Transcript: How to Develop a ‘Real’ Sustainability Program that Aligns with your Organization - w/ Barbra Batshalom from the Sustainable Performance Institute

We were the green building consultants, and there weren't that many back in the 90s. And what we saw was that we would be involved in a project, and we'd help the team move the needle for that project, but the 20 to 30 to 40 people sitting around the table would then go back to their firms and business as usual. With LEED in the marketplace, on one hand, it's been great because we've seen what it looks like for firms to kind of just focus on the building itself, but it's also shown us that if you just do that and you're kind of looking at end of pipe solutions like rating systems and you're not looking up the pipe at the organization's culture and systems and processes, then you never actually cross the line.

You get stuck in random acts of sustainability, purgatory forever. So we emphasize that, yes, your client services and business development are really important, but you also have to look internally because if you're not walking the talk, people will not believe anything that you're doing for your clients. If there's a disconnect, you undermine your own credibility. Hello, I'm Brittany Campbell Turner, and this is the Constructor Podcast, episode number 43. Hello and welcome to the Constructor Podcast, the best way to build it.

This podcast is dedicated to helping property owners have certainty in their decisions about their construction projects. We talk about fostering trusting relationships within your project teams, help you understand how to lower risk, be under budget and on schedule, and most importantly, exceed your end user's desires. If you missed my discussion with Steven Mulva from CII about the benefits of flattening the supply chain, stretching the dollar or shrinking for agility, check it out at constructor.com slash EP42, that's episode 42 at constructor.com. Today I speak with Barbara Bozzolone, social entrepreneur, educator and change agent.

She is the founder and CEO of the Sustainable Performance Institute. She works with a variety of governmental, institutional and private sector organizations to help them institutionalize sustainability and achieve portfolio wide measurable improvements in performance and profitability. We talk about how SPI works with companies to prepare organizational strategies and do the right things culturally that support a sustainably focused organization. Without further ado, listen in to our interview. Welcome Barbara, how are you this evening?

I am great, thank you so much for having me, I'm really looking forward to it. You are the founder and CEO of the Sustainable Performance Institute. Could you tell us who and what you're supposed to affect in this world and how that fits into what you're doing at SPI? You know, it's funny, it started probably when I was six years old and I remember a family member asking me, what do you wanna do when you grow up? And aside from be a ballerina, I actually said that I wanna fix broken companies or I don't know what the words were, but my parents told me later that I was talking about how companies don't work right and I wanna fix them and something kind of bizarre.

So who knew what the future would be? As I got older in college, I studied social psychology and I was working with the adaption of cultures, immigrants adapting to a new culture and to different cultures that were also immigrating. And that's what led me to architecture. I saw how people were using space, people from tribal countries versus Western Europe use space very differently and had different social norms around it. And I thought, huh, the built environment could really respond to people's needs in a better way and it would be more efficient and more cost effective.

And then that led me to architecture. And then in architecture, I spent 12 years as an architect in mainstream airports, museums, colleges, et cetera. And that 12 years basically showed me a lot of dysfunction. And in my daily experiences, I kept feeling like, how is this okay? How can we be inflating costs and being so irresponsible and delivering such lower value and no one is acknowledging this.

It felt like the emperor wasn't wearing any clothes and nobody was saying anything. And that's kind of what got me to really accidentally go down this path, which I never anticipated that, I never anticipated that I would be an entrepreneur. I never anticipated that I would start a company. I thought I would just be an architect. But when I saw how broken things were, I just, I couldn't participate in it anymore and I really felt a draw to trying to change the norm.

That is an amazing story, especially since you somehow had that inkling way back when you were six years old. I think it's so funny how our core values really start to form when you're at such a young age and you meander and you eventually figure things out. I think that's super awesome. Yeah, it's funny. It feels like lots of circling back, almost like a spiral.

You go away from something, then you come back to it in a different way. And I definitely have felt that way about this. Yeah, to get a little bit more into what Sustainable Performance Institute does, or is SPI affectionately used? Yes, absolutely. And it's a much easier on the mouth.

SPI's roadmap to continuous improvement, that's what SPI is all about. I mean, when we think about sustainability, we typically think about green and things like that, sustainable materials and recycling and all those things that come along with design. But let's talk a little bit about what sustainability means to you and then how that differs from what I understand you to call it, random acts of sustainability. Yeah, that term has definitely caught, every time I use that term in an audience, people laugh with understanding. They acknowledge that they live in that spot.

What you said, definitely the products, the strategies, renewable energy, all that stuff is definitely sustainability. But what I experienced, so I started, SPI used to be called Green Roundtable when I started it in the 90s. I started it in 1998. And at that time, there wasn't much going on. The US Green Building Council existed, but it hadn't really caught any market share yet.

And there wasn't really a central place or clearinghouse for these issues. And so when I started in 98, we became kind of that hub. I started getting people together just volunteering at lunchtime to talk about issues like construction and demolition, debris, product specifications. And that little group grew from three of us to 450 in a year. And now it's 26,000 people who are part of our listserv and group nationally.

