- Howdy, ladies and gentlemen, welcome.

- [Audience] Howdy.

- Yeah, that was good.

It got a bumpy start, but we did it .

And welcome back to an exciting semester, under tough health conditions.

We hope and pray your family and you and the whole population recovers in this example of what can happen when health issues get out of balance.

And I'm delighted to say thank you to Dean Vanegas and Greg Lou Han and Ray Pentecost who were gonna help with the program and I wanna thank KAMU TV.

This is our, we started this in 2009.

So I think this is our 12th year.

Not all of which was at KAMU, that started about five or six years ago.

I gotta go look back at the record and see, but they've done a wonderful job and our lecture series is probably one of the most exciting ones I think we've done because we've been thinking and Harold Adams has been doing, he's in doubt three, four professorships, interdisciplinary professorships.

Dean Vanegas has been talking about interdisciplinary efforts and we put a program together with landscape and construction science.

So each week we're not gonna cover everyone, but we're gonna have a lot of basis field with landscape architects and construction managers.

And it's really fun to put something together like this, but it's not easy.

So I'm gonna invite Greg Luhan up.

He's going to be taking the official title of the professor of this lecture series because I've been approved for leave of absence.

I don't know if Dean Vanegas knows that but.

And so thank you, Greg, for jumping in on that and thanks to all of you, wish you a good semester, Bill is now a student.

And I think Jay Maddock is way in the back there and he's been helping us for several years on this.

So I have a feeling, some of the students went to Francis Hall.

I had sent, Ginger had sent her, sent them an email that it was here and I think it's known.

Anyhow, Greg Luhan is our new department head in architecture.

He's FAIA.

He's got a PhD, he was Associate Dean at the University of Kentucky and we're just delighted to have you here and thanks for helping out on this.

So I'll turn it over to you and... (audience laughing) - Howdy.

- [Audience] Howdy.

- So the ripple effect has been proven, George.

So first of all, thank you all for coming both to the radio station, as well as to us joining us online for this very exciting lecture series.

So just some brass tacks for the students that are gonna be joining us.

First, for the students that are in 481, the students will be required to take class notes and then turn those notes in via canvas.

The students that are in the 681, will also be doing a research on the firms that we'll be presenting.

So a week in advance, the students will be presenting their work and asking questions and being prepared for the class as well as turning in your class notes.

Class participation is mandatory as well as attendance.

So we'll be taking attendance.

Myself as well as Dan king will be joining us.

He's a TA for our class.

We'll be taking notes along with us and then we'll be reviewing and compiling that information.

But again, everything will be handled via canvas this year not via email.

So we have a fantastic new learning management system that we're gonna put into full effect this year.

So thank you for doing so.

On behalf of George Mann, I'd like to thank him for putting together a very excellent series this year.

When I was a PhD student, I was a very active participant in this lecture series and it put me onto the pathway to become a research fellow and the center for health systems design and I'm very excited about the lecture series that he put together many years ago and then this one, because it's really at the future of how we work together.

Whether or not it's collaboratively or as teams, this is a very exciting opportunity for us to think about the role of health and the design for health as we move forward through the pandemic.

So without further ado, I'm gonna turn this over to Ray Pentecost, who will introduce our lecture today and I look forward to continuing on with you and answering any questions that you may have.

So, Ray.

- Thank you sir.

Howdy.

- [Audience] Howdy.

- It is my great pleasure and privilege today to introduce our speaker, our Dean for the college of architecture here at Texas A&M, Dr. Jorge Vanegas.

Jorge studied architecture in Columbia.

Got his professional degree there and became a registered architect in Columbia.

And he came to the United States and studied at Stanford for a master's and then a PhD in construction engineering management.

And he pursued after that, an academic career with of the distinction that you would imagine would accompany that set of credentials.

He joined A&M as an Interim Dean for the College of Architecture in 08.

And three full terms as Dean after that plus a special extension.

Jorge will finish his term as our Dean next year, after about 14 years in service in that capacity.

That number of years and rank places him at the top seniority among deans at Texas A&M.

That is a position of extraordinary achievement.

In addition to his work as dean, he has recently taken over responsibility in leading the Institute for Sustainability because deep down that is his passion.

Others have recognized his accomplishments.

In 2010, he was inducted into the Pan American Academy of Engineering.

In 2018, he was invited into the National Academy of Construction.

And those of you who follow such things will know that participation membership in any of the national and regional academies is supreme recognition of a career well led.

It is easy to serve under someone for whom you have a lot of respect.

