This episode features a conversation between Phil Dillard, Founder of Thruline Networks, and Jonce Walker, Principal and Global Director of Sustainability and Wellness at HLW, a leading international full-service planning, architecture and design firm that is building the future from skyscrapers to the workplaces of today’s most innovative companies. In this episode, Jonce talks about the importance of weaving sustainability into each stage of the design process, improving end-user health and wellness, questioning the norm, designing with passion, and building the future.
This episode features a conversation between Phil Dillard, Founder of Thruline Networks, and Jonce Walker, Principal and Global Director of Sustainability and Wellness at HLW.
HLW is a leading international full-service planning, architecture and design firm that is building the future from skyscrapers to the workplaces of today’s most innovative companies.
Jonce oversees the coordination of a holistic, integrated design process - from managing BEYOND, HLW's in-house sustainability, resilience, and building performance consultancy, to reinforcing the firm's pledge, advocating for carbon-neutral construction in the next 10 years.
In this episode, Jonce talks about the importance of weaving sustainability into each stage of the design process, improving end-user health and wellness, questioning the norm, designing with passion, and building the future.
—
Guest Quotes
“In 10 years, we should have a carbon free grid. We should be building and designing spaces that are regenerative, meaning we need to dig out of the hole we've created, from a carbon and ecology perspective, and it needs to be a net positive situation. It's a must.” - Jonce Walker
Episode Timestamps
(01:46) About HLW
(07:02) Jonce’s background
(15:21) A moment of euphoria
(20:13) Designing for creativity versus impact
(26:46) Certifications and safety in the space
(35:06) New tech and innovations
(38:13) Quick hit questions
Links
Phil Dillard: Hello and welcome to Thruline to the 4th Sector, where we're exploring fourth sector capitalism and impact investing as an invitation to innovation and changing the world. This episode features a conversation between Phil Dillard, Founder of Thruline Networks and Jonce Walker, Principal and Global Director of Sustainability and Wellness at HLW.
HLW is a leading international full service planning architecture and design firm that's building the future from skyscrapers to the workplaces of today's most innovative companies. Jonce Walker oversees the coordination of a holistic integrated design process from managing BEYOND, HLW’s in-house sustainability, resilience, and building performance consultancy to reinforcing the firm's pledge, advocating for carbon neutral construction in the next 10 years.
In this episode, Jonce talks about the importance of weaving sustainability into each stage of the design process, improving end user health and wellness, questioning the norm, designing with passion, and building the future.
Now, please enjoy this interview between Phil Dillard and Jonce Walker.
Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of Thruline to the 4th Sector. I'm your host, Phil Dillard, here today with Jonce Walker. Jonce is the Global Head of Sustainability for HLW. How are you doing today, Jonce?
[00:01:27] Jonce Walker: Awesome, Phil. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.
[00:01:30] Phil Dillard: Great to have you. Actually, Global Director of Sustainability and Wellness at HLW. I don't want to minimize your title.
Jonce Walker: Thanks. Yeah, no worries.
Phil Dillard: It's great to chat with you. Let's just kind of get started. One of the ways we always start this off is with the easiest softball questions. So when people ask you, uh, what do you do, how do you describe what you do?
[00:01:51] Jonce Walker: It's a good question. This is always a fun one to answer. So what I do for my job is I run our in-house sustainability consultancy at H L W, called Beyond. And what we're doing is we are working to decarbonize the built environment, maximize wellness for the end user. And repair ecology. Another way to answer that question is how do you enjoy your time? So going on hikes, going for runs, you know, those types of extracurricular things are just as important for personal sustainability, obviously as they are for your role at within a firm.
So at H L W that's what we're really focused on is, um, working to repair. You know, a lot of the unfortunate damage that we've done in the built environment through informed design decisions.
[00:02:44] Phil Dillard: And who would you describe your clients of? The work, the
[00:02:46] Jonce Walker: consulting group? Yeah. So as you know, h LW is a global design and architecture firm, and so our clients vary in scale and typology.
So we do a lot of work with. Know the tech sector, you know, the Googles, the Metas of the world, audible, Amazon, but we also have a lot of clients who are like law firms or in the financial sector or in the medical space or universities. So it's really interesting and fun because the clients vary wildly.
And they all have different drivers. And then of course, not to mention layer on different geographical locations where our work is. So the clients, um, are broad and some of them are local firms and some of them are global firms. So it makes it very interesting and dynamic. We're not just stuck in one type of sector.
We get to sort of dabble in many. And it
[00:03:43] Phil Dillard: sounds interesting that way you get to see a lot of things. You get to address a lot of challenges and things like that. Where do you meet these clients and what are they generally these days trying to
[00:03:51] Jonce Walker: accomplish? Yeah, so what's kind of a fascinating trend that's really caught on, I'd say the last two, you know, three to five years is most of the companies that are.
