Built Environment Matters

Digitalisation & health and safety in construction, Built Environment Matters podcast with Professor Jennifer Whyte, Director of John Grill Institute for Project Leadership and Head of School of Project Management at University of Sydney

• Bryden Wood • Season 1 • Episode 20

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Bryden Wood Asia-Pacific Lead, Adam Jordan, talks with Professor Jennifer Whyte, Director of John Grill Institute for Project Leadership and Head of School and Project Management at University of Sydney. She will be discussing innovation in construction, how digital is transforming the delivery of major projects, and how Modern Methods of Construction can help address the major issue that is mental health in the construction sector.

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Adam Jordan:

Hello everyone and welcome to this edition of Built Environment Matters, the Bryden Wood podcast. I'm Adam Jordan, Asia-Pacific Lead for Bryden Wood based in Sydney. And this month we're very pleased to be joined by Professor Jennifer Whyte. Professor Jennifer Whyte works with project leaders and sponsors to take forward a vision of projects and their leadership encompassing the whole process of value creation and realisation. This builds on her research interests in future making, delivery of large scale projects, systems integration, digital delivery, how leadership is distributed and how teams achieve outcomes. She is Director of the John Grill Institute for Project Leadership at the University of Sydney and retains her position at the Centre for Systems Engineering and Innovation and Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Imperial College London. A fellow of the Institution of Civil Engineers, Jennifer was Shimizu Visiting Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford University in 2015. She is on the Construction Leadership Council and the Advisory Board for the Transforming Construction Industry Challenge in addition to other panels and steering groups. She gave evidence to the UK Lords select committee inquiry on offsite manufacturing for construction in 2018, and worked with infrastructure owners through the infrastructure UK client working group, Project 13, collaborative project teams program. Welcome Jennifer.

Jennifer Whyte:

Thank you Adam. I'm pleased to be here.

Adam Jordan:

We have actually met before, we worked together in Hong Kong, back in your Imperial days, I have very fond memories of it. I'm also a Sydney sider, so I wanted to start by asking you what brought you to Sydney and how are you settling in so far?

Jennifer Whyte:

Well, the opportunity to be Head of School of Project Management and Director of the John Grill Institute for Project Leadership brought me here. Now there seemed to be a real opportunity to build on the capability that there is in Sydney, around, project and to help transform the industry in Australia and globally. And that's something that I'm passionate about.

Adam Jordan:

What are your thoughts on the construction sector in Australia in New South Wales, I guess specifically, but Australia more generally, and how it compares to your experience in the UK and elsewhere.

Jennifer Whyte:

Well, I think in both Australia and in the UK, there are pockets of excellence. And then there's also policymakers that are really focused on delivering outcomes. And that's really strongly how I believe that the industry needs to move forward to think about how do we deliver projects as interventions into infrastructure systems and what kind of production process do we need to deliver to that? That's why I was involved in the transforming construction agenda in the UK. And it's why I'm interested in, how things like digital technologies are transforming the delivery of major projects. And really getting to know some of the major projects in Sydney and I'm interested in how do we learn across those projects and how do we create a, what I'd call a kind of mega project ecology to learn across for the projects that are being delivered because I think a lot of the innovation challenges that we face as an industry are systemic challenges. And so they require different bits of the industry to work together. They require government and the research base and policy makers and practitioners working on projects to collaborate, to understand how to transform the sector.

Adam Jordan:

It's easy sometimes to

Jennifer Whyte:

um,

Adam Jordan:

just do the same thing every time, even if you know that it didn't work perfectly well the first time, just to do it again, because that's the devil you know, right. Rather than changing direction, you follow the same path over and over again. So, do you find that it's a difficult ship to steer? Is it slow to change or are you seeing promising signs?

Jennifer Whyte:

I think there are promising signs Adam and of course there are, but I actually think that we need to be shifting much faster than we are doing, given the, given the really large challenges that we face around creating sustainable infrastructure. I think it was a real mindset set shift and I'm very focused on that kind of project initiation, frontend, working with infrastructure clients, to understand how to set projects up, to deliver the kind of outcomes that they need, because for us to have sustainable, resilient, just futures, I think we really need to shift our mindset faster than we are doing around infrastructure.

