Hello, welcome to Built Environment Matters, a monthly podcast brought to you by Bryden Wood, an international company of technologists, designers, architects, engineers and analysts working for a better built environment, Bryden Wood believe in design to value to cut carbon, drive efficiency, save time, make beautiful places, and build a better future.
Hi, I'm Jaimie Johnston, Head of Global Systems at Bryden Wood and welcome to episode three of our podcast, Built Environment Matters. This time, I'm joined by John Dyson, former Vice President of Capital Strategy, at pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline. And now Professor of Human Enterprise at the University of Birmingham in the UK. Were going to be talking about design to value in
process engineering. We'll talk a bit about what that means, in theory, and then look at some of the practical real world examples. Hi John, welcome.
Hi, good to speak to you today.
So first things first, John, what is process engineering?
Yeah, so process engineering is it's an it's an interesting subject to talk about, because often people jump into the idea of the sort of science of process engineering, and chemical reactions and the sort of subjects that you study at university and university courses. But, but for me, process engineering is much wider than that. And it's about understanding the systems that
create outcomes and purposes. So whenever there's a desired outcome, there's a process that that needs to be needs to be gone through in order to achieve that outcome. And that means that things need to flow that things need to come together that things need to react together to happen and understanding how that how that happens. That system that comes together to produce the outcome is really important to make sure that we get the outcomes we
require. And, and although process engineering is often focused towards things like manufacturing, where there's the output is clearly something like a product, it can be as equally applied to something that has a social outcome, or a service outcome.
Yes, that's quite important, isn't it? So when I first encountered this term, I assumed it only referred to pharmaceuticals or car production, but actually that, you know, we apply process engineering much, much wider than that, don't we?
Yeah, so so hospital is a process is a process of, of bringing in patients, you know, finding out what's wrong with them carrying out tests, consulting, treatments, recovery, that's all part of a process for a patient to go
through. And understanding that process helps you understand how to design a hospital, which which, of course, you know, a lot about, but an airport is, is another process where you've got to take passengers through, you've got to, you know, security, check them, get their luggage and security, check that and get them onto the plane, they're all processes as much as the sort of classical manufacturing processes of, of, you know, manufacturing goods, putting them in packaging, etc.
Absolutely. And why? Why do you think process engineering is particularly important now in the current climate?
And I think we're, we're realising that, that there's lots of challenges to tackle. At the moment. I mean, the the one, the one that's right on top of us now, is, of course, the covid pandemic. And there's all sorts of outcomes we're trying to do there, whether it be you know, tracking and testing people, whether it be creating vaccine vaccines, and then ultimately distributing them, or other treatments. There's lots of processes that
that we're doing. But But on top of all that, you've got things like the thing, the climate crisis, and global warming and lots of outcomes there. And there's a general understanding that unless you really go into and understand the processes that need to come together to make these things happen, you won't get the outcomes you require. And just leaving it to chance and leaving it to, to simple thinking, you know, won't won't get us the results we want.
Yeah, that's quite right. So I'd like to come back to vaccines, particularly later, but maybe let's explore a bit more conceptually what we mean by process engineering. So at Bryden Wood we very often talk about design to value being our overarching principle, how does process engineering relate to design to value isn't the same thing? Is it? Is it a part of design value? How would you How would you articulate it?
Yeah, I think it's, it's, they're very, very closely linked. So when I talked about process engineering, the first thing you're looking at is what they are, the desired outcome is the end point and, and design to value looks at that in in two ways. One of them is it looks at something called a problem statement. So what's the step change in performance, we're looking for what what's the outcome we're looking for? What is the problem we're trying to
crack. So if you take the pandemic, what the problem you're trying to crack at the moment, which is a difficult problem, is is to allow people to go about their business to allow the economy to, to grow and people to be employed, but also to protect life and that and that's an outcome, that's the problem that you're trying to fix. And that's the starting point of process engineering is understanding the problem that
you're trying to crack. And the second really important part, then is to look at value itself. And what what, what you value about the outcome. And And the thing about value is, is often people jump when you use the term value to economic value. And so the cost of something, or the return on investment, or those sort of financial
measurables. But, but value is much more than that, and it includes many other factors, there's a social value, the value of providing a, you know, for a social need, things like democratisation, you know, allowing people access to products or services that they couldn't have them before, of course, the environmental values, the impact you're having
on the environment. And there's also value in things like aesthetics, and how good things feel, and work and how comfortable people are in working in places or working through processes. And then on top of that, there's what do you what can you gain? we often call it the value from doing what can you gain from the process itself? Can people can people
what can they learn? What can they be educated on how can they personally develop How can doing a particular project actually benefit the the people who are neighbours to the project. And so there's lots of value. And part of that is really understanding the value that you're going to go after, when
you're on design to value. And then comes the modelling and understanding of the processes, which which are going to deliver those those value outcomes and trying to find trying to find the optimum balance between them.