Publicly traded, have really aggressive, uh, what's called E S G goals. Um, environmental social governance. We have several things happening at the same time. One is you have these firms that have these e SG targets, and I'm sure we'll get into this a little bit later, but then you also have sort of the policy and regulatory.
Framework side in the built environment, increasing in needed rigor as well. So sometimes we'll have a client that is just beginning their journey along these E s G goals and we help them define those, whether it's around decarbonization or you know, hiring local talent or whatever that is. Some firms like those big tech firms.
Have had e s g goals for 20 years. So it's sort of a fascinating time in that regard as well because, um, we can help create these for some of these firms.
[00:04:59] Phil Dillard: You know, there are a lot of companies out there who are thinking about this in terms of technology side, right? How are you buying your electricity or how are you purchasing your cloud?
How is it different in the built environment?
[00:05:11] Jonce Walker: Yeah, so another, another interesting question. Again, you know, like if you have a project that's located in New York City, for example, the electricity grid and the carbon makeup of that grid differs greatly than a project in the Midwest or somewhere else. In the world even.
So those operational carbon components we have to really watch closely in terms of region. And some clients actually are so committed to decarbonizing their operational carbon that they are investing in infrastructure to help the grid. Get cleaner. Um, we're talking about large, you know, financial, uh, clients.
So it just depends on the scale of the project. And my team, what we do is we. Advise our clients on the best way to decarbonize based on all of those parameters, right? How is the grid, what's the plan for the grid In New York, you know, there's gonna be a clean grid by 2040, um, versus another grid, you know, in Texas, for example, which may be actually going the other direction.
So we help inform them based on that knowledge and research and say, Hey, listen, you're, you know what you wanna do with your space. Plus, you know, the grid, uh, where it is and where it's going to go, plus the things you wanna do from a materials perspective. That all goes into sort of our. Advice on how to decarbonize project by project.
So it's very, um, it's not completely custom every single time, but it's a lot of insight and research on every project.
[00:06:52] Phil Dillard: That sounds pretty amazing, and I'm very curious to dig into it more and learn how it works and where it's headed. But before we do that, I want to take a. Back and let the audience get a chance to know a little bit about you.
So can you tell us a little bit about how you first got involved in Fields and what were some important roles along the way that you've had to get here?
[00:07:12] Jonce Walker: Yeah, great question. So I went to school for Urban Design and Urban Planning and um, geographic information systems. And I was a planner in Phoenix, Phoenix, Arizona for several years.
And, Started to, you know, get super interested in sustainability in the built environment. And lead had just come out, you know, maybe a few years before I was really getting interested in the US Green Building Council, et cetera. And so I was a public sector planner, so developers would come and we would help, you know them get entitlements, et cetera.
And quite frankly, I got a little disenfranchised with the process. I felt like I was hitting roadblocks with policy that was completely archaic. That I had no lever to pull in terms of trying to get a developer to do what is the right thing. And so through that process, I was able to become the sustainability manager for Maricopa County.
So I left the role as a planner and still was on the public side. But now I was creating policy for developers and for the county itself in terms of sustainability. I was also an advisor to the mayor at the time, mayor Greg Stanton, a sustainability advisor. And so I spent the first part of my career on the public side really understanding policy and the regulatory.
Needs around sustainability, albeit in the southwest, but you know, it translates to other municipalities as well. So I sort of got my early start on that side and then over time made my way to a nonprofit and then made my way to the private sector. So my career is fascinating because it's sort of, you know, the three main, you know, sections of, of a job is, you know, was public sector, then nonprofit and non-private sector.
[00:08:59] Phil Dillard: Which is pretty amazing and it's a good fit for our discussion because we tried to talk about fourth sector companies, right? Folks who understand the roles of the public sector, the private sector and the nonprofit sector, but are building mission driven companies that are incorporating the impact as part of their core business, which is, you know, something that it seems like you've kind of evolved into.
I'm really curious about your point of view. And the balance between those things. Like in the past week, and I talked with some architects in preparation for this call, but I also talked with somebody who was doing tire recycling outta Minnesota and he said the industry would never have changed had it not been for a law that mandated.
You couldn't throw tires into the landfill anymore in the state, and you had to do something to recycle them. And we get often this friction between industries who says, we're gonna do the right thing, the free market's gonna guide us in the right direction, which sometimes works and sometimes it does not.