Adam Jordan:

Yeah, it's promising signs and starting to change, but where do you think that initial change is going to come from? Is it policy driven or is it private sector driven? Is this going to be companies stepping up in the industry, or is it going to be something that's did by government or is it going to be a bit of both?

Jennifer Whyte:

Well, I think there's a bit of both, certainly in both the UK and Australia. We've done some work in Asia and places like Singapore have a very strong Building and Construction Authority, so have strong support, public support. I've also done a bit of work with colleagues looking at the west coast of the US where there's more of an investment culture and more of a startup culture. And so there's different drivers and different supports for innovation in those places. I think in all of those places there are companies like Bryden Wood that are really pioneering and driving paths and and pushing governments to think about infrastructure in different ways. So I think the government is a pretty slow sort of oil tanker to kind of shift, right. I don't know if oil tanker is the right analogy but it's quite a heavy organisation to shift. I think it's necessary to shift government in many places around the world because they're a big client of infrastructure. But I think companies in the supply chain that are doing innovative things are really pushing for that.

Adam Jordan:

Should governments be talking to each other more? Do you think that conversation is happening as much as it could be?

Jennifer Whyte:

Yeah, I've just joined the academic board for the Global Infrastructure Hub. And they're really playing a role in talking to the G20 and thinking about infrastructure across the G20, so I think there are some mechanisms both through the Global Infrastructure Hub and through the World Economic Forum, that's beginning to share best practice around governments across the globe. And given that the challenges that we face affect all of us wherever we we're situated. I think that's absolutely important that we're starting to think about that. They will play out slightly differently in different places than in developing countries and developed countries. There are different drivers, but I think the global sharing of information is important because our big challenges are around things like sustainability and resilience.

Adam Jordan:

In Australia, unlike the UK where you have a central government that dictates policy and steers the whole nation. It's really up to individual states and everyone is taking a slightly different path, which does make things a little bit more confusing than maybe would be ideal. But do you think, is that something that you're a part of too that, how that state-by-state conversation is going?

Jennifer Whyte:

I'm learning how that state-by-state conversation is going and looking at what projects Victoria are doing, for example, and what we're doing in New South Wales. I would say actually there's something similar in the UK because the devolved governments have invested differently And R and D support for construction. And so in Scotland there's work going on that people are looking at in London and and so on. And so I think, I think actually that, that diversity of approaches can be quite helpful because it allows you to compare and contrast what's working and not working. We're thinking with our bit of work on the megaproject ecology to start to look at those different innovation systems. I really think for the kinds of systemic innovation that we need in construction those supports that are not at a project level, but at a program or portfolio level or innovation ecosystem level become really important because they require different actors in the supply chain to change at the same time. If you want to introduce, for example, modern methods of construction, off site methods of construction, then that requires change from clients, it requires change from the supply chain. It requires a lot of players to change at the same time. And in the UK, the Transforming Construction agenda has really tried to foster that change, but for me, it's those mechanisms that are above a project that become really important in allowing that kind of innovation to happen.

Adam Jordan:

The industry needs to actually see a pipeline of demand coming through to justify the investment required to I guess, do things in a different way. So that's something that's quite challenging, but in Australia we do have those megaprojects. So, is that where you see the opportunity in terms of the scale of project procurement that's necessary to drive that industry change.

Jennifer Whyte:

Yeah, I think there are real opportunities in Australia to get procurement on that pipeline of projects right. There are challenges around skills and that pushes you in the direction of looking at more automation and more modern methods of construction. And so I think there are real opportunities.

Adam Jordan:

You've talked a lot about innovation already in our chat. Where do you think innovation is most important in construction? What specific areas of projects do you think are ripe for innovating and how do we foster that? How are we going to develop that?