So I saw very quickly that people needed a multidisciplinary place to connect and solve issues. And what I saw, especially in the 12 years when I was in practice, and then in Green Roundtable's first years, was that people could easily look at problems like product specification. And I don't mean that that's an easy problem to solve, but they gravitated towards the shiny objects, things that you could deal with, but they were not looking at how to really institutionalize that so it happened all the time. So for example, Green Roundtable in the first 10 years did a lot of project consulting, buildings, larger scale planning, redevelopments.

And we were the Green Building Consultants, and there weren't that many back in the 90s. And what we saw was that we would be involved in a project and we'd help the team move the needle for that project, but the 20 to 30 to 40 people sitting around the table would then go back to their firms and business as usual. They didn't take the experience of working on like a lead project and then bring it back and apply it to all the other things they were working on.

So we saw that the big gap in the industry was not so much the products and all those other issues, which are still problems, but lots of people are working on that. We saw the gap as the ability to institutionalize a practice so that it was consistently done. And that's what really gives the clients, building owners, the value. Because if you do something once, yeah, okay, you could get a lead building and it could be certified or silver or even platinum. But if you are a firm that consistently turns out buildings at that level of performance, then every building you do is higher performing, more cost effective, et cetera.

So SPI, we switched our focus from projects to organizations, helping companies raise the bar across an entire portfolio, as opposed to just having some shiny, here's a billboard project and the random acts of sustainability. I would say that typifies most companies, whether they're building owners, developers, or designing construction firms, where they have some great initiatives, they have a bunch of projects, maybe handful of projects that they can point to, but it's not like any project would meet that same level of best practice. It's more random.

That's a great explanation. And what I find really interesting about the approach is that you seem to align, like you said, it's the ability to institutionalize the approach, so that they're thinking more broadly and influencing the mindset of the leaders, the stakeholders in the organization, and the culture to ultimately achieve better performance, not just in the buildings, but in their company, in their profitability. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And really what we do is management consulting, except our management consulting has a very specific focus.

And I have had occasions where I've been in a room with CEOs and COOs and other executive leadership and have gotten challenged. What are you talking about? This is our core business. This isn't sustainability, because we'll talk about accountability, and we'll talk about knowledge management or resource allocation, leadership capabilities. And really the answer is that there's a pretty fine line, or maybe a very blurry line, between core business excellence and implementing sustainability in a company, because whatever your goal is, if your goal is not sustainability, it's profitability or whatever, you still need to have all of the culture and mindsets and actions within the company align towards that goal.

And one of the big problems is in sustainability, that is lacking, especially at the top leadership level, or there are disconnects. Even when top leadership says, we're gonna commit to sustainability or reducing our carbon footprint, that doesn't always translate down throughout the company to a concrete understanding of how everybody contributes to achieving that goal. And there isn't always accountability for that. So for example, with buildings, universities, healthcare systems, developers of certain, really high quality developers have internal standards. They want to reduce their carbon footprints or they want buildings that achieve a certain level of energy performance.

Now, most firms, and when I say most, I wanna say it's like 90% of firms that you work with, don't have an internally driven requirement to even set an energy target at the beginning of a project. Sure, they'll do it if it's a lead project and they're pursuing a third party rating system, but that's no excuse to not set an energy target. The companies that we work with, one of the first things that happens is they figure out how they can get every project team and every project manager to work with their client to set an energy target and then deploy all of the behaviors and actions to support pursuing that target through the project.

It seems like a little thing because it doesn't cost any money to do that. There's no inherent expense to focusing your sharpening your pencil to look at. If we use glass curtain wall as opposed to 30% glazing on the facade of our building, what is the impact of that on our operating costs? Those questions need to be asked super early on and what I've seen in the industry over the last 20 years is that culture and that mindset of being accountable for asking that question just hasn't matured yet.

And there are many, many firms who are on the path to doing that and obviously the larger the firm is, the more difficult it is to make it a widespread kind of consistent behavior. So it's emerging, but it's still something that needs to be more firmly entrenched in the culture and in the systems. So some of the firms that we work with who have made a decision to commit to looking at energy performance, they look at, okay, what tools do we use for project management? What are our quality assurance or quality control protocols and how can we tie that to this kickoff part of the project or the review at the beginning of design development?

And they look at what are the triggers that happen on day-to-day projects that we can tie these things to so that they will be consistently implemented. And then in performance reviews, do project leaders, are they held accountable? What is the predicted energy use intensity of your projects this year? And how does that compare to other teams within our firm? And how are we, where are we missing the mark and how can we improve?

So those are the kinds of questions that are becoming part of a culture in the companies that we're working with. And that definitely improves the, not just the performance, but also the profitability and the value for the clients. And there are lots of things around resource allocation and streamlining the already constrained design process, which are good for company efficiencies as well. So is this all part of the assessment that you go through when you are speaking with a new client and figuring out what their baseline is like?

Yes, definitely. It's always a good thing to get a baseline when you're starting any kind of improvement process. And the baseline that we look at with companies looks in a bunch of different categories. It looks at leadership effectiveness. So that's not just the CEO and the C-suite, but in a company, especially a larger company, you have leadership at many different levels and often across business units or divisions.

So how effective is the leadership, especially at implementing strategic initiatives or any kind of change? Change management is a big, almost a non-existent concept in our industry. Then we look at collaboration effectiveness. How do they work with partners? Are they internally driven with their best practices?

