Transcript
Speaker: Sustainability is no longer something that's just a specialist subject, but it really needs to be culturally, needs to be embedded into everything we do.
Speaker: Welcome back to Infrastructure Connections, the podcast where we explore what makes sustainable infrastructure work. Brought to you by the Infrastructure Sustainability Council, I'm your host, Seth Scott, and today we'll be speaking with Evelyn Story.
Speaker: Evelyn is Oricon's Director of Eminence and Sustainability and has been with the business for more than 20 years. Graduating from Imperial College in London, Evelyn has over 35 years' experience as a structural engineer and has successfully led multidisciplinary design teams for complex and award-winning buildings in both Australia and the UK.
Speaker: Evelyn has a passion for elegant and sustainable design of engineering structures. She sits on Oricon's board and is immediate past chair of Engineer Australia's Structural College Board.
Speaker: Welcome to the show. Makes sense. Tell us about your background. You were educated in London, you worked as an engineer there for some time, and now you've been with Oricon for over 20 years. What's the overarching driver of your career?
Speaker: Yeah, and in fact I'm not sure I've got an overarching driver, but yes, as you said, I i so spent the first half of my career in London. I'm a structural engineer by background, so I was working predominantly in building structural design in the yeah UK. And since I moved to Australia with Oricon, I've been, i suppose, a much more involved in what you might call operational roles, so various business unit leader roles. But I think the common theme in all of that is I've always retained a close connection to engineering design.
Speaker: um I've always, despite my profit and loss P&L type responsibilities, I've always retained a close connection to projects and to clients. And I think that's probably been the overarching theme of my career is is wanting to remain close to what we do as a business, to actually creating and delivering projects for our clients.
Speaker: And you're now the director of eminence and sustainability for Oricon. It's the first time I've heard the term eminence used in a job role. So if you could tell us a little bit about what it means for you and what's the eminence mindset.
Speaker: Yeah, look, it is an unusual job title. i have to say i often do have to explain what that means. It comes with a sort of ah a little subtitle. and But I think really in Oricon terms, ah we we talk about eminence as being both the focus on technical excellence, but also the meaningfulness of that, if you like. So we all understand in a consultancy world but how important it is to have technical expertise, to have credibility, to have built that deep technical expertise that you deliver on projects. But really, that means nothing if it hasn't got credibility with our clients, if it's if it doesn't actually translate to something that's useful to them. So we talk about um eminence really at Oricon as being that mixture of both deep technical expertise, but also in a way that is useful um to our clients. So whether that's you know within my portfolio, are things like a our graduate technical mastery program, but also um our design academy, which is is really the program for our most senior professionals. And they're all connecting staff to both building their technical excellence, but also ensuring that we retain close connectivity to what our clients are telling us, what the markets are telling us are most relevant and needed. And you'd spoken on the importance of culture previously. How does that play into that role?
Speaker: Oh, super important. So, i mean, my my full role title has eminence and sustainability in the title. So you might say unusual bedfellows, but in actual fact, both of them um are equally important in how we deliver services to our clients. And culture is really almost as important as the technical skills that we have. and I guess when I first spoke about that importance of culture,
Speaker: in delivering sustainability. it was probably a good couple of years ago now. And I think that was the start of the journey for many in in the industry as we started to move from um sustainability as something that was, um or even eminence, something that was actually delivered by specialists. And we gradually move now to the importance of it actually being embedded in everything that we do. Sustainability is no longer something that's just a specialist subject, although we do have people with deep expertise in in in various sustainable um services.
Speaker: But it really needs to be culturally needs to be embedded into everything we do. So every single one of our engineers, every single one of our project managers needs to deliver um sustainable thinking as part of the project. So culture comes first, really. Everyone's got to be on board. You've got to build knowledge. um People have to feel comfortable understanding what the levers they can put in their role are in relation to sustainability. um And I think that's the cultural piece.
Speaker: What parts of sustainability do you find yourself working on the most? Well, that's that's changed as well a lot over the last couple of years. So when we first um introduced our sustainability by design program, we called it a good two or three two two and a half years ago. our focus was really on just um building literacy across our entire workforce. So delivering a knowledge programme, making them all feel comfortable in talking to their clients about sustainability. And a big part of that, I think at the time was probably embodied carbon. That was a, it was a good starting point because it it drove many of our staff to think about materials usage and the efficiency of what they were designing.
