by Pam Touschner, FAIA

Summary: In the third installment of 2009 and Beyond, Markku Allison, AIA, interviewed Laura Lesniewski, AIA, Eddy Krygiel, AIA, of HNTB Architecture of Kansas City, Mo., and Bob Berkebile, FAIA, of BNIM in Kansas City, Mo., about their 2006 essay in the original report on integrated practice. Their original essay was titled Roadmap for Integration, and examined what the authors characterized as the ultimate design challenges: integration between nature and human nature, integration between the built and natural environments, and the technologies we use to pursue this integration.

Since the anthology was first published in 2006, significant changes have occurred in the integrated practice/integrated project delivery environment, and in the mindset of the key players involved. Allison’s goal was to capture their knowledge of IPD, their current perspective on the industry and the validity of the topic today.

All three authors strongly believe that the topic is even more valid today. The emphasis now is on the integration of building information modeling and sustainable design. In comparison to the 2006 essay, Lesniewski would deemphasize the role of technology, even though this aspect of integrated practice keeps progressing rapidly. She believes personal behavior and team behavior is a more difficult challenge to effective IPD than previously anticipated.

Berkebile indicated that since the essay was written, there’s been an unprecedented economic freefall and ever more daunting information about an environment that needs to support human life and wellbeing. While we need to develop better technologies and use them wisely, the real issue, he says, is our ability to think differently and to use these tools more intelligently. What we're experiencing now is a return to old process behaviors, rather than using an unprecedented economic freefall to create a new economy, a new sense of community, and a new approach to design, building, and operating communities.

Krygiel would also emphasize more heavily the need to change culture and perspective, with less emphasis on the need to change the technology. While Krygiel believes technology is a very important tool, and promotes a methodology needed to get where we want to go, it is still just a tool. However, practitioners must be willing to use these tools creatively and adopt a more flexible mindset in order to realize the changes discussed in the original essay.

Lesniewski stated that technology allows us to do important things. These new interfaces—master interfaces—allow people to “get it” a lot more easily. Information can be presented in a way that is more tangible and more acceptable. These technologies help us move this transformation along, she says.

A quote from the original essay seems to supports their claim that technology is just the tool; it is really cultural change that remains an enormous issue and needs to be more in the forefront today than it was in the past: “If the BIM model is the only place where integration occurs, then we have failed. However, with the model, team and system integration has a better chance of success.”

Early adopters

When asked if she thought the overall industry environment is more supportive and adoptive of integrated and collaborative methodologies today, Lesniewski suggests that, because of the current economy, there are more opportunities to expose our clients to the benefits of the integrated project delivery model. Clients seem to embrace these new ideas in one of two ways: 1) some are even more afraid to try something new because they’re just so hesitant about everything right now, or 2) they're saying this is exactly the right time to embrace change and move forward.

When faced with uncertainty and change, Krygiel believe humans, by our very nature, tend to revert to traditional behaviors. However, most of the people already using these new tools and seeing an advantage also recognize how important it is to accelerate our ability to embrace change. Integrated approaches facilitate positive change because richer, and more complete, information is available to decision-makers.

Allison asked Lesniewski, Krygiel, and Berkebile to look across the industry as a whole, and identify any particular sectors that have been more receptive to integrated and collaborative models today than was the case three years ago. Lesniewski indicated that her involvement at the Lean Construction Institute suggests that the healthcare industry is at the forefront of adopting integrated project delivery. This is the case because the high dollar value, and physical complexity, of new medical facilities requires a high degree of integration to get it right. According to Lesniewski, the healthcare industry figured out a long time ago that to the ability to model something before building it makes the opportunity for savings more visible and allows the team to take advantage of more life-cycle analysis opportunities.

Berkebile believes that the engineering professions, particularly those working with storm and waste water, have been using these tools to evaluate a variety of cost and design options. However, these same professionals have been reluctant to use the technology to look at natural integrated solutions. Berkebile continued with an example in America today: There is a trillion dollar issue related to what's called overflow control, which is the mixing of sewage and storm water in streams. While modeling is being used to reduce the cost of storage, pricing and pumping, the same technology is not being used to look at natural integrated solutions of landscape, and changing the doctrine of water use from “collect, pipe to streams, and release”, to collecting in a different way, and transferring it through groundwater, not through pipes, and re-charging rather than discharging.

Quoting again from the original essay, “We may now have the information and tools required to achieve integration in the technological sense, but what we must recover is our understanding of resource consumption and global regard for the environment.” Krygiel stated that decision-makers (government or corporate) who are able to embrace the way nature works can make these connections and get to an integrated solution which gives them much more powerful use of these tools than those who can't make that leap to natural systems.