Do they have best practices? Over 10 years or so, we developed a bunch of metrics and key performance indicators in a variety of those fields to help firms assess and measure their capability in those areas and look at where their weaknesses are. We often do internal surveys, confidential, and external surveys of clients and partners and aggregate all of that information to give them feedback, which a best practice for any company is to do a voice of the customer, maybe annually or every couple of years. And we find that most companies never don't get around really to doing that.

So this is also a good excuse from a business development and marketing perspective to engage clients, as well as a lot of companies, attraction and retention of talent and morale are huge issues. And sustainability is definitely one of those things that really gets people excited. So we do the assessment and with the design and construction firms, as well as with developers, one of the first things that comes out of the assessment is that they don't really own a methodology. How do you turn out your widgets?

How are your buildings, what's your process for designing or constructing a building? Now, obviously everyone has a process, but the question is if your end goal is not only meeting the budget and meeting the schedule, but also meeting a performance target, how does that change your process? And we have this workshop that we've been doing all around the country, which is really fun, where we go into a company and we get anywhere between 20 and 50 people from different levels and cross different business units to come together for a day and actually deconstruct their project delivery process and re-engineer it, looking at what are the barriers at each phase of projects and what could we do that's within our control tomorrow to align ourselves with the outcome that we want.

And it's amazing. I mean, first of all, getting those people across the hierarchy and across business units to have conversations and what usually happens is someone, maybe an executive leadership will say, oh, at this point, we always do this. And then you'll hear a project manager pipe up and say, we never do that. And you get, it's almost like a therapy session because people are kind of like daylighting all of this stuff that is really, has been bothering them and creates conflict within the firm around best practices.

But then they get to the part where they're coming up and brainstorming new actions. Oh, well, if we determine what the occupancy expectations are at this point, and we do the energy model, then we could really get a handle on this, that, or the other thing. And they start layering on, here are the seven to 10 things we could do tomorrow in our process to improve it. And then they look at organizationally, what has to change to support that? Do we need to hold project managers accountable for asking that question at the beginning of the project?

Do we need any tools or resources that we don't currently have? How are we gonna learn from our own projects across different project teams? So all of these things come out that have always been issues, but just no one's ever really had the time to deal with them before. So I feel like our assessment and this project mapping workshop, which usually comes out of the assessment, have been an amazing tool to kind of help companies daylight what their issues are, but not just that. Really come out with very practical and pragmatic solutions that give them hope.

Things can actually be better, and it also gets at the cultural things. So for example, energy focus obviously is critical today, and having architects own the energy performance is like a huge cultural shift in the industry, but it's a cultural problem for them within the firm. So one of the things that a number of architecture firms have been doing as part of this cultural shift is making every project team post on a public wall, the predicted energy use intensity of the project that they're working on.

So if you're going to get coffee or you're on your way to the bathroom, there's a wall, and it shows every team's project and kind of like a miles per gallon for each project. And that starts, there's healthy competition, and there's people like, ooh, how is their score 26 and ours is 57. Cool things come out of these that are really transformative. I just want to keep hearing more because of all of the great ways that you're positioning the multiple parties that are participating in the process.

I am interested in how this then translates to the organizational strategy, and then also how does that translate to accountability? Yeah, well, it's interesting because any company is used to kind of coming up with strategies for various things, but I don't think that companies are particularly effective at implementation of those strategies. And that is where that big concept of change management comes in. But it's also a question of taking a step back, formulating strategies that are the ones that fit the current time, the current culture, and the current situation.

So sometimes you can have a strategy, for example, a company that we're working with that leases all of their office space. And one of the ideas that they came up with is, we want green leases. We want to implement green leases for all of the properties that we're renting. But they didn't have a lot of leases that were turning over soon. And they also didn't have the pieces in place in terms of their internal legal counsel and the real estate agents.

And they kind of jumped ahead a little bit with their strategy. And what they really needed to do was think about, okay, what's the pre-strategy for the strategy? It's easy to jump to a strategy that sounds maybe sexy or appealing, but it may not be the right time or place. So first of all, strategies have to align with the priorities. And then second of all, when they're being implemented, if you go to business school, there's lots of stuff that you learn about change management, Cotter and Lewin and William Bridges.

There are lots of folks you study who talk about effective transformations within a corporate context. From what I've seen, people don't get that education in the design and construction industry. Unless they've, you know, in construction, I see more folks who have done MBAs. But certainly in design, it's not so prevalent. So here we have these big companies with lots of cashflow, and they're trying to implement changes, but they don't really understand how to make those changes stick.

And they think that just because a decision has been made on high, everyone will, you know, lockstep with that decision, which never happens. And people, whether it's time sheets or sustainability, it's like, it doesn't need to be a big change. But being intentional about the change management approach and understand who are the stakeholders that need to buy in. Who are the folks that have the most influence over the decision makers that need to roll something out? I think that's one thing that we bring to the folks that we work with that is probably the farthest from what they have been thinking about.

