Process Over Perfection: The Real Path to Healthier Buildings

Podcast Transcript

Courtesy of Net Podsitive podcast

Richard (00:00)

How do we help every practitioner in the design and construction industry do the best they can with material selection within real constraints of time, cost and complexity?

Welcome to Net Podsitive: where we help you to transform your eco-anxiety into action through regeneration and resilience. I’m Richard Garrett and in this episode we explore what it takes to scale healthy, sustainable materials across the building industry with two people here who have spent their careers at this intersection. Charley Stevenson and Matt Root are the co-founders of Materially Better, a platform built to bring transparency, clarity and usability to product data so that anyone on a project can make informed decisions on material choices and not just experts. Charley and Matt, thanks for joining me in this conversation today and welcome to Net Podsitive. Thank you very much for

Charley (00:57)

Excited to be here at Living Future with you to really bring this conversation to a larger group.

Richard (01:02)

This is exciting. We’ve gotten to spend many years at this kind of conference. So I’m happy to have this chat here with you. Charley and Matt have led some of the most ambitious materials projects in the world, including more than 15 Living Building Challenge projects or Petal Certified projects. And their work isn’t just about compliance, but it’s about developing the tools and the systems that work.

in the real world under pressure and with imperfect information. And today in our conversation we’ll discuss expectations versus reality, why better materials can sometimes feel out of reach, the power of process, how organization makes smarter decisions, and expert guidance for all.

helping to make better material choices intuitive and not just exclusive. And as we start to unpack these topics, I’m really intrigued to hear about your pathway of how you got to this place and what that looked like for you. And you both have said in our chats before that you didn’t expect to be at this niche of materials and the healthy materials in the built environment.

I’m really curious to find out more about that pathway for you.

Charley (02:23)

In I would say I got here by mistake and I love it.

Richard (02:27)

In a sense. Tell me more Charley.

Charley (02:29)

So I was a math teacher and then I was a college administrator and I was just drifting away from my environmental interest and roots. And then in 2008 I joined a consulting engineering firm that was very focused on energy as a generalist, really trying to bring LEED practice in the middle early days of LEED. And that’s where I met Matt at summer camp.

Richard (02:50)

Yeah.

Charley (02:52)

Building

Science Corporation in the Boston area has what’s billed as summer camp and it’s a very informal summer conference that ends literally in, it was described to me as around a backyard fire. It’s the biggest backyard and the biggest.

Richard (03:06)

You’ve

seen.

Charley (03:07)

Matt

and I met through a mutual friend there, a colleague of his at the time. so it started with this lead work. And then in 2010, I read about the Living Building Challenge and it completely resonated as the thing that we should be doing. And then an RFP at my alma mater, Williams College came along and it literally said, lead platinum or dot, dot, dot.

And it really struck me that that ellipses could be replaced with the idea of the Living Building Challenge. So I happened to win that job with an architect and then went through an 18 month process of exploring the feasibility of Living Building Challenge. And we knew it would be both challenging and expensive, but the college rose to that occasion. And interestingly, tomorrow that project will be on the stage here for

achieving Living Certified years ago, but felt just shy of Living Certified and they’ve really committed to it as we have. So it’s that idea of sort of serendipity and then it was really hard work. I underbid that project by a factor of five. So I joked at the time that I supported my Living Building habit with the project.

Richard (03:58)

congratulations.

Charley (04:18)

And then with people I see here.

started a second and then a third and then a fourth Living Building, again focused on materials, always with the idea that we’d find efficiency. We’ve done it before, we’ll get efficient. And that efficiency was elusive because there’s only so much information that your brain can hold and there’s only so much information that a spreadsheet can hold that’s relevant from project to project. So really got thinking about data capture and data structure. And it was with the fifth project where Matt and I began to collaborate,

out an enormous commission that was to add the Materials Petal to a project that was already designed through change order. Another momentous challenge, but it was also the occasion where we saw we really need a system. We need a system that will scale digitally to help everybody do this work first for this project, but ultimately it became clear that the solution we built was the solution that everybody needs.

Matt (05:12)

Yeah, and I guess if Charley got here by accident, I got here more by strategic decision.

Richard (05:18)

done.

Matt (05:18)

because I had been working in building performance and energy efficiency for 13 or 14 years and felt like materials and healthier materials was kind of the next big thing. And this was in 2017 and Charley offered me a position and I decided to join thinking it was a rocket ship about to take off. we haven’t quite blasted out of the atmosphere yet, but hopefully we’re about to do that.

Richard (05:45)

Thanks, man. So I’m really curious to start to explore some of the topics that we’ve talked about or at least planned to talk about here today. a large one of those is, well, I actually would like to continue a little more on your personal and professional pathway and tell me a little more about your organization and some of the types of projects that you’ve had the opportunity to work on before we really start to unpack

some things. I’d love to learn more about your org.

