Often in engineering, we focus on the technical, production parts of a project, but it is the people who make the projects. As a leader, learning to support those people is vital.
Today we hear from a prominent engineer who through his work in ground engineering, consulting, operations, HR and business, has gained many skills in managing and leading people. He believes safety, quality, inclusion and collaboration should be at the forefront of every project and combining that with purpose-led business creates the ultimate best outcomes.
Our guest today has almost 30 years of experience with one of Ireland’s leading construction companies and believes in adapting the construction industry to support diversity and sustainability. He is BAM UK & Ireland’s Executive Director of Ireland, Alasdair Henderson.
THINGS WE SPOKE ABOUT
● Transitioning from managing projects to leading people
● Approaching safety with prevention instead of reaction
● Working on public infrastructure such as the National Children’s Hospital
● Sustainable design to support a net zero future
● Planning diversity and inclusion to create an accessible society
● AI, robotics and material innovations for the future of engineering
GUEST DETAILS
Alasdair Henderson is BAM UK & Ireland’s Executive Director of Ireland. Alasdair joined BAM as a graduate engineer in 1996 and has worked his way up through a variety of operational and business leadership roles across BAM.
He is well known as an advocate of purpose-led business, believing that the best and most sustainable financial results are achieved when the things we build add value to society. He holds safety, quality, inclusion, and collaboration as key tenets of what makes a good business and is delighted that he sees all these things on a daily basis at BAM.
Alasdair is actively involved in policy development in the industry and is a fellow of the Institution of Civil Engineers, a fellow of the Institute of Quarrying, and a visiting professor at the University of Strathclyde.
Connect with Alasdair on LinkedIn
MORE INFORMATION
Engineers Journal AMPLIFIED is produced by DustPod.io for Engineers Ireland.
QUOTES
"The time you spend thinking most about safety is normally immediately after an accident." - Alasdair Henderson
"It's one of the largest buildings in Europe." - Alasdair Henderson
"If you start with a misaligned scope, it never gets better. It just gets worse and worse and worse." - Alasdair Henderson
"You can absolutely make those environments safer, warmer, more welcoming by changing the way you design that infrastructure." - Alasdair Henderson
"Our industry is addicted to concrete and steel. If we want to get to net zero, we're going to have to do something around that." - Alasdair Henderson
KEYWORDS
#Engineering #Construction #BAMIreland #NationalChildrensHospital #PublicProcurement #Sustainability #Diversity #Digitalisation
TRANSCRIPTION
For your convenience, we include an automated AI transcription.
Dusty Rhodes 00:04
Hi there, my name is Dusty Rhodes, and you're welcome to AMPLIFIED the Engineers Journal podcast. Often engineering is focused on the technical, logistical and production parts of a project. Today, we're going to hear from a leading engineer who believes that the best outcomes are reached by focusing on the people.
Alasdair Henderson 00:22
The reason the construction goes wrong is that the expectation of the customer and the belief from the contractor of what they're providing starts misaligned. So that's scope misalignment, it never gets better.
Dusty Rhodes 00:33
Our guest today has almost 30 years of experience with one of Ireland's leading construction companies, where he's worked in business operations and HR before moving on to the C suite.
Alasdair Henderson 00:43
The time you spend thinking most about safety is normally immediately after an accident.
Dusty Rhodes 00:49
It's a pleasure to welcome BAM UK and Ireland's Executive Director of Ireland. Alasdair Henderson, Alasdair, how are you?
Alasdair Henderson 00:55
I'm fine. Dusty. Good to meet you.
Dusty Rhodes 00:59
Now, listen, I always get wild and varied answers to this first question, how did you get into this wonderful game of engineering? What was the little thing when you were a kid that went, 'whoa, I want to do that'?
Alasdair Henderson 01:10
Well, I had a head start Dusty. So my father was a civil engineer, still is a civil engineer, retired, but it's just not, it's a lifestyle choice. It's not something you give up. So as we I'm one of four boys. As we went around on various holidays with the family, we were perpetually standing up beside various structures for Dad to take photographs. We thought he was photographing us. He was there. He had us there for scale. So it sort of becomes a way of life. And so I've got a very vivid memory of when I was about five years old going to one of the projects that Dad was working on. It was a tunnel project in Aberdeen. Of course, five years old, I had a hard hat that didn't fit me, and we went down a shaft in a Ricky old cage, sharing the cage with a box of nitroglycerin explosives, and then went out along the tunnel. And when you're five years old, boy, does that make an impression on you. So I think it was, I wouldn't say it was predestined, but it was pretty well set up. So that's how I got into it.
Dusty Rhodes 02:08
So you just kind of went through secondary school and then on into university and everything. And when you came out, then as a new graduate, you pretty much joined, BAM, straight away, and you stayed there your whole career. What kept you there?