Jennifer Whyte:

Yeah. I think our relationship with the supply base. So how will we think about delivering in modular ways and therefore the digitally enabled product platforms that allow you to think about libraries of kits of parts become quite important, then they allow you to innovate in a different way. So to think about how you're configuring predefined modules in innovative ways, rather than designing everything from scratch on every project. So that mindset shift away from starting with a blank sheet of paper to starting with data sets about usage. Thinking about your project as an intervention into an infrastructure system, and thinking about your relationship with the supply basis is stuff that we've looked at, really driven by my work on how digital information is transforming the delivery of major projects, because what digital information has done is, it's, brought different parts of that process into contact in a way that they never were before they've made it possible to engage with the supply chain in a different way. They've made it possible to understand your users and your end users in a different way. They've changed the relationship between what projects deliver most projects now don't just deliver physical infrastructure, they also deliver a digital twin into operations. And so that digital information I think, is an area that's really precipitated a whole series of innovations in infrastructure and in construction. I think there's real opportunities around how we visualise those datasets and data on its own is not enough and as we get larger and larger datasets I believe that the visualisation of those to make decisions become important. So there's a kind of set of challenges. We did some work a while ago with Crossrail and CERN and Airbus, and brought them together to look at the challenges of managing in a world of large data sets and, you know , I think how you manage change in those data sets is something that 's an area we still need to innovate in. The digitally enabled product platforms, I think have a big role to play. How we visualize that information and engage with stakeholders and the role of stakeholders in projects, these are all areas where there's significant need for opportunities for innovation.

Adam Jordan:

Yeah, the digital landscape is just evolving so quickly. I think it's my number one kind of impression of the construction industry or my experience is how radically the industry has been transformed by digital technology over time. And in a lot of ways, I think the digital technology is evolving faster than behaviour is evolving, which is a problem, right?, because you said digital technology enables different stakeholders to engage with the supply chain in different ways. But I think maybe what's happening sometimes is that the new digital tools and the innovations that are coming in, but those relationships aren't changing and people are trying to deliver a project in the old way, using the new tools and you get this kind of a stumbling block. How do we unlock that? Are we going too fast? Is it better to slow down? I mean, are we kind of failing to take full advantage of the capability of digital technology today?

Jennifer Whyte:

We're not going too fast. So I think other industries are taking up digital technology faster than the construction sector is. But I do see data scientists, for example, now being employed in construction. And I think project analytics is an area in which we're very interested in doing research, but it's also beginning to be an area in which practices and beginning to engage. There are beginning to be new companies forming in this sort of area. There's beginning to be interest in putting various forms of what I call project analytics into projects. So taking data in and analysing it in various data-driven ways. And that's something that has changed over the last few years. So I think for a while, we talked about doing BIM to enable collaboration. And then we talked about collaboration to enable BIM and digital twins as deliverables and now I think using that data in different ways for various forms of analytics becomes really where the innovation is going on.

Adam Jordan:

And BIM stops being the centre of everything, doesn't it a little bit as we start to go in this path. A few years ago BIM was the digital future of construction and now BIM is just another data source.

Jennifer Whyte:

Yeah, I agree and particularly around things like the digitally enabled product platforms and so on, then I think BIM is part of that, but it's not the whole part of that.

Adam Jordan:

It seems like a no brainer in a lot of ways that you would obviously want to obtain as much project analytics as you could, because why wouldn't you want knowledge about how your building was being built, how your project was working, how your finances were ticking over and what your end product was looking like, why wouldn't you want that knowledge? Why do we need to convince people about this?

Jennifer Whyte:

I think it's to do with skillsets actually, Adam. So I had a computer scientist work as part of my research team and he went into the construction sector. And, you know, in this first week he increased the productivity of the company that he worked for because he just automated a whole load of rather manual processes that people were doing. I suspect there are many places in construction where people are still doing these inefficient processes, but don't have that kind of intelligent computer scientist or data analyst who's able to take that work out of the process. Of course, in companies like your own and in the engineering consultancies, there are graduates coming in and starting to challenge those models and that then requires you to procure for value rather than procuring on an hours basis so that it has a sort of series of, of implications about how we value the work that people do. But, I'm certain, there are still plenty of opportunities to improve the productivity of construction by, by automating activities that we do routinely that are not value adding.