But it's probably a question of whether or not it's really a free market versus regulatory driving a specific change. So you're right in the heart of it, and I think. As a mission driven ator capitalist, you wanna see the market work, but you understand the role of regulatory. Where do you see that those things are now, and how do you leverage your experience to kind of move them in the right direction?
[00:10:20] Jonce Walker: Let me tell a very quick origin story about when I felt like I needed to sort of pivot a touch and then I'll sort of reflect on where we are now. So, when I was a planner, there was a developer that was wanting to develop this site, Virgin Sonoran Desert, beautiful Sonoran Desert, right in the Phoenix area.
And I asked the developer, I said, cuz I went to the site and it has all these beautiful Saguaro cactuses and all these, you know, yucca and all this be. It was beautiful. I asked him, I said, what is your plan? For the landscaping. What's your plan for all these plants? What are you gonna do with them? And he laughed.
He was like, what do you mean we're just gonna bulldoze the site. We're not gonna save any of this vegetation. And I realized I had no recourse. There was no law that would've required me to make him do that, other than the Saguaro is federally protected, but otherwise everything else that he could have done that.
That's when I realized I needed to sort of be on the side of writing policy and developing policy for a while and put some framework in place where people weren't allowed to do that. That's what I did for a while. To answer your question about where we are now, look, the US is way behind Europe, most of Europe, and that's not a mystery in terms of.
Requiring certain things from a energy code perspective or you know, a sustainability perspective or a framework. We don't even have a national energy code in the United States, which is stunning. So in the US we have a long way to go, but the US is a very massive place. And where I work in the New York City, where our office, our headquarters is, I mean, I work in all of our out of, I have projects in all of our offices, but.
In New York, we are leading the charge. We have policy in place to decarbonize the grid. We have local law 97, which is basically a carbon budget for buildings over certain square foot. We have local laws that require, you know, solar and a green roof to be put on. New buildings or you know, a building that's getting a roof replaced.
There's a lot of really powerful policy that has come out of New York City in the last five, six years. We're not alone. DC has some stuff. Boston, of course, um, San Francisco, Los Angeles, but the middle of the country. He is pretty far behind, but I think we're moving in the right direction. In general, we are moving in the right direction.
Whether we're doing it fast enough, I kind of doubt it, but some places are doing a lot better than we were five years ago for sure.
[00:12:45] Phil Dillard: For sure, and I could only imagine that it's accelerated by current political trends and some, you know, from one side of the story people would say for the developer. So what about the Virgin Desert?
It's my property. I can do with it what I want. Right? And I should be able to develop it how I want because it's, it's my property. How do you respond to that sort of thinking mentality? What do you, what do you, what would you say to the developer?
[00:13:11] Jonce Walker: Yeah, I mean, listen, I have a lot of friends who are developers and we work a lot with developers, but unfortunately, too often than not, developers are unable to see past their parcel boundary.
They don't understand that impacts that occur on a site transcend for miles. Hundreds of miles. Sometimes if you develop a site that's in the pollinator corridor, you're removing that species's ability to get food. You know, you might build a glass tower in a bird migration corridor and now you're gonna kill hundreds of birds every year.
You're building might, you know, burn. Natural gas, well, methane gas on site, and it's going to contribute to, you know, your neighbors. From an asthma perspective, there's a lot of. Things that happen in the built environment, that spill over that parcel boundary. And the sooner we can get people to understand that, and even if you're a neighbor to something like that and you, you understand the impact it can have on you personally on your family, the better off we'll be.
Nothing happens in a vacuum. Everything is connected to everything else. Yeah, sure.
[00:14:25] Phil Dillard: And in economics. We used to call those externalities to the business. Right. And corporations used to say those, the externalities. And indeed, you know, I'm a Chicago booth trained MBA finance strategy, right? Reedman would say the free market should manage these certain things and be untethered feder, except that government should set the boundaries of what's fair in terms of competition.
And it seems like those things are the ones that are fray, right? Where those boundaries exactly are and are understanding of the interconnectedness. To them. So I understand that. You know, the thing that changed you is saying not seeing that the policy was driving things and going from planning to policy to actually then implementing and also working, it seems like hand in hand with policymakers to help those who want to either at a minimum comply, but at a maximum short term lead in the right direction to do these things in New York and around the world.
And in doing this work, is there any sort of, Big lesson that you've learned and the interaction between these different sectors and how to make them worse, and that stands out as a, like a key tip or an aha moment? Yeah.
[00:15:35] Jonce Walker: Yeah. Every client, there's sort of two main, well, three really drivers in decision making.
There is obviously profit, profit margins. There is the regulatory requirements, which we've talked about. And then the third is, The personal story. I had a project years ago in Buffalo, New York, and our client would talk about how he would go down to this certain waterway and fish with his grandfather, you know, as a kid.
