Part 2: Professor Jacqui Glass from The Bartlett, UCL's Built Environment Faculty in conversation with Board Director Jaimie Johnston on our construction podcast

Part 2: This episode, Jaimie Johnston and Professor Jacqui Glass get into the semantics around construction nomenclature before turning to the foundational importance of industry standards. Finally, Jacqui talks about why we should be attracting graduates and master's students into the industry as they can bring about significant shifts in how things get done.

To learn more about Bryden Wood's Design to Value philosophy, visit www.brydenwood.com. You can also follow Bryden Wood on LinkedIn and X.

Transcript

Credits: 0:09

Hello, welcome to Built Environment Matters, a monthly podcast brought to you by Bryden Wood, an international company of technologists, designers, architects, engineers, and analysts working for a better built environment, Bryden Wood, believe in Design to Value to cut carbon, drive efficiency, save time, make beautiful places, and build a better future.

Jaimie Johnston: 0:33

Hi, and welcome to this episode of Built Environment Matters, the Bryden Wood podcast. I'm Jaimie Johnston, the Head of Global Systems. And this is Part 2 of my conversation with Professor Jacqui Glass, who's Professor of Construction Management at University College London. So coming back to the semantics, yeah, that's an ongoing problem that I don't know how we resolve it. I mean, I've had I certainly remember it being really difficult in the days of BIM when it was first mandated that one of the genius things I thought Mark Bew did was not try and define what BIM is, is saying you'll understand the outcomes once we're doing it, which was brilliant in one way, because saying it's been two years defining it, but you think painfully another way, because people spent two years arguing about what it meant, we're getting a similar thing with Modern Methods of Construction now, we're getting similar things with Platforms as a sort of a growing number of these terms that are sort of starting to burgeon all over the place, which is increasingly painful, I wonder if you can talk a bit more about that, and the sort of challenges it creates, and the sort of, you know, the miscommunication sometimes that must get in the way. And you must see it an awful lot more maybe when there's there's so many of these sort of stakeholders bumping together at the points of interface that you're looking at?

Jacqui Glass: 1:41

Well, it's, it's a perennial challenge. But the the interesting thing for me is that some academics will spend their entire careers trying to define a term. And actually, in academic life, that is an entirely legitimate way to spend your time. Because it is about clarification, and understanding and positioning your work. So if we just take, I don't know, we take take MMC, take Modern Methods of Construction, inevitably, then when we talk about it, we have to talk about standardisation, we have to talk about prefabrication, we have to, of course refer to'Modernise or Die,' you know, I cannot tell you the number of student work, I have a number of student essays I have read that Mark Farmer has influenced so well done Mark, great influenced there. But to be able to understand and negotiate what terms mean, is important. But at some point, you have to draw the line. And say, actually, I think we've got to a point where we have an agreed, a consensus view on what this means. So for me, actually, the role of standards, by which I don't mean a limiting thing, I mean, an agreed common set of terms is incredibly important. And so actually, you know, it's really interesting if we take BIM, because if we look at a comparison between the UK and other countries, our our view of BIM, and our understanding of BIM, for me is incredibly robust. It's incredibly widespread. And I think actually, the UK gives itself a really hard time sometimes thinking, Oh, some, you know, another country is ahead of us. We're running behind, but actually in construction, the UK in terms of its innovation and its practices, is incredibly, highly regarded.

Jaimie Johnston: 3:40

Yeah. And I think, yeah, I remember it was sort of part of a deliberate strategy to sort of publish the UK BIM standards, or try and make them you know, the de facto international standards, which is obviously obviously happening. Do you think there's a there's an opportunity we should be following that within, you know, Platforms and these other things, we should go right, you know, the BIM standards, were just a way of clearing a path for all the things that followed, we could lean into this and start to really export these things. I've talked to Keith Waller about this on this podcast previously, do you think that's the opportunity we should be focusing on particularly sort of post Brexit and that we're working on what to do next?