You know, they think about the nuts and bolts of things, but not so much how to promote change, especially when it's partly cultural. So we emphasize that, yes, your client services and business development are really important, but you also have to look internally because if you're not walking the talk, people will not believe anything that you're doing for your clients. If there's a disconnect, you undermine your own credibility. So we suggest that people look at their own carbon footprint, but then they have to balance things that are visible with things that have impact.

So, you know, maybe switching from paper cups to China isn't the biggest impact they could have within their company, but it's very tangible and concrete to people. So we recommend that they look at a bunch of different actions that will help reinforce culturally and in a concrete way what they're looking at, in terms of how they're changing their services to their clients. And accountability that you asked about, I think that is the hardest thing, especially in architecture. You know, as I mentioned, we work with architects, engineers, contractors, and they're definitely different cultures and different ecosystems.

Construction clearly is much more comfortable with SOPs, standard operating procedures and checklists and accountability being rolled up. Much more comfortable with that. I think maybe because of safety, and things of that nature. They were forced to do that. Yeah, with safety and with lean, which has been growing in the industry.

And the complete opposite of that is architecture, which thinks of itself as highly creative and don't hold me back and don't impinge on my creative process. When the creative part of architecture is not the dominant part, it's much more about flashing details and specifications and really the unsexy stuff. But the culture and the mindset is still very much away from accountability. And I would say when we do these mapping workshops, and I ask people if they come up with this great idea, which they always do, of like, oh, let's make sure everyone focuses on energy at the kickoff and sets a target.

And I say, so how are you going to make sure that happens all the time? How will you know if it didn't happen? And I get these like, that leads into this question of accountability. And it is always this big hairy, like, gosh, how are we going to do that? And considering that architects have to be insured and they have to be part of that insurance, ask them about their quality control programs, I have to tell you, I have seen more firms than not tell me, oh, yeah, well, we're trying to get our quality control program in place, or yeah, we really struggle with that.

And it's like, oh my God, if their insurers knew, it's more predominant than I think people outside the industry would expect. So that accountability thing really becomes an issue and definitely a focus. And there's a lot of fear around it because people don't want to be overburdened because these projects get fast tracked more and more all the time. The schedules are crazy and the budgets are not growing and there are more and more specialty consultants that are needed. So it's kind of this problem that keeps getting uglier and uglier, but the resources don't match the scope of the problem.

So when you ask people to add on more accountability and more check-ins and more, you know, they kind of freak out just on a basic human level of how am I gonna handle this? But then, you know, we work with them to figure out how does that get embedded just in the activities that you're already doing, just to have a different mindset and expectation. And they have to hear consistently from leaders at all levels. You know, if the CEO says, we are committing to reducing our carbon impact on projects, but then the project executives don't echo that and don't have that expectation, then the project managers are never gonna think that that's a real thing.

So there has to be consistency down the chain of command and in performance reviews or post project closeout processes, which is another thing that doesn't always happen. So is that something that you work with the teams to establish and put in place then? Yeah, and there isn't one recipe, you know, one size fits all. So that is something we work with them to try and help them understand what's gonna be the best way in your culture and your context to make this happen. So in some firms, the concept of performance reviews makes everyone roll their eyes.

Yeah, we do them, they're stupid, they're a waste of time, blah, blah, blah. So with one of those firms, it was an architecture firm, we said, well, you know, we're working with this construction company and they don't do performance reviews, they do project closeout reviews where they do kind of a 180 or 360 after a project is done and then you get feedback from your team, not just from one person who might be a supervisor but doesn't really know you that well. And the architecture firm was like, oh, well, we should be doing project closeouts and we're not, so we could get double value out of doing that, you know?

And in another firm, that wouldn't be the right solution, they do performance reviews within their studios and that's the effective way that they've been monitoring things. So yeah, it's definitely, we work with these companies to try and meet them where they are, understand their context, see where they wanna go and help them figure out what's the best way for us to actually have some small successes, build on them, create momentum and be on the path for continuous improvement. I think that's very practical. I have colleagues that I admire and respect who have a different approach who say, we don't have time for that kind of slower improvement, we need to leapfrog and we need to radically change everything tomorrow.

There's not a lot of companies that I've met who have the capability to do that. So for me, that's been the approach of kind of meeting companies where they are and helping them figure out how to grow makes the most sense to me, even though it can be frustrating and not very fast. Yeah, and I mean, I think everyone has to look at, like you said, meet them where they are, look at their baseline, look at the results that they're achieving and challenge themselves. And there are teams who can respond to incremental change, very small change and make large leaping results.

And then there are groups that can make bigger changes over time and systematically approach it and do that. So it's a matter of the nature of the work itself. And then, I mean, when you're doing design, for instance, I mean, it takes a while to actually get the design in place. So when you're iterating the design process, it takes some time to monitor it, understand what you're tracking, what the milestones are, making sure you have the right decisions at the right time. And then when you do the whole process again, it's kind of like, wait, what did we do last time?

If you're building something over and over again, say you're a carpenter, you're doing this regularly. You know how to do this and it's that consistent thing. You know how to tweak it and improve that one small skill. Right, and I think I've seen, especially in bigger companies, that can actually be an advantage because you could have one group that is definitely kind of a leapfrog group and another, you know, like the San Francisco office could be really aggressive about doing things. And the New York office wants to challenge them.

