Grow Places
Welcome to the Grow Places podcast where we explore the virtuous circle of people growth and place.
Brought to you by Grow Places and hosted by our Founder, Tom Larsson. These short conversations with industry leaders and community figures share insights on the built environment and open up about their purpose and what drives them on a personal level.
Thank you for listening. For more information please visit our website; www.growplaces.com and connect with us @WeGrowPlaces across all social channels.
We cover topics such as real estate, property development, place, urban design, architecture, social value, sustainability, community, technology, diversity, philanthropy, landscape design, public realm, cities, urban development, people, neighbourhoods, anthropology, sociology, geography, culture, circular economy, whole life carbon, affordability, business models, innovation, impact, futurism, mindset, leadership, mentorship, wellbeing.
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Grow Places
GP 16: Incremental Victories for a Sustainable Future: with Mel Allwood of Arup
It was a pleasure to host Arup's Sustainability Director, Mel Allwood, as we explore examples from London and around the world, and how our daily habitats can move us forward, step by step.
Our conversation uncovers the delicate dance between wellbeing and design, emphasising the transformative power of spaces that are as nurturing as they are sustainable. We learn from past global health crises, like the SARS outbreak, to fortify our approach to building certifications, ensuring that the spaces we inhabit are not only safe but also contribute positively to our collective wellbeing.
Hear about the role of impactful decision-making in reducing embodied carbon, as we dissect the influence of early design choices and the supply chain's responsiveness to sustainable demands. The conversation unfolds to illustrate how transparency in material sourcing can echo the strides taken elsewhere, providing a blueprint for conscious construction practices. We also highlight the necessity of designing for flexibility, adapting our built spaces to the ever-evolving ways we live and work, thereby maximising their utility and sustainability.
Join us on a personal journey back to Mel's childhood, where the seeds of innovation were planted by a simple fascination with the mechanics of everyday objects. Reflecting on the courage it takes to venture into the unknown, we encourage project teams to step away from the familiar and embrace change as we collectively strive towards a more innovative and sustainable future. As we rewind through Mel's formative experiences that shaped a life-long curiosity in engineering, we celebrate the incremental victories that compound to monumental progress, declaring that it's these small, courageous steps that will eventually lead us to a greener horizon.
Hello and welcome to the People Grow Places podcast, where we explore the virtuous circle of people, growth and place Brought to you by Grow Places and hosted by our founder, Tom Larson.
Speaker 2:Mel hi, how are you doing? Good, thank you, good. Good, just before we dive into it, I'm going to ask you one question at the top, which we'll come back to at the end. So project yourself forward to 2035. So project yourself forward to 2035. What is the one thing that you would ask us to talk about or to do right now that would make the most impact to those people in 10 years time? So the reason I haven't asked you to answer straight away is because it's a big question. So maybe just pause that and think about it as we go. But, mel, you are sustainability director here at Arup, which is obviously a huge remit, obviously really needed at this point in time. Um, maybe you could just elaborate on that a little bit and then also say well, what does that mean to you? What is a sustainability director? Why is that important?
Speaker 3:great. So, um, yeah, as you say, I'm a sustainability director specifically for our building engineering practice here in london. We do sustainability in lots of different ways, so we have lots of teams and lots of equivalents like me that do slightly different things, but the part that I focus on is all around buildings and buildings in London, and the role of me and my team is that we work with our project delivery teams to understand how we can work those designs, how we can work them harder so that we use less materials, less energy as materials, less waste and we deliver better social value.
Speaker 2:so it's all about understanding how we can systemically intervene in design to deliver better outcomes great and, as you say, this is something which is what no, we're in the built environment industry, but it's very much about the humans, isn't it? It's about the people side of that, too, and I think, well, it'd be good to elaborate on that a little bit about how that rounded definition of sustainability for you.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think one of the things that we really recognise is that, you know, as designers and engineers and probably actually as humans, we really find it much easier to focus on things we can count. Yeah, if you can't, you know, if you can't measure it, you can't control it. And actually one of the two really features of sustainability that make it really interesting but also make it quite hard is that there's a whole bunch of things that we can count. You know, carbon, it's really countable, but there's other things that are just as important and are much, much more difficult to count. So, for example, well-being. You know we want to design buildings that make people happy, because then they'll stay in them forever and protest with placards outside if somebody tries to set them down. That's a great building, but it's so much more intangible and so much more subjective. And that's, you know, that leads to.