And now there's no fish in there anymore and why is that? And, and so, and the project was near this site and, you know, Because we were able to communicate why that is. He cared more about the project being a steward to that body of water because he had a real experience to that place. And I think humans are driven by sort of this, you know, we have these memories of things that we did when we were younger and if, if you can.
Create a connection to a project, to something like that, you move people to action because it's no longer about like, how much money am I gonna make on this project? It's really about protecting a core memory, a core thing that somebody experienced in their life and they, they feel very strongly about that.
So what I try to do is, of course, you know, the triple bottom line, which is, we've talked about a long, long time economics. Ecology and social. The social piece, of course, things that we do for our clients make them a lot of money. That will never change. But we should also think about how do those, how do those projects make people feel?
How does it affect them on a health basis, and how does it affect the ecological web that we're part of? And those are not mutually exclusive things. We can pursue all three and still be successful at all three. We just have to be smarter about how we do that.
[00:17:32] Phil Dillard: Yeah. That makes a, that makes a a ton of sense because at the end of the day, people say buying is an emotional decision more than a logical one.
And if you can connect with a positive emotion, it seems like a great way to draw people in. I'm curious also, because when you started, you described yourself in terms of, You know what you do, but it, but you threw in, you know, the hiking and being out in nature and that sort of stuff, and I'm curious about the times.
I'm wondering how often you go back to that sort of experience to kind of connect with a client on a human level. About the, about the impact part is, is it a big part of the, the repertoire, you know, to inspire some of the emotional connection?
[00:18:15] Jonce Walker: Mm, that's a good que That's a good question. It's definitely part of.
When we first get in front of a client, even in the interview, before we even have a project, I do some due diligence and figure out sort of the drivers of the firm from an e s G perspective. I'll do research and figure out if they have net zero goals, et cetera, et cetera. And I will be, I will be, uh, equipped to discuss that, but I'll also try to connect with people on a personal level and find common interests.
So, you know, We do a lot of interviews now via Zoom and, and teams, et cetera. And so everyone has a background that's curated that, you know, most people don't have stuff in the background that's a mistake. They have stuff in the background that they like to do. So, you know, sometimes we'll have clients that have a mountain bike in the background and I'll be like, oh, do you like riding mountain bikes?
Oh, interesting. Yes. So do I. I used to race, you know, there's like this connection and when you have somebody who has interests like that, typically. They're doing it in a place that's beautiful and they wanna protect that place. So there is those types of things that connect. It's not like formalized Phil, like in terms of like our process is like we do X, Y, Z, and X is, you know, we try to, you know, figure out that connection, but it's just something that happens and it should happen a little more organically.
[00:19:37] Phil Dillard: Right. Because then it's natural when you're meeting people where they are and you're sharing and you're connecting on that side of it, of the emotional side of the, where all humans have that thing, right? I think of architectures maybe being categorized as one of two sides, one being like a super artistic kind of creative one, and one being like a very meticulous.
Grind all the little things out. Like I talked with the architect recently who said he helped someone solve a problem of designing a pie shaped building because the person wanted to be able to see certain things in their, their line of sight, and no one could figure it out because they weren't being.
Creative enough. I'm curious how much this conversation bleeds into or leverages the creative side of the architecture discussion because the one about consulting for E S G or for Impact, or seems almost a little more, um, engineering and formulaic than it is creative. Can you, can you speak to that a little
[00:20:35] Jonce Walker: bit?
Yeah, it's, it's interesting question. And then the client you mentioned, that's fascinating. They wanted a full line of sight all the time. That's very interesting puzzle to solve. So we have amazing architects and designers at H L W. I mean, they're incredible. Their work they produce is really unbelievable and.
What our role is within my team at, within Beyond is to help them, let them do the design cuz they're amazing at it. I don't need to opine on, on architecture, uh, necessarily of the form of it cuz they have that handled right. They're really good at that. What we try to do is help them with some of the granular things that they may not have time to even look at.
So things like material selection, making sure we're doing healthy materials, making sure that we integrate biophilic design. So you mentioned the view shed thing of your colleague that's actually a biophilic pattern, is this idea of you wanting. Needing to be able to see really far. It's a prospect condition, but also having protection.
So that's a refuge condition. It's called prospect refuge. So we do that at H L W. We think about space conditions, and we wanna make sure that there's plenty of those prospect and refuge conditions, but also making sure we integrate biomorphic forms and patterns and natural materials. And if you have a space that has a landscape, making sure that that landscape is stochastic and it's not just a boring turf.
