Breaking the circle of blame

The People: Becci Taylor: Building Services Engineer, Arup, London. Pete Wilkie: Civil Engineer, Arup, Leeds.

The Project: As with all the projects on the programme, the young engineers started by looking at the Four Change Challenges and discussing issues in the context of their jobs and experience. In particular, they considered the ambition “To embed sustainability thinking and practices into the culture of organisations and across different professional groupings.” This led to the well-debated question; why don’t we have more sustainable office buildings?

Becci and Pete started to look more deeply into the issue. Traditionally, the developers would say "there is no demand" - and the tenants would say, "there are none available". It’s the well-known 'Circle of Blame” where it is always someone else’s fault. They decided to shape the project around this debate and explore how the different parties are actually linked, and how the perceptions could be broken.

Their research began as literature reviews and extended on to interviews with people involved in procuring and managing office buildings, from investors and developers to designers, constructors and occupiers. The interviews revealed that often the decision making process that decides against sustainable buildings is founded on inaccurate information, false perceptions and a lack of data.

They then mapped out the existing situation diagrammatically, so to illustrate the problems and design solutions. By drawing this out, it was easy to see where the information was not flowing and where attention was required.

The Results: The project identified six key areas where improved information flow is needed, including guides for developers and financiers on how “green” buildings can provide an improved return on investment, and a manual for building users on how to get the most out of “greener” offices. Becci and Pete propose that organised information exchanges would enable better decisions and radically improve the performance and quality of office buildings to be built in future.

The Value: The project provided an original insight into a well-documented problem and crucially, offered fresh solutions. The results are being published in a number of trade journals to stimulate movement towards those solutions.

On a more personal level, Becci felt being a part of E21C gave her:

"an opportunity to think about things differently outside my normal job along with learning and working with other people with similar values."

Pete’s key outcome was:

"the opportunity to tackle a project that was very different to my normal day-job. This allowed me to challenge my assumptions, to learn new stuff and hopefully to communicate useful information to other parties for the benefit of the industry."

Overall, the project provided a useful and original investigation into an important issue for the engineering profession.

For further details about this project, please contact Lorna Pelly.