I think that's incredibly important, very pertinent the moment so I don't think it's coincidence. I mean, we've been talking about design to value for a couple years, the the Construction Innovation Hub recently published the value toolkit, for instance. And my perception is that whilst I think the word value has been slightly debased in retail, where it's associated with kind of value brands and cheapest product, I think that's because retail has been doing this for a
long time. They're sort of in the incremental gains phase, whereas construction is nowhere near that. And I think for a long time, yeah, we've been chasing capital cost, regardless of carbon outcomes, or maybe societal outcomes. I think we've been pursuing one metric. And it's, it's led us into some, yeah, some of the inefficiencies, we're now seeing some of the climate issues were
that we're now facing. So I don't think it's coincidence that the conversation around value and broadening out the outcomes that we expect to get from projects is incredibly timely, and like, we really need to focus on it around this sort of thing for the next couple of decades, at least.
And of course, your point, or one of the reasons why it's difficult is because it to start with it isn't straightforward. It isn't just about taking a specification and
meeting a specification. It is about taking a broader view and really trying to understand get under the skin of the client or the or the governmental society and understand what what's really valuable there and then trying to decide what the best thing is, and what the best designers to achieve that it's sort of much easier to just say, well, that's what you wanted. So that's what we did. And this process requires you to be to be braver and more innovative.
Yeah. So maybe a good way to bring it to life is to contrast it's a normal design process, a normal sort of linear stage by stage design process and explain what the differences are when you approach it in a different way.
Yeah, I suppose it's quite quite interesting. The first thing is we talked about a brief a couple of times Items already, it's almost like seeing a brief as a as a hypothesis, a guess what it is that it's required, and it gives you some insight into, into the problem
that's trying to be solved. And then, and then it's about picking, picking that apart, the best way I find of explaining it is to talk about one of the first projects that we use design to value one for me, which which really, sort of brought home what it's all about. And it was a project for putting carbonated and soft drinks into Africa. And the business had decided that he wanted to build a new factory in a different part of Africa, in order to manufacture some new
products. And hopefully, because of the local manufacturer would grow the market. And this had been through a very traditional design process. So it gone out to a large engineering company, they they, you know, spoken to the client about the project, and they came back and they came back with a 70 million pound factory. The only problem was, is that 70 million pound factory didn't have any return on investment, it just wasn't
financially viable. And the immediate reaction, which often happens, then was was you've got to make it cheaper. So that you know, 70 million pounds far too expensive, other people, other people could build it cheaper, go and find a way to build it cheaper. And in fact, we did do that process. So So we looked at the the overall size of the factory and optimised it and we looked at the construction techniques and, and reduce the
complexity of those. And ultimately, I think we took 17 million pounds out of the capital cost which, which was great, but it still didn't make financial sense. In parallel to that, we started to ask the question about about the financial viability and why it wasn't financially value viable.
And we modelled we started to model the the products that were going through it, and the costs of those products, how much it costs, to produce the energy that went into them, the raw materials, and how much it costs to build the particular part of the facility and the equipment to make each stage of the
production. And from that we found this really interesting fact that the one of the main products that they were going to make in this is new factory, which was bottled water was actually going to be unprofitable because there was high energy costs, and a low sale price for bottled water in Africa. And it was it was that product itself, not the whole factory and not the whole idea that was actually making making that that a non viable
investment. And in fact, because of that it was decided not to do that project at all. That was a really interesting process for me. And it also brings alive one of the uncomfortable truths of this process is that you could conclude that not doing something is the most valuable thing.
You're gonna want to talk about three topics around this one is questions. One is tools, and one is people. So the The question is, why don't you raise this point? One of our directors, Steven Tilkin use the phrase which remember, you say everyone else is trying to answer the question, can we do this? And he's trying to ask the question, should we do this.
And that's a really good example of that, where maybe you can talk about we talk about opening up the solution space, or the search space for ideas that we don't become fixed too soon, we start to open up the problem. Before we get anywhere close to trying to solve the problem. We try and define really what the problem is. Can you talk a bit about that?