You know what I mean? So those types of details. We're able to advise our design team to make sure they're included. But the beautiful design and architecture, they do that and they do that really well. The only other thing I would say is if we're doing a new construction and they're doing, you know, several different massing models of, of different schemes, my team will help model those from an energy and carbon use perspective so that we're getting Aun building from the onset, and then they take the design from there.
Interesting.
[00:22:37] Phil Dillard: Okay. So it's, um, integrating the e s G components of it into all of the aspects of it, you know, the strategically for the client, but also strategically for the, the design team and so that all the elements are included, and that's pretty amazing.
[00:22:54] Jonce Walker: Yeah, and I, I will say Phil, I think that's one of the really great things about the firm is that it's in-house, like my team is in-house to H L W, whereas a lot of architecture and design firms, they hire this workout to some other consultant, and I've been that consultant before.
And so one of the really intriguing things about the firm when I joined was like, oh, it can be in-house. So you can inform the design in real time. And have it be, versus a consultant reacting to a design. I think that's also really interesting.
[00:23:25] Phil Dillard: Let's take a quick pause to talk about one of my favorite companies, Caspian Studios.
Caspian Studios is a podcast as a service company. They make podcasts for B2B companies like Dell, Oracle, snowflake, VMware, Asana, and many more. In fact, they make this very podcast. They're the best marketing investment I've ever made. If your company wants to start a podcast or video series, the only choice is Caspian Studios look.
Making podcasts is a ton of work prep interviews, scheduling, recording, audio engineering, publishing the list of tasks never ends. But if you use Caspian Studios, they do all the heavy lifting for you and deliver with world class quality. They also build the audience by running growth marketing campaigns.
Don't waste the time trying to make it yourself. They'll get your podcast live in 60 days. The team is super accessible and friendly, and can brainstorm ideas with you For free, make your podcast rise above the noise. Head over to caspian studios.com to learn more. And now back to the interview.
Yeah, it seems to also then help embed it into the d n A of the organization and probably have better conversations about what those sort of things means. I would assume that trying to use bamboo instead of plywood or pine or you know, the selection of certain types of woods is gonna matter in a number of ways.
Structurally and in the look and feel of it. You're gonna want to get right for not only the design aesthetic, but for the impact. Measurements that you're trying to get after. I'm curious how this sort of work has changed the description of impact at the organization itself. Because it seems like as you expand this thinking, it would expand that definition, maybe both internally and externally with clients.
Can you speak to that a little bit?
[00:25:20] Jonce Walker: Yeah, so we as a firm have several commitments that are, that are non-negotiables. So one is we have a healthy materials protocol, and so the materials that we select that go inside of a building have to meet a certain. Threshold of performance and what's called a a healthy product declaration or an environmental product declaration, an H P D or an E P D.
So at H L W we have, we have this protocol in place, so all of our clients, we use that protocol for our projects, which the good news is it lines up really well with most of the ESG targets our clients have. Right. It's not like we're trying to course correct design that we typically do to. To comply with their E S G targets.
They actually compliment each other. The other thing that we are now in our fourth year of is tracking our operational carbon for all of our projects. So we're also trying to chase net zero carbon by 2030 for our projects. It's very, very hard to do that, but we've been tracking it, um, for four years now.
All of our projects, the carbon, so. Again, that also lines up with most of our clients', e s G targets because they, they also are trying to decarbonize and reduce their carbon, uh, footprint for their. Organizations, right? So just as a firm, h l W has a DNA of at least those two things of trying to decarbonize, but also maximizing sort of the health and wellness of the materials.
Cuz it doesn't make sense to design a really, a building that has amazing, you know, mechanical system that has good filtration. If you're gonna just fill the building with gross carpet that's gonna off gas and adhesives that are gonna off gas, you've sort of missed the point, right? So, We're trying to do both.
There's other firms that do that too. I mean, we're not the only ones, but we take it very seriously and, and try to employ that on as many projects as we possibly can.
[00:27:21] Phil Dillard: Yeah, it sounds like you take that serious and I, I appreciate how you describe the components of impact that are carbon based or related and also not carbon related.
It's some, sometimes people, uh, I've heard people say that PE folks get carbon blind, right? But they think just about the energy is thinking about, but they don't think about water and healthy environments and aesthetics and other things that are not carbon based. But definitely related to the inputs and such, and I know you guys have been working on certifications and programs and, and leading in this space, which can you comment on some of the, some of the programs or the certifications that you guys have been
[00:27:59] Jonce Walker: driving?
My team, um, is heavily focused on project certifications. There's many of them out there. All of them are really, really good. Nobody does everything, and I don't think we should have a certification that does everything, but we do a lot of lead consulting. We have over 50 million square feet of certified space now at this point.
