Seven Transformative "Best Practices"
To Improve The Way We Build

Keynote Address by Donald Watson
to
The First South Florida Sustainable Building Conference and Exhibition

Donald Watson

How well we design buildings and how well they operate can be taken as a direct measure of economic viability, social well-being, and environmental health. Too often these three "legs of sustainability" appear to contradict one another, that is, the prevailing opinion is that one cannot create buildings that are economically viable, good for people, and environmentally sound. Below are seven proven ways and variations that suggest how to cut through the rhetoric and demonstrate that sustainability can work. It is possible to improve business practices while dramatically improving the quality of what we build, not simply in terms of economic performance but in ways that yield continuing social and environmental benefits.

Continuous learning: Establish a "learning organization" approach to professional practices, achievable through small steps such as creation of an information library, office "heartbeat" seminars as a setting for creative dialogue, and any other approaches to sharing information so that all individuals in an organization become learners and teachers. Creative design teamwork: Use "integrated team" brainstorming to bring together the best ideas and expertise at the formative stages of design and points of decision. Case studies: Document "case studies" of buildings as a record of lessons learned through systematic post-occupancy evaluations, thus evolving measures for the performance goals and qualities you seek to promote. Lifestyle performance measures: Establish high-performance life-cycle goals for buildings, seeking out exemplars to imitate and surpass, including buildings that have positive impacts on the environment, with measures continuously improved throughout the life of the building by "green team" management.1 "Three L" development: Implement long life, loose fit, low impact goals for land planning and building developments that restore and create the bioregional environment and provide settings for broad-based environmental education.2 Vertical process improvement: Apply "vertical streamlining" that integrates system-wide decisions to dramatically improve the quality and reduce the time and cost of delivering building services. Community design workshops: Undertake public workshops and design charrettes to bring the design process into public and participatory community meetings.3

References Watson, Donald and Kenneth Labs Climatic Building Design New York: McGraw-Hill 1993 Watson, Donald editor Energy Design Process Washington, DC: AIA Press 1994 Watson, Donald Environmental Design Charrette Workbook Washington, DC: AIA Publications 1996

	Background: "best practices" in quality improvement processes
	The term "best practices" describes any idea, method, or approach to improve any part of architectural design and delivery of services. "Best practices" can thus be an approach to design team integration, marketing, office management, quality control of construction--in short, any improvement that you or someone else considers to be exemplary.
	What is now widely recognized as the quality improvement approach to organizational development has been on-going for nearly 40 years, widely credited to W. Edwards Deming, who consulted with the U.S. government and Japanese industry about reconstruction following World War II. Deming formulated the ideas of what has become known as the quality improvement process, or "Total Quality Management" (TQM). The process of quality improvement has now been widely adopted by business and governmental organizations worldwide.
Create constancy of purpose for improvement of product and service, through innovation...	Deming was the first to propose that our organizational goals emphasize above all else the quality of service and production and the involvement of on-line workers as part of team management. The first of Deming's "Points" contains his main insight into organizational change, to "Create constancy of purpose for improvement of product and service, through innovation, put resources into research and education, continuous improvement of products/service, and invest in maintenance and aids to production." In this one point, Deming emphasizes innovation and a challenge to change, learning through research and education, and an organizational culture of continuous quality improvement.

	Peter Drucker, in a November 1994 article in Atlantic Monthly, updates this approach in stating, "We are in the midst of the most extreme societal changes in recorded history." While the industrialization of our economy was accompanied by the dramatic rise and fall of the blue collar worker, Drucker says the present and future business environment is best understood as the rise of the knowledge worker, in which information and specialized knowledge is more critical than product or produce. Drucker anticipates our emerging 21st century era as an unprecedented challenge to innovate in education, political, and business organizations
"...mission focused, values based, and demographics driven..."	In The Five Most Important Questions you will ever ask about your organization, Drucker sets forth his pointers by which organizations should define themselves: (1) What is our business mission? (2) Who is our customer? (3) What does the customer consider value? (4) What have been our results? (5) What is our plan? The critical point is suggested by questions 2 and 3, that is, the need to understand and respond to a customer's perception of value. Drucker and the many others who promote the "customer driven" organizational change approach would not disagree but simply ask that the notion of both owner and public as "customer" be central to our business. Frances Hasselbein, President of the Drucker Foundation, summarizes the approach succinctly that all viable organizations must be "mission focused, values based, and demographics driven..."
	Peter M. Senge, author of The Fifth Discipline, is a proponent for what he calls the "learning organization" approach to groups, whether engaged in business, social, or civic enterprise. Senge adopts concepts from systems theory and brainstorming, such as the use of visual diagrams and maps to represent ideas as "mental models," ways of achieving a common vision and team learning. Senge's essential point is that all organizations should have a defined process of learning, following the cybernetic or systems definition of learning as one that involves feedback and self-correction. Senge considers most organizations as "learning disabled" when it comes to documenting and systematically learning from what they do.
	Design as a structuring of the learning process
	The design process establishes a structure or mental model for learning. We envision goals and measures at the beginning of a learning cycle. We explore options by rigorous investigation as if one were a scientific detective and by free-wheeling imagination as if one were a poet. We take action and constantly evaluate results to followup with corrective action.
	A building project--or more properly, the process of building design, construction, and management--is a structure for learning. What is described here as "best practices" is intended to make this process clear and accessible to the many individuals involved in a design and building program and, most importantly, to establish goals and measures of performance so that designers, builders, owners, and users can participate in the success of the organizational learning enterprise.