Adam Jordan:

To be clear, this isn't about reducing the construction workforce and putting people out of jobs by bringing in robots, is it? This is about making the construction industry a more dynamic and exciting industry in which to work rather than removing that workforce. Yeah. And I think I do believe that we should be taking the workforce off the construction site and putting them in safer environments and doing more interesting jobs.

Jennifer Whyte:

So we know that when people are doing work on the construction site, you know, the safety is an issue. But actually mental health is a bigger issue. And if people can be doing that kind of work in a factory environment, they can go home to their families every night. There's a number of improvements that there are for quality of life of the workers in construction, as well as for quality of products and consistency of the products that we're delivering as interventions into infrastructure systems. So we'll always need some people on site, but the more that we can do some of that manufacturing and assembly off site, the better quality, but also the quality of life of the people that are working in construction can be improved.

Adam Jordan:

Yeah, I've heard the exact same feedback from from factory workers myself, people who have been on sites and then have moved into factories and they say exactly that, you can buy a house or have a house in an area and knowing full well that that's where you're going to be working for the medium to long-term. And you're not going to be called Interstate or to a different place for a number of months to do a construction project. And you also get that job security of knowing if you're producing standardized construction components on a framework basis, rather than a project basis, you're not threatened by a project completion you have your ongoing pipeline demand that's going to keep you busy and keep you productive. So I, I think there is a big quality of life benefit there.

Jennifer Whyte:

Yeah, I agree. I mean, there, there are stats on mental health and construction are terrible. They're much worse than fatalities on site cause we've done a lot of work on health and safety on construction sites, but there's something like seven times as many suicides of construction workers as there are fatalities. Those are the statistics in the UK and I don't know if they've got better in COVID but it's been largely about migrant workers, not being near their support networks, being in quite a male dominated environment, if you like, but kind of living away from home for an unknown quantities of time and so it's something that Construction Leadership Council has done quite a bit of thinking about in the UK and so major construction projects tend to have mental health first aiders. They might not be exactly the same in Australia, but when I looked them up they've got similar kinds of initiatives around mental health and construction.

Adam Jordan:

Yeah, it is and it's scary too. Like we talk so much about we're going to save some time and we're going to save a bit of money. We're going to reduce the costs by 10% and we're going to reduce the schedule by 30% and construction productivity is going to be way up and they're all pretty good benefits, but health and safety is the most important thing. You can't argue with it really. If you can reduce the number of reportable incidents on a project if you can reduce injuries and if you look at some of the statistics, a construction worker entering the industry is pretty much guaranteed statistically to have some injury incident and awesome mental health issue over the course of their career on current performance. We've got to improve, right?

Jennifer Whyte:

Yeah. I mean, I did some work with Judith Hackitt around building safely by design the kind of work that she was doing that now she was looking at the safety of occupants in our building and, you know, making the argument that high-rise buildings, that people sleep in are safety critical and so we need to be an industry that looks at what we produce as being safety critical. Yeah, and I think that also plays through to the way that we produce it. I mean, she was the Chief Executive of the Health and Safety Executive in the UK. And she has some very strong views about how think about this systemically. She came out of looking at a big chemical engineering disaster, the Bronzeville disaster in the UK where people really quickly wanted to call it a problem with a pump. And, you know, she was saying, well, what's the organizational kind of. Set a processes that have allowed this problem to happen. And, you know, with the Grenfell disaster that initiated her work in the UK, people very quickly want to talk about the cladding. Now there are problems with the cladding there that absolutely undoubtedly but what it revealed was also a set of problems with the sector and so sitting on her committee in government holding the industry to account before I joined Construction Leadership Council. It was really apparent that the people didn't know how they work connected up, systemic understanding of the fact that we're delivering safety, critical buildings and infrastructure places where people spend their lives and inhabit, but particularly she was focused on high-rise and residential where people are sleeping. It didn't show our industry in a very good way. And if you read in the introduction to her report, she's quite scathing about our sector, that she doesn't feel that people understood they need to do to be professional in this space. And it was quite interesting to be sitting on that committee with people from the airports industry, with people from chemical engineering, you know, looking into our sector and saying you're not performing as a safety critical sector.