Speaker 3:The second half of the coin is that, you know, we're often trying to compare an impact against one kind of thing like carbon, against a benefit, against another kind of thing like well-being. You know, shall we make windows bigger so that people can see out of them and enjoy the place that they're in and connect with their neighborhood, even though that means that that compromises in terms of the operational performance. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. We love things with a yes no answer, and sustainability is often it depends, and actually that's what's great about it, because we're trying to find the right answer for the right situation for the right person yeah that also makes it tricky yeah, definitely, and we're all learning, aren't we?
Speaker 2:particularly in this space, I think, and the industry is getting smarter and smarter, which is great and, um, if you look around the industry obviously a company like arab you're very fortunate that you have a a big, you know, a global lens, as well as a national and local lens. If you sort of look through those lenses, where are places doing really well? What can be learned from different areas of the world?
Speaker 3:That's a really great question. I mean, we see that not just in the present, but also in the way that the focus of sustainability has moved over time, that the focus of sustainability has moved over time. You know, one of the things that we really see now is that the UK, and London in particular, has really begun to grasp the thorny embodied carbon, the question, and beginning to, you know, we're beginning to understand what it means and how to measure it robustly and comprehensively, and that's been a really steep learning curve. But we also learn so much, you know, when we um, uh, when we first entered into covid, we really it was really it's startling how well the well-building certification really addressed things like covid and set in place some really sensible measures that would, you know, help us to manage that kind of threat.
Speaker 3:And what we understood because we hadn't really asked the right questions was that actually a lot of that was developed in response to some of the SARS the outbreak of SARS in East Asia and that actually a lot of what we needed to know had been done already in other parts of the world. We just hadn't really recognised its implementation and and how soon and how quickly we would need to get up to speed on that kind of thing. So that ability to reach out across the world and bring in people who've done maybe not the same thing, but a similar thing or a different thing with enough same components really helps us get on top of things really quickly. I really appreciate how how that sort of global span works for us yeah but I also really appreciate that we have.
Speaker 3:We have a huge diversity even within offices. You know. It's having having bringing different experiences to every project, because if you have diverse teams, then you get different perspectives. It's it's not it's not something that we tick a box with diversity. It's if we're trying to solve global challenges quickly and having lots of heads. Heads is good and having lots of different heads is brilliant. Sometimes you just get ideas that come out of the box that you just think I would. If I'd sat here forever, I would never have thought of it from that point of view. I still don't agree with it, but I would never have come at it from there. But maybe there's something in that that we could work with yeah so, yeah, I think that not.
Speaker 3:It's not just the sort of geographical diversity that we have, it's it's also a sort of diversity of ideas that I really recognize yeah, no, I can.
Speaker 2:I definitely would um test that, you know, having worked with you. Um, and it's interesting, you know, because we did a piece of work, didn't we, a couple of years ago, which was looking from first principles and saying, okay, well, trying to do exactly that, trying to sort of forget the rules, almost, yeah, um, and think about embodied carbon, but also operational from a first principles approach and some of the moves that maybe you can make around building fundamentals to change that. So, you know, you talk about grasping the nettle of embodied carbon. This is obviously something which I think we need to do, and there is an element that we're doing good things in the industry but does feel like maybe there's sort of further.
