Fixing the Black Elephant in the room

Andrew Bulmer, CEO at The Property Institute, posted on Saturday (the 8th anniversary of the Grenfell Fire tragedy) about Peter Apps speaking at their annual conference in May.

Pete explained the concept of a Black Elephant to describe Grenfell. The black elephant was eloquently articulated in Gill Kernick’s book, Catastrophe and Systemic Change.

Whilst a Black Swan event is a high impact event that could not have been predicted, an unknown unknown, Grenfell was a known unknown: we knew it would happen. Grenfell was a black elephant.

It is refreshing to see someone as senior as Andrew Bulmer post about the reality of where construction and the built environment is currently at with building safety.

The answer is, in a mess.

However, what is missing from Andrew’s post is an investigation into what the industry can do about it, beyond the vague concept of “culture change”.

Culture change is such a compelling concept to senior leaders because it wraps up blame, guilt and shame into a simple package that they can use to articulate the industry responsibility without producing any actionable metrics. Dame Judith Hackitt has been using it for eight years without effect – because it is ineffective. It doesn’t help; it simply pushes the problem around.

How do we fix it?

In order to move beyond the vague concept of culture change and learn how to change the building safety crisis we have to lose our obsession with blame and blame avoidance.

Gill Kernick, who is very experienced in dealing with the fallout of Black Swan events in other industries, talks about blame a lot in her book.

We must stop blaming the firefighters, the manufacturers, the designers, the asset operators, the architects. Can you feel yourself wanting to? Me too.

But it must stop now.

I believe that the answer instead of culture change and blame is to listen to the voices of people that are on the ground and know what the problems are. We need to listen to the uncomfortable truths from troublemakers, the ones who are often sidelined or ridiculed.

Some examples from Grenfell: Eddie Dafarn, Gill Kernick and Emma Dent Coad.

Some examples from the Post Office Scandal: Alan Bates, Richard Roll and James Arbuthnot.

No one has the full picture of the problem, but they all have a part of it.

We need to hear what they have to say, and act on it.

We need to look for the people who are helping and learn from them.

This is why I invited Neil Yeomans CEnvH MCIEH and Matt Hodges-Long to have a public conversation with me at Digital Construction Week this year. To me they are two valuable examples of helpers/troublemakers looking at the challenges faces by building owners and operators. They know what is wrong and how to fix it and they are not often given the ear of ministers and the media.

I used the black elephant as an illustration of the problem and asked them what we should actually be doing to fix the mess we are in.

What Neil and Matt had to say: The Problem

During our conversation we looked at three examples of problems:

BIM and handover

• The software chasm between BIM in construction and asset management in housing.
• The nature of the asset owner operator community and their experience and understanding of the buildings they are looking after.
• A lack of common standards and the inadequacy of COBie to cover all the information asset owners need.
• The difference between ‘as built’ and ‘as occupied’ when so many changes happen in the occupation phase.

The EWS1 Scandal

• How introducing a certification scheme without a central registry, proper governance or version control was an obvious magnet for fraud.
• How we still don’t know the size of the problem, but a refusal to accept the mistake means that thousands of homeowners have become stranded and unable to buy or sell their property, and they have no idea whether it is safe or not.

Implementing the Golden Thread

• How the regulator is implementing the golden thread regime without creating a ‘single source of truth’. People providing information cannot link to it, they have to upload a copy, answer questions on a spreadsheet, and then do it again for the fire service.
• How this is creating costly duplication of work and preventing the efficient management of information right across the sector.
• Rather than demonstrating safety and efficiency we are simple compounding error and increasing risk.

What should happen now?

I asked Neil and Matt what one thing they would urge industry, regulator and government to do.

• Neil said that the key is to adopt the UK Housing Data Standards and soft landings.
• Matt said that they key is to value the data you are governing.
• I urged industry to learn the basics of information management and become more transparent in your communications.

We have spent eight years thrashing about and not fixing the problem. Indeed it looks like we are making it worse.

Let’s take some actionable steps. Lets start listening to the ‘troublemakers’.