And so you get these centers of excellence. And in a bigger company, that can be a really cool way, a strategy of influencing more broadly when people in a company start seeing, ooh, there's lots of noise about the San Francisco office. Look at what they're doing. I wonder if we could do something like that. So you can really play these groups off of each other and on their own motivation and successes.

Yeah, and I think there's something to be said about the bottom-up approach versus the top-down. So I mean, if the project executives or even the lowest level designer or whatever the case might be, if they are excited about achieving X result and it's also coming from the top, that alone kind of get everybody in the middle going, you know? That's a good point. I think what you said is right. You know, is it better that it's top-down or bottom-up and it can't be one or the other.

And unfortunately, I'll tell you what I see most is that people are leading from the middle. And I can't tell you, I literally get at least one or two calls a week from people and maybe they're a sustainability director that's not in the C-suite or maybe they're just a project person. And they and their ragtag group of compatriots are trying to implement change from the middle. And there's a lot of literature in business and there's a lot of focus that we do on leading from the middle.

And how can you be more effective in your communications? And how can you have better influence when you're leading from the middle? Because it's definitely, I think, at least now where most of the energy is. And I have to say, there are definitely some companies where the executive leadership is totally committed and you think like, oh, problem solved. But they struggle because they haven't been fully aware of the disconnects between what they see and what everyone else sees and how to translate what they want to happen down to the different levels of their company.

So the grass is always greener, but it's not really totally green anywhere. There's this sort of happy medium that you have to know better what level you're in. You have to at least picture and have that mindset. All right, what's the work? Literally at its nitty gritty level and really understand the nuances there.

And then also stand back and look at the big picture again and look at the business approach and say, okay, what are we trying to achieve as a business? Who are our clients that we're continuously going after and things of that nature? It's very interesting. I like this concept of leading from the middle. It's where a lot of people are emerging from.

And the other question too is what do other people perceive in the company? Because what I've seen through this work is that no one has the same picture in mind. It's like that old fable about the blind men and the elephant. And I'm not gonna remember what it really is, but basically, if you get these three blind men and they're each touching different parts of an elephant, you ask them, what is it that you're touching? You'll get three completely different answers.

So one thing I've definitely seen as an Achilles heel is whether it's executive leadership or project management or IT or HR are always surprised by how other groups perceive the same situation. Just kind of moving on a little bit. I wanna know a little bit about the SPI certification. What's the process and how do you get one? Sure.

So it's basically three steps. We try to keep it pretty streamlined. So the first question is who, who can get certified? HUD adopted our program in 2011, I think, and we certified 50 affordable housing developers related, which is a much bigger commercial developer has an affordable housing component to what they do. And I think they were the first ones through the process because they were really supercharged.

So anything from building owners, developers, through architects, engineers, and contractors can be certified. We have also worked with product manufacturers and others, but that hasn't been a huge focus for the certification. So the process is three steps. The first one is the baseline. Where are you now?

And we look at a number of metrics, which you can find on our website, which have to do with not just how you currently deliver your services to your clients. That's a main centerpiece of how effective are your collaborations with various parties that you have to work with? Do you have internally driven best practices? Are they implemented consistently? But not just that, but also looking at, do you have leadership in place for sustainability?

It doesn't have to be called a sustainability director. It could just be project managers are held accountable, or you do have a sustainability director. We're not prescriptive. We're looking more at effectiveness. So it's much more like an ISO program than it is like lead.

So the first step is looking at the baseline. Where are you at right now? And then from that, we do a gap assessment and we make recommendations. So what are the things that are holding you back? Is it around resource allocation?

Is it around skills and capabilities, tools and resources? Is it accountability? Usually what we find are the things that are the biggest barriers have to do with kind of commitment, accountability, things that don't cost money. They take a little time, but they're much more about the culture and the approach to doing business. So after the assessment, we do the gap analysis and recommendations.

And then we work with the organization to align and prioritize what those things are so that they are aligned with the core business objectives of the company. And then the last thing we do is evaluate evidence. If you say that you deliver the best value to your clients, you can deliver high performance buildings, independent of whether or not they're lead certified. What's the evidence that you do that? Do you set a target in the kickoff?

When do you do energy modeling if you do that? What analysis do you do for facades and thermal bridging? We look at specifically, you make a claim, what evidence do you have to substantiate that claim? And that's the certification process. It's not paperwork intensive or bureaucratic like has become.

It's much more, let us look under the hood and take a look at what you've got going. We've had some firms who had been leaders in sustainability for a long time. So there wasn't much they had to do to change it. And then there are other companies who have to make a lot of changes. And those changes aren't again, investments in money, but they're investments in leadership.

So if they don't have an internally driven standard, like here's how we do the best building for you, they have to figure that out. What is that gonna be for them? And we help and we give them resources, but sometimes that can take time. If a company has been truly in the sustainability world and consistently delivering high quality, then it's like a three month process at most to go through certification. And the thing that takes the most time is just getting the surveys of their clients and partners done.