Alasdair Henderson 02:20
Well, we do fantastic, interesting things, and I've moved around in the business, doing a lot of different things. So when I joined, I actually joined as a student. I did two years of summer work as a student and did some just extraordinary jobs. Again, working in tunnels, working in ground, investigation and characterisation. I studied civil engineering with geology, which is a slightly odd thing. It's civil engineering infrastructure, as you would expect engineering to be taught, but with this wonderful little thing of geology thrown in there, which normally engineering is very analytical. You know very much about the answers, very much about things having definite answers. And then you throw in the natural world and all this ambiguity that comes with it, and you start to realise just how you know how much we deal with it through engineering. You know, that has natural variability to it. We'll come back to that because it's a really interesting subject as to how you deal with ambiguity generally. But that got me into that got me into ground engineering. So I joined BAM as as a ground engineer. And gosh, every, every three or four years, I was doing something different in BAM. So interesting, nice, big business with huge opportunity.
Dusty Rhodes 03:21
You have a particular fascination with tunnels and being underground, and I believe you were involved in quite a big underground project in London at one stage.
Alasdair Henderson 03:31
I was, yeah, look, we have spent a lot of my time underground. It's, it is a thing that either thrills you or horrifies you, and you know, so Crossrail is the project you're talking about. We as a business, we did a lot of the tunnelling in Crossrail. My particular part of the business was looking after how you deal with the settlement in the ground that happens when you make these tunnels. So if you can imagine, when you bore a tunnel, which is what we were doing in London, the ground around it relaxes, and as the ground relaxes, the structures on the surface start to settle down. Now we were, we were tunnelling under Mayfair in London, you know, the highest value property in London, banks, jewellers, you know, amazing places. You know, it's just an... it's a natural factor of making those big horizontal holes in the ground that the ground relaxes. So the predictions were that we would have settlement of maybe up to 200 or 300 millimetres in some places. And of course, you can't have that with a building. So we have this technique called compensation grouting, where we inject liquid cement above the tunnel to jack the ground back up again. So you don't get 200 millimetres of settlement all at once. You get 10 millimetres, and then we push it back up by 10 millimetres. Then you get another 10, and we push it back up by 10, so the building stays in the same place, the tunnel stays in the same place, and we sort of fill in the gap with compensation graduating. It was wonderful.
Dusty Rhodes 04:50
That sounds logical, but explain to me the scale that you're doing that on.
Alasdair Henderson 04:56
So we would sink a shaft. And you know, I would love to. Take people on tours around Mayfair, because I can say we had a shaft there. We had a shaft there, but we would, we would have a vertical shaft, and then we would drill out horizontally up to 90 meters. So we'd be drilling, and the head of the drill would be two or three streets away with, you know, hundreds of 1000s of people every day walking above these things, traffic, going, businesses operating, absolutely unaware that that's what was in place. And we had these arrays, these beautiful arrays of grout pipes in the ground that allowed us to access every point where we needed to put crowd. And we could just inject every time the monitoring system said we're seeing some settlement here, we could go to that particular location and just push it back up again.
Dusty Rhodes 05:38
Are there any other particular projects that kind of bring back good memories like that for you.
Alasdair Henderson 05:42
Oh, sure, I did one in called Locky tunnels, which is in the Northern Highlands of Scotland, which was hydroelectric tunnels. So these are aqueduct tunnels that allow water to be collected in one part of the hillside and taken through this tunnel and put into a reservoir, and then they're used to generate hydropower. These tunnels are typically between about two and a half to four meters in diametre. Two sets of tunnels here totalling 24 kilometres long. So you know, going going through mountains in Scotland. Now it's from a technical standpoint, it's wonderful, it's interesting. It's all those things they were bored in the 50s, and we were in there repairing them, stabilised, and then doing rock bolting, hard rock tunnels, so they're unlined. And you go through the middle of this mountain and you see these, you see the rock all around you, and it's beautiful. I mean, it's you just, you know, you see this fresh-looking rock. But there's something that's even better. I mean, you've taken an ultraviolet light, and this is the geologist in me. You've taken an ultraviolet light, and you switch off every other light, and you switch on the UV light, it causes some of the minerals in the rock to fluoresce. And it's like, I don't know, it's like being in a movie. It's things just shine and sparkle. It's, it's like diamond mines that you might see in a Disney film. And it is just the most stunningly beautiful natural phenomenon. So, yeah, look, there's, there are so many things in that kind of length of career. One of the real pleasures of working in infrastructure and engineering, particularly as a contractor, is you go to some incredibly interesting places, and you see things, and you go to places that nobody else is allowed to see or see, so wonderful.
Dusty Rhodes 07:15
So listen, tell me about your career then, because you've kind of pivoted through all of those like, hands-on engineering projects, and then you kind of got into business roles, and then on to people and culture. Just tell me briefly, the story of your journey.