Charley (06:16)

Sure, so we used to be known as Integrated EcoStrategy and then we rebranded this fall as Materially Better really with two reasons. One is we really have narrowed our focus to materials because it is so replicable and so scalable despite the fact that it hasn’t.

scaled yet, but the lessons learned on any project are inevitably applicable to every other project. It can be a very systematic work that we do. We’re a team of about 15 people.

five of whom are in software. So really working digitally to bring more information into an organized way so that it can be served into project teams. And then also, through this project work, we’ve realized that if good information fell from the sky on tablets written by… They still might not make it…

I mean, there’s a really good chance that they wouldn’t make it into a project. So that there has to be this multi-dimensional aspect to it, that there’s good information and there’s good process and there’s good accountability and there’s ultimately buy-in at every level in a project team.

So we take both humor and hope into this work, but realize that there’s a lot of work to be done and that it won’t be a sort of lightning bolt of transformation. It will be a process of one foot in front of the other that leads to the kind of change we want to see. it’s great to be here at Living Future where these ideas really…

germinate, it’s also great to be just out in the world because there aren’t that many people here relative to the number of people in this industry and a lot of the work that we see as central to our mission is translating these leading projects and these projects at the cutting edge into common practice for all.

Matt (07:59)

Yeah, I mean, one of the great things that LBC really has given to the industry is just this framework about approaching materials and looking at healthier materials through a specific lens. And that really has been a tremendous gift to the industry. And now the question is that we’re really focused on is how do we expand those ideas and those concepts beyond just LBC projects, because all projects can really benefit from this effort and this thought. It just might be an

a different scale than it’s done on an LBC project.

Charley (08:31)

Thank

Richard (08:32)

Tell me a little bit about, you’ve even started to hint at this, the expectations versus reality in your work. You’ve even given just a good tee up here of that first project that you were planning. You underbid by five-fold. That’s a big difference in between expectation and reality. So tell me a little more about your experience there with that sort of disparity.

Charley (08:58)

you know, it’s…

I’m trying to think about, it’s certainly multi-dimensional. It should be easy, right? You begin with the idea that it should be easy. Show me a good product, I’ll choose it, and I’ll put it in the specifications, and someone will install it, and then that will contribute to just a better project outcome. In our estimation, sustainability is never higher than fourth on the list of selection factors. Budget.

availability, durability, schedule, maintainability.

So all of those things are reasons why not to use a product you haven’t used before. So I’ve come to describe my work as 20 % technical, 30 % educational, and 50 % diplomatic. There’s a tremendous amount of work that needs to be done for people to be comfortable.

Richard (09:46)

Hahaha

Charley (09:51)

moving away from the status quo. Even though they know the status quo is imperfect, it’s comfortable. And all of those other reasons are really valid reasons. We can’t push away budget and say you’ve got to use this thing. a lot of these reasons why better materials aren’t specified or installed are based on incomplete or imperfect information, really fear. We did a project through change order to

upgrade from lead to Living Building Challenge Materials Petal, the cost difference, under 1 % in the materials. So there’s this perception that it’s out of reach. It’s really a matter of picking this commodity product, not that commodity product, where you achieve better levels of transparency and optimization. I guess on the topic of expectations,

it’s hard to fight expectations, we take a data-driven approach to that. We’re really trying to use this experience to help others get comfortable that their expectations are in fact not quite calibrated to reality and we can help them make that change.

Matt (11:01)

And just to add some data to that, that the reality of successfully completing a materials petal project is that you’re getting your project is roughly 25 to 30 percent red list free. So in terms of expectations, the real success of an LBC

Materials Petal project is that you are conducting a massive amount of advocacy to the industry for better, more transparent, Red List free products. Because there just aren’t that many products available to us in the marketplace right now. And so I think if the one expectation that I could communicate to folks about what you do when you’re doing a Red List free project, or…

pursuit of a Red List Free project is that most of the work is actually advocacy for that next job so that there’s more products that are compliant and there better options in the future rather than focusing on trying to make your one current project you’re working on perfect.

Richard (12:01)

Matt, I want to tease that out a little more. Explain like I’m five. What is a Red List free product?

Matt (12:08)

So the requirements of version 4 of LBC is that a product must be fully transparent and then also free of Red List chemicals. And there’s a specific list of chemicals that are considered Red List. And so in order to be fully compliant, you need to meet both of those two requirements, the transparency and the elimination of Red List chemicals.

Richard (12:31)

And when

you say transparency, you’re talking about chemical transparency of the components and the makeup of that product, not just if you can see through it.

Matt (12:39)

Exactly, it’s disclosure of the ingredients that are used to make that product. So think of like in kind of food terms that nutrition label that lists like what went into that product. So it’s not just the amount of sugar and the amount of fat, it’s what are the ingredients, how much flour, how much water, how much spices.

Richard (13:01)

Exactly.

Charley (13:02)

And this is another piece of that expectation thread that we pull on a lot because…

There’s no quantum difference between, it’s not a step function from a normal building to a better building, to an even better building, to a Living Building. There’s no barrier there. It’s just each project has done a little bit more. And if you get to that 25 or 30 % mark, it’s living, but it’s only a few percent better than a non-living building. And the task is really to

use that vision of an ideal project as an attractor, not as a…

not as a barrier that needs to be leaped over or to, that we really see this as a very incremental process. And in large part, our practice is about inviting people on that journey as far as they’re comfortable going, because the next step is just as easy as the step before. And particularly if you’re careful about recording your lessons, you can move incrementally step by step through a series

of projects to be a market leader without any radical transformation.