Jacqui Glass: 4:14

Well, I've been thinking about this for a while because I think, does it go back to Construction 2025 where we were talking about the sort of the value the the export value, where Peter Hansford was talking about the export value of the skills, the expertise that we have in our industry for on behalf of the nation. And I don't think we really understand that, to be honest, I don't think we know how to exploit it particularly well as a sector. I think some firms do. I think obviously Bryden Wood is is one of the firms I would probably point to and I say that genuinely not just because you're interviewing me today, of course, I would, I would cite others in that of course. You know, Arup have been international for a very long time, of course. But if you think about Okay, how do we promote ourselves internationally? I don't think we do a great job of that, as UK Construction, I think we've got so much more to give. I don't know, I don't think we know how to configure that expertise. So if you look at ISO 19650 isn't it BIM, one of the things that always frustrates me is that when these when standards land elsewhere, people say, wow, this is fantastic and actually, are we, I say we as a sector, are construction businesses, enabling their staff to take part in the creation of standards. For me that I, you know, I chaired a BSI committee. And it's, it was always a problem, to try to get people to take part in standards committees. It feels like if firms think, Oh, well, it is like a charitable donation in some respects. But it's got to be about advancing the whole sector, hasn't it? And I wondered, you know, I did wonder idly the other day about Construction Leadership Council, and Construction Industry Council, and how they could actually trigger some really quite interesting moves in the sector to make sure that we have that sort of international profile that we, well, I think richly deserve.

Jaimie Johnston: 6:20

Yeah, I wasn't expecting to talk about standards, but it's a, yeah, topic I'm actually bizarrely interested in. There is something really interesting about the I mean, I've been involved in obviously, the original PAS documents, and what what a process, I mean, I can see why people don't get excited about it, it's quite a, it's quite a weighty process. I was talking to someone the other day and saying, you know, the lag between innovation happening and the standards keeping up is will start to get in the way, I suspect, as we start to get quicker and quicker, you know, iteration and innovation. I've seen, I haven't looked in enormous detail. But Highways have got a sort of a almost like a Wikipedia version of standards. And I think that's quite an interesting model that rather than going through this kind of, you know, endless consultation and commentary, you could do something not for all of them. But there must be some, there must be a better way of leading into some of those kind of open source type things or Wikipedia, like things of getting, firstly, more people involved getting to consensus quicker and, you know, driving a better outcome. I don't know whether you've had any thoughts on that, or whether you've looked at some other models of how people write standards, because it does feel that we do yeah, they are absolutely critical. But the time and effort taken and, you know, the way the written does not engender, you know, does not encourage people to engage in the same in the way that you think they should do.

Jacqui Glass: 7:33

Yeah, I have thought about this, because of the work that I did years ago on and trying to still do, amongst all the other things around responsible sourcing of construction products. And of course, the if you like the the main standard for responsible sourcing is a private standard, created by BRE, BS6001, very influential, certified, you know, a couple of 100 or so products, I think now something like that. But it wasn't a the same sort of standard process, standardisation process that you would have for an ISO, for example, completely different because it's a private standard. And actually, I don't think we necessarily quite understand the kind of configuration of the different options we have available to us. And it's interesting that we're talking about that, because we've been using in our teaching recently, of course, the Construction Playbook, which came out in December, and trying to help students to understand and get a handle on a very influential document, which is not a standard, which is not a piece of legislation. You know, so I think there is a challenge in understanding where information sits and the the relative authority and legitimacy that it has whether you're in business, whether you're a client, whether you're studying the sector, very interesting space, and I couldn't point to any particular source which gives clarity on

Jaimie Johnston: 9:04

Yeah, you've probably seen the work we did that actually, for the the Hub on the Define the Need piece taking all of the cross sector pipeline and put it into Uniclass, which was an incredibly painful exercise, because no one tried to do it before. And again, semantics got in the way every department has its own nomenclature for all the base types. But when we put it all together, you could suddenly, it unlocked all these things that people intuitively knew about the kind of level of cross sector commonality, but no one could quite articulate. So suddenly, that's, you know, a massive piece of evidence towards the Yeah, how you can unlock the Platforms how you can unlock this sort of Industrialized Construction, but it was really painful getting there. And I'm just very hopeful that we don't then leave that as a proof of concept and never come back to it. You want that to become you know, more and more common and more and more sort of standardised, but it's those sorts of things that are really going to unleash the benefit but yeah, there's always a suppose in my head interesting thing between Everyone wants to get on and do the kind of interesting groovy stuff. People that same people don't necessarily want to write the standards, because again, our sounds like a bit dull. But again, no one's a complete foundational underpinning of the other, you can't really have one without the other. So I don't know whether you'd agree or whether that's something you've sort of you must have tackled over your, your career?