"Business pioneers are finding surprising ways...to measure and manage the ultimate intangible: knowledge."	These approaches are impacting corporate practices, to quote a Fortune Magazine report, October 1994, "Business pioneers are finding surprising ways...to measure and manage the ultimate intangible: knowledge." The article cites how leading-edge corporations are creating "accounting systems" of their "intellectual capital" to recognize and reward the intellectual assets of people in their organization, much like a University faculty assessment wherein publications and patents are indicators of intellectual excellence and evidence of the contributions to knowledge-base.
	Studies undertaken in the 1960s of decision-making and creativity in R&D Laboratories by John Allen at MIT indicated that some individuals in organizations are active "gate keepers" or leaders of information and idea exchange, recognized by their peers as helpful, informative, and the source of "best ideas" and guidance in their own work. Allen's studies showed that such gate keepers were not necessarily recognized either by compensation or status in the hierarchy of their organization. Further, significant "gate keepers" were active readers, attended conferences, were interested in their own and other topics; in short, they were by personality and by temperament individuals who were exemplary "idea networkers" whom it is possible to recognize and nurture. In any organization setting, it is possible to encourage cross-fertilization by a culture of learning, including placement of library, periodicals, bulletin boards, etc. as a setting for informal "serendipitous" communication, networking, and learning.
	Adoption of quality improvement processes
...establish goals that can be measured.	An operative notion of the quality improvement process is to establish goals that can be measured. The goal--for example, to become the foremost A&E firm in health and educational facility design within a designated region--is fine but only gets to "walk the talk" by only establishing specific measures and metrics by which one could make that statement. These metrics and measures should be qualitative, that is, not simply the number and size of health and educational buildings but the qualities of design and services that your firm and its clients take seriously, such as design awards and recognition, continuing work with one client, innovations in health and educational practice, post-occupancy and long-term evaluations of buildings, etc. For firms that aim and claim to provide efficient and cost effective practice, the critical measures are one's record of budget estimates compared to bids, percentage of change-orders, specific measures of scheduling, project delivery, and so forth.
	The design professionals--and I include myself--do not do enough to state our values in terms that clients can understand, and we do an even poorer job of articulating what is foremost in a client's mind in ways that can be objectively measured. Our goals and values can be expressed as specific objectives, program requirements, cost (first-cost and life-cycle cost), staff investment, building and equipment operations, repair and maintenance--each represented in measurable terms. A&E firms that can articulate their own approach to client issues and define how they measure and improve their own practices will obviously find a responsive chord from across the interview table.
"...what we are about and how we can do better..."	In the quality improvement process, metrics and measures of performance are intended to help focus the efforts and energies of an organization, to constantly keep in mind "what we are about and how we can do better." As such, performance measures have to make sense to those who do the work. Ideally, goals and measures are developed through participation of on-line staff, framed in terms that makes sense to staff.
	Any one of these steps of self and organizational evaluation will initiate a process of learning and an aspiration to improve. They are best combined in a program to adopt best practices. Specific areas in which to adopt best practices are presented below, including programming, energy analysis, building commissioning, and post-occupancy evaluation.
	"Best Practices" of environmental design
	This section views environmental design--with the combined goals of energy-efficiency and low environmental impact--in the context of an overall approach to quality improvement in architecture and engineering services. From this perspective, environmental design is part of an effort to improve quality and is thus "driven" by the A&E firm or team, beginning with pre-design programming and is undertaken throughout the design, construction and post-occupancy evaluation process.
...criteria and design methods of environmental design are seen as an integral part...	There are advantages and disadvantages to this view. The advantage is that the criteria and design methods of environmental design are seen as an integral part of an extended process of new business practices that are, like all quality improvement approaches, "client driven," that is, undertaken to improve client and customer satisfaction and evidenced by metrics of performance. In this view, environmental design practices would be undertaken willingly by A&E firms whether or not clients were aware of or demanded building commissioning as part of professional services.
	The disadvantage is that for some firms such a broad sweep and cross-cutting approach to improvement of services is onerous, that is, "too much too soon." Such firms will be more comfortable with smaller and more modest efforts at improving their practices. But even in this "incremental" view, changes in business practices that lead a firm to adopting environmental design as part of standard practice require preparatory and follow-through steps, more extensive than many practitioners are prepared to undertake.