Alasdair Henderson 07:27
So I went to university fairly young. That's just the Scottish education system I studied at Glasgow. So I say, I've got, I've got three brothers at that time. You went to your local university because, well, you couldn't really afford to see anything else. That's where you went to, yeah, turned out to be a very good university. I really enjoyed my time there. Came out, and as I say, I'd done two years of working as a student, as a contractor, and I think as a young engineer, I had done what was a very theoretical degree. So the view was, you know, I'll do maybe five years in contracting, and then I'll move off into consultancy, and I'll be a consultant engineer for the rest of my life. Yeah, it didn't happen. I went straight into contracting, into a part of the business which was focused on ground engineering, a sort of specialist contracting business on ground engineering, and it was a really interesting way to start your career. So one of the things about specialist businesses is that they are very close to their customers, and they're very close to the doing of things. What a lot of people don't understand around the contracting industry at Tier One is there's a lot of subcontracting. There's a lot of management of subcontractors for us as a business, a lot of direct delivery as well. But a lot of the activity and construction happens within that specialist supply chain. So people are employed there, and they do the special things that once you add it all together, makes construction. So as a young engineer, the first thing I did was went out onto projects and started to run them. And you were given a project. It had to be planned, it had to be priced, it had to be won. And then when you landed on the project, you had to deliver it, which meant organising your own resources, understanding what they cost, making sure that you are applying for the money that you are earning, working with the customer. To understand, is the customer satisfied? Are they getting the thing they need? Managing your workforce and then reporting all that back, forecasting where you're going to end up, all the other bits and pieces that come from the business, the commerce of contracting and of course, as a young engineer, you don't really you respond, you don't think, think twice about anything like that. You're just doing the things that people have said, No, do this. Now, do this. This is the process. Get on with it again. As a young engineer, you you're looking to do the most exciting and exotic things you can, because it's technically interesting, it's engaging, and it's very self-centered, and it's very much experience built, and all those sorts of things. You know, you know. You learn that working with customers. You learn the the the same management of a workforce, rather than leading a workforce, because at that that stage is still very much management, and you learn commercial management, which are from any business perspective, are brilliant things to learn. So that was a real plus in being in that specialist business. Yes, you know, after a few years of doing that, you start to a few things start to dawn on you that that idea that people are looking to you for their cues, that you've got this workforce that are really talented, really capable, don't come from the same background that you do. Haven't gone to university, aren't like the circle of friends that you're used to and you because of the work you do with them and working really closely with the group of people that you need in order to deliver a project, you really see how they contribute value and how they make their own contributions, which is an interesting realization for a young man from a privileged middle-class background, which is exactly what I was. So you start to think about leadership, not consciously, but it sort of happens, the idea that you've got to motivate people, that you've got to explain to them why they're doing the things they're doing, what it is that is important, and why we're trying to achieve the thing we're trying to achieve. Not just dish out instructions and expect people to deal with them. And you also come across some other stuff. I mean, you get tested in a way that's quite surprising, the as I say, the surprise of shifting from managing to leading and realising a that that's a thing and B is a really, really important thing, but also the surprise of having to cope with the unexpected. You know, it's a it's a regrettable fact of construction still much, much better as it is now. It is still an industry where there is significant hazard and managing safety is a real problem. And the first time you have an accident, or you're exposed to an accident, and a real human being, somebody you're responsible for, is injured, that's a that's a real moment of change for you as an individual.
Dusty Rhodes 11:31
When you talk about that, do you have a particular incident in mind that you can share?
Alasdair Henderson 11:36
I have to say, the I've got a lot in my history, unfortunately, where we you know very minor incidents, and you can look at them, you can understand how you prevent them in retrospect, and a very small number of more significant incidents, and they all leave an impact on you. And they all leave an impact on you because you learn a very interesting thing. The time you spend thinking most about safety is normally immediately after an accident. You look at it, you understand that. You think, if only you know, here's the things we could have done that would have prevented this. And a lot of what we do now, actually, within the business is is about trying to find better ways to do that, to get people to think about safety without them having to go through the consequences of having an accident in a curious thing. And this is a really interesting thing about the business right now, as as you get safer, and the accidents become further and further apart in time, the opportunities for learning get further and further apart in time. So you need to find a new way of learning. You need to find a new way that allows you triggers that. How do we make this better? And we do that through a particular way in the business now, which is really, really successful, but in those days, you know? So that was the that was the 90s, the first thing you injure somebody, or somebody's injured on your project, or you have an incident, something happens, you know, it is unplanned. It's surprising, and you are the person you have to cope.
Dusty Rhodes 12:50
How does that make you feel?
Alasdair Henderson 12:54
It's a huge mix of emotions. Again, I think engineers are trained to be very analytical and very pragmatic and get things going, even more so in contracting. So when something happens, it's full activity mode. Stop this change that make it safe. Do this. All the activity comes out around how you deal with the immediate aftermath of something, whether it's safety, whether it's technical, whatever it is to stabilise the situation, and then that period of reflection happens, and it happens at the same time as investigation and improvement and all those things, but the personal reflections that come from that, particularly around safety, build up. I won't say that on day one, when you've, you know, when you've the first day after an accident has happened and something you're responsible for, you're immediately changed. You are, but not in ways you recognise, but over a period of, you know, a few years of not very many of these things happening, but enough that it has that impact, you start to understand the nature of that responsibility and how that compares with some of the other responsibilities you have. There's a really interesting thing. So I became a I became a dad when I was Gosh, 28 or 29 something like that. And you know, prior to that, work was absolutely everything. The biggest problem I could think of as a work problem, all those sorts of things. And I now say to my staff, you know, until you've stood in a pediatric A and E at two o'clock in the morning with your child in the arms, you don't really know what a problem looks like. And after you've done that, then it gives you a different perspective, and it allows when something happens, say, an accident happens. My first question is, is anybody hurt? And if the answer to that is no, the rest we can deal with.