We do a lot of well consulting. Fit Well is another rating system. Well, health safety is a rating system that came out of sort of covid, the Covid Pandemic, which is a run by the same group that runs well, which is the I W B I. We do a lot of zero carbon certification. That's actually a program run by I L F I, that's the International Living Future Institute.
So there's a lot of them and they're all great. And we typically leverage more than one rating system on every project. So, You know, five, six years ago, clients would be like, we just wanna do a lead silver project. And you know, we would do that and that's fine. But now clients are like, well, we wanna do lead gold minimum and we wanna do well gold and we wanna do fit well.
You know, so we're doing several rating systems at the same time, which is. Which can be incredibly complex because you have different credits trying to accomplish different things, and so we've gotten really good at knowing where the co-benefits are of certain credits and where they overlap and where maybe we don't want to pursue certain things because of a different reason, but.
Most of our work is a lot of rating systems and we've gotten really, really, really good at that. We have over 40 projects right now, pursuing several rating systems at the same time. So it's something that's evolved and uh, clients are wanting to do more, more at the same time, which is really exciting.
[00:29:47] Phil Dillard: That is very exciting. I don't know a ton about Well and fit. Well, I know a little bit about Lead and I'm, I'm sure folks you know, will probably, and put them in the show notes and make it easier for people to figure out, you know, more about them. And I was gonna ask about how you determine the benefits of them, because I think people are concerned about.
Concerned about greenwashing, right? People are going on this path. They go, okay, I great. I love it. I want to do something. I wanna make sure it's substantive. I wanna know how it's valuable. But I also heard in there the thing, it says, nobody, no system does everything and nobody does all these projects.
There's some projects you're gonna choose certain rating systems versus others. But the whole intent is still the same. The intent to be a great steward, the intent to be making the best possible development that you can with all of the things into account, I'm assuming you have to do a lot of work in terms of messaging and communication to actually make it clear to people what's being worked on and maybe what's not and why.
Can you highlight a little bit of some of that challenge and maybe some of the areas you kind of have succeeded in in getting that out there?
[00:30:56] Jonce Walker: Yeah, sure. So it's very well, well said point. Most of our clients arrive at the conversation knowing very little, unless they've worked on a project in the past.
But you know, we do. A lot of headquarters and headquarters don't come around that often, so they're coming fresh to this conversation some of the times. And what we will do within the Beyond team is we will do. Essentially a feasibility study for them. And we say, okay, what are your drivers for this project?
What are your E S G targets? What are your drivers locally for this project? And then we'll actually dive deeper and sort of have a little mini charette interview with the team and say, what are you really wanting out of this project for yourself and your team? And what comes out the other side is a recommendation for a rating system or several rating systems or something custom that we might create for them.
We've created some frameworks, some custom frameworks for Audible in the past that they are now using, which has a little bit of a rating system flavor, but it's not a rating system. So, We will help advise them on the best path forward. We might say, listen, for this project, we think a lead gold or a lead platinum is achievable and doable, and here's what the potential costs might be, but here's the potential impact.
I think it's important to tell that story too, and we might say, but maybe not, well this time because of X, Y, Z, or maybe not fit well this time for X, Y for X, Y reasons, you know, or it might go the other way. You know, they might have a really big focus on. Wellness and, and sort of getting people back to the office and not really focused on carbon, and we would say, well, We're still gonna drive down the carbon as much as possible, but let's just focus on the well rating system, for example, this time, right?
And not do lead. So we help, we help them on that journey and we help them make that decision. And the best time to do that is as soon as possible because you don't want a project getting all the way down past through design and starting construction. And then the client says, oh, we, we wanna actually do lead now.
We can do it. We've done it, but it's really hard to go backwards and change things because a lot of times things are already set and it's costly to do that. We help them on that journey and we help make that decision together with them. Then there's the
[00:33:16] Phil Dillard: part of it of how to communicate the why, right?
Like I remember working with a corporation that was doing budgeting, and they said, out of a hundred percent of our budget, we'll carve off X right off the top for regulatory, and that percentage of X was big enough such that folks, anybody looking out could say, well, that's a pretty big chunk of your budget to put to regulatory.
You guys are at least putting forth a solid effort, right? And I think that it's gotta be tricky in the conversation. I'm curious, I'm thinking it's trying to put forward a solid effort towards doing the right things towards carbon and the, and carbon and the health of people and outside of the project boundary.
Is that contained in one of the, one of the metrics, or is it one of those areas where this is kind of evolving and you're working on communicating it as a project? As a project moves through its phases?
[00:34:07] Jonce Walker: Yeah, so you know, the allocation of funds dedicated to sustainability unfortunately can oftentimes bubble to the top when we're, when we're having value engineering conversations.