Because the contact information is for some reason, always a hard thing for them to organize. If it's a company that's kind of at the random act stage and they have some definite gaps that they need to address, then it will take them longer because it will depend on how quickly they can kind of put those pieces in place. But everything that they're doing has value to their core business. It's not like just busy work. It's either improving their internal communications or their efficiency or things that could be improved even if you weren't looking at sustainability.

I like the hands-on approach to the certification. It really makes a lot of sense. I love how the sustainability building aspect is interwoven into the process, but it's not the main focus. With LEAD in the marketplace, on one hand, it's been great because we've seen what it looks like for firms to kind of just focus on the building itself. But it's also shown us that if you just do that and you're kind of looking at end of pipe solutions like rating systems and you're not looking up the pipe at the organization's culture and systems and processes, then you never actually cross the line.

You get stuck in random acts purgatory forever. So let's talk about the report card. Walk us through what that is and how it works. We use an online survey and what we hear so often, especially from architects is, ugh, engineers, they're horrible, blah, blah, blah. It's like the most dysfunctional relationship in the world.

They need, it's a relationship that needs marriage counseling for sure. And one of the things I find is that there's very little feedback. The architects feel like they're shackled to their engineering partners because a lot of times RFPs will say the architects to submit a team that they've worked with before. So they don't wanna change horses. At the same time, they're not happy with what they're getting but they suffer in silence, both sides, the engineers as well as the architects.

And we've had some experiences where we've worked with firms and we've said, look, you have to deal with this. You can't just let this dysfunctional relationship limp along. We realized that it would be helpful to provide a free tool for people to use that could be anonymous. So people, if you're an architect, if you're an engineer, if you're a building owner or a contractor, you can go online and take this, I think it takes like 10 minutes survey and you fill it out about a partner and you can choose whether to be anonymous or not.

And if we get a number of those together, we can aggregate the results and send them. So we kind of like become this broker of information. And we did have, there was one engineering group in particular that a number of different firms had criticisms and we were able to take that and aggregate that information and send it to their leadership and said, look, here's X number of your clients who are not happy with your work. I don't know why it's so hard for firms to just, just give that feedback directly, but somehow it is.

And there's also, it doesn't have to be critical. There's also, in the report card, you can say this firm is outstanding, they're fantastic. When we do the certification, we require that a certain number of clients and partners give feedback about the firm. If we look at stuff and say, oh, that looks good, but all of their clients say they stink, then that would indicate to us that there's a bigger issue. And we learned from that, that there's feedback there that's very valuable.

And we asked them to give specific examples about things that were good or weren't good. And we asked them also to rank the firm compared to its competitors. Are these people better than their peers, the same as their peers, or not as good as their peers? So it gives good information, it takes 10 minutes tops and it's free. And I think there should be more feedback in the industry.

If we were more honest and direct about performance across the table, then maybe we could all learn from that or make things better. So do you just go back to the companies that are being reviewed and share that information, or is this posted somewhere more publicly? That's a good question. It has not been posted publicly. We just share it with the company.

However, if this happened once, where we had a state agency ask us, have there been reviews on a certain company? And we did share the aggregate information, but in general, we don't post it publicly. It was something that we thought we would do early on, but I don't think we're there yet. I'm on the AIA, the American Institute of Architects working group for the 2030 commitment. I'm mentioning it because it ties into kind of public display of information.

Architecture 2030 is an independent nonprofit led by Ed Misriah, who is an architect. And who was the person who threw a very bright spotlight on the fact that if we can't reach carbon neutrality by 2030, we've got some really big problems. So he translated climate science and climate action into the design industry and set some very specific goals for midway reductions. So the 2030 challenge that they put out says, by, I'm not gonna remember the numbers off the top of my head, but by like 2017, you should be able to be 30 or 40% better than building code, than basic building code.

So you're looking at CBEX data and basically by 2030, you should be able to build carbon neutral. So this organization partnered with the American Institute of Architects and they created this program called 2030 Commitment. And that commitment asks primarily architects, although some engineers and construction folks have also signed on. That commitment says that as a company, you are going to put yourselves on a path to net zero and you're going to do everything you can to hit these carbon reduction targets at these different increments. So we've already passed the 30% better than basic building code milestone.

And the AIA collects data and issues, public reports showing how the industry is doing. Now that gets back to the data. Obviously, it's been a big push from the AIA and others who care about these issues to get as many firms signed on as possible. And hundreds of firms have signed on. That information is public.

But these firms, once they have their executive leader sign this commitment letter saying that they're gonna do this, they then have to begin reporting the energy use intensity of their buildings across their entire portfolio, not just like, oh, here's three good buildings. So it's really introducing this kind of culture of accountability to design in a way that LEED never did, never ever. I mean, people might disagree with me, but you could do LEED projects and then have that be 2% of your portfolio and not do anything on the rest.

But this program really says, we don't care about one or two projects. We wanna know what are you doing as your responsibility as a professional? So they have to report this. And there was a big discussion about should firms scores be public? And if I were an owner, I would definitely wanna see based on their performance.

We do that with ratings for restaurants and things like that. But the big concern was it's such a challenging program and architects are really kind of freaked out by how are we gonna do this. If that was made public, fewer would do the program. And it was much more important to shift the market than it was to be public. To balance that, one of the kind of campaigns that I'm on and the group is on is to get more and more owners to ask in interviews and to put in RFQs and RFPs that either SPI certification and or 2030 commitment signatories are preferred qualifications.