Dusty Rhodes 14:24
It's really interesting how you say there's a difference between managing a project as an engineer and then leading people. And it's something you seem to have come through kind of quite naturally, because as you are managing then you become a leader, something you didn't realise you can learn by experience, which is one way of doing things, but obviously it's better to learn from others experience before you, and to do some kind of, you know, kind of professional or personal development on on that were you able to learn about leading people as a result of those incidents and experiences that you had?
Alasdair Henderson 14:58
Yeah, and through both. The mechanisms that you've just mentioned there. So, you know, as an organisation, we've always done lots of very good individual development. Early Career Stage used to be very focused on technical development and leadership didn't come until later on. We've changed that a lot in the business now that leadership, as soon as people are being exposed to the idea that they are managing groups of people, we help them into leadership training, because it's such a positive impact and it makes such a difference. Commercially, in our business, it makes a huge difference, because you end up with better managers and better leaders before those individuals it, it accelerates the way they think about those things. But informally, and I think certainly my early career, that was the most profound thing. I had some really inspirational people that I worked with who without, without formally teaching about leading, or without even perhaps knowing that they were doing it through leading by example, visible leadership and just the way they conducted themselves and the humanity of them actually allowed you to recognise that this is a good way of doing things. I had a particular line manager, a chap called Ian Walz. She's retired now, but Ian, I still keep in regular contact. And I think Ian, I would say, allowed me to understand that you can run a big business, a complex business, like a contractor that has lots of commercial concerns, that has lots of activity going on all at once. You can do all of that without being a monster, without being a table banger. You can do that and still be a human being and that, if you know, I can pass on any lesson. That's the one I want to pass on to people humanity and being, you know, being authentic and true to yourself and true to human beings that you're working with is much, much more powerful than the whole command and control trying to tell people what to do. Most often when you try and tell people what to do, number one, they're a bit suspicious of it. And Number Number two, at least some of them don't do it. So it's really not a great method of how you get things done. I
Dusty Rhodes 16:50
think the point you're making about people and the importance of people is stuff that you don't really realize until you're, as you say, in the middle of a job, and there's all kinds of which you're very experienced that now with diversity and inclusion and all kinds of things, which I want to talk about later, but firstly, I want to just pivot and talk about BAM for a few minutes, because BAM Ireland is known for delivering ambitious projects across all kinds of sectors, and one of the biggest and most well known recently is The National Children's Hospital. Big projects like that always have changes. Can you tell me, firstly, how big is the National Children's Hospital project, and why is there always changes when it comes to these things?
Alasdair Henderson 17:31
So it's, it's one of the largest buildings in Europe. And I think perhaps some of the commentators on the project or on the outcomes the project, don't necessarily understand just what a scale a project. It is six and a half thousand rooms. You know it is. It is going to be the envy of not just European, but, you know, Western Hospital pediatric care across the world, really. It's, it's an extraordinary facility. It's a brilliant facility for Ireland, the whole island of Ireland. And it will transform pediatric care with a shadow of a doubt. But of course, it's not at that stage yet. It's at the stage where people see it as a project. They see it as government expenditure. And of course, they're quite rightly concerned about those things. I think, as you zoom out from that, and I've been involved with lots of major projects, you start to see patterns in some of them. And one of these patterns that you see around major projects, and let's not, you know, let's not apply this absolutely to Children's Hospital. It has its own particular features, but generally speaking, with major projects, one of the things you notice is that, and I'll be clear, major public funded infrastructure projects, they are, you know, they're huge, so they tend to only be affordable by governments, and immediately, then you have the value for money, public expenditure questions being asked, which takes you into political arena, and quite rationally, society are interested in that these projects are hugely complex. They are so complex that, in reality, being able to understand the scope and delivery at the start, before you've done anything, becomes almost impossible from a just from a sort of philosophical standpoint. They are so complex, and the complexity can't be seen until you're in amongst it. But of course, we have ways of dealing with that, and one of the ways of dealing with that is detailed, rigorous engineering planning. The more time you can spend on that before you start building, the better the outcomes are. And that's a lesson from major infrastructure construction everywhere. Unfortunately, that tends to conflict with a political desire that once you've got permission, planning authority, budget for doing something, you really want your start now shovels in the ground, Bill, build, build, because they the the political capital that comes from having started something, the visibility of starting something, and the public's need to see that progress is being made is a physical need rather than a, you know, rather than a sort of practical need. And so often these projects can be started before they are actually ready to start. And the result of that is that change happens as you go through the project. Again, I'm not going to say that specifically what's happened at Children's Hospital, but it's a thing that you see the other really. Interesting, recurring theme that happens with these major infrastructure projects that are hugely impactful on, you know, creation of opportunity in society, creation of wealth, provision of service, whatever it looks like. But the benefit is, once that benefit starts being provided the day you start treating a child in the Children's Hospital, everything that's gone before is forgotten. I mean, if I talk about Dublin, specifically, Port tunnel. Remember port tunnel? You look at infrastructure that deeply problematic and complex in its time, was an absolutely essential piece of infrastructure now Dublin, Dublin Airport, terminal two. You know, it's you wouldn't imagine Dublin airport without terminal two right now. But you know, another complex infrastructure project that had its own challenges.
