Great meeting with @Valeriya Ionan and @Andrii Remizov leading digitization and Entrepreneurship in Ukraine. We at BIM4Housing are looking at ways we can assist in construction and digitization. Plus, Richard Freer’s IceFire will be helping new Ukrainian businesses with free web sites and marketing support.
@George Stevenson and @Richard Freer will be holding further meetings in the coming weeks.
More details to follow.
Special Guest at our meeting last week was @Chris Waterman. Advisor- and sometimes thorn in the side- to Government Ministers and MPs, Chris distilled and explained the Fire Safety Act and the Building Safety Act to MPs and even the Levelling Up Department’s Ministers and luminaries. With decades of experience inside the corridors of power, Chris had many helpful insights from the other side of the fence- along with a rapier wit, which livened-up matters considerably!
Ably assisted by @Matt Hodges-Long and @George Stevenson, and chaired by @Richard Freer
We’ll be looking to hold regular meetings with Special Guest spots in the New Year.
See a recording and notes of the meeting here from next week. https://bim4housing.com/fire-safety/
Just to remind you, our ongoing efforts can be found on https://bim4housing.com/ at the bottom of the Home page.
We worked on an initial 2 phases. Phase 1 defined the over-arching questions that need to be answered, for 12 fire-critical asset types, to deliver the BIM-plus solution necessary to the effective functioning of the Golden Thread in terms of Fire Safety.
The questions defined are:
Phase 2 sought to answer those questions, offering a definitive guide to the delivery of The Golden Thread through the effective management of required information.
The work is ongoing- we’d appreciate your help.
Wednesday’s Advisory Working Group meeting examined the challenges of managing competency. Looking at how aware people are and whether they’ve actually looked at the competence product framework. Setting some context first, the meeting looked at a recently-finished Innovate project on product based building systems.
The meeting was chaired by @Debbie Carlton and @Dave Peacock
The subject of this meeting was Competency Management.
Featuring a presentation from @Debbie Carlton. A video and High Points of the meeting are available on
There’s not long to go before the Construction Industry learns its fate. The Great and the Good have been piling on the pressure, but will any of it help alleviate the outcomes determined by a Chancellor on a mission. See Building’s analysis here.
https://www.building.co.uk/news/autumn-statement-infrastructure-and-net-zero-must-not-be-sacrificed-says-industry/5120471.article
The biggest challenges cannot be solved by technology alone – particularly those posed by Hackitt and the Building Safety Bill. Changes in culture and better processes are also necessary so we have sought to learn from other industries that have had problems with safety – Healthcare and Aviation.
The latter seems to have it cracked, creating a culture and process of reporting mistakes and addressing them, rather than transferring blame.
As Matthew Syed writes Black Box Thinking “When pilots make mistakes, it results in their own deaths. When a doctor makes a mistake, it results in the death of someone else. That is why pilots are better motivated than doctors to reduce mistakes. But this analysis misses the crucial point. Remember that pilots died in large numbers in the early days of aviation. This was not because they lacked the incentive to live, but because the system had so many flaws. Failure is inevitable in a complex world. This is precisely why learning from mistakes is so imperative.”
Construction is also a complex world so failure is inevitable.
We need to establish a similar culture to Aviation and encourage reporting of mistakes – our own as well as those of others – so we can engineer them out of the process.
Bill East (of COBie fame) is a ‘fellow traveller’ and has directed me to a podcast by the BBC’s Tim Harford who gave an example of ‘two pressure relief systems that react in such a way that neither of them work.’
Tim presents evidence that the safety measures introduced to prevent catastrophes can make processes more complex and when systems are both complex and tightly coupled, we should expect catastrophic accidents.
Within BIM4Housing, we are establishing this Black Box culture, inviting people with deep understanding of individual asset types, the systems they form part of and the inter-relationship of systems, to join with other experts to better understand how we can mitigate (not eliminate) risks.