And what I have found is, and I'm not trying to throw cost consultants under the bus, but they're not good at placing economic costs on sustainability. I've not really seen it done well because things get placed into big buckets and it's labeled lead and it really sometimes may not even have anything to do with lead or sustainability may have something to do with ergonomics or, or energy code or, you know, stuff like that, which you have to do anyways.
And so we just need to get a little more sophisticated about how. What we're calling sustainability because the market has rapidly evolved. It's not like it was five years ago. Five years ago. It was expensive 10 years ago. It was expensive, right? To do a lead building. Now it's like zero to 2% of the cost of a project, so it's very small and the outcome is, It's palatable.
I mean, you can tell when you're in a lead building. You can tell when you're in a well building, your staff can tell. So the value. It goes beyond the economics of those types of things. But still, Phil, to this day, I mean, you know, we'll start to say, oh, the project is 5 million over budget and the first conversation that happens is lead.
You know? It's like, well that's, you know, let's talk about this. You know, let's talk about what is in here that you're calling lead, and what is in here that is actually has nothing to do with lead and. Also, let's put on our triple bottom lines lens here and think about what is the other value to these things other than just the dollar, right?
Or just the, the monetary value.
[00:36:00] Phil Dillard: There's always trade offs, right? The best definition of economics. Unlimited desires, limited resources, but one is gonna make the right strategic decisions so you don't lose sight of the whole objective of the thing from the be from the beginning. I'm curious, as we wrap up this part of it, before we go to our, uh, our quick hits or rapid fire session, where do you see the opportunity?
For entrepreneurs to bring value to the space for new technologies or new innovations to bring value to the work that
[00:36:30] Jonce Walker: you're doing? Yeah, I think there's a lot of opportunity. I think the more we can tie. Solutions to ecology, the better nature has been doing this for billions of years. Like we should be learning from those things.
We should be sort of designing spaces that function more like uh, things that can evolve and change sort of a circularity mindset, so things that can be swapped out quickly or easily if they're damaged, things that can be upcycled if they're damaged, things that can be reused in some fashion. One thing that really is, uh, a real big problem in the built environment, especially in the commercial office space, is the waste stream.
When things get remodeled or refreshed, a lot of waste ends up in the dumpster. And if there was some startups that really, and there's a few out there, but there's still few and far between, if there was a company that could easily match furniture, That's completely usable to a firm that's in need of furniture, and it could be very simple and cost effective.
That would be huge. In New York, I don't know. There's a Times article, New York Times article a couple days ago that talked about an immense amount of her Herman Miller chairs that just ended up in storage or in the landfill because spaces, you know, firms leased and fit out space and now they're empty, and now they're trying to figure out what to do with that space.
And that's all ending up in the landfill. So that's a problem, and I think there's a lot of opportunity for firms, for companies, for startups to think about materials as a circular path and not a make. Take waste path. There should be a better way to think about that. So from materials perspective, thinking about things circular and tying it back to ecology.
How can we use more natural materials? How can we use more materials that mimic nature even in the space? And how do we, um, design buildings that can evolve that are not just, you know, once you're done with construction, it now sits there for 10 years and sort of falls apart and then you have to replace everything.
I think there's a lot of opportunity in the market for that specifically.
[00:38:43] Phil Dillard: Well, that, that's really great to hear. I was just, uh, just reading up on some things in that nature and, and know some folks who were working in things in the space and actually after hearing what happened with the auction for Twitter, Building materials after, you know, Elon Musk kind of slashed the size of the office and such.
There seemed like a lot of opportunities for doing things like that better and making great, uh, great opportunities, but also like great reuse of all that material so that we're not, so that when we're building something new, we are actually building new because we need to, not because we're not using well, we.
What we had before.
[00:39:18] Jonce Walker: Exactly. Exactly right. Yep. So,
[00:39:20] Phil Dillard: um, thanks so much for that. I'm gonna go now to our, um, the final segment where we asked the same three or four recap questions to everyone and see, uh, and you can answer these, these are like, I'm minute, another two short, short answer questions. So, first one, 10 years from now, or shorter, if you need to be, uh, what does success look like to you?
[00:39:41] Jonce Walker: In 10 years, we should have a carbon free grid and we should be building and designing spaces that are regenerative, meaning we need to dig out of the hole we've created from a carbon and ecology perspective, and it needs to be a net positive situation. It's a must. Super.
[00:39:58] Phil Dillard: Yeah. Um, it's always tough to talk about sustainability with people who are in the field because we wanna go to regeneration.
And I think people who aren't even understanding sustainability are like not ready for another concept to be layered onto that. But I'm, I'm with you. Um, a hundred percent. Super. Uh, second question right now, outside of your program, is there any project, program, campaign, industry leader, other creation that's really
[00:40:25] Jonce Walker: inspiring you?