Adam Jordan:

There's such a duty of care on everyone in the sector, really. For that exact reason, I studied architecture and it's one of the things they tell you at architecture school is you do have to take it very seriously, but there's so many stakeholders in a project and especially the mega projects, just coming back to this for a second, so many stakeholders, so many pairs of hands the project, the design goes through before it gets realised that responsibility is spread so thin. How do you ensure that somehow somewhere someone is going to kind of dot the I's and cross the T's.

Jennifer Whyte:

Yeah. I mean, having done a lot of research on systems integration you know, I think accountability and responsibility is really important. How it's structured through the project. We've done a bit of work on seven lessons from Crossrail. And it's actually in one of the reports that the Institution of Civil Engineers has just put out about systems approaches to infrastructure, and really that, at its core, it's about managing delivery processes as systems integration processes. So yeah, it's really those boundaries between units that you get the problems. And so whether that they're technical units or organisational units? So how do you make sure that people are accountable you know, and the people are responsible and accountable for those interfaces as well as for the, for the units that are being put together, but I think to address the kind of challenges that Hackitt has laid out for the industry, you know, that golden thread of information and that standardisation of parts and that understanding of kits of parts are part of the solution to that. I don't see this as being separate agendas, I think we need that high level of information about the things that we're delivering. And to do that, we need this golden thread of information that ties together all of the parties that are involved and new kinds of commercial models that allow that to happen.

Adam Jordan:

Is this somewhere where we can also start to learn some lessons from the manufacturing side because other sectors like in Bryden Wood, we do a lot of work in pharmaceutical. They have a huge duty of care for the health of patients, food also have safety standards, any product that's being ingested is obviously really safety critical. And I'm sure that there are issues from time to time, but maybe not the same high profile kind of shortcomings. Can we learn lessons from the manufacturing sector in those ways?

Jennifer Whyte:

I'm sure that there will be recommendations that come out of the works have been in there been changes that have been made as a result of some of that work. But manufacturing. I mean for me, what's interesting is where does the manufacturing industry touch into an industry that delivers complex product systems? So in the literature on innovation, they talk about innovation in manufacturing, being quite different from innovation in complex product systems, because manufacturing is organised by continuous flow, whereas complex product systems are organised through projects. And I think digital does change the interface between those two worlds. Construction's always used manufacturing, there's always manufacturing products in a construction site. There's always a little bit of complexity around a project, but I think the boundary between those two things has been shifting differently in different areas of construction, so there's some volumetric house building where perhaps, the largely a manufacturing process and less emphasis on the complex products. I think major transport infrastructure projects are always going to have that element of being a complex product, but there are also opportunities to take things like doors and just standardise them across the whole piece. And that's sometimes involves some early decisions ahead of setting out the contracts and starting to do procurement. So that early phase, that initial phase of those, those really big projects is super critical, really, really important. That project initiation phase, when you don't have too many people and you haven't sort of started to scale up the organisation to deliver.

Adam Jordan:

It's true, I think the construction industry is different to the manufacturing industry, for sure. But what you said about complex product systems being broken down into kind of subsystems or packages that could be standardised, that could be componentised that could benefit from manufacturing, maybe this is part of the approach and then the element of the construction industry that is different to manufacturing is the fact that at the end, you still need to deliver a complex asset on a site. And, but maybe the role of doing that, it's a bit different. Maybe it's more of an integrator or an aggregator of components rather than a main contractor, as we know it today.