Richard (14:21)

So Matt, I’ve got a question here. You, I want to tie some things together.

Charley mentioned education, Matt you’ve mentioned advocacy. The sort of sub topic here is around expectations and sort of setting and recalibrating those. How does education and advocacy play into your project work? You mentioned 50 % of your work is education and I would imagine some of that is to your client, some of that is to your employees and team, but then tell me where else you’re providing

education to the market.

Matt (14:57)

Yeah, it’s definitely all across the industry.

I guess the key word is kind of awareness in terms of the issues. so people may have heard the word red list or the term red list, but what exactly does that mean? I mean, back to kind of my roots of energy efficiency, there is a whole lingo and awareness and most people know what EUI is right now. But the language around healthier materials and what defines the healthier materials and what should a designer or a construction

team member be thinking about when they’re trying to select a better product. There is a whole language and a framework and a methodology and thinking and approaching about those that decision that needs to be made.

Richard (15:45)

I’m starting to look forward into our notes of our conversation, but you’re already starting to tease at this of how your…

providing information that sort of democratizes that information. It’s not just for the experts. And so my question here is around that learning curve and what tactics you use through education to even help lower that barrier of learning curve.

Charley (16:10)

I’m

not a cynic and I try really hard not to be sarcastic, but Richard, what’s your favorite carcinogen?

Richard (16:17)

Let me think about that one. Which cancer do I prefer?

Charley (16:21)

Exactly. it’s, you know, lot of it, that things you learn you can’t, certain things you learn you won’t unlearn. Right. And I think, you know, back to expectations, we operate in a…

until recently we operated in a world where we thought that the government generally had our best interest in mind and that things that are really harmful are probably illegal. And that’s simply not the case. we’re, you know, the backdrop here is that there are a tremendous number of harmful chemicals that are in regular production. So, you know, we sort of do degrees of education just starting with that fundamental awareness. Business as usual is not safe.

for humans or for the ecosystem. So with that understanding, the next natural question is what should I do? And then it gets pretty philosophical pretty quickly because we have multiple crises that we’re trying to manage in addition to budget and schedule and aesthetics because what’s more important, climate or human health? That’s a religious question and I’m an atheist. So we’re trying to bring all of these issues to the surface, not in a way

Richard (17:20)

You

Charley (17:25)

that is sort of paralyzing, but rather empowering. So we then try to bring a logical layer to that. If I’m concerned about…

carbon, embodied carbon in particular in building materials, where should I focus first? Well, most of the carbon is going into the foundation and the structure and the enclosure and the metals. So perfect, in the refrigerants. So great. I’m going to prioritize carbon or embodied carbon, reduction of embodied carbon in those particular product sectors. Where are the health impacts? Well, interior finishes where people are spending their most time. Where are the social

justice impacts. Those are in products that are generally inert once they’re installed, but you sure wouldn’t want to live next to a PVC factory or neoprene factory. So you can layer in all of these dimensions of knowledge and we’re really trying to boil it down to use this, not that. A perfect example is we sit in this room and I see sprinklers in the ceiling. There is a vibration isolation hanger

above each of those and each of those has a little gasket in it. Well, the standard is a neoprene gasket because you can use neoprene anywhere. It’s oil resistant, it’s acid resistant, it’s grease resistant, it’s water resistant. But what’s the likelihood that there’s acid in the ceiling in the Hilton ballroom?

Richard (18:28)

little rubber gasket.

Charley (18:47)

zero. So EPDM is much more benign than neoprene. You have to specify EPDM, but once it’s in there, nobody gives another thought to it until the building’s renovated. So it’s a perfect example of a no impact substitution that has a measurable reduction in harm to a vulnerable community. So it’s trying to cut through all of the noise to say,

use this, not that. And then done a thousand times over the course of a project, you’re changing the trajectory, not just of that project, but of the workers that assemble it and the neighbors of the factories that produce those materials. And I think we’re really beginning with the idea that our job starts with knowledge transfer. That we want everybody on a team that we work with to be…

more comfortable doing the work on the next project so they don’t need us as much or maybe they don’t need us at all because these lessons can be internalized and then applied and repeated through time.

Matt (19:43)

you

And I would add knowledge transfer based on data and a systematic process. so by having a methodical way in which you approach the effort, whether you’re focusing on all of division 09 or just a few spec sections within division 09 or the whole project, you can choose your scale and then be very kind of strategic in the way in which you’re approaching your

your goal and using again data. We’ve looked at over 26,000 products and so we know where there are opportunities for improvement and where there are not. We want to help focus clients on the places where they can really make that advancement and then back to the advocacy where there aren’t as many good options. Let’s advocate for better but not spend time kind of just looking for something that is

there.

Richard (20:40)

Matt, tell me about the power of process and how does that help businesses and organizations make better decisions about materials?

Matt (20:51)

Right. Well, I could talk process all day. I have found that people don’t really like talking about process for very long. But within construction, it is really important because there are these processes in terms of the development of the project documents and then how products move from design documents into shop drawings and then ultimately into submittals and installations.