Yeah, there's a few things going on. There's, um, the International Living Future Institute has a, has a label called just, which is, uh, just several performance indicators around things like social equity, diversity, and inclusion. Pay equity, stewardship, et cetera. Procurement. That's a very exciting program.
H l W has a just label. We're one of the few architecture firms that has one, and I would love to see that really catch on because it, it forces firms to look. Inward and course correct, and we did a lot of that. There's a lot of things going on that we weren't really aware of around some of those things.
And, and we took a really hard look at ourselves and, and we course corrected and fixed them and we wouldn't have done that otherwise, probably, uh, at least not. As quickly as we did. So that's one thing. I think there's a lot of movement in the embodied carbon space right now. A lot of, uh, focus on decarbonizing materials.
We've focused on operational carbon for a very long time and we need to continue to do that. But embodied carbon is, is sort of really important. And there's platforms out there that exist. One click, l c a tally, e C three. That are platforms to measure embodied carbon. And I think in terms of, just so you know, that's sort of a, a d e i and a, an embodied carbon answer.
But I think in terms of people, there's, you know, a lot of folks that I've followed in my career that I, I really admire Ray Anderson, who, you know, founded interface years and years ago. Set out to, you know, do mission zero for, for a carpet company. And they are doing incredible work and they're not the only carpet manufacturers doing amazing work, but he was somebody who was definitely at the forefront 20, 30 years ago.
We need more people like that in that space. Doing things that are important and just doing it cuz it's, cuz it matters. Not be necessarily because there's some regulatory reason why. It's great to
[00:42:28] Phil Dillard: see people like that, and I'm very interested in learning more about the uh, programs that you shared, so thanks very much.
So last one, what's the most important thing that individuals can do to influence governments or corporations for a better, more sustainable, almost ultimately more regenerative future?
[00:42:49] Jonce Walker: The consumption of goods and things can speak volumes if people are. A little more informed, and the thing is the data exists.
It's out there. It's not like a secret, but buying things that are more local, that are organic, that have some sort of, you know, third party label. I mean, all of this is been said for decades. It's now, I'm not inventing something new, but that really matters. The other thing is like, just show up. Like just show up to stuff and ask a question and raise, raise your hand and say, why are we doing it this way?
Why aren't we doing it this way? Not only does that get the person or the people that you are trying to sway to think about it, but it also gets the people in the room. They may have not thought about that to start to think about that. The leaders that I really admire, that's what they do. They ask the question, they push back a little bit when needed.
That's what's necessary. That's how things happen. That's how things change. That's how policy gets changed is because people are speaking up and asking for them. That's what happened in New York with a lot of the local laws that are pushing sustainability. As people got together and convened and said, we need to do better, and that's how policy got.
Got passed, you know, the local I 97, the Climate Mobilization Act. That all happened because a bunch of stakeholders, people in the design community got together and said, we can, we can do better. And. That's the outcome. That's a tiny example, but there's many, many, many. So just show up and be slightly informed, but ask questions and, and push for what you think is better.
[00:44:20] Phil Dillard: Yeah, that sounds great. It seems like you know, little behaviors, people can take little behaviors and they can move along way. You don't need to radically change your life. You don't need to. Your job and full-time, you become an activist. But those little bits and pieces they can add up over time. And, and I think the other thing about, um, the people in the room, there are times you go to the room to hear one person speak and hear someone else.
You're like, wow, I didn't even think about that. And it's really helpful, helpful thing. So
[00:44:45] Jonce Walker: agreed. Yes, absolutely, Phil. Totally
[00:44:48] Phil Dillard: appreciate that. Well, um, I know we could keep going for a while cuz this went super fast. Um, but we're outta time and I need to respect your time and your, your schedule, um, your wealth of knowledge and a breath of fresh air. So thank you very much for sharing your time and your insights with us.
[00:45:03] Jonce Walker: Absolutely, Phil. Anytime. It was awesome to chat with you. It was great. Yeah.
[00:45:07] Phil Dillard: Well, thank you for joining us Jonce, and thank you everybody else out there for listening. We'll see you next time in the next episode of Thruline to the 4th Sector. Please take a moment to rate and review the show and join us each week for a new episode. Thank you for listening.
Thank you for listening to this episode of Thruline to the 4th Sector. I'm your host, Phil Dillard. If you enjoyed the show, please leave a rating and tell a friend. To learn more about the fourth sector economy, visit thrulinenetworks.com. That's T H R U L I N E networks.com. Thanks again, and we hope to have you with us in the next episode.