So that if you don't have one of those things, you're not eligible to be considered for the project. And I'm actually doing a session at the National AIA Convention in New York City this June on that with three owners from healthcare, retail and commercial real estate development who are talking about why they put in these preferred credentials in their RFPs because they know that they'll get better. They'll get a better quality product because of it. But we're still too early to put ratings on, miles per gallon on the firms.

They would probably make them run away and scream. I don't know. That's so interesting. I really like the fact that there's that consideration of making that information public and making it available. I think it would just including in the RFP or RFQs gets people thinking a little bit deeper about how an organization is run and how are they keeping accountable to their own goals that they committed to.

I think that speaks volumes, honestly. Exactly. Yeah, I've been on the owner side of the table a number of times doing design team selection. And if you ask an architect, how much energy did your last three projects consume? You get blank stares.

I have no idea. But now with firms who are doing this 2030 commitment, I was working with a university in Massachusetts and they wrote that into their RFP, RFQ. And you ask architects who qualify for that now, what's the PEUI, the predicted energy use intensity in your last few projects and what was the actual? And they are fluent. They are articulate.

They can say they own their product. They can tell you, you know, imagine going to buy a car and the car salesman can't tell you how many miles to the gallon it gets. I personally think it is absolutely criminal for architects to not design to energy targets. I think an architect who cannot do that should not have a license. And I know a lot of people would be pissed at me for saying that, but I truly believe it is part of just best practices.

That's a strong statement, but I think it's completely valid in it. And it sets the standard to what it should be, right? It's a question of what's your integrity as a designer? And yes, it's a creative industry, but at the end of the day, your owners care about how their building is going to be operating after you're done because there's a time you're with them, whether it's leased space or owned space, they're with that facility for a long time after you're done. It's keeping their best interest in mind and that should be the focus.

Absolutely. And the AIA put out a report just recently about the 2030 commitment signatories. And to what you're saying about what the owners care about, $1.4 billion of savings were accrued by all of these firms who signed on and were able to hit these targets. 1.4 billion in the US, 3.1 billion globally. Wow.

That's a drop in the bucket compared to like the cost of construction in the world, whatever, but that is nothing to laugh at. $3.1 billion globally saved because architects are now paying attention to this. It's crazy. That's an incredible metric. So let's talk about mindset and culture.

What are the top things that you recommend for any of the companies that you work with to develop the right mindset to be a sustainable company? And we talked about sustainable in a number of senses. What would be your top recommendations? Well, this may sound silly, but I think the first thing is to be intentional about mindset. Mindset happens by accident now.

Everybody has their own mindset and whatever it is, it is. I think the minute that you are intentional about something that already brings it up a notch. I mean, I think of, I'm not the biggest sports maven, but I think of sports teams. Like coaches with sports teams, it's all about what the culture of the team is and getting everyone on the same page and what are they all about? And we don't have the same intentionality to what is our mindset as a firm.

Sometimes the questions that come up are, are we a service firm or are we a design firm? Like what, who are we? So I think the first thing is that you have to be intentional about asking the question. And I think leadership needs to understand or needs to establish the tone. What are the values that are important to the leadership?

How is leadership going to translate those values into expectations and actions around the company? Can't just be posters on a wall. It needs to really translate into concrete expectations, accountability, reward, and whatever the mindset is. So for example, Woods Bagot is an architecture firm that comes out of Australia, but is now has many offices in the United States. And I was really impressed by them a number of years ago when I saw one of their folks present and they came out and said, we've decided that by the year X, I can't remember what they said then, we are only gonna design net zero buildings, carbon neutral buildings.

And this was way before that was like a buzzword. And then he started talking about how that mindset was being established in the firm. First of all, they made a commitment to something. Second of all, they made it very clear to their employees that that was gonna be an expectation. Then they created a professional development matrix and made it clear who needs to develop what skills at what point in their career in order to be able to fulfill.

And then what partners are they going to work with? And they had some partnerships like with Lawrence Berkeley National Labs and some unusual partners for a design firm. And then they were very careful about the engineers that they worked with. They took something that that promise and a vision. And then they were very careful to translate that into how people were supported in professional development, how they were held accountable, what the rewards were.

And they had very visible and concrete tangible things in the day-to-day running of the office and how people outside of the office were, they had volunteer things. And in every dimension of an employee's day-to-day life, there was something that reinforced that mindset. And over time, it became very clear that if you were at that firm, you were a net zero designer. Like that's what you were. And people who were not of the same mindset left the company over time.

And the new people who came in were aligned with that vision and that culture. So I think you have to be intentional. You have to be consistent and make sure that that message ripples through the organization in ways that people perceive and feel are real. And then it becomes kind of embedded into the DNA of a company. What a great example.

And I think that kind of ties back to change management. Yes, totally. And having that consistent communication and alignment with the values internally at the company and making sure that it's in the best interest of every single person that's there and repeating that behavior throughout everything that you do. You can never repeat too often. I've seen that not just as a parent of four children, but as an employer and as a consultant and as an educator, repetition is never, never a bad thing.