So the process and the flow of that product is really important because there are I mean on a typical project we will look at north of 3,000 products. But only about a thousand products are ultimately installed on the job. So there are a lot of products that are coming and going and under consideration and then out and it takes a real concerted effort to make sure that the

products that we want to end up installed on the job, which is the ultimate goal, actually get there from that initial high level design development and kind of goal setting all the way to the end of the job. So the process is absolutely critical because as Charley was saying, if that aha information fell from the sky, that doesn’t necessarily mean that it absolutely

get some on the job.

Richard (22:18)

Are there tactics or ways that projects can make sure that the process includes these real careful steps of creation or selection?

Matt (22:29)

Yeah, think,

well, I guess one specific…

not to do is using spreadsheets. Unfortunately, we have just learned through our trial and error, and Charley can show you the scars of that Excel spreadsheet. It’s really easy to get information into it. It’s actually over the lifespan of projects, which go for years, it becomes really hard to get the information out in a way that is usable. And so using a

platform and there are a couple out there that allows you to track the information and really digitize that information because right now the unfortunate reality within construction is that a lot of information just dies and gets lost in static PDFs. Whether it’s the 100 % CDs or all of the construction submittals, those end up just becoming a PDF that sit in a folder and it’s really hard to access that

information later on. we as industry professionals are so busy and so overwhelmed and keeping track of why did I make this decision.

six months, eight months, two years ago, becomes really hard in Excel files. So for folks to use a digital platform that allows them to record all of the data points that they’re interested in and are pertinent to that question and then be able to track it through the timeline of a project is really important.

Richard (24:01)

Do

you think by having that information digitized and not in dead PDFs and folders is one of the methods to make a red project into a green project?

Matt (24:15)

I think that it helps because it will allow you to do more scale. And I guess that’s the question. If you’re just focusing on a handful of product types, you can probably get by with a spreadsheet. It’s when you want to start to scale that up. But also more importantly, make sure that the decisions you’ve made on one project can get transferred to future projects. It really is going to require more.

Charley (24:20)

Mm.

Matt (24:41)

So one tactic that we frequently recommend is just to start small and focus on five products on one job. And then you can solve for those five product types and then on the next job you don’t want to have to redo those five product types. You want to build on it and do a new five so that after the second job you’ve got 10 and then 15 and it goes from there. And especially for firms that are working on multiple projects, that scale can expand very

very quickly when they’ve got five or ten projects going at a time. They can really quickly increase and cover whole divisions in a relatively short period of time.

Richard (25:22)

So using this example of picking five products, do you find that folks like us start to geek out about these products and finding alternatives? Do you find there’s some passion that gets ignited through awareness?

Matt (25:36)

absolutely. And I think that’s what’s one of the really interesting parts about it.

there is a lot of opportunity. And now with the Common Materials Framework, taking what LBC has done with the Red List and expanding it to their five strategic buckets in terms of focusing on materials. I’ll just, with Charley’s help, I’ll run through. there’s human health, climate health, ecosystem health, social health and equity. Circularity. you, Charley. So it really provides a very broad

framework for looking at materials. And you can start at a more simpler one bucket level, but then there’s lots of opportunity for expansion and the ability to really geek out and go as deep as you want and you can.

Charley (26:26)

And I think that in large part, as Matt was referring to, it’s process, it needs to be deeply collaborative.

Richard (26:31)

I was just going to ask about sort crowdsourcing some of that too.

Charley (26:35)

So crowdsourcing

on a couple of different dimensions. Within a project team, there are many, many decision makers. If you think about a…

modest sized commercial project, there are probably 15 or 20 designers that will touch different systems. And then it gets passed to the general manager, excuse me, the general contractor, the construction manager, and there’ll be 10 people just from the construction manager. And then there’ll be 20 or 30 different companies that are trade partners doing the actual work. And those trade partners,

pick the majority of the products that go into a project. a designer might specify the paint, what you’re going to see, but they’re not going to specify the joint compound that’s under the paint. They’re not going to specify the tape that holds the joints together in the drywall panels. They’re not going to specify the drywall down to the product level. They’re not going to specify.

Richard (27:33)

Fasteners.

Charley (27:34)

Yeah, we even ignore the fasteners. I when we talk about 1,000 products in a project, we’re sort of things that wouldn’t fit in a shoe box. We get up to about 1,000 products. So all this to say that there’s that level of coordination, and then there’s also the sort of coordination within an architecture firm. And you talk about crowdsourcing. Once a product is deemed pretty good,

it’s probably pretty good for a period of time. It’s not such a dynamic market that you have to look at it every time. And that’s one of the realizations that we’ve had is that if it’s good for this project in Western Massachusetts, it’s probably good for this project in Central Massachusetts. And it’s probably pretty good for a project in New York City. And then where do you draw the boundaries? There aren’t that many places where you draw boundaries. when Matt mentioned-

Richard (28:24)

Good.

Charley (28:25)

Good is good and better is better. then as you…

Richard (28:29)

TM. Yes,

exactly.