	The end result is that viewing environmental design as part of "best practices" in improving A&E services enables design professionals to better understand and therefore to move toward adoption of these new approaches to design and construction out of a desire to improve from "inside" the firm, rather than by reacting to changes imposed from without.
	The ladder of "best practices"
	To understand this view more easily, simply conceive of what it takes to be able to represent to a client something as follows: I (or we), as the architects and engineers (A&E) of your new building project, will demonstrate that we are able to achieve a high level of building performance in your building, evidenced by achievement of specific energy, environmental, and human performance and satisfaction goals and measures, benchmarked alongside similar building programs and projects.
	Many clients will respond to such a statement with something like "But that is what I thought you were doing anyway." However, if the following key words in the A&E statement are highlighted as "demonstrate....evidenced by specific...goals and measures, benchmarked alongside..." it becomes clear that such a statement is bold. It claims to be able to quantify the performance of a building and to provide evidence of such goals and measures.
	By adopting environmental design practices alongside and as part of other "best practices," it is possible to make the claim of "specific goals and measures." Energy-efficiency and low environmental impact is part of such evidence and quality control. Steps that are essential in supporting such a claim include:
	Predesign: Life-cycle performance goals made part of design program,
	Design: Life-cycle energy and environmental design,
	Construction: Building commissioning, and
	Operation: Green team building operation and maintenance protocols, post-occupancy evaluation.
	These steps are listed below in a typical sequence to make the point that environmental design can be made part of continuous improvement throughout the programming, design, construction, and (life-cycle) operation of a building.
	program/performance goals and performance metrics program and process audit (health, safety, welfare) eco-design and life-cycle decision-making energy and environmental design bioclimatic analysis and energy design (passive heating, cooling, daylighting) indoor air quality (materials and ventilation) energy-efficient technology integration green materials specification construction waste management (reduce-reuse-recycle) building commissioning green building operation and maintenance post-occupancy evaluation "green team" management: continuous maintenance and improvement

	Checklist for Design, Energy and Environmental Quality Planning
	* What are the goals of the building design in terms of people, productivity, energy-cost reduction, and a positive benefit to the environment?
	* How will the various disciplines of architecture, landscape design, engineering, management, and construction be integrated as a design, build, and operations team to achieve excellence in total building performance?
	* What local landscape, planting, and ecological features that can be improved through the building siting, placement, and design?
	* How can the building location, layout, and parking utilize and improve local and regional transportation systems, mass transit, bikeways, and pedestrian ways?
	Environmentally responsible design
	* Have solar approaches, sunlight for winter heating and for daylighting and shading and ventilation for cooling, been integrated into building orientation and design?
	* Has building energy demand been reduced and, if possible, "shifted" to reduce peak-hour energy demands and costs?
	* Have the total life-cycle energy, operating, and repair/replacement costs of the building been reduced by cost-effective, energy-efficient technologies?
	* Have the materials of construction been selected to minimize negative environmental and health risks and to promote sustainable resource use?
	* Has water consumption and waste production been reduced to improve environmental quality band and aquifer improvement?
	* Has indoor air quality and occupant comfort and productivity been addressed through the interior design and environmental systems of the design?
	Continuous evaluation and improvement

	*Will the building be evaluated systematically to monitor its performance in terms of design and operation goals, both quantitative and qualitative?
	* Is there a "green team" of building managers, staff, and operators who are rewarded in continuously improving building quality and performance?
	Donald Watson, FAIA