Yeah, so I mean, I mean, some good way to think about a project is that it has a problem space and a solution space. And if you look at traditional ways of working, people spend all their time in the solution space, as if, as if the problem is absolutely understood and set, and very clear when everybody knows what's required. And all that's required is a solution to meet
that outcome. The more we worked in this area, the more we realised that actually coming up with the proper problem space and really understanding what what the problem is to be fixed. And then and then from that, then looking at the particular solutions to do it. The the the better the outcome. And it's a bit frustrating sometimes because people just want you to
get on. And rather than ask lots of questions, and but but as we've we've done this a number of times you realise that there are some much better solutions out there than the ones that
fall into people's minds. You know, we've we've looked at brand new training multimeter million pound training centres turned into 20 very cost effective training hubs which delivered much better training and much lower cost to a company, rather than the, you know, the first thought of this lovely shining training facilitate in Asia, just by really understanding what what the end result was that they were looking for. And then picking at some of the ideas around that,
yes, like so many of these things, it comes down to people. So I'm gonna
leave that one to last. But in terms of tools, I mean, you've mentioned modelling, we use, I think, quite a vast range of different tools and techniques from data analytics, discrete event simulation, you know, there's a whole range of digital techniques, perhaps you can talk about some of those and particularly Chip Thinking, which are described as quite a sticky concept, once clients have understood Chip Thinking they really understand the power of, you know, how this helping
them think about projects.
Yeah, so I'll start talking about Chip Thinking, because because Chip Thinking came out of the idea that you wanted to be able to link different datasets together when you are modelling. So people do often model do financial models, but that tends to sit in the in the finance department, and no one else can see what's going on. And then you have the engineers designing, specifying equipment and designing things, but they do that in their
engineering office. And then you have people who who do understand the overall process and the logistics, but they are, again, separate from one another. So Chip Thinking is quite a simple methodology, but it's huge power is it brings all, all parties together. And what it does really is look at a process from end to end, it can be a manufacturing process, or as we talked about before, it can be a people process like a
hospital. And what you do then is you break that into spaces where where you know, key parts of value are added to the process. So that might be a manufacturing step in a factory, but it could be in an airport, you know, the security check. That's a that's the thing, and we call those chips. And basically, if you imagine, then our process, what he does is a strung together, flow of th se chips together. But the be uty of the chip, is it that ph
sicalize is it as well. So it al ows engineers to be designing in it, while also generating da a, which finance people can us to to generate things like co t of goods, and, and so on. So it brings together the di ferent perspectives. And it al o allows people to have a lo k and because you can di itally show these chips. And so people can see what's ha pening, they can see an early re resentation of what a factory an airport or a hospital might mi
ht look like. And if you co bine that sort of tool with so e of the other things you ta ked about, like discrete ev nt modelling, which is de ailed and dynamic process mo elling, so so you know, where wh re goods would move, how pe ple would move on how long it wo ld take them to do each step. An then introducing things like na ural variation into that gets yo to really starting to un erstand how, how the process mi
ht work. And they'll start to ma e some really good design de isions about how how you can he p those processes flow and ac ieve their outcomes better.
But it also allows you to test things very, very quickly. So we talked about rapid iteration, the idea you can model something in chips and see the outcome go back, try another idea. So rather than do a sort of fixed, you know, two months of design submitted to the client get their comments back, you know, we're iterating in days hours, you know, it's a much, much quicker, much more reactive process, isn't it?
No, absolutely. I mean, we had, you know, projects with with 30 to 40 options in them. And that's not laborious, because the the whole sort of structure of the of the chips allows you to, it's almost like a game a set of game cards. And once you've Once you've created them, you can put them down in different orders and you can test out different scenarios and the modelling can follow you and so you can really start to hone in on where the interesting
interesting places are. It's a bit like people say this bit like set sending lighting up a cave really and looking for looking for the gold in a cave. The more that you can light it the more options and more corners that you can, you can look into the more chance you have of finding finding gold.
Yeah. But then at the invocation of that and it takes us to the people question. We started recognised the speed of iteration was so fast that we almost had to have the client in the room. So that then started the this culture of colo spaces, collaborative spaces, blended teams physically working. So perhaps you can talk about, you talk about conceptually how chips sort of brought in
people's thinking. But then we started to say, Well, actually, let's physically have people co working on the problem simultaneously. And that completely changed the dynamic between customer and designer people's interaction with the project people engagement, perhaps you can that you can expand on that.