Speaker: I think as time has gone on, Now, as I said, we've moved to this point where sustainability is really embedded into our core services. I mean, um we talk about sustainability is really just good engineering. um But I think the conversation has moved on from in just, I suppose, in embodied carbon, which is particularly focused on the design and the I suppose, the creation of an asset for a client to now we're looking at um resilience and longevity of of assets, how we extend their life, whether we should extend their life or replace them. um If we're extending lives, what are the
Speaker: What are the design criteria that an asset might face into the future? um So climate change and scenarios, so a much broader range, I think, of topics now. um But I guess underpinning all of that would be this idea of resilience, I think, would probably play into lot of what we're doing. um And alongside, um i mean, decarbonisation is clearly always going to be an important topic. but they're sort of the yin and yang of the discussion that you might have on whether you're building a new asset or extending the life of ah of an existing one.
Speaker: Do you see engineers coming in with more information on sustainability than previously, whether they're coming out of university or just from their time in the field? Oh, absolutely. i think um it's actually pretty difficult for um someone who who works in consulting engineering to not have good solid knowledge now. In fact, they would be fairly quickly irrelevant, to be honest, if they didn't have some core skills. But but yes, we find our graduates are joining us with um good awareness. and I think that's probably driven from their own sense of self as well and their interest and passion for the topic. um But they have been introduced to core concepts in the in their undergraduate studies, which...
Speaker: um It's great. It means we're coming they're coming in with it with a core level of knowledge. um But we build on that through you know our knowledge programme, our sustainability knowledge programme. But as I said, we've moved really from something that was two and a half years ago would have been, we called it sustainability by design. And it was very much about building base knowledge and awareness consistently to now sustainability in practice. So it'ss we now, um we take that base knowledge for granted. We support when necessary and we're looking to support our teams in how they take that conversation to the client and um and and use those skills.
Speaker: It's so important that you give them the groundwork and lay the principles before they speak to the client so that they know how to present it in a way that the client is going to appreciate. That's fantastic.
Speaker: Absolutely. and I think it's important that we i mean we always say to our teams, you They're not expected to be experts. And so we do have we do have sustainability practitioners who have deep expertise across a range of topics.
Speaker: um but But our teams need to be able to, our staff need to be able to talk to their client about their particular area. So if they are a if they' are a structural engineer like me, um they can talk about material selection, embodied carbon. and They can talk about despite design life and materials. um and things that are relevant to them. We're not expecting them to go and talk about biodiversity or decarbonisation. So we we definitely we feed that information and and provide that support in the areas of expertise that they need to have.
Speaker: And you'd written that sustainability plays a role in whether or not to start a project or whether it gets finished. um Where do you see the risks involved in starting a project without sustainability involved?
Speaker: Projects major projects in particular face so many risks in delivery and our clients are ultimately looking for certainty that, you know, it's not, we can't always provide, but certainty of delivery, certainty of costs, certainty of time and that the asset they receive at the end is fit for purpose. I think the sustainability aspect of that is really understanding in an uncertain world, you know, what are the range of,
Speaker: of scenarios that that asset might, you know whether it's a building or a road um or a piece of um an Olympic stadium, maybe what, you know, what, what is the future going to hold for that asset? What are the climate scenarios? What are the population scenarios? You name it. and I think that's where sustainability comes in. You you can, um you you bring to the table um almost a philosophical conversation about what's the the client is wanting to to to get from that particular asset? um And then what are the likely responses? So it might not be framed. i mean, i I think we would rarely go into a conversation like that, framing it as if it was a sustainability conversation, but it is nonetheless. It's it's about how that asset will be sustainable into the future, given its life and and the client's aspirations.
Speaker: I guess that's what makes it so encouraging that we're seeing it incorporated early into major projects now. Oricon has been working on some very large projects and seen some spectacular sustainability results. What are some of the projects that you've seen that you're most proud of and what were those outcomes?
Speaker: As I said, I'm building structural engineer and I started my my sort of design work as and as a graduate engineer back in London. And i've I've been interested to see through the arc of my career how the use of timber has actually gone from ah what was actually quite common usage in the yeah UK, um but in a much smaller scale, to what we're seeing now in in in terms of mass engineered timber. So back in London, a lot of availability of European softwoods, timber was often included in our projects in actual fact. But when I moved to Australia 20 years ago, that was really, there was a lot less timber in usage in in the sort of work we were doing. um i did, I was very fortunate to work on on two or three glue land buildings we did for Brisbane City Council, what were aquatic centres, which was the first time i I'd seen timber used and and another beautiful auditorium we did for UQ probably 10, 15 years But
Speaker: but What's been really interesting is to see the rise of mass engineered timber. So Oricon were involved in the well the building, the office building that I now work in at 25 King, which was, you know, the tallest commercial mass engineered timber building still is in Australia um ah through some other projects and onto um our team, you know, designing the the award-winning Bula Catterjian building, which was for Murdoch University over in in Western Australia, an absolutely beautiful building that, that combines, I guess, a beautiful sense of place for the students over there in Western Australia, but also at the best of, you know mass engineered timber technology and supply chains and engineering design. So it's been fantastic to see, i suppose, that arc of of how what of where we've got to now um and how much that
Speaker: A building like that, you know, provides such a great sense of place, but also amazing sustainability outcomes in terms of reduction of material use. So long may that continue. Let's on to the next ones.