Jennifer Whyte:

Look I agree that there are potentially different models and, you know, having been studying that systems integration activity. The idea of systems integration comes out of some of the post-war American projects, where they had a lot of technical complexity and they hired a company to act as the systems integrator, separate from things like project management. Now can the client completely outsource systems integration? I would be doubtful of that. I think that there's some accountability for systems integration. That's going to remain in the client, whether that's the client, the end client or a delivery client, but they might be able to give responsibility for particular interfaces and so on to other, but then the oversight and the governance and the understanding of how the system's going to come together. Yeah. So it's kind of challenging because some of it, you can fit out in the initial phase then often on these big projects, there's also some emergent, complexity and uncertainty that you have to manage through delivery and then of course, the final integration to get the project and

Adam Jordan:

Do you think the client role is going to need to change in the future? Clients are often quite kind of standoffish about construction projects. You hand over a package to a main contractor and say, finish up the design portion of this and go ahead and build it and I'll come and have a look when it's done. Does the client need to be more involved in some of these processes and particularly the standardisation elements and having a much more clearly defined brief.

Jennifer Whyte:

Yeah. I've learned a lot through being involved in what's called Project 13, it was an initiative of infrastructure clients including Sydney Water in Sydney, but also major clients in the UK. And they've really pioneered different models for thinking about delivery, more as an enterprise and less as a set of transactions. And I think that mindset shift in clients around, what kind of outcomes are they trying to achieve? And therefore, you know, what are they going to do to achieve those outcomes is really important particularly given the amount of change that there is, in a post COVID uncertain world. And so I think absolutely mindset shift in clients is required.

Adam Jordan:

we were talking about the role of government in setting the policy and the role of the industry, the sector itself to kind of step up and innovate, but the client's got to play a role in this too, particularly what we were talking about before on health and safety and or poor outcomes on construction projects. Maybe clients should be stepping up and demanding more and saying, we're not getting good value from the industry and it's not good enough.

Jennifer Whyte:

I think it depends what you think that clients should procure for. So I think they should be, they should be demanding a lot from the industry. It's easier in a longer term working relationship to demand a lot. I think the hyper competitivity around cost, it's very damaging to the industry. But the set of values that people should be procuring to should include, of course, things like health and safety and quality and the kind of outcomes that people are trying to achieve. And health and safety is often treated as a qualitative outcome, isn't it? It's almost like a box ticker. Of course, we're going to comply with all the applicable standards, but it really should be a quantitative thing. There should be metrics associated with that you need to comply with. Yeah, I mean, because I sit in the research space I found that it's an area in which the industry is actually happy to collaborate on research on development, on sharing knowledge, because it's not an area in which companies compete with each other. It's an area in which everyone believes that the industry you know, needs to not be complacent and the UK has globally, it has a good track record in terms of health and safety, but it's very baked in not to be complacent about this because any accident is not good enough. We want all of our workers to go home safely to their families at the end of the day and so they've been doing a lot of work on mental health and supporting mental health, but that has been not an area for competition in the supply chain, that's been an area for collaboration across companies that would otherwise compete, have been sharing in that space and I think that's absolutely right and important. And for me those areas where you can get companies to understand the value of collaborating are actually important for addressing some of these big issues.

Adam Jordan:

We really believe that value has to be driving all of this change. The change won't come if there's not a benefit to doing something differently, there's no point to doing it differently. I think really focusing on what that benefit is, and maybe getting early adopter projects that have realised the benefit that people can look at is maybe not the perfect solution, but a step forward in the right direction. It's a good approach. Is that something that you believe.

Jennifer Whyte:

Yeah, I do. And I think both the Project 13 initiative and also the work on them systems approaches to infrastructure have taken that approach, so they've got a series of examples of projects and companies that have gained benefit and Transforming Construction as an initiative in the UK, similarly, has demonstrator projects and it provides something tangible that people can can kind of see the benefit around now I'm less familiar with the examples in Australia at this point in time, but that's research that we're beginning to do in terms of understanding, you know, where the locations of best practice are and being able to kind of showcase those case studies. The global infrastructure helped us some of that internationally in terms of showcasing examples of best practice.