Charley (28:32)

Well,

that’s another funny story about our new name, but I’ll get to that in a minute. But ultimately, that idea that not only does every project not need to do this work, but not every firm needs to do this work. If we get to this common language about what a good product and a better product looks like, that can be shared. Nobody’s going to win sustainability or win sustainable materials if we can split this work about deciding on good products among all practitioners and then have a way

to just publish that and get products reused. And that’s ultimately where the efficiency comes from. One of the reasons that we were 5x over budget on that first project is that it took us six to eight hours to research every product.

Richard (29:14)

I would think

that is at a minimum.

Charley (29:16)

Well, I mean, I just remember it was like we running a boiler room and I had my first employee, Don, was on the phone and he would pick it up, you know, he’d call somebody and he’d spend 15 minutes explaining what the Living Building Challenge was, what the red list was and…

Richard (29:31)

Education,

advocacy.

Charley (29:33)

And

if they didn’t hang up thinking that he was trying to steal the family recipe for, you know, we might get somewhere. And now, you know…

both as that work has happened, the crowd sourcing of all of these projects globally that have pursued materials, petal, or Living Building, the awareness is now there. And then reuse of information and looking in these places where you’ve already found better products helps you not search everywhere for products. there’s been a 10x reduction in the effort even on these projects that are pursuing certification. But a project that isn’t pursuing certification can just rely

on a trusted source. know what? Matt said it’s pretty good. don’t like better than a random selection of this product so we’ll just put that in. yeah, there are dimensions to that crowd sourcing that take a lot of the work and the friction and therefore the cost and the fear out of the process.

Richard (30:08)

It’s still good material.

Matt (30:25)

Yeah, and I’m just, mean, when Charley mentions collaboration, my mind immediately runs to communication and just how important communication is in our industry. And back to your question about process, I mean, there are these very formalized avenues of communication within construction, but there’s all these informal ones in terms of keeping.

the design team on the same page because it’s not just one designer who’s making all the decisions. There are lots of different players involved. And so how do you keep everyone on the design team on the same page? Because typically, the architect that is reviewing the submittals is not necessarily the architect who put together the construction documents. So there are multiple players involved. There are multiple different firms. There are multiple different sub-consultants. There are multiple different

Trade partners and being able to keep all of them on the same page is a challenge.

Charley (31:20)

And back to

spreadsheets, spreadsheet and you add a column, it’s not the same spreadsheet anymore. So this idea of keeping multi-dimensional information alive is really important. And we talk sometimes about just this all being one enormous game of telephone. Because I like this product, I want you to put it in the documents. Did you put it the documents? The only way I can find out for sure is by…

reading those documents. this sort of call and response and the quality trail through a project, there’s going to be human error and therefore how do you maintain a certain level of quality. So we think about digital tools a lot that allow that reanimation of documents, whether they’re spreadsheets or special documents. Oh yeah, mean we’ve got a whole macabre.

Richard (32:05)

I love that reanimation of…

Zombie.

Charley (32:11)

that

we can go into here. But ultimately what we’re trying to say is that for information to lead to insightful decisions, it needs to be organized and searchable. construction and design and construction is, I can’t remember, it’s a three or four trillion dollar industry in the United States. And there’s no source of truth. couldn’t, other than going through and looking through those folders that Matt mentioned, you couldn’t, a typical architect

construction firm couldn’t tell you what paint was used on a particular job. They’d have to go look. So, you know, thinking about ways to keep all the levels of insight organized and searchable, we unlock not just sustainability value, but…

efficiency value for firms, confidence and risk reduction factors for owners. know, bringing, keeping, getting all this information back to life and keeping it alive is, we think, central to making this more approachable because the experts are influencing a much larger sphere and the building owners and the members of the team that deliver projects are not just unlocking sustainability value, but they’re

unlocking efficiency value, they’re unlocking risk reduction value, and all of those things make sustainability is effectively a co-benefit of doing this work in a thoughtful digital way.

Richard (33:27)

My mind is starting to wander here around expertise as well. And if you’ve got individual contributors who are submitting information and then sharing that out into the community and that all people can access that kind of information, that inherently raises the floor of expertise.

Charley (33:47)

Absolutely, and then the term API, jargon, I try to avoid it, but it’s the idea of information in structured form that can move from one website to another. Health Product Declaration Collaborative has an API. You can subscribe to that if you accept their terms of use, and all of the information that it’s in HPD can be brought into another website. Same is true for building transparency in their EC3 EPD library. Same is true for

true for Declare and all of the label information in Declare you can get digitally. It’s a non-trivial exercise to merge those records together and we figure out a way to do that efficiently. So in addition to sort of individual experts, there’s this idea to bring best available public information into one place and then layer on, we don’t call it product scoring, we think about it as product grading. What’s the best drywall that I can get in this market?

what’s the best interior paint that I could use in this application. So this whole taxonomy of products, you can think about the recommendation engine in Amazon. Richard, if you’re interested in this, you might also be interested in that. And you know, then you see the number of stars next to it. Well, about the same price point, but more people seem to like this product than that product, so I’ll give it a shot. So it’s that idea of crowdsourcing at all the levels, the wisdom, the confidence.

the knowledge so that nobody has to do as much work and therefore everybody can be more ambitious in their goals.

Richard (35:12)

Well, I’ll just say.

