Sustainable collaboration

Ted Garrison

Construction Week’s Conference on Sustainability in the Middle East in Abu Dhabi on 1 November offered many insights.

One of the main ideas that came out of the conference was the importance of collaboration to achieving maximum sustainability. This view was expressed over and over by contractors, consultants, designers, and even government officials.

The problem is the idea of collaboration is it at odds with the myth that the best way to maximise performance is highly competitive bids in the design-bid-build delivery approach. Unfortunately, the facts do not support this myth.

Professor and historian Walter Russell Mead wrote: “The more complex a society, the more need it has for multi-disciplinary, synthesising (thinkers) focused on communicating serious ideas to a large audience.”

Story continues below

Advertisement

FEATURED COMMENT Please click here to comment on this article

The complexity of construction projects, especially when attempting to create state-of-the-art projects that are highly efficient, requires the collective efforts of all the various disciplines from the start of the project. Today’s projects are too complex for any one individual or discipline to have all the best ideas.

Contributing to the problem is the fact that different people have different perspectives and different agendas, and therefore often focus on opposing approaches to the project.

Roger Martin, the dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, Canada says when people appear to consider opposing views, they are thought of as weak or indecisive.

Martin, who is on Thinkers 50’s list of top ten business thinkers in the world, disagrees with that conclusion. The reality is that most issues facing the construction industry are not simply ‘either/or’ choices, but complex issues that require addressing both sides of the equation.

Martin has developed a concept called integrative thinking which is defined “as a discipline and methodology for solving complex problems where, instead of choosing one at the expense of the other, generating a creative resolution of the tension in the form of a new model that contains elements of both models, but is superior to each.”

In construction, this approach is referred to as the integrated project delivery method. The most common form is the design-build approach. In the desire of sustainability, the tension is between the front-end costs versus the positive long-term impacts of sustainability.

A major discussion at the conference was about the collaborative effort necessary to address the complexities of creating a masterplan for one of the world’s most sustainable cities, Masdar City, which is situated about 17km from downtown Abu Dhabi.

“The city, which at full build out will house 40,000 residents and hundreds of businesses, will integrate the full range of renewable energy and sustainable technologies, across a living and working community. As with most dynamic technology clusters, the city has a top-notch research university that is a source for innovation, technologies, R&D, and highly-skilled graduates.”

Collaborative efforts are not limited to the UAE. The US Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory, located in Golden, Colorado is another example. Their research support facility is the most energy-efficient building of its type in North America.

Its cost is only in the 25 percentile, and there isn’t any technology used that is not at least ten years old. When I asked a consultant on the project how they achieved this desired result, he answered simply: “Collaboration.”

When asked to be more specific, he explained they had decided to use the design-build approach to construct this project because the design-bid-build approach failed. When they tried that approach, it came in way over budget.

However, when the Department of Energy made a list of all their requirements and priorities, they were able to go out to design-build teams and ask for proposals. The results speak for themselves.

Ted Garrison is host of New Construction Strategies Radio