Speaker 2:We can continue to go, yeah, whether that's in early concept about fundamentally, should we be building, what types of things should we be building? And going through that gateway process to once the decision has been made to do something new, or maybe to knock down or to to reinvent, then what are the parameters that enable the best sort of outcomes to happen? And all the way down to the, to the sort of what materials are we choosing at the kind of the back end which is, in a way, is very important, but it's maybe the tail to the dog in some respects in terms of what, what, where we can make some of these big improvements. So yeah, so, so how do you see that? In terms of embodied carbon, then, what are the things that we can do collectively to to really move things on?
Speaker 3:I think that's a really interesting phrase about doing it collectively and I think there are, in some ways, that tail wagging. The dog piece is really important. I think there's absolutely things that you know we as project teams can control. So things in early concept stage about thinking about massing and form and, you know, reducing, reducing architectural heroics in order to make simpler buildings that require less complexity, because complexity basically is linear with body carbon. So there are absolutely things that we can do at those early stages to get the shapes right, to get grids and spans, those things right. There's absolutely, it's it's, it's absolutely not the case. The work is done there.
Speaker 3:Yes, a lot of the big moves, you know you can, you can lose a good, a good outcome there, but you can't win it there alone.
Speaker 3:There's absolutely pieces that we need to do all the way along the line with increasing levels of granularity, and those are all things that we can control because they sit, they sit within the design, but I think it's really easy for us to forget that those are things that we do on a project level. The bits, I think, the tail of the dog, that piece around supply chain, that's where we have influence and actually that's where the impact potentially is much, much greater than a project alone, but where we do need to act collectively. You know, what we know is that that actually, from the from the lens that you look through at stage two or even stage three or even stage four of a design, the supply chain is really opaque and actually there's a huge potential different differential between getting something out the supply chain that's really had the work done on it to reduce carbon as much as possible without compromising performance, and something that hasn't, and and although we have influence over that, we don't have control over that.
Speaker 3:So typically I think we, you know, we've stepped a little bit away from that and said, well, it's not a lot we can do about it, but actually there is a lot we can do about it because people only sell things, because we buy them yeah we need to be more consistent about what we're asking for, we need to be clearer about the difference between good and bad, and there's you know there's plenty of work to do there, but I do think there's enormous potential for change happening in the supply chain, and it does need both halves of the coin to understand each other much better and and to have much more communication between sort of design and procurement, to understand where those opportunities are and to really reward those um threads of the supply chain that are really sort of stepping up and making a difference yeah, it's interesting because, um, you know, I think about sort of what's happening in fashion and you know trainers, you know a pair of all birds, trainers or something.
Speaker 2:It will tell you exactly what it's made out of and where the materials have come from, and it kind of has that in theory, that transparency. Now, obviously there's a lot more goes into a building than a pair of trainers, but that principle of transparency of material passporting is obviously there that we talk about conceptually but in terms of that, delivery is starting to come through and hopefully, you know that will that will continue, um, but it's hard though it is hard yeah, it's, it's.
Speaker 3:I, I'm gonna, I'm gonna take a covid example again just because we've talked about it a little bit already and sort of cast your mind back to I don't't know four years ago today, when we were trying to work out how to get I don't know face masks and the government was trying to get supplies of face masks and we didn't know where they came from or what they were made of. And that was a piece of fabric and two bits of string, trying to get an air handling unit and acknowledging that we had that little control over traceability, over something that simple yeah I think it's.
Speaker 3:I think it's easy to look at the sum and think well, this is straightforward and actually the reality of understanding our intertwined global supply chains that have been honed to deliver most cheapest price, above all else yeah. Trying to push backwards through those to understand what the carbon implications of each element of it are. It's quite a thorny problem.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it is, isn't it? And then it's funny when you use the example of masks. On one hand it's not very transparent, but then you look at the way that we handle it in this country. It was actually very transparent as to where the contract had gone, but just back to the embodied carbon piece then, because you talked about the operational side and you know, with things like Neighbours we are getting smarter. But also with that getting smarter, there's also everyone across the industry starting to use some standards and kind of measure things in the same way With regards to the embodied carbon side?
Speaker 2:do you feel like we're getting to that now, because it feels like there's a lot of goodwill from consultancies and bodies, um, to try and at least map these?