Matt (35:13)

Sorry, I was just gonna

add Richard and expand

That like we don’t want the expertise and the wisdom to just have to be confined to a few individuals. really the goal is to expand it and get it so everyone is able to leverage the information and take action and implement it. And if that means that at an architecture firm, like everything has to go through one or two sustainability specialists within the firm, that’s just an inherent restriction to our

our ability to rapidly improve and increase the effort. So we really want to be able to have a few strategic experts making decisions that can then be broadly disseminated out to the rest of the group. Because as Charley was saying, the products don’t change that rapidly. And so if a team can make a decision on a product and then capture and disseminate that

that decision out to the broader group, then the junior level architect who’s relatively new doesn’t have to go and ask the principal every time about a specific product. So they can look at the decision that that team has made and take action and implement it on that project and ideally other projects.

Richard (36:34)

So let’s talk about this a little more and just the idea of institutional knowledge. You’ve given an example here of a junior architect who’s building skills, building resources, a principal who has been doing this for decades. And tell me a little bit about how that knowledge exists, it lives, it transfers, it gets utilized, it gets applied.

day.

Matt (37:00)

Yeah, I mean I think traditionally it was transferred through years of kind of understudying.

And one concern with the kind of post-COVID era is that there’s more remote workers, junior staff don’t have as much exposure to those more senior level people. And is that knowledge transfer happening? But so we really believe that if we can use technology in order to capture that.

that knowledge that those experienced people have and be able to then transfer it to other people, it really can be a benefit. I mean, one other thing that I know I’ve talked to junior level architects about is they find out about products using Google.

And that’s how you need, know, there used to be more organized and structured data and now folks just kind of use the web and go out and like, is this product equivalent to that? Well, I’m going to ask Google. And what we at least do with our software is we have a very precise product categorization system so that we’re really grouping products together and using

again back to that experience of if a principal over here said this product is the same as this product, and another principal at another firm said the same thing, then we can start to see that there is a relationship among a couple different products and those can be grouped together and we can offer that insight to more junior level people so that they don’t have to just rely on.

Did Google give me a good answer or not? We can rely on that expertise.

Richard (38:43)

And Charley mentioned sort of the idea of the recommendation engine, and he compared like products. Here’s an alternative to the same product that you are looking at. But another function of that recommendation engine is customers also purchase these associated items. You may be interested in these other elements.

Charley (39:03)

Right, so

did I say that I was a math teacher? The idea of, I’ll just take a minute long digression into dimensions. The problem with the spreadsheet is that it’s two dimensions. know, rows and columns, and if you get really smart…

Richard (39:06)

in another life. ⁓

Charley (39:20)

links to other tabs and some people love pivot tables. So you can get to a certain number of dimensions, but not that many. So when we’re talking about categorization and we’re talking about product equivalence, we use the power of artificial intelligence, we use the power of vector analysis to look at products in thousands of dimensions. Is United States Gypsum incorporated the same as US Gypsum?

Is that the same as USG? Is that the same as USG Corporation?

Probably, yes. So you can use sort of word association to move away from probabilistic. I need everybody to call it United States Gypsum Inc. to a more colloquial language. Like, yeah, I know probably when you say USG, you mean the company that the federal government recognizes as United States Gypsum Incorporated. So we can use computing power and mathematical power to bring ideas together.

and then, you know, at the product level, is this product a direct plug-in replacement for this other product? Maybe, or maybe, you know what, if you buy socks, you’re probably also going to put on shoes. So it doesn’t have to be a direct equivalent, but to your point, it’s part of a system and these things tend statistically to go together as a package. Yeah, so there’s a lot of thinking around just that.

you know, not just finding good products in isolation, but finding good systems that work together because again, we want durability and performance to be every bit a part of these sustainability driven, justice driven decisions.

Richard (40:55)

You mentioned artificial intelligence and with that advent of technology and its acceleration, is it playing a role in material choices?

Charley (41:06)

I guess we see it primarily, we use it a lot in our work. I think the primary benefit that we’re focused on is data quality. So when we talk about reanimating data, we have trained an AI agent to read three-part specifications and just give us structured data out of it. Here’s a 500-page document.

Richard (41:15)

I

Charley (41:26)

read it, tell me what product types are in here, what manufacturers are in here, what products are in here. That’s really useful information.

Richard (41:35)

And would

take a lot of time to read and parse out.

Charley (41:37)

Our experience shows six to eight minutes per product if you’re hiring a human to read through that document. depending upon which version of OpenAI’s chat GPT we’re using, that’s six or eight dollar task to read a 500 page document. We don’t trust it completely. We want somebody to babysit it and to make sure that it’s doing a good job. But…

using this kind of probabilistic analysis, get a big data set, you’ll get some strong signals about equivalence and quality. And it’s not, we’re not flying airplanes. We’re not, you know, we’re not.

Richard (42:06)

can verify those.

Charley (42:13)

making life or death decisions or recommendations or judgments. So we can accept a certain amount of ambiguity in this because…

the signals point in the right direction, it always ends with human judgment. The principal at the firm is going to say, no, we don’t trust that product, we’re not going to use it, and we expect that. But our question is always, can we tilt the table toward better decisions? And how much we can tilt it, and how much people react to that influence, there are many other factors.

all things being equal, want to tilt the table toward these better decisions for a larger larger fraction of projects.