Jacqui Glass: 10:20

Well, it's difficult to know where to start with that, to be honest, because, you know, I've got a huge amount of respect, and actually appreciation for people who do get involved in developing standards. Because these, this is a long term, sometimes, as you quite rightly say, gruelling effort. And once you move to the international standards making space, the language issues become even, broader, wider, open to debate, political differences, cultural differences come into it's incredibly diverse. Perseverance is for me incredibly important in this, if you think about it, why shouldn't it be, you know, we're in the business of creating buildings that we expect, generally, to last a very long time. So actually, the, the underpinnings of ours, our design processes, and regulations, they should have a significant and authentic and authoritative amount of input to them in their development. And you know, the one thing just moving on to the idea of regulations to some extent, the one thing that bothers me, when we do research with industry, is the number of times people will say, 'ah well,' the building regulations should tell us what to do. This is only for me, this is a this is always a disappointment when people say this, because the building regulations are not there to inspire the industry. They are not there to set our ambition, right. They are there as as regulations, if that's why they're called Building Regulations, but the industry has at its at its worst, it has this really quite negative way of thinking about itself, which I think curtails its ambition. So if it's doing that, then the likelihood is it can't really see the long term value of investing time in developing effective standards.

Jaimie Johnston: 12:26

Yeah, that's that we've never talked about this before. That's really interesting. There's something really to think about the You're right, the long term nature of buildings, and the long term nature of building projects even but the short term nature of decision making, and you go, that's really weird, isn't it? That? Yeah, if I always think that there's not enough effort put into the front end of projects, we've talked about this before, we're really out there kind of understand the brief and opening up the problem statement. I think even the design period, there's not enough effort at the front end, what do you consider the life of the building is going to be there for 100 years or 60 years, you can probably spend a couple more months at the front end getting the project right and not launching into the thing that's gonna be a car crash for the rest of the project, you have never thought of it in terms of quite how long term actually some of the the implications of the things we do are, and therefore, you know why you should put this kind of effort into front end. But you're right. That's, that's why these things take time. And actually, that's why they should they need to be persistent and correct. Because they have such a long period after them. Yeah, that's really interesting, actually. Brilliant. Moving on. So you're, you've obviously worked in the industry for a long time. Do you think through things like TCN Plus, I mean, I'm interested in are we getting the right people into construction? I think it's a general question that we've asked on this podcast a few times is, you know, what's your prognosis for the kind of the future of the industry? And particularly, do you see, you know, the people coming through universities? Are we attracting the right sort of people into construction? Are we missing out maybe on people that are not coming into construction, because they don't see it either as a place of, you know, some really interesting academic research? Or that it's, you know, it doesn't lead anywhere? Even if you did a piece of academic research? What's your sort of view on that from a from a, you know, from your point of view?

