Low carbon consultant Derek Deighton keeps up the high standards

It is often said that the past is another country, and this very true of construction and building services management; gone is the time when the “customer was king”, the construction industry read the likes of Egan, Deming and Crosby, and the drive was for “quality” and “integrated teams”.

Sir John Egan said: “...Continuous and sustained improvement is achievable if we focus all our efforts on delivering the value that our customers need, and are prepared to challenge the waste and poor quality arising from our existing structures and working practices.”

Quality management has, however, become overshadowed by the concept of sustainable development, which has been driven to prominence by excellent people who, mostly, live outside the box of the established construction and building services paradigm. As a result, they often do not understand the drivers and constraints of those inside – or even speak the same language. What is needed is a few common phrases, and I believe these come from the “language” of quality. Let me explain.

Loss to society

The Japanese engineer Genichi Taguchi made a seminal statement: less than perfect quality creates a loss to society. Herein lies the link between the languages of quality and sustainability – as any process that contains losses is by definition unsustainable, be it a machine, a construction project or an eco-system.

The existing business paradigm, which we cannot change on a timescale relevant to the present rate of environmental decay, is based on financial metrics – the costs of less than perfect quality, ie not making “appropriate” use of resources or doing the right thing correctly, every time. Those costs can be social, environmental or economic failures within the built environment, but can be reduced continually by application of the many business tools developed over the past five decades, since Deming first said: plan, do, check, act.

At the heart of a construction process there needs to be a virtuous circle of process design for sustainability, driven by the ingenuity created by a synergy of stakeholder knowledge and skills, taking into account external factors.

Towards a sustainable future

The 2006 changes to the Building Regulations echo this holistic, integrated approach to quality, which should drive a continual reduction in lifecycle costs through the minimisation of process losses at all stages of design, realisation and operation of buildings.

CIBSE’s Low Carbon Consultants Register can help to promote this synergy in process design by recognising that minimising the lifecycle emissions of a building can only be achieved through the integrated design and management of its natural rhythms and the rhythms of the processes occurring within. At Ecobuild, Dr David Strong commented on the need for “whole system thinking”, saying: “This means collaborative, multidisciplinary, integrated team-working like we’ve rarely seen before.”

Taking responsibility

Under this heading in the brochure for the Toyota Prius hybrid car, it says: “Toyota’s product and technology development can be summed up in two words – zeroise and maximise.” The carmaker is striving for zero impact on the environment and maximum satisfaction, fun and excitement. That is, maximising added value while minimising loss to society. This surely also applies to any inspirational building.

Concern with words may sound pedantic but the sustainability message is not reaching many in the construction community in a language they can understand and the message of construction quality is being drowned in the process. Quality and sustainability are the two sides of the same coin – toss it and you can only win.