Dusty Rhodes 20:41
I want to get back to this particular topic of public procurement because public procurement and contracting models is something you will be very familiar with, right Can I ask you, what is your view on identifying the best procurement model for Ireland, which is focusing not just on the cost, but on delivering the right outcomes for the country.
Alasdair Henderson 21:01
You've nailed it just in that sentence. Outcome focus is the thing that's here. Now, you know, Ireland's had all sorts of challenges, as every country has, in how you procure infrastructure effectively, and there's a lot of moving parts in that you've got. You know, how well funded is the country? How are you procuring that money? Is it Is it money that's in the treasury? Is it money that's coming from external financing? What's the risk appetite for the organisations that are delivering this? Because, you know, fundamentally, risk starts with the person who wants to develop it. If you want to, if you want to build a tunnel somewhere, let's say you want to build a tunnel for a metro system in Dublin, for example, right now, that's a government problem, and all the risk sits with the government. At some point, they'll contract to some organisation to do some construction, and the purpose of that contract is to pass risk. It's to deliver scope, but it's fundamentally a risk-sharing model, if you like. You ask somebody to do something, they commit to do it, and they take certain risks in doing that for a commercial price. That's changed a lot in the past. In past five years, actually, never mind the past 10 or 20 years that the level of risk associated with the business model of contracting has changed enormously, and the ability of contractors balance sheets to sustain that, or I'll put that a different way, the willingness of contractors to sustain those kind of risks on their balance sheets has reduced enormously. The construction industry knows very well what it's doing. It absolutely can deliver these projects well. And actually, Ireland is good at delivering these projects. There's a narrative that says we don't know how to do this in Ireland, not true. We do know how to do it. We just sometimes choose to do it in a way that is different, and you end up with the wrong outcome. But jumping back to what you want from this, anybody who's procuring fundamentally, they're looking for something around budget, something around program and something around the expected benefits. So let's call those outcomes. If a procurement model that you're currently using doesn't take you to those outcomes, then it can't be right. So single stage, lump sum contracting are offering up complex projects to say before you know, we conceptualise something for six years and put it out to the market for three months to have it priced, which is automatically a rush. And therefore, you know, information poor and time poor, tell me right now, without knowing anything about the future, what that's going to cost. And you can't charge me any more, by the way. You know, how do you expect that model to deliver a rational outcome. And that takes you to thing we call two stage contracting. The two stage contracting has unfortunately got a bit of a poor reputation in Ireland from a couple of implementations. It is, right now, the best way, and it's demonstrably the best way. And it does two things. You you have a first stage which is has to be competed for. So you have the market competition thing, but the first stage allows the customer and the contractor and other interested parties to work together, paid to work together, to develop the scope, the planning, the risk profile, and get to the end of the first stage, where the customer knows what it is that they're going to be paying for this that everybody has talked about what it is we're doing, that the design is fully developed, the risks are understood and properly allocated, and crucially, the scope alignment. So the understanding of what the customer thinks they're getting versus what the contractor thinks they're providing is perfect because you've been working collaboratively together to do it. If at that point, the customer says, this is the right answer, let's go. You move into phase two, and that's building the customer. Can also say, actually, having gone through all this detailed phase, I can see I don't want to do this. Or this isn't to you know, this isn't the right price. We need to do something else. Most commonly challenges that happen with construction. Or the reason that construction goes wrong is that the expectation of the customer and the and the belief from the contractor of what they're providing start misaligned, so at scope misalignment, and if you start with a misaligned scope, it never gets better. It just gets worse and worse and works. So, you know, it's a real challenge. One of the challenges that people throw at two stage contracting is, well, you do this first stage and that that just increases the cost these. Jobs, it's much more expensive because everything's getting lumped in there and adapt. What actually happens is it gives you a much closer view of what the likely outturn cost is. If you want to compare procurement methods, to say, give me your best guess of what you think is going to cost. So your best tender price for the start? Yes, you can compare those. You can compare those all day long, and you can go for lowest price, or you can go for some other most economically advantageous model. But that's just the price that's proposed at the start. It doesn't include anything that might happen, or anything you could foresee happening if you had a bit more time to spend on it. And it's certainly not a brilliant guide to what the outturn cost is going to be.
Dusty Rhodes 25:38
No so procurement is a complicated area. And as you say, it's about budget, and then it's about benefits. Another thing that I think you must be considering is sustainability, because it's a huge focus for for engineering today, and there's a lot of kind of rethinking and change going on in the construction industry around that. Bam says that it's committed to building a sustainable tomorrow. Sounds great. Lovely Little Yeah, very corporate explain to me, as a human being, exactly what that looks like and how it's being implemented.