Jacqui Glass: 14:08

Yeah, so have you got another hour? And, for me, Yeah, I mean, we've thought about this a lot. Even if they the short answer is 'could do better.' Okay. And a number of reasons why I would say this. It's always been curious to me why we don't have enough women in the sector. And of course, that's, you know, that's something close to my heart. But it's close to many people's hearts, actually. So the issue of gender and race in our industry, it's still there. People are working on it. I'm seeing a lot more activity these days than there's ever has been. So let's, let's set that one aside for a moment. If we then look at the industry, as and the academic researchers who are part, for me, part of the industry, let's think about This is a whole, what we're not doing as a collective is conveying the level of stimulation, the interest, the fascination that we have, why we're in the industry and why we stay in the industry? Why, you know, how do we convey that level of interest and enthusiasm to people, I think there's been a lot of interest and a lot of activity on engineering. But there's something about separating construction from engineering that we have to do, and the language that we talk about. So one of the things I'm really interested in is trying to look at the skills that we need, the competencies that we need. And you know, the first things, I remember saying this a couple, maybe a couple of years ago at a conference, remember when national curriculum changed in schools, and coding came onto the national curriculum. Think of all those years of school children who are coming through with those digital skills with those coding skills, they are available, in principle, to construction in the same way that they are available to other industries, when these young people come through to study and graduate. My question is, where do they put the indicator on and turn off on a different route. And that's what we have to make sure that we actually are capturing people with the new skills that we need. So there's always my you know, there's a few of us in the academic world who have a great deal of respect for the leaders in industry who are very committed to bringing apprentices and young people in. But don't forget the graduates. Don't forget the Masters students, because actually, they've got the higher level skills to land directly into management levels of organisations and make really significant shifts in how things are done. I remember very clearly, a placement student coming back from a placement from a construction management degree program and saying, the people I was working with on site, the senior managers were crying when I left, because none of them could drive Revit. Okay, none of them could use it. And it's a simple example. But I think it's effective. Let's really privilege these digital ompetencies, because this isn't ptional. Come on, we need it. turned up with their digital skills. Not everyone knows what to do with them. It needs the right organisation with the right kind of fit to actually be able to leverage those skills. And I think that's one of the things we're not getting the industry ready for them. So they're going to arrive and there won't be anything for them to do. And again, it's a bit dull, go off and do something else. I think that's my concern is the kind of the spark gap between Yeah, clearing a path and making sure that we can actually leverage them and let them loose on it. So things that, you know, you've seen some of the apps that we've been doing that were deliberately aimed at lowering again, barriers to entry. So yeah, that's quite an interesting take on where the industry is. The other point about that, of course, is something that I've really noticed since arriving at UCL, the number of data scientists that we have working on studies of construction, the built environment, you know, we have one particular part of our faculty, which is almost entirely data scientists looking at the built environment. So actually, you know, I think there's work for everybody to do on this. But we know the people are there. You're right, we've got to make a digital home in construction.

Jaimie Johnston: 18:40

Yeah, it must be one of the sector's I've got no evidence for this. But it feels like it must be one of the sector's which has got the most amount of data, which is completely untapped. And just sort of lying about it, no one's doing anything with it. Again, we must have huge amounts of data that can be put to use. And we haven't got a hope of getting into digital twins and smart assets and all the rest we go, we're not doing a particularly good job of the data we've currently got. So yeah, again, that's one of the huge gaps. Which brings me it's probably just time the last question maybe. So moving forward, assuming we got another round of funding, what are all the things that you didn't get to do in TCN that you'd like to do? Or where are the gaps that you'd like to cover? If you had a wish list? What are all the topics that you think needs a further explanation? So obviously, data science and you know, we've talked about one of them? What do you think are the pockets that either you didn't get around to this time, or you've learned about the thinking or that needs a project that needs looking at? What are the kind of things you'd like to explore moving forward, assuming we get we get a chance?

Jacqui Glass: 19:40

Yeah, I think it's a very interesting question. And where we are now is actually quite different to where we were two, three years ago, to be honest. My view is that there's a couple of things I would be on the data science side, and a couple of things I would really bring forward. I think, in our team, we We very much really started to understand the business model innovation that is possible. What we don't yet understand is how to, you know, take that forward, I think we like to move to a point where we've got to maybe some, we call it action research, it kind of means doing on the ground and studying it whilst you're doing it. But the idea actually, that we could start to test within live construction projects, or firms, test out some different business models. Now that I mean, I can imagine some people just sweating at the thought of that. It's pretty risky stuff. But if we could find some businesses where we could go in and do that, I think that would be a magnificent opportunity. I'd really relish that, you know, in Platforms, this is active niches, I think, isn't it, where you've actually got a little segment of a company set aside to take, you know, to really undertake some risky sort of work. I think that would be a marvelous opportunity. To be honest, though, like, in the bigger context, we really, really need to accelerate our action around netzero carbon and climate change. We're not moving fast enough on that as a sector at all. So I would absolutely bring that forward.