Yeah, I mean, a lot of a lot of processes are done at arm's length in design. So, you know, we talked about brief and specifications that are passed, and then, and then someone responds to those in a tender or responds to them in a written document. And that's, that's consuming, but but you miss the huge value of bringing people together, who all have ideas, and all have good ideas.
And if you can bring them together with their desires in it, if you can bring them together with their ideas and insights, you can find, you know, really new, and potentially, you know, exciting possibilities. But but it that completely changes the dynamic, it means that what you've got to try and encourage is people to, to work together on on sort of
an equal power base. So it isn't client, just telling, telling the supplier what he wants, it's about, about the client trying to explain what they're trying to achieve, and, and what they know about their business at the moment, because they'll know a lot and what they're very good at doing, because they will have some core competencies, but also saying, Yeah, but we don't know how to do this bit. Or maybe you do, and you can bring, bring
your expertise to bear. And also explain there are things that neither of us at the moment need to know how to do this, there's some bravery in this because in past processes, they're sort of everyone pretends that they know everything. And that pretence is really dangerous, because lots of assumptions are made. This process invites people to say, we want to do this, but we don't really know how to do it. But if we're really sure that if we work together, we'll find we'll
find the best solution. So requires that I just want to say that, that we originally thought that being together physically was really important. And, and, and it was, it was important for us to start with, because when you're trying to do something new, you need to step them outside of their, their normal workplace, because because that, you know, being in a corporate office makes you feel corporate, and makes you do the corporate
things. Whereas being being in a, in a in a more interesting design office makes you feel more liberated and design focused. And but what we've also found is, is you can do, you can do many of these things using tools and techniques and approaches remotely. And in fact, there's some benefits to the remote remoteness, because it it gives people much more equal status. And and equal status is key to this collaboration.
Yeah, it's gonna be interesting I one of the things I miss most about the office. So for listeners, we started moving GlaxoSmithKline people into the office, we gave them free space to work from from one of our floors in the office. And we'd formed these blended teams with us and Glaxo people and some of our competitors, even subject matter experts. And then other clients started saying, well, when do I get my space, and so we had one entire floor of the office was
was pure colo space. And it was a shifting cast of characters. It might be Ministry of Justice for a few months, it might be Landsec, for for a few months, it was a company changing, but that sort of dynamic feeling of you know, people running into each other. I remember one of the things I used to do was was if he had a potential new client, I would stop you in the corridor and get you to take them for coffee. That kind of serendipitous thing you can't
create any more. So yeah, as you say, there's benefits to working remotely. But I do miss the kind of buzz of it. I've seen this in action on that floor. And as he said, I think one of the really interesting things of people not being able to tell, who was a client who was a designer who was a subject matter expert, I thought that gave it a real kind of Yeah, as you say, kind of democratise the process to kind of level the playing field and everyone had almost an equal
voice. So we're obviously we're still working through that. But yeah, that was one of the most exciting things about the process. I always thought.
Yeah, and you mentioned both an excitement and I think that that is something we really noticed about doing during design to value in this way, is people really enjoyed it. And projects, you know, can be really miserable places. And I have, you know, been in project management for a long time. I'm, you know, I'm always dismayed about how miserable people In projects, they seem
really hard. And actually, they're really exciting things or projects you're trying to, you know, make a step change in, in, in whatever you're working in. And if you're working in hospitals or, or technology or the environment, you're making step, changes in those things that should be an exciting place to work. And design to value part of it is to capture that that excitement that, you know, the possibility that we could do something special there, every
every time. And that's why we started to use words like exquisite design, because we wanted to impart in people the excitement and the potential of bringing everyone's ideas and everyone's knowledge together and creating, creating special outcomes. That very different from from what the normal processes would encourage people to do.
Yeah. And yeah, I mean, the outcomes are vast, the benefits are vast, can you talk about some of the projects, so maybe Parma, Factory in a Box, some of the impacts this this approach had on those projects?