And having things repeated in different ways and in different, having things show up and kind of through different channels and vehicles really reinforces things. We are only human after all, so. We are. So what would you say your recommendation is to the listener right now? Are there any resources that you would recommend that they look into or follow at this time?

Well, I guess this is such a broad topic. Certainly our website, sustainable-performance.org on the resources page has a lot of resources. There's definitely a lot there. And the free report cards and a whole bunch of free resources. I would say going to architecture2030.org is another fantastic research.

If you want a general education about what is this issue? Why does it matter? What are the numbers? And they also have a couple of tools there. They have the 2030 Palette, which is a free tool looking at building envelope strategies.

It's kind of like a strategy coloring book. It's very pretty, but it's also very practical in terms of like what strategies have people used to deal with these issues. So architecture2030.org is fantastic. In terms of visuals, who might be listening for their personal skills? There are a few books that I would recommend looking at.

One, the first one is Getting to Yes, which is like the Bible. The Fundamental Bible on Negotiations, it's a very short book. It's very powerful. And I think negotiation and communication skills are the one area that is the weakest. And if you wanna be a champion for sustainability, the first thing you need to do is develop your negotiation skills.

That's one of the things we do a lot of training in. So Getting to Yes is one of those books. There's a book called Influence by Roberto Cialdini, C-I-A-L-D-I-N-I. And that kind of goes along with negotiation because you wanna be able to influence effectively and you wanna be able to overcome resistance and connect with people through interest-based dialogue, as opposed to trying to just convince people all the time. And then Change Management, the two gurus of Change Management are Cotter, K-O-T-T-E-R, and William Bridges, which is just how it sounds.

And those books are amazing. And on our website in the blog, we have what I did is I took Cotter's Framework for Change Management, and I did an eight-part blog series translating it to our industry. So that's a free download that people can look at. There's another book that was written more for construction, but I think it applies to everyone, called I think it's Partnering by William Ronco, R-O-N-C-O. And that book, it's a little redundant.

It repeats itself within the book, and it's not a very thick book. So again, easy reading. And that gives very practical step-by-step, even agendas for how can you structure meetings, especially early meetings in a project team so that you create conditions that are conducive for success. It kind of takes partnering from the construction industry and gives it a broader brush for application. And I think that book has been helpful as well.

I think those are a good start anyway. Those are awesome resources. And I have, I mean, they're all on my list now for me to read. And as far as the links to your site, I'll make sure to include that in the show notes. And then I might as well throw in the book links as well so people can have easy access to them.

Yeah, I have just completed the very first draft of a book that I'm putting out, but I can't tell you when that's gonna be because it's a secondary project. And the book that I'm gonna be putting out will have a web compendium, which is basically how to institutionalize sustainability in your organization. That's not the final title, but it's a work in progress. And so, I'm sure, yeah, if people wanna do LinkedIn Me on LinkedIn, I will definitely blast through LinkedIn or through Twitter when that book is finally finished.

Tell the audience where they can find you. Obviously you mentioned LinkedIn. And then in addition to that, I want to just make sure to extend the invitation to you. Like when your book is getting released, we can go ahead and do another interview and talk a little bit about that. And then we can kind of showcase it.

So where can people find you? So I'm not the best tweeter, unlike our president. I am not that active these days on Twitter, but I am there. LinkedIn is probably the best way to find me, Barbara Botchelome, and through our website. And if anyone out there who's listening to this is struggling with anything, feel free to reach out.

I talk to people all the time, just kind of listening to what you've got going on in the mainstream. So if anyone hears this and thinks, huh, I have this problem and they didn't talk about it, I'm totally open to anyone reaching out to me. Wonderful. Well, thanks so much, Barbara. This has really been a pleasure.

Yeah, yeah, I really appreciate it. You can tell that Barbara and I had a good time just hanging out and talking about sustainability. If you enjoyed yourself too, let me know on Twitter at Brittany underscore CT, or find me on LinkedIn. Pretty easy to find. Just search Brittany Campbell Turner, or just email me at Brittany at constructor.com.

I wanna know how this podcast is helping you. Again, that email is Brittanie at constructrr.com. Two things to look forward to, constructors. Number one, the Constructor Podcast is going to the Lean Construction Institute Congress in Anaheim, California during the week of the 16th. So that's October 16th, 2017.

If you're going to be there, let me know, and I'll be happy to meet you guys there. I will also be happy to meet with some of our lean practitioners who I've brought on the podcast in the past. So I actually have a treat for you guys from the Congress. I won't tell you until I get back, but hopefully you guys find it just as interesting as I do. So number two, moving on, it looks like in November, I will be doing a series about blockchain and construction.

You've heard me talk about this over the past couple weeks that something is brewing, and yeah, this is gonna be pretty cool. So you guys don't wanna miss out on this series. We'll be talking about smart contracts, BIM associated with blockchain, smart cities, and a few more fun, practical topics. I'm looking forward to it, and I hope you guys are too. Don't forget to subscribe at constructrr.com to get email updates from me.

If you haven't already subscribed to the podcast, you can do so at iTunes and Stitcher. Please leave a review to show your support and let me know you're enjoying the podcast. I look forward to talking with you guys next week.