Matt (42:47)

Yeah, and I don’t think we’re using AI to make decisions. That still ultimately requires a human with the proper expertise, but we’re using AI to better inform those decisions.

Richard (42:58)

Okay,

that makes sense and accelerate that process just to get the mountain of information

Matt (43:03)

And allow designers and construction teams to do more. ⁓ Absolutely.

Charley (43:07)

Hmm.

Richard (43:10)

So a bit of a different topic here, but tell me the story of Materially Better. How did you bring the organization to this point?

Charley (43:18)

I mean, it has a lot to do with this conference and it has a lot to do with serendipity and a mentor. I came to this conference in Portland in 2011.

I’m going to say 11, it might have been 12, I’d have to look to see. The first one I came to was in Portland, and a dear friend and mentor of mine, Bruce Coldham, been working on a Living Building at the Bechtel Center for Smith College in Hatfield, Massachusetts, and a mutual friend introduced us, and Bill, excuse me, Bruce,

He and I met over drinks and a couple weeks later he said, hey, do want to be my roommate?

Richard (43:56)

Living

future? Sure.

Charley (43:57)

I mean, I’d met him a time, you know, sort of the Dean of Green Building in New England, so you know, a lion in the industry and a really incredibly generous human being. you know, I met, our flights converged in Chicago, we flew here together, we were flying on Southwest so we could pick seats together, and we got here, and lo and behold, was as if Sting had invited me to Bonnaroo

walking around and everybody knows Bruce and he’s like this is my roommate Charley. enormous transfer of wisdom and momentum and support. So that was sort of it for me. was alluring and just saw the opportunity to change the status quo and it really relished every minute since then.

And then the you know materially better so we used to be an integrated eco strategy a number of friends here in the room helped develop that name and it’s it’s a lot and we were interviewed by the local newspaper and Berkshire Eagle they have an incredibly talented

copy editor who writes some really witty article titles. So we were there on a Sunday paper and the title to the article that was looking at our growing business in North Adams, Massachusetts was, materially better. It’s like, that makes all the sense in the world.

Richard (45:17)

So it’s

everything you need to know.

That’s great. Well guys, I want to take a transition in our conversation here. Thank you for sharing. So far we’ve talked about expectations versus reality and setting those and calibrating them. We’ve talked about the power of process and how to organize that massive amount of information and the need to make that in a palatable way, but also that expert guidance for all, which I think is amazing.

Any before we move on to our next segment? Any final thoughts?

Charley (45:50)

I’ll just say we’re full of hope in this work. You know, is, it is, it is, it can feel daunting but it is really just like taking a walk. And it’s not scary terrain, it’s not dangerous work. It’s just very possible to put one foot in front of the other and make really significant progress.

Matt (46:08)

Yeah, I would just completely share that optimism. I do think that as someone who’s been in construction for a long time, think that the opportunities are really beyond just the sustainability criteria that we’re primarily focused on and motivated by, but that construction has been an industry that has been very slow to adopt technology to aid its work.

Because of that, are lots of missed opportunities in data and just better understanding about buildings. And so I think what’s really exciting about the industry right now is just the opportunities for a revolution in how we design and construct buildings. And that’s going to happen for a number of reasons, but one big one is just the cost of the effort. The cost of construction is becoming so large that it’s really

hampering the ability to build and grow right now. And so if we can help develop tools that reduce cost and build better buildings, that’s super exciting.

Richard (47:16)

That’s

amazing. So gentlemen, I’d like to invite you to the community garden portion of our conversation. Nice little.

tiptoe through the tulips, if you will. Have either of you done the Rose Thorn Bud framework before? Maybe with your family? Oh, you? Okay, well then you already know. But a quick review. I’d love to find out what’s blossoming in your world these days. Your work, your world, your life. You tell me. A thorny problem you may be having or experiencing.

Matt (47:34)

at the dinner table.

Richard (47:50)

and then what’s bringing you hope for the future. So Matt, tell me what’s blossoming in your world these days?

Matt (47:57)

I think it’s just the enthusiasm and the connection with people. mean, that’s why I like being at this conference so much, is seeing friends, it’s an international conference, there are people from all over the world, and I really do think that whatever our pathway forward is going to come through that human connection. So I love reconnecting with people who I haven’t talked to in a year.

Charley (48:22)

Mmm.

Richard (48:23)

Oh,

there’s so many great faces and friends around here. feels like homecoming, if you will. What about you, Charley?

Matt (48:30)

Yeah.

Charley (48:33)

For me, I’m very optimistic about the pace of change. I think there’s a lot of appetite for this. Working at it for a period of time, I would have thought we’re further along. But I’m less worried about the progress we’ve made than the second derivative here. It feels like the inflection point is upon us. Part of this is driven by technology. Part of this is driven by a groundswell of

interest to do the right thing despite the world we’re living in right now. So yeah, I’m an optimist through and through.

Richard (49:04)

And the opposite side of that is tell me what thorny problems that you’ve been experiencing lately.