Krygiel reconfirmed his belief that BIM is a great tool and acknowledged that up until three to five years ago, a lot of the tools were about collecting data. Since that time, we have accumulated a great amount of data and information about projects, about teams, and about sites. But Krygiel says it's still about getting that information out at the right time and being able to communicate it effectively to the other team members who are critical to a project’s success.
The big problem remains the difficulty of communication between the tools themselves, i.e. the lack of interoperability. While individual tools have advanced greatly, their ability to cross-communicate remains problematic and this issue leads to information loss, replication of data and the need for additional specialization.

Allison sums up the primary benefits of BIM as 1) using parametric capabilities to eliminate waste, add clarity, and to evolve in a positive way, 2) achieving interconnectedness and communication through interoperability, and 3) teamwork. Lesniewski, Krygiel, and Berkebile unanimously agree that interoperability is absolutely the next step.

Everyone today is interested in better information and information that's easier to understand—integration certainly offers all of that. Promoting integrated practice among industry participants is about showing the benefits and getting the attention of people who are very busy doing what they've been doing using obsolete approaches and technologies. The tools are now at the point where we can efficiently outline parallel scenarios. We can take an approach and forecast it through the life of a building, or a development, or a neighborhood, and see what it looks like. Then we can take a more integrated approach and demonstrate, in a virtual way, what the differences might be—and those differences can be pretty stunning.

Krygiel added that practitioners must have the ability, the need, and a willingness to change in order to embrace integrated practice. People are creatures of habit, but it’s important to force yourself to try something new. In general, integrated design, integrated project delivery and BIM are about exploration and the willingness to adopt change, and this can take people out of their comfort zone. Embracing IP is about taking risk, and even if it doesn't work the first time, trying it a second time with the information and knowledge that you learned on the previous try.

The discussion shifted to emerging professionals and how the profession can help younger professionals develop the skills and knowledge and attitudes necessary to function effectively in a collaborative environment like IPD. Lesniewski believes emerging professionals are more prone to adopting integrated practices, and are more willing and able to adopt the available technologies because they don't know—and aren’t encumbered by—the old ways. They don't have the learned behaviors to fall back on. The trick is also making sure the kind of technical knowledge and experience that is critical in our industry is provided hand in hand with the ability to jump forward technologically.

The next three years in IPD

When asked to describe developments happening today that will have the most significant industry impact over the next three years, Berkebile explained that several leading, corporate entities in this country had been embracing integrated project delivery and already are changing the way they design, build, and operate facilities. “When you look at the performance of these companies—companies like G.E., Walmart, Interface—in this climate, you see that they're outperforming their competition,” he says. Secondly, in the design and construction industry, new projects are being launched due to stimulus money. Berkebile says, “Most of that money is being invested in what we generally think of as obsolete approaches and technologies, but the good news is that current administration is requiring that these projects be monitored and the results be published.”

Lesniewski has hope in the federal government. The newly created positions—a Chief Sustainability Officer, a Chief Information Officer, and a Chief Energy Officer—acknowledge the problem and recognize that the solution requires more integration than considered previously. “The GSA seems very interested in using these integrated tools and processes to push forward an agenda that is about developing a deep understanding of their built assets, and they want to know how they can reduce the cost of operations over the lives of their buildings,” she explains. The GSA has a great capacity to influence change in the building industry.

Krygiel added that cultural changes are becoming more prevalent in the world at large. The norm is becoming change. People's overall willingness to adopt and try something more sustainable, to think differently, to try new technologies and new processes will allow them to become more efficient. Waste and excess are becoming less acceptable within an economy of scarcity. Krygiel is optimistic about what's to come, even though the economic conditions prompting these changes are accompanied by much hardship.

Allison wrapped up the conversation by reading a quote from Janine Benyus's book Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature, which really connects all of the pieces of their discussion and reflects the heart of their original essay: “The most powerful lesson to be learned is the reality that nature is a fantastic web of interconnected elements and systems designed to work as an integrated whole, and that this idea of integration is the key.”

In closing, Berkebile recalled something Bucky Fuller said: “The only way to make significant change is to make the thing you're trying to change obsolete.” Berkebile added, “The new Speedo suits, developed with biomimicry, made everything that preceded them obsolete. The iPhone does the same thing for communications.” And while much has happened in last three years, we have to move on and start using IPD in an intelligent way to achieve the same kind of transformation. Lesniewski, Krygiel, and Berkebile believe that Integrated Project Delivery provides all the ingredients for significant change in the design and construction industries.