Speaker 1:in the design stage.
Speaker 2:Obviously we talked about the latter stages, but it'd be great if we can get to some point where there's kind of everyone's trying to map things in the same way so that the kind of standards are accurate.
Speaker 3:You feel like we're we're moving that direction, I feel like we're moving really fast yeah, yes we've got a long way to go and if we make that comparison with operational carbon and think about the, you know, think about the focus that's been on that element since since the oil crisis in the 1970s, you know they've had nine, fifty years to get this right. Um, we've been working on it for, you know, a few years to get to reach the same level of, you know, the. The emergency is, is is focusing on both, both elements of those, as quickly. We've got a lot of catching up to do, but a lot of catching up is happening. I think we spent a really long time sort of arguing about how to do it perfectly and actually the shift that was made with the release of the first version of RICS was like we just need to do this. Some really fantastic things. Like you know, policy decisions by the GLA to require the collation of data of big projects at planning stage will really help build the databases that we absolutely need to understand where the opportunities are. So those two big moves in parallel have really helped.
Speaker 3:You know it's absolutely true that you know, the better we get at counting embodied carbon, the more we find, and that will continue to be so for a while until the plateau flattens off. That's not a reason not to do it. That's a reason to do it. It's a. There's an awful lot more carbon in in in buildings than we you know. If we'd known how much there was when we started counting, I'm quite glad we didn't, otherwise we might not have started um, but we're getting better at it. We're understanding where the gaps are and, particularly, we're understanding how little we know at early stages and therefore how much allowance we need to. Well, not quite yet how much allowance, but we've got a fairer idea of that. The amount of allowance we need to build in early stages is substantial yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:So, as you rightly say, buildings have a huge amount of carbon within them. We know that industry is very high up globally in terms of the contribution towards overall CO2. One thing again that we've talked about in the past is around intensity of use, like utility of buildings. Yes, because you assume that you know that carbon is spent. It's there, whether it's an existing building or obviously, even more importantly, if it's a new building, but then there's a going. Well, how is that actually used? What? What bang for your buck are you going to get from that?
Speaker 3:how much? How much use are you getting back for the investment that you've made?
Speaker 2:really exactly and um so. So how do you see that? Obviously, uh, particularly important at the moment. You know you mentioned the pandemic and you know it does feel slightly um, a long time ago in some respects, but it probably feels longer ago in terms of how far maybe society shifted in terms of patterns of use of buildings or I don't know if some of that you know. There's different opinions on whether some of that's returning to no norms or not, but there is change. So back to kind of usage of buildings throughout the day, throughout the week, different uses. How do you see that to be more sustainable and how we actually use these resources?
Speaker 3:I think there are real opportunities for us to think, you know, to think about the way that organisations and buildings work together, because we can make buildings work differently if organisations flex into the flex that buildings have. There are some fundamental things that we can build into designs that say OK, given that we know we don't know how people are going to be using buildings in five years' time. Let's take that as a I think again, four years ago today, we were probably all scrabbling around trying to work out what team's meeting was. That change happened really quickly. Yeah, if you'd asked us that january if everybody would be working from home in four months, we wouldn't have would.
Speaker 3:We might not have laughed at you because we're not that rude, but we might not have expected it Exactly yeah, we can't sit here and say that we can never expect a change like that to happen again or a different kind of change.
Speaker 3:What we can do is understand that, exactly as you say, what we need to build into buildings is the flexibility to be able to use them in different ways.
Speaker 3:And that means thinking about you know, how do we?
Speaker 3:Uh, how do we design in security lines, for example, even just sort of simple stuff that says, most often we can't use buildings flexibly because we design in security lines that mean you know, quite soon to the building, you're inside or outside, and that makes it really tricky to understand how we can, um, use buildings at different times over the weekends, in the evenings, how we can flex around so that you could, you know, have a project where you work to tuesday to thursday week and then a different organization had a monday and friday.