Adam Jordan:

So we've had a very wide ranging conversation, actually, Jennifer brilliant thing and it seems to me like in your role and particularly at the John Grill Institute you're exploring lots of different avenues, so it's not a single solution. There's not kind of a single approach that you're exploring to transform the construction industry, your advocating for greater adoption of digital. You're looking for more collaborative and communicative relationships between different parties and maybe shifts in contractual relationships with gene parties and moving away from a pure focus on cost. You're looking to deliver better value on projects with a greater focus on health and safety. You're looking at different construction methodologies and modern methods of construction being one of them, standardised kits of parts being an approach, but maybe not the answer in all cases. It seems like there's a lot of different avenues that you're exploring. It's quite a complex puzzle and kind of simultaneously working in all of these paths, is that correct? And is that something that's overwhelming. Do you see progress in all of these areas or are you more focused in one aspect in your immediate future.

Jennifer Whyte:

So in the John Grill Institute for Project Leadership, our focus is very much on project leadership and project leadership encompasses all of these these kinds of challenges, but we're, we're focused on taking a socialised perspective to leadership, so not looking at leaders in terms of their biographies or their psychology, but looking at how do you set up leadership and governance structures that enable you to deliver outcomes? And so, you know, how do you do that in a world that's uncertain and changing. So we're interested in project leadership in a changing world and that world is changing because of technologies, it's changing because of the increasing numbers of stakeholders and different kinds of organisational structures. And it's also changing because we have a changing climate and so we're starting to understand what we're doing with built infrastructure in relationship to the natural environment becomes really important. Then we've continued to collaborate with our colleagues in London around that idea of projects as interventions in these systems. Both infrastructure systems and also natural environment systems. So yes, it's a big landscape, but our focus in the Institute is very much on what does that mean for project leaders? How do project leaders have to think differently given the challenges that we face.

Adam Jordan:

You keep preempting some of my questions. It's great. We have a really similar kind of train of thought because I'd realised that we hadn't touched on sustainability yet. You brought it up there and it's great that we've managed to touch on it because it's another crucial aspect of this and part of the duty of care. I think of the industry, given the scale of the impacts industry on the environment in a lot of ways, it seems like we have these crucial challenges in sustainability in the increasing level of competition that's emerging in the industry and the demand for projects and we also kind of happily resigned to get some of the tools, some of the solutions because digital technology is increasing at such an unprecedented rate because all these different innovative construction methodologies are beginning to emerge. Maybe the time is right. Maybe now is the time because we have this kind of confluence of a challenge and an opportunity or, or a possible solution to address this.

Jennifer Whyte:

I mean, potentially, I think there are some potential challenges. So, we did a bit of work on the future making online, you know, in this kind of digital world that we all went into during the pandemic. And we had some concerns about how the digital communication can close the world in on itself and so you can miss stakeholders. You can forget to compare and contrast different solutions. You can close in on a solution too quickly. And you can fail to think about how you then progress something out into the natural environment that you're building in. And so I think digital has huge opportunities, but we have to mobilise it in the right way and ask the right questions of it. You know, because ultimately we build physical things with digital twins, but the materials that we use are very resource intensive. And concrete is the most used material on the planet after water then. So, you know, we have these tools to start to think about how do we use the materials? how do we design in a way in which we tread lightly on the world.

Adam Jordan:

It's not going to be easy. My last question how optimistic are you?

Jennifer Whyte:

I'm optimistic that we have bright people who can address these challenges, but I'm not unaware of the scale of the challenges that we face. So I think the world is at a really critical moment. There's some really substantial challenges. And they are challenging for our industry because they require letting go of things that we've done in the past, as well as doing new things.

Adam Jordan:

There's so much that's thought provoking in what you say. It's been a really interesting, engaging conversation and I hope everyone found that as interesting as I did.

Jennifer Whyte:

Thank you so much Adam, I've really enjoyed being here.

Adam Jordan:

thank you everyone for listening. Please join us again for the next edition of Built Environment. Matters.

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