Yeah, so the Parma project was to make a drug called an attachment inhibitor. And in itself, that's a really valuable, with a really valuable thing to do. The attachment inhibitor is a drug that treats people who are suffering from HIV, AIDS, and the and the other drugs are no longer working for them. So there's a small percentage of people on traditional treatments, which are much better these days, who no longer will their treatments
be working for them. So they're, they're facing quite a bleak future. And this drug has been found, which, which can help a large number of those people. And GlaxoSmithKline wanted to get it to market as quickly as possible it was in, in development. And this is an important point about design to value is it sort of loves, loves it when things aren't clear. So when you're trying to accelerate a product to market, what you don't want to do is is too early is to tie everything down,
because you'll be wrong. During the development process, something will come out which is unexpected, and, and that and that will, if you're not careful, that will really impact your outcome. So you've got to be flexible, and you've got to work closely together. So we worked very closely with GSK the client, but also the the local designer and construction companies, we fast tracked the
design process. But using chips allowed us to make sure that we created the space for the process, while not completely understanding what it would be till later in the day. And also the modelling. processes, the structural modelling in this case allowed us to, to simplify the building in order to make sure that we could hit a much quicker timescales. And that for that project from, I think feasibility to to product coming out of the door was about 18
months. Of course, the facility went on award from the ISP facility of the year
Can you talk about maybe Factory in a Box because I think that was quite an interesting physical manifestation and some of the benefits that came that came out of developing that DfMA solution.
Yes, so Factory in a Box, so people people are fascinated Because ultimately, it was a pharmaceutical secondary factory. That was that when we first tested, it was built with Gurkhas, and it raised, it raised a lot of of interest because of that, that story. But behind that was something was something really
quite, quite special. I mean, first of all, it was a problem for a large business, about how it could build quickly cost effectively, but also very high quality facilities in in emerging markets, whether the local capability was very variable to how how might you do that? And secondly, as well, and talking about the value of through doing the project is how could you use that investment directly to improve skills and build capability in the locations that you're building
the factories. And from that problem came this idea that we could using components which are readily, largely readily available in the supply chain already, but bringing them together in a in a simple and clever way. We could, we could produce factories using not people who had loads of experience in construction, but but local competent people who weren't necessarily have any skills in construction, but just were competent. And you could meet all the quality requirements that were acquired.
And we tested that using using expert soldiers because they, they weren't builders, they weren't in construction. But they were very competent people who could follow, follow processes and procedures. And we and we proved that you could build a facility very quickly to
the right level of quality. And after that, when it was put in place, for the first time, in anger in a real facility, actually, within the UK, we also found that it was significantly more cost effective than the building in traditional ways. And it took two people about 10 weeks to, to put a facility together, which is, which is just sort of unheard of in construction, those sorts of small numbers. So no fascinating, fascinating
project. And I think we learned, we learned a huge amount about what you can do to take out a lot of the waste in the overall construction process in delivering that.
It was I mean, I love it as a case study, it was a it was a phenomenal piece of work. But it demonstrated so many of these things. So as soon as he talked about the kind of earlier the you know, the outcomes of the societal outcomes, we took a bunch of people, trained them up demonstrated that you could diversify the construction workforce, it was a precursor to Platforms. But a lot of the things we learned on that project obviously fed into the
Platforms thinking. But at the end of it, it was still a lot cheaper. So by not necessarily focusing purely on cost, but looking at this broader value landscape, actually low cost kind of fell out of it, along with better quality and upskilling of people and all these other things we learned. So I think it was a fantastic sort of demonstrator of how you can achieve low cost, but also get a load of other other
benefits. I can't help thinking there must be a use for some of this learning in at least the healthcare projects are coming up. But also we're going to need to make a lot of vaccines, perhaps you can talk about the the vaccines modelling, which is the other the other piece that's very current and very pertinent around this around this topic.
Yeah, so yeah, of course, of course, the where we are today is that we're we're all avidly waiting for a vaccine and there's 200 odd in development. And and the difficulties with them is that that there are all different stages of development, different probabilities of success. And they're also different technologies in there requiring different manufacturing techniques and different logistics so. So it's a really complicated field and and how can you be as ready as you can
be for for that? Well? Our answer is you can start to model it, you can start to link in with the people who are understanding the development processes, and their likelihood of success and those sorts of things and those people at universities. And so I'm working on that. And what we could do is link directly into that and start to look at the physicality of the supply chains for that. So what's likely to happen what what capacity do different countries have to make different
vaccines? And what would that do to the overall global supply of vaccines. And by understanding understanding that, that picture, you can, you can start to potentially make some decisions about, about what you might put in place, which would overall increase your chances of responding quickly to a vaccine that came through, and being able to provide vaccines to people that need them as quickly as possible. So a really
interesting place. And you mentioned, things like Factory in a Box that they're really useful because they're they're sort of standardised across, there are things that are standardised across the different processes. So all of them need hygienic spaces. So for instance, you could make sure that you have the hygienic components available to you without without building, you know, the wrong wrong factories
in the wrong places. You could have components there, which you could, you could deliver very quickly. So as soon as you start to model and understand you can always start to see great opportunities, even in really uncertain times and outcomes to be able to take steps to to add value to the process.