Speaker 3:Those are, those are really difficult to do when we have the the sort of simple parameters around security lines that we have. There's all sorts of other reasons why they're difficult as well, but there's some things that we can really solve if we think differently about how we occupy as organizations and then ask buildings to say you know how? How do we need to design this so that we can, so that we can move with the organizational flex that we've got and that I I think those those opportunities to really understand how we can, uh, how we can respond to how people now yeah now work.
Speaker 3:But you know, there's huge opportunities for us to just complete, think completely differently or just think a little bit more broadly than we do at the moment do you have any thoughts around you know, is that happening or could that?
Speaker 2:could that happen? I'll kind of give an example that's just come into my head. You know, if we talk about like a utility score almost as the same as where you've got a, got an embodied carbon and you've got an operational carbon, I know it kind of factors the operational because it would be used more intensively. But if you were up top of my head, if you were to say like a hospital, ok, that's got obviously really high utility.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:It's got really and that utility is also very high. Social value, yes, but you know it's going to have a huge operational carbon bill with that. But that's OK. Yes, To give you yeah, how do you see that, you know maybe a scale back from, from those types of uses and do you think there's anything we can do around kind of becoming smarter around utility of buildings and how that factors into the overall whole of carbon analysis?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I don't know whether we're yet ready to sort of factor it into the analysis. I think for now we've got so much more work to do instead of getting the big number right before we start working out how to split it up. But I do think there's opportunities, particularly around that social value piece, for us to talk about. If we can't make buildings work for us 24-7, 3-6-5, who can they be made to work for? And it's certainly the case that we flex around renting rooms to local organisations whose values meld with ours very well. And we've got a great building, We've got everything, We've got security and front doors and lights and heat and cooling all the time. There's a couple of local organisations that we work with that it doesn't cost us very much really in physical terms. It just needed a bit of organisational management for us to be able to say OK, we can make this work. Here we go. Yeah, it's it.
Speaker 3:It is hard because it's asking us to do something different. Yeah, but it's not impossible and it's probably a lot less difficult than some of the engineering challenges that we, you know, joyfully step up to the plate for all the time. Yeah, I think it's. I think it's good for us to flex into what behavioural and organisational change means, and actually we treat those as sort of problems that somebody else does, and actually maybe we need to step up and do some of those as well.
Speaker 2:Interesting. Yeah, this always comes back to the human unpredictability of it all, doesn't it? So you say this is hard work. That's happening, you know, and everyone is doing so. For you personally, Mel. Why have you chosen this hard work? You know? Why do you feel you've ended up in this space and what drives you, on a personal level, to kind of do what you do?
Speaker 3:I'm really excited by change for the better, I think change, you know, if you're not happy with the way something is, you can sit around and moan about it your whole life. You can step up and you know, say what can I do to make something different happen. And I think it makes me happy to think. You know I can't change everything, but there's little bits of it where I think I've got, you know, an opportunity to push something in the right direction that will help a whole bunch of other things pushing in the right direction and bring about the change we want to be.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I suppose it isn't any more complicated than that really. You can lie awake at four o'clock in the morning worrying about the end of the world. Or you can think can I push the end of the world a little bit further away and see if the people who come after us can actually solve it with the time that we've we've won for them. And that's yeah, it's enough, it's not. It's not any more complicated than that, I think, and I work with great people all the time. I'm really privileged that you know. You can have half an idea in a room full of a bunch of great people and somebody will pick it up and mold it into something that work. I can't underestimate how brilliant that is to work, not just sort of internally but, you know, with external collaborators and clients and project teams. You know, being part of a mission to solve a problem it does.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that feels good absolutely and um and is that? Has that always been something in you? You think that that that's kind of driven your actions, whether it's career decisions or or broader than that?