Jaimie Johnston: 21:31

The business model ones? Yeah, that's fascinating is where it needs to happen. I mean, yeah, well, we've talked before on this podcast that the things that are holding us back actually aren't really the technical bits. Now a lot of it is the cultural and the Yeah, insurances, warranties, and things, it would need, I suspect, or one way you could do it, if you'd want a client that was able to absolve a kind of little special purpose vehicle or something or some of the normal risk. I think you couldn't do it as a business model on its own, you'd also need the right project and the right client to sponsor it. And maybe one of the things we did early in the day for Heathrow, the pier segregation things, we used to describe it as being a sort of bubble where someone to take away all the friction and all the kind of normal constraints and said, right, just get on make this happen. COVID like, you know, the world's version of that where everyone said, right, we're going to be super digital in two months go in because you just have toto, yeah, it needs something like that doesn't get someone to actually change the game or take and take the brakes off to allow these things out for you. So yeah, that's one way. Yeah, I'd love to keep talking about that in due course, because I think that's where it's going to happen. And as you say, I think we live in a world where we've talked about this before that every other sectors had some disruptive business model that's tipped things on their head construction, so risk averse. And again, because of the long term implications, if you get a digital thing slightly wrong, it's got a transients, that doesn't matter. Whereas if you build a building wrong or a school wrong, then that's got some, you know, some implications. So yeah, that's a Yeah, a topic for another day maybe to talk about. Very last question. We ask everyone this, and it's obviously impossible question. But where do you think, given what you what you know, about, you've just mentioned, the fact that we've changed a lot in the last couple of years, you know, 5-10 years, if everything went well, you know, if you've got some thoughts about where the industry could get to, if all of these things converge right in the right way, or where we should be aiming to get to in the next decade, as you say, I think the net carbon ones massive. If we haven't solved this significantly in 10 years, then we really are facing some enormous problems. So any sort of thoughts around that?

Jacqui Glass: 23:31

So you're absolutely right, the the net zero carbon is the mandatory thing, we have to do that. That is absolutely business critical. But you know, in in five to maybe 10, let's say 10 years, it's a bit more generous. But I'd like to look at an industry and particularly the major contractors, and I'd like to look at them and not see any, that were still based on Return on Capital Employed. This is not sustainable. I cannot believe we still have so many major contractors in business, where they are still operating on this model. This I mean, this is incredible, quite honestly. And surely 10 years time, things on that will have changed. If that s changed, then they've got m re than they're being judged on Return on Investment. They re investing in their business s, they're doing more R&D, t ey understand, you know, where t ey need to change, they re creating the net z ro businesses, they've proba ly disrupted their busine s, they've probably changed. So or me, the change will be seen in the contractors.

Jaimie Johnston: 24:36

Yes, yeah, that's brilliant. Because I've heard that talked about an awful lot. Everyone sort of says or a number of people have said, yeah, it's gonna happen in the Tier 1s contractors. That's that that's the one that when we talked to Josh Johnson McKinsey last time, he said that's where the change, the biggest opportunity for change will happen. But no one's articulated exactly what that looks like. That's probably the best articulation I've heard of what they should be heading towards. That's incredibly useful actually, so brilliant. We'll have to leave it there unfortunately, loads more we could have talked about and I look forward to catching up with you in real life once things settle down. So thanks ever so much for coming on and offering your your insights.

Jacqui Glass: 25:11

My absolute pleasure, Jaimie, I look forwar to revisiting our conversatio on business model disruption I'm sure that, let's e disruptiv

Jaimie Johnston: 25:19

Absolutely. Thank you. Thanks for listening. And please join us next month on Built Environment Matters.

Credits: 25:26

Thank you for listening to Built Environment Matters podcast brought to you by Bryden Wood. Listen and s bscribe wherever you get your f vorite podcast. And you can f llow Bryden Wood on LinkedIn a d Twitter.