Alasdair Henderson 26:12
So you'll have heard of net zero. Yeah, everybody talks about net zero. So this is about getting to a place where the carbon emissions of the way we live our lives have there's no net emissions of carbon. There might be some emissions of carbon, but there's something else that offsets them. If you understand it, 39 40% of carbon emissions come from the construction or operation of the built environment, whether that's infrastructure buildings, the house you live in, the way you heat your house, the way you travel. 39 to 40% of anthropogenic CO two emissions come from that if you can't deal with the built environment, which is the construction industry, then you just can't get to anything, to net anything. So you have to deal with the way that construction traditionally gets done, and the way we operate, the built environment, the buildings we have, and the infrastructure we use. So very straightforwardly, there's two parts to that. There is the capital build phase. That's the bit that I suppose I'm very involved in as a contracting business. What does it cost? What do we emit in doing these things? And then there's the operational phase. What does it cost to run your building, power, water heating, particularly the operational phase is very strongly guided by how the facilities are designed. How are they designed to operate. So things like putting an air source heat pump into your house or into your building, instead of a gas boiler or an oil found boiler, zoom out to building scale. You know the kind of buildings you see in central cork, central Dublin, central Galway, big, impressive buildings, and of course, they are heated in different ways. Efficiency is important. How they're insulated, things like lighting, making sure that the lighting is efficient and well designed. Energy consumption, water consumption, trying to limit the use of water. There's some other interesting aspects in sustainability as well that aren't just about consumption, but the way that the building deals with the environment. So we we take a green field and we turn it into something hard and concrete or aluminum or whatever. When rain hits that it runs straight off it and into the into the drainage system. Instead of soaking gently into a field. When rain hits a field, the water flow is attenuated. It's slowed down. When rain hits a building, it's speeded up and it rushes down into the surgeon. Get these flood surges that happen. So now, when we design buildings, just as a case in point, we've done one in southern Dublin, we have what's called a blue roof, so it has a green roof. You're probably familiar with that, a roof that looks sort of grassy. It's actually a different kind of plant. It's not grass, but it looks nice. It's not like a hard roof. So water comes into that, but beneath that, we also have a water storage layer so it attenuates the rainfall. It doesn't just hit the building. It goes straight into down pipes. It hits the building and is slowed down so that the peak flows in the outfall into the sewer are much, much slower. Come back to the construction phase. It just, just to be absolutely, uh, sort of final point in this, the construction phase. One of the biggest things you see in civil engineering construction is diesel being burned to construct these things. You know, big equipment fueled by diesel plumes of smoke. CO two emissions. Two years ago, I switched our business to using hydro-treated vegetable oil, certified hydro treated vegetable oil. That's a that's a really important distinction. So this is not HBO that comes from palm oil or or first virgin sources, if you like. It's comes from used waste oils that recycled to make a fuel that has a huge impact on our CO two emissions that come from from liquid fuels. The thing that everybody's doing our car fleet. So we have a fairly big car fleet, three or 400 cars, moving those over to EV over a period of three years. By the end of 2026 our fleet will be 100% EV. So you know, we really are stopping doing the things that we said we would still do.
Dusty Rhodes 29:43
Also on planning projects, while we're talking about these things, how is BAM handling the challenge of supporting biodiversity that may be interrupted by sites
Alasdair Henderson 29:52
biodiversity is one of the most interesting, most productive challenges for us. Actually, it is. It's really hard to measure, so we don't yet have a great. Measure of what improvement in biodiversity is in a, you know, purely numerical sense, but conceptually and qualitatively, you can absolutely see it. So imagine what you you know, if you imagine the motorway, what a motorway looks like, and how the in the engineering profession says this is how a motorway should look. You know, it's strips of tarmac and at the side, sometimes you're in a cutting where you've got slopes going up from you, and sometimes you're on an embankment where you've got slopes going down from you. So you have this alignment of the road, and it doesn't just follow the land. It cuts through the land, sometimes cutting, sometimes embankment. And you'll Picture those embankments and those cuttings, and you'll see long planar surfaces that are covered in grass, the same kind of grass. And it's very neat. It's very geometric. Is exactly how an engineer would draw this. This is, this is what good practice looks like. Make it neat, make it tidy. It's easy to maintain, easy to construct. So from engineering standpoint, that's been best practice for many, many years. And from a biodiversity standpoint, it's catastrophic. It's monocultural grasses, the roads and indeed, Rails, long, linear infrastructure is a real problem, because it interrupts, interrupts the movement of animals. So animals that are naturally migratory are animals that are territorial. So as they produce offspring, have to expand their space. These long bits of linear infrastructure block that. So what do you do about it? Well, there's a few things you can start using, things like green tunnels. It's just one solution, but it's a solution where you allow these spaces, green tunnels and green bridges at these crossing points at regular intervals on long linear infrastructure to allow natural migration of animals. But you look at those long linear slopes, those planar slopes with monocultural grasses on them, what we actually need there is some decay and decomposition. Positive decay and decomposition now saying those words and the word positive in the same sentence sounds nuts, but it's that is how nature works, that you need that you don't want to be cutting the grass all the time. You want trees that fall over and rot and they support insect life and they create nutrients and all those sorts of things. So the way that we manage those landscapes changed. Don't make a mistake of thinking they're not managed. This is people are it's very popular to talk about rewilding as a solution. Rewilding is just another way of managing a landscape. These are now managed landscapes, and we have to deal with them. If you look at the global biodiversity loss, and you look at a map of that, the Ireland and the UK are in the bottom 10% the most biodiversity, the most sort of loss of natural biodiversity across the globe, largely through land use. This is about how we've set up our infrastructure, but also how we use the land that we've turned over to farming. This is not farming as bad. This is just we have to find ways to manage the landscape in a different way that support all the things we need as a society, infrastructure and farming amongst them, but also all the things we need in order to continue. What are we doing as a business? Well, we're starting to feed this into the way we design these projects, the way we conceptualize them, the way we advise customers about them, and the kinds of things we leave behind through our monocultural landscapes, more active biodiversity, where we manage motorways, and we do plenty of that in Ireland, thinking about the way that we manage verge cutting and things like that. Less of it allow wildlife to grow, allow plant life to grow, variations in plant life, even sometimes things you know that are a little bit twee, but you know, bug hotels and beehives and things like that all make an important impact. But the biggest single thing we can do is change what we think the best practice in constructing long, linear infrastructure looks like.