Speaker 3:I think I kind of always liked fixing things. I think my mum tells a story about christmas, when I must have been. I think I must have been too. We lived in a big, rambly old house and it had those old-fashioned doorknobs with the square and then two ends, and I think I think busyness and christmas was going on and track was lost and they found me in a corner with all of the spindles and all of the doorknobs, having extracted all of the doorknobs from all of the doors across the whole house, and, uh, when I left home at 18, um, nobody had managed to reconnect all of the spindles and all of the doorknobs again. I think I just liked yeah, I think I've always liked working out how things work and seeing if you can make them work better.
Speaker 2:Yeah Well, that's a very kind of engineering minded approach, isn't it? To things? It's kind of like trying to sort of break things down into components and then put them all back together again and see if what you've got is the same or better. I wonder whether your mum would think that the door operated better, maybe after you'd had a go at it, or not.
Speaker 3:Funnily enough, her version of this story isn't as enlightening and uplifting as my version.
Speaker 2:She just had rattly doors for the next 20 years, or whatever it was.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I don't think she saw it as a sort of enlightening presage of my career path. I think she saw it as why was nobody watching that child?
Speaker 2:yeah, exactly. Oh well, you know what you're going to get wrapped up at the next Christmas. Anyway, just a few doorknobs or a screwdriver, exactly.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I do remember working out how screwdrivers worked and just being like, oh my god, this is amazing. And I remember, uh, I remember my granddad, who I don't remember much of because he died when I was quite young, and, uh, I realized much later that my main memory of him was how he smelt. And what I realized much later was that he smelt of rum rum because he was a sailor. Yeah, and I remember him.
Speaker 3:He used to make ships in bottles and I remember him showing me how you made you put the ship in the bottle through the neck, but when you posted it in, um, the mast was lying down and facing backwards but had a little piece of string attached to it. So when it was inside the body of the bottle, you pulled the string to lift to them, to raise the mast up inside the bottle. And then he reached in with a little splint of wax and he used the, the blob of hot wax to to seal the string onto the bow, sprint at the front of the boat, keeping the keep, and I just remember watching that and thinking that is amazing. And then he reached in with a really sharp knife and cut the string off. So there was no evidence of the magic. I don't know. I just like fixing things.
Speaker 2:Yeah, amazing, it's amazing. Those kind of memories come back to you, isn't it? When you kind of think about these sorts of things, just that small moment maybe, as you say, maybe helped, do you feel like you've? You've always kind of had that, that intuition then to um to fix and to be inquisitive about those kind of aspects yeah, I don't think it was squashed early enough, I think.
Speaker 3:And then and then later on, uh, later on, they built the thames barrier at the end of my road, right, so I watched the thames barrier going up, which was just such a sort of um, sort of an amazing experience of kind of watching a thing being built by people and and realizing the sort of impact of you know what you could do by making intervention that that would make people's you know it's a, it's a, it's a game changer for london.
Speaker 3:If we didn't have thames barrier, we'd all be waiting around in wellies on exactly quite a lot of the last few weeks or worse, exactly so, watching, I think, watching the idea that you could, you could have an idea about how to do something differently and you could make that happen, and that the difference would would work. I think having that sort of being built at the end of your road in such a sort of a thing that was sort of beautiful but functional and effective, I think that can't help. I sort of wonder why everybody in my street didn't grow up as an engineer. Maybe they're all looking the other way or something. So, yeah, I think it just yeah, I think you have to.
Speaker 3:I think you sort of have to believe yeah and you have to have, and then, once you've believed you have to have sort of repeated proofs that that that you can make change for the better happen by doing things that you think about yeah, absolutely so.
Speaker 2:So looking forward then. Well, so what, what?
Speaker 3:what do you think we have to kind of believe then, maybe to, to frame that going forwards I think the thing that I remember every day is that the project teams I work on are really good at doing things, and mostly we get good at doing things by doing it and then doing it again a bit better and then doing it again a bit better.
