News

Judging the many excellent submissions to the CESW Awards 2021 presented Martyn Jones with his thought for the month: How we can we accelerate the pace of change and improve the spread and adoption of the best practice as demonstrated in our award-winning submissions?

The CESW Awards are recognised across the South West built environment as the biggest and brightest celebration of best practice.

They are the HEINEKEN of awards (other lagers are available), in that they reach all parts of our operating system from developers and clients through to consultants of all disciplines, main and specialist contractors and suppliers of materials and components.

They also celebrate leading practice in dealing with current issues such as pivoting from price to value, sustainability, quality and compliance, digitisation, integration and collaboration, and conservation and regeneration.

Every year our Awards capture exemplars of excellent practice and some of this year’s entries yet again provide some cracking demonstrations of our industry at its best.  On this occasion, not only demonstrating best practice along Constructing Excellence lines but doing so whilst meeting the immense challenges presented by the pandemic.

But, why are aren’t these principles of best practice not being embraced more widely in the industry? And how do we accelerate the rate of change and the spread and adoption of this best practice to meet the challenges we face?

Here are some suggested guiding principles, all of which have long featured in the work of CESW, but which now need to be pursued with a much greater sense of urgency and resolve:

• Capitalising on the current sense of urgency to address the safety and sustainability of our products (past, current and future) and processes. To borrow a phrase, “never waste a good crisis”
• Acknowledging the complexity and challenges that the current change agenda presents but also the immense opportunities for change
• Catalysing efforts particularly around social and environmental innovations and investing time, energy and resources to progress beyond compliance to create greater value – and at pace
• Adopting outward looking, transformational and enabling leadership to stretch stakeholder expectations at all stages of the development process from Strategic Definition through to In Use
• Empowering people through the habit of learning, experimentation and innovation
• Creating spaces conducive to change and populating them with clusters of individuals with the passion, skills, commitment and energy to drive the change agenda
• Nurturing relationships based on values, trust and mutual competitive advantage
• Dismantling the barriers to change presented by our traditional operating system and achieving closer intra- and inter-organisational alignment
• Strategically coordinating the spread and adoption of innovations and focusing effort at pivotal points in our programmes, projects, and supply chains

Are you keen to play a leading role in grasping this once-in-a-generation opportunity to really transform construction? Then why not join one or more of our Thought Leadership Theme Groups?

• Construction Clients Group (open to those from Client organisations only)
• Procurement and Productivity
• Innovation and Sustainability
• SMART (Digital and Offsite)
• Quality and Compliance
• Health and Wellbeing

And if you are a young professional, or in the early stages of developing your career in the built environment, then why not join G4C in the SW? This offers the opportunity for you, as a young professional, to express your ideas as to how we should be reshaping the built environment.  After all the future belongs to you.