Dusty Rhodes 33:22
Let me get away from the environment and back to people. And one thing I hear over and over again on the podcast is about engineering and diversity and inclusion within the industry, from your point of view. Why is it important?
Alasdair Henderson 33:39
Well, you know we we are of society and in society as an organisation. If you honestly believe that we can construct the right things for society in the right way and not include the viewpoints and contributions from part of society, whatever that part looks like, whether it's gender, race, whatever it is, then you're kidding yourself when you look at the way the infrastructure is designed. And let me, let me give you an example around public transport. If you are like you and I are, you know, a white male of a certain age, confident in our space, the world has been designed around us. So the world has been designed to suit us because it's been designed by people like us and built by people like us to be operated. So when you walk into a, I don't know, a railway station in Dublin, or you're sitting in Kent station in Cork, or Kent station down in Galway, which we are rebuilding, by the way, you're standing there, it's an environment that you're completely comfortable with. If you're standing there at 10 o'clock on a Friday night, and it's not terribly well lit, and there's not very many people around, and you're a woman, you've probably got a different experience with that. You've certainly got a different experience of that. And how can we deal with that? Well, that is an environment that's been created by engineering design. You can absolutely make those environments safer, warmer, more welcoming by changing the way you design that infrastructure. And unless you've got. Insight at design stage and at construction stage, then you're not going to build the right thing that works for the rest of society.
Dusty Rhodes 35:07
So this is why you're saying we need a more diverse people included in the industry, at the design site, in engineering, because they will bring these different perspectives, and the projects will be better as a result.
Alasdair Henderson 35:20
Exactly that. Let me give you another example. You're wandering around city centre cork. Somebody's doing some work on something. They've put a hoarding up. It's blocked off a bit of the pavement, so you have to step off the pavement into a temporary walkway. Now, you and I can manage that. You know, we're able-bodied. We can walk and all the rest of it. If you're a wheelchair user, if you've got a buggy if you know, if you are not of that group, then that just that simple change has a really profound impact on the quality of your life that day, or your or actually your ability to do something. Those insights are necessary for how we think about infrastructure, even a temporary sense. And then, of course, from a from a business perspective, this is dead, dead obvious. You know, even if you don't believe the moral case for including people in your business. We are sitting here in Ireland with basically full employment bar structural factors. So we have not just a skills crisis, but a total availability of population crisis. Is the Civil Engineering and Construction Industry sufficiently attractive that people are rushing towards it? No, not really. So we need to make sure that we have access to all of the people, the potential talent that could come into our business, and make sure that they feel that this is a welcoming environment for them to come to and stay.
Dusty Rhodes 36:29
Do you think there are kind of preconceptions then about how engineering works that's creating barriers?
Alasdair Henderson 36:36
Oh, yeah, absolutely. When we do when we do student placements or school placements, one of the things we try and do is get the parents in on day one, because more often than not, the parents are hugely influential in how children choose careers or feel about a certain industry. And often the parents have a view of construction. If they're not exposed to construction or infrastructure, indeed, engineering, more broadly, directly, they tend to have a view on it that is sometimes a bit dirty. It's about manufacturing, or it's about digging holes and stuff, and it looks a bit I don't really want my daughter to go there. And then you bring them along and you show them the the really high-quality professionals that we have within our business, the money, amount of money we spend on incredibly productive, modern equipment, the use of digitalisation. I mean, it's, it's Minecraft, RIT, big, if you like. And the parents see this, and they see the care and attention, sophistication, understanding and the support of culture around what we do. And I have to say that parents absolutely love our industry when they see it, and they're very happy for to say, you know, my daughter, my son, yeah, go do your placement there. But before that, contact, yes, there's absolutely preconceived notions around mucky, dirty, you know, not very nice industry.
Dusty Rhodes 37:45
Listen. Let me wrap up our chat today by talking about something we love. Talking about the podcast, the future from your point of view, though, looking towards the future, how do you see engineering evolving in the next 10 years?