Speaker 3:So mostly when you're asking something somebody to do something of the kind of radical change that we need to make a difference happen, we're really asking people. We're saying I know you're doing, you're really good at your job, you're're doing something great, you know what you're doing, you can deliver this business as usual really well. I want you to take a risk and do something really different. I think the thing I would like us to do is to not to do that any less, but just to acknowledge the change that we're asking people to make and to acknowledge that that's taking all of the kind of skill and experience that they already have and asking them to do something different, even when they know doing it the same would work.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:I think that's a really big ask we're asking of people. I need them to do it anyway, but I think it's important to respect that and I think that piece around sort of respecting the increment of change that we need, I think that feels like one of the really big keys.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely, and I think something I'm guessing for you, mel, is that you have a very good ability, it seems to, to break things down and to focus on the things that you maybe can control, or the step-by-steps, as opposed to, maybe, a sense of overwhelm or anything around the scale of what's happening, which is probably, if I'm honest, more the scale that I tend to go on to and have to bring myself back to. Okay, well, what can we do? Like now? And, and as you say, those, those incremental moves on a day-to-day basis maybe don't feel like very much, but you look back over weeks, months, years, and you go, wow, look, how far we've come.
Speaker 2:Uh, humans could now build things like the thames barrier, for example, and you know, it's kind of quite remarkable when you think about that. So maybe, mel, that's quite a nice way actually to segue onto this question. To wrap up, that I asked you at the top which was okay, you know we're in 2035. Now we're sat here again um, what's the thing, looking back on on this period, that you, you think we you'd have asked that we do right now?
Speaker 3:I? I think my answer would be that we we don't have the luxury to panic. It's too much to be done too soon. We just have to pragmatically get on with this and not give in to the overwhelm absolutely, absolutely.
Speaker 2:And um, just to conclude, then, what would be for me and maybe for anyone else listening out there who's wondering okay, well, how do you do that on a day-to-day basis? And how do you? Individually, maybe collectively as an organisation? How do you stay grounded in the here and now and move forward?
Speaker 3:Yeah, some days I can answer that question and some days I can't. It's, it's not easy. What I'm asking, you know we've, we've, we've got so much to do and so much change to make. I think, just making sure that we carry on talking to each other. You know, it's great to sit down with you and and and and. Have you forced me to express myself? Actually, that's really important because it can be we can be so busy doing that we forget to articulate ourselves.
Speaker 3:And actually, if we're trying to bring along along other people with us and that probably the single thing that we need to do is to is to practice being better at being articulate, and, yeah, stop and sit down and have a conversation about why we're doing what we're doing sometimes and then take that into the conversations that we're having, because none of us can do this on our own.
Speaker 3:I think it's everything that we need to do is about breaking us away from that kind of um, reductionist perspective of we can take I on my own, can take everything apart, I can take all the doorknobs off and I can put them back together again through a wider systemic perspective that says, in a circular economy world, we have to start thinking more systemically, and that means that we have to talk to each other more and we have to break the um the sort of renaissance habit that we have of procuring buildings by breaking all the components down into little parts, hiving off all the parts to the cheapest person who can do the job to the brief, and then pulling them all back together and expecting miracles to happen yeah we have to think more broadly, and that yeah, that just means talking to each other yeah, absolutely, and that that is, um, one of the key elements of being human.
Speaker 2:Isn't it bringing this back to sort of a societal change, which is some of the stuff that we've talked about? This podcast is actually the more difficult stuff to do, yes, um, but it's kind of where we really need the energy, isn't it? So having these types of conversations is, um is really important, and I'm really grateful for you giving your time up today for having this conversation I've really enjoyed it, thank you.
Speaker 3:Thank you for for asking questions. That made me think that's good.
Speaker 2:That's good. That's the least I can try to do. That is my job, after all, and in all seriousness, that's a big part of this for me is sort of you know, you need good clients, you need good kind of. Every element of the project team needs to be inquisitive and needs to be kind of asking good questions to kind of move things on, and hopefully this podcast acts in that way for people as well. So great, appreciate your time. Thanks Tom, thanks Mel.
Speaker 1:Thank you for listening to the People Grow Places podcast. For more information, visit growplacescom and follow us at. We Grow Places across all social channels. See you next time.