So we could talk about this all day, couldn't we? But yeah, there's quite a whole raft of benefits that come out of this. There's a clearly a whole number of reasons to do this. Obviously, we've we've grown this ability. I think I started talking to you about this maybe 12 years ago, 13 years ago, this has been a sort of journey we've gone on. Do you think it's something that everyone can do? Do you think it requires a particular skill set
or as a particular culture? What do you think stops us becoming Given It feels like it's a very needed thing in construction, what stops is being sort of much more widely scaled.
So anyone can do it. It's not it's not magic, it's not a magic process that the issue, the issue comes is that first of all, you have to break with, with the, with the ideas and processes that you've been following before. And there's sort of some comfort and protection in taking a brief and doing what's asked of you, and claiming variations and, and
just carrying on. And, you know, lots of companies have worked out a mechanism of surviving and under that, under that sort of process, so so why would they change, there's a need for bravery and stepping, stepping out. And I said before that, they, it's quite an interesting and risky place to be when when a client comes in and says, I've got this idea, I'd like to do this, and you say, well, that's really interesting, but we don't think that's the right thing to
do. That that, you know, is potentially a risky conversation. So of course, you don't have it quite so abruptly as that, and but you go on a journey together. And so so you've got to have the, the the the courage, if you like to, to
do that. And I think the other thing you've got to have courage in is, is you're going to start to employ different people with different skill sets, you're going to have to embrace technologies, and ideas that you haven't haven't thought about or use before, you're going to have to as an organisation learn, you're going to have to maybe take some risks in who you recruit, because what you're doing as you need to expand the diversity of knowledge and understanding and technology in
order to find new ideas. And all those things, particularly in industries where where you're worried about profit margins, and you're worried about, about business, and you want to hold on to your current clients are all difficult, difficult steps to take. So on one hand, it's really it's really open to anybody to do on the other hand, it's incredibly difficult to do.
And it's a bit like a bit like Toyota, I mean, Toyota, you know, have what are perceived as fantastically good, lean manufacturing processes, and, and they open their doors to all their, all their competitors to come in and have a look at them.
And they do that in the knowledge that yes, you can understand how to do these things, you can understand the different processes and that you apply, however, you've got to have a completely different mindset to do them and a completely different set of ambitions for yourself as a company, and and for your people, etc. And unless you have that culture and ambition, then knowing knowing the process steps isn't going to help you.
But it does feel like an idea whose whose time has come maybe. So if you you talk about bravery at risk. But if ever clients needed a way to deal with uncertainty, because who knows how long you know, the ramifications, because they're going to cost at the
very long shadow arent they. So if there is a time to have some way of dealing with uncertainty, but also I think every company has learned that they can deal with sudden shifts, no one expected to be running Barclays off kitchen tables was the quote I read in the press, you know, eight months ago. So hopefully, companies have recognised actually, they can make fairly quick adaptions if they need to, and they probably need a different set of tools, because the world isn't going to get any
less uncertain anytime soon. So it does feel like it's it's the time maybe more people should start embracing some of these ways of thinking.
Absolutely. I mean, when I was when I was in GlaxoSmithKline, I just, you know, wanted people to do these things more and introduce the ideas to many companies. And, and although they, at one level, really excited about the prospect. They felt that they the risks for them as a company were small, and but you rightly raised that today, people have understood that, that things are
very uncertain. And I mean, they always were, and it's just that people get deluded into the idea that things are certain and they hold on to them. That if only we can we can we can carry on in this way everything will be will be okay. I really do hope that people embrace the uncertainty actually, when we're forced to change we can find much, much
better ways of doing things. And we often think doing things differently are going to be risky, but what we tend to find is that we find much better ways of doing things, opportunities that were always there for the taking, but but we were always a bit bit too nervous to take them and now more than any time, but those those risks have all ramped up anyway. So you might as well take the plunge and have a go. And that can only be to the good if we can expand our minds and expand our ambition,
about what's achievable. You know, we, you know, there really is opportunity in this in this in the situation we're in.
So, as I say, we could talk about this all day, but I think that's a brilliant place to leave it. So on that final point, expand your mind, expand your ambition. Thanks, John, for joining me today.
It's been a pleasure. Thanks very much. Cheers, Jaimie.
So join us next month, I'll be talking to Jami Cresser-Brown, one of the Directors from our Creative Technologies team talking about residential and how we might use some digital tools to unlock the application of Modern Methods of Construction to deliver the housing pipeline that we desperately need.
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