Alasdair Henderson 38:00
Well, look, we're sitting here today. There is a force 11 storm across Ireland. We've just come through a Christmas period where one of the principal freight transport links came out of action. You start to understand that Ireland is in a place where it's its infrastructure is fragile, and the infrastructure that supports the rest of society needs attention, needs to be built. And on top of that, when you look at the challenges that Ireland as a country faces, and the world generally faces, these extreme weather events that are challenging the infrastructure that we have now, buildings, you know, where the cooling systems aren't enough to keep them cool in the peaks of summer heat, railways, where we have the rails that buckle in the peaks of summer, heat, cold weather snaps that freeze and land snow on us that we can't clear for a week. Those kinds of events are coming now, and they're coming more regularly, and our infrastructure is not shaped through it. So we need to update the infrastructure we've got, and we need to new build, new infrastructure that helps society work. And the positive around this is you can see this also from the way that government policy is shaped around it. Is shaped around this. People really now understand the value of that infrastructure and how it creates opportunity and employment for a future Ireland. So I would say, if you're thinking about coming into engineering, generally, construction, specifically, it is probably the most important 50 years coming in construction that there has ever been when you look at the challenges that the world has to deal with. We are the organisations. We are the industry almost uniquely that has the capability to deal with that.
Dusty Rhodes 39:29
It's happening, and it's changing so fast that the next 10 years is going to be particularly important. Aside from that, on the technology side of things, you know, we've got aI everybody's talking about, you've got more and more and more use of robots and stuff like that. Are you excited by any of those new technologies?
Alasdair Henderson 39:44
Oh, hugely. And you they're making a big impact in our industry already, efficiency, effectiveness that we've gone through quite a long period of productivity not really enhancing. And then you start to see how some of these automation techniques are really enhancing our productivity, and whether that is modularisation for house building. I. Whether that is about much clever, more expensive capital equipment that we buy, but it's much more productive, and therefore it's worth it. You know, those things are changing. What you will definitely see in construction over the coming years is there will be fewer people in construction, which is, it's a bit like the the Genesis that farming went through. It becomes more productive, and it's not because it doesn't mean that fewer people are employed in the industry. What happens is there is a bigger industry because it's able to do more. So by increasing our productivity, we get away from some of the skill challenges that mean that we just need more people to do things and with the people we've got, but we do need people, let's be clear, but with the people we've got, we can do even more. It's a huge opportunity. And digitalisation is just extraordinary. What we do now compared with even five years ago, absolutely amazing.
Dusty Rhodes 40:46
And my favourite expression is when you look at these new technologies, you have to remember that this is the worst they will ever be. What about Finally, on materials? Because materials are changing all the time. Lots of innovation. There have you seen any that excite you?
Alasdair Henderson 41:02
Yeah, and we're actually doing a lot in that space. So concrete and steel, our industry is addicted to concrete and steel, both very, very high embedded carbon content with content materials. And of course, if we want to get to net zero, we're going to have to do something around that. So one of the technologies we've been working on biocarbonisation, it is about how you treat the ground in situ using bacteria. I'm not going to bore you about it now, but it's an extraordinary use of natural resource that you can use bacteria to improve the strength of the ground. So instead of doing that traditional construction thing of digging a hole, dumping the soil and then filling the whole field of concrete, you can actually treat the soil so it's got a higher strength and is more usable as a construction material, but we must start using more effectively, ceramics, fiber based materials. Get away from our absolute addiction to concrete and steel. Aviation has been doing this for many, many years. The materials are well understood. They absolutely have application in civil engineer.
Dusty Rhodes 41:55
Last question for you, Alistair, and a little bit of advice for everybody who's listening today. You've got a very interesting point of view on what engineers should be interested in. Explain to me.
Alasdair Henderson 42:07
So I when I talk to people about the things that they should be developing in their career. And of course, you do get lots of people come and say, How do I get your job? You know, how do I become like you? Not many actually, but people who want to progress in their careers. And the thing I say to them, I suppose, is a little bit surprising, but the thing I value most is bread, and that's for a few reasons. You know, breadth of understanding of the world that you're working in. As I say, we are in society and of society, if you don't understand it, then the decisions you make around how you do things will not be good decisions.
Dusty Rhodes 42:37
So you're talking breadth, breadth, yeah. So, all right, yeah, maybe the Scottish, Scottish accent sounds like bread. You see the toast? Sorry, the breath, yeah. And that's, you
Alasdair Henderson 42:47
know, that's everything that is. It's culture, it's society. Why do we do the things we do? Why we talk? Why do we exist? Philosophy, you know, philosophy. You should absolutely be interested in philosophy, understanding what it is, where we've come from, where we're going. Those things might not sound like engineering, but they change your perspectives, in your Outlook, and help you deal, help you engage with stakeholders who are relying on you to do good work and help them meet their requirements. All of that feeds into a sort of critical thinking mode, if you one of the challenges that we have in the modern world is lack of critical thinking, and it often comes from an inability to see perspectives from other people, if you if you work to improve your bread, apart from being interesting and self-fulfilling anyway, it also allows you to be a better critical thinker, because you are able to see and understand more perspectives. Helps you reduce your, you know, Availability Heuristic biases. It helps you reduce your confirmation biases, all those things that constrain critical thinking, and goodness knows, we could do with so much more critical thinking in the modern world.
Dusty Rhodes 43:50
What a fantastic point of view to wrap up on. If you'd like to find out more about Alasdair and some of the topics that we've spoken about today, you'll find notes and link details in the description area of the podcast. But for now Alasdair Henderson, Executive Director of BAM Ireland. Thank you so much for joining us.
Alasdair Henderson 44:06
Thanks, Dusty. It's been a pleasure.
Dusty Rhodes 44:08
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Until next time from myself, Dusty Rhodes, thank you for listening.