Charley (49:09)

I the…

pick one. I think there is still this undercurrent of fear that we’re working against, of the unknown, this idea that problems will result from bringing change.

Richard (49:13)

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha

Charley (49:29)

I understand that, but that’s what I’m really working against, this reluctance to bring process change, because we know it’s inefficient in human and ecological ways. yeah, trying to find the language that helps overcome that resistance.

Matt (49:43)

Yeah, I think I’m kind of along those lines in terms of I mentioned that there is opportunity for tech to really revolutionize construction, but the adoption rate is still very slow right now. And so that I think has just been a challenge that we’re working through in terms of how do we get over the hump of getting better adoption, working through the friction, because people are overwhelmed and they have a

demands in their professional life and getting folks to do something new is a big ask. But in order to really have a breakthrough we need to do things differently than the way we’re doing right now.

Richard (50:23)

What brings you hope for the future?

Matt (50:25)

I think that I am constantly hopeful because we have always, as a human race, we have always figured out the…

Charley (50:41)

Hmm.

Matt (50:42)

and it does feel super dark at times, but there has always been a breakthrough and a radical change. I constantly talk with my boys that it’s not about what happens, it’s the reaction that you have.

Richard (51:02)

yeah.

Matt (51:03)

And so there is always going to be bad things and something that we wish didn’t happen, but more importantly is how we react to that.

Charley (51:13)

Sort of in a similar vein, I’m very hopeful just because of the number of people and the degree, interested in these ideas and the degree to which they’re committed. When I think about our staff, it’s a young staff, it’s a committed staff. It’s back to the point that it’s hard to, once you’re aware of these issues, it’s hard not to take them seriously and put them at the forefront of your mind. So I try not to use a fire analogy.

Matt (51:36)

It’s,

you know, it’s…

Charley (51:38)

I guess we can use a seed analogy, right? These seeds are resilient seeds and they can grow in small cracks. And once they get their roots into those cracks, it’s really hard to get them out. So, I’m optimistic for that.

Richard (51:50)

Oh, that’s a perfect segue to my next question, is around gardeners. Charley, tell me who have been the gardeners of your career and your life, who have helped you to grow along the way?

Charley (52:03)

I mean in addition to family, would, you know, I think of the lessons learned on every single one of the projects that we’ve worked on regardless of the level of ambition, you know, for our scope. Yeah, I just, we very much bring a learning mentality to the work that we do and a teaching mentality to the work that we do. And I, you know, I think every project we’ve done has led to either evolution or revolution. I love it.

that idea that everybody has something to teach and something to learn. I really live by that.

Matt (52:35)

Yeah, professionally, I’m at.

absolutely taking lessons from every project and every kind of mistake is an opportunity to learn. But the one person who has really influenced my career most professionally is a woman named Katrina Cook, who is just a wonderful, hard-nosed Irish woman who was in construction when there weren’t a lot of women in construction. And so she had the edge, but she could also do it in

such a way that really won everyone over to her side. And so just really showing the importance of being able to connect on a human level with people and find a bond and realize that you might be coming at it from different perspectives and have different motivations, but that we are all still human and working together to find a path and a solution.

Richard (53:26)

That’s great. So Matt, last question for you guys. Tell me about one of your favorite places in nature. Paint me a picture.

Matt (53:34)

So I do a lot of trail running. love trail running and there is just one path near my house that I can access very quickly and my favorite time is early morning going through and just the dappled light comes down and…

Charley (53:49)

that come.

Matt (53:50)

pass it and falls on the ground there. so I would like, whenever I do get invited to a biophilic design charade, I always talk about dappled light and I always get shut down because people are worried about shadows and tripping hazards and stuff. But I really love the dappled light in a forest.

Charley (54:07)

That’s

my favorite place. live in southern Vermont and there’s this beautiful hay field across the road from my house and it’s kind of amazing because it’s actually five hay fields but the way they intersect you turn the corner and it’s different every time. are crows, are be turkeys, there’s gonna be a hailstorm coming at you. It doesn’t really matter but it’s right there and it’s super varied.

Richard (54:09)

Sounds like a treat.

This has been a great conversation, guys. I really appreciate it. You’ve taught me a lot. You’ve helped me even set my own expectations or learned that those can be malleable and should be. And I really appreciate that power of process action here. I think that that’s important just to normalize a lot of that data and get it into a usable place.

Charley (54:59)

Absolutely, and I would just say imperfect steps are better than no steps. It’s really a, yeah, it is a process.

Richard (55:03)

⁓ that’s… ⁓

doing something is better than doing nothing even if it’s imperfect. You can continue to add to it there. And even in your example here of a Petal Certification to full certification, there’s still an opportunity to make this better. that’s great. I think that’s a good takeaway as well. I really appreciate this time. I hope that you’ll come back for another chat with me. And for those listening along, please reach out to Charley and Matt.

They’ve got so much information and Materially Better is a great organization that I’m happy to continue to follow and watch all of your success there. just another thanks to you and for those listening along. Please join us again on our next episode of Net Podsitive. Like and follow, subscribe and look forward to seeing you again here on the show. And gentlemen, we’ll see you again. Thanks so much for joining me.