Speaker: Yeah. That's great. That's great. So you're a big advocate of extending life of existing assets. That's very much in line with the moment. What are some of the tools that we have to maintain and renew existing infrastructure that may might not have prioritized in the past that we have now?
Speaker: think what we're seeing now is the rise in in the rise of the AI environment um is is much more ability to look across a range of potential scenarios for that asset, whether that's a range of climate scenarios or population scenarios, um economic scenarios, um and what that might mean to make to make smart decisions.
Speaker: um So yes, we're we're able to to to tweak and investigate and model so much more than we could even even five years ago. Well, there are a lot of exciting things coming up in sustainability and climate.
Speaker: Where do you see the next big things coming down the pike? um Sustainability is good engineering. i mean, that's really what it is. It's actually really efficient engineering, minimising waste, um absolutely delivering to the scope or the brief, um you know, the design criteria that are are required. and no more, with really good integrated into the supply chain really well so that whatever we are specifying is available, we'll have a lifespan that is appropriate, that is maintainable into the future and and will be resilient to the shocks that are likely to come, and whether those are environmental or economic or or population or or whatever. So I think um you can't separate out sustainability from
Speaker: anything else ah but from actually all of those other risks. It's just an integral part of project delivery now. So as I've i've said a few times now, I think embedding it, um giving you know so ensuring that you know the entire engineering workforce really has that front of mind as we deliver these projects is going to be key to our profession remaining you know credible and trusted into the future.
Speaker: Oricon has quite a few projects with the IIS rating. um What role do you think the Infrastructure Sustainability Council plays in helping Australia's organisations become more sustainable?
Speaker: The rating tool is obviously credible and trusted. i think the role of the of the council is so much more than ah than a rating tool because it's actually about having an industry standing.
Speaker: um I think being a connector and a communicator and an advocate. I think i think when I think of ISC, I think of of that respected voice in the industry that is um advocating connecting for, you know, good best practice um so much more than just the rating tool itself. And I think, you know, that goes hand in hand with um the education piece. It's um about upskilling our workforce. I often think, um you know, I feel very fortunate that I work for an organisation like Oricon, who, you know, who invests in upskilling our workforce um and ensuring that we are, you know, um every single one of our staff is able to deliver that best practice to our clients. But we're a very broad industry. um Not everyone has access to those same tools.
Speaker: learning um opportunities um or or being challenged to think about what they could do better. that i think ISK as an industry body has really fulfilled that um for across the range of of our industry and brought the whole um playing field up, if you like.
Speaker: Well, what's one piece of advice you'd give our audience that they should act on? Look, i think um I think it comes back to learning. Again, Seth, I think um I think having that learning mindset, um nothing ever stands still. If I think about my career, and I'm definitely one of those people who's at at the tail end of their career rather than at the start. But if I think of how much industry has changed, you know, back in my London days, sustainability wasn't really even in a word that would have been that would have been spoken about in those terms. We just didn't think about that. what we were doing in terms of material selection, usage, waste.
Speaker: um it It simply wasn't um on our radar. The first decade of my life, i just in my career, I would have said. And now I think about how much has changed in that period um to now at the tail end of my career, where it's really embedded in pretty much everything we you know we consider. um the amount of learning I've had to do along the way um has been huge. And I think that's what I'd encourage everyone else to to consider. You know, i I think AI might be quite transformative. It may not. It's impossible to tell at the moment.
Speaker: um But there's no doubt that our industry is going to change a huge amount over the next decade. um And therefore, keeping an open mind, keeping that learning met mindset always, whether it's listening to podcasts, reading, and attending courses, podcasts, stepping outside our comfort zones and, and you know, learning from other disciplines, and other professions, and all of that helps us all move forward well. So keep that learning mindset would be my advice.
Speaker: Thank you so much, Evelyn. It's really reassuring to hear how far we've come. Thank you so much for being on the show. No, thank you for having me. I've enjoyed it.
Speaker: And thank you for listening to another episode of Infrastructure Connections. Please take a moment to follow us wherever you get your podcasts, and we want to know your thoughts. Leave a comment down below to let us know what you think.
Speaker: Stay tuned for the next episode of Infrastructure Connections.
