same.
We need to change why we build and how we build much faster. The first step of any change is awareness- The awareness we don't build for ourselves. We don't use digitalization or BIM for itself but to achieve something. Therefore, the essential mind hack from this chapter is:
Focus on the client’s needs
This focus on the client’s need is one of the core principles of lean management, as you can see in the stories you read, and the stories become widely applicable. For me, very often, it's the starting point for any process and many of the other principles rooted in it. At university, I often worked with three different people. All collaborations had different qualities I enjoyed and liked a lot! But most effectively, Florian and I worked. We both looked at the expected final result and when optimized our work to deliver what was necessary. An early application of the principle of "focus on the client's needs'' without us knowing. When we separated our roles, one did the work on a topic, and the other ensured quality and asked critical questions. This is something we came up with after reading about extreme programming.
In this sense, I invite you to think about or, even better, write down one of your stories where this principle of focusing on the client's need could have helped or helped you. Feel free to share your story with me in the comments.
Hopefully, this exercise will help you see every professional in the industry has power when talking to clients and helping them make good decisions to change the status quo.
This concludes the first chapter and next week; we will continue with Step 1- Communicating and collaborating. When you like reading my texts, please help me spread the word and kindle the discussion with your comments on LinkedIn and Substack.