And I will tell you that it has been my great pleasure here since arriving at A&M to serve under Jorge for whom I have great respect.

Please join me in welcoming to the podium today, our Dean, Dr. Jorge Vanegas.

(audience clapping) - So I'm an adopted Aggie.

Howdy.

- [Audience] Howdy.

- As Ray said, thank you for that very wonderful introduction, I wear many hats, but each hat has a different reason and each hat will be reflected in my talk today.

Yes, I am actually, my boss in architecture is here, but I also have a professorial appointment in civil and environmental engineering, which is my other half of my career and the Director of Sustainable Communities.

It's not sustainability.

Sustainability is integral but that's only one faction of that.

But I'm also a Texas Engineering Experiment Station Researcher.

And what this says is that I have seen the world through multiple lenses and that is why it is my honor and privilege to welcome you to the fall of 2021 architecture for our health visiting lecture series.

I liked that topic when I first read it, you will take coordinated teams, to design build and operate health and hospital facilities for the future.

My only problem with that is that it falls short of the full potential and capacity that we have here at Texas A&M to actually enable, facilitate and take to the next level architecture for health.

So my talk is gonna be focusing on future proofing architecture for health.

And I wanna make a distinction that is personal and it's not a negative reflect on anything, but here's what we wish for.

Architecture for health, blue skies, blue oceans, nothing stops us from providing health to the world.

But one of my arguments is that I'm sorry, but architecture is not what we do here in our college only and part of the theme for this series is going to emphasize the fact that one of the biggest allies for health is actually what we call the capital projects industry.

And that includes architecture, but it also includes planners.

It includes engineers and it includes the supply chain and it includes operators and maintainers and it includes policy makers and regulatory agencies and all kinds of things, finance institutions, all kinds of things that come together on that pesky little word called health.

And it is a complicated industry.

I have been in that industry for 40 years and I can tell you that we're still talking about things we talked about 40 years ago.

And as we all have been living, all right, this is what we actually get.

We get a state of being that says we are in choppy waters.

We are facing storms.

So we need to learn how to plight together and that is gonna be the complete theme of my presentation today.

So I wanna say that architecture is just one of many key players.

I don't distinguish one more than the other, we all need it.

I have a favorite saying that all we need to do is change that, me, me, me, me mentality and all we need to do is switch the M to a W and we get the we, we, we mentality.

And that's what we need to be able to face that.

So the first thing I'm gonna ask is when we use the word healthcare industry, anybody know how big it is?

Because it is big, very big.

And looking at some of the latest statistics, the healthcare industry represents about $3.8 trillion, which divided by the population of the US means we spend about 11,582 per person on healthcare and that's a share of the gross domestic product, it's about 18%.

That's huge.

That is really, really big.

But within that sector, the capital projects industry plays a key role as it delivers and maintains the facilities and the infrastructure that enable and support all dimensions of health care.

And some of those dimensions are direct.

Clinics and hospitals and everything that has to do with direct health care.

But it's also the spas and the well-beings and all the things that people do to keep well.

And it's also in the home today through telemedicine.

And it's also everywhere.

Schools have nurses.

So health is something that is everywhere.

So let's switch now to why I say capital projects industry, because when we use that word, also a lot of people don't know what I'm talking about.

They like to see AEC, architecture, engineering and construction.

And yes, that's an industry and it's a big industry.

It's about a trillion dollar industry.

But again, it doesn't capture everything.

But capital projects has a tendency to do.

Because capital projects means anything that you spend money in this industry to do something new, whether it's a facility or whether it's an infrastructure system or whether it's anything, even a rehab or an update or an expansion, whatever it is, we're using capital.

And that is a very important concept because we keep complaining that there's not enough money to do things and we don't even look at how much money we are wasting based on what you're gonna hear today.

So if we talk about the industry, what do we really mean?

So I'm gonna use the parable of it depends.

If you're talking to some people about an elephant and you're all blind about the rest, it's a spear, it's a fan, it's a wall, it's a snake, it's a tree, it's a rope, but the elephant knows it's an elephant.

And that's what happens with an industry as big as this.

It all depends and when you look at it, what lens are we looking for?

Because you can go from a subjective to an objective close and use a microscope and you can go objectively out of distance and you can use a telescope.

That will give you a very different view of what that industry is.

And there are people that worry in research of doing the little microscopic improvement on how to increase a certain thing by 1% and forget about all the other things that we're not doing.

So it's a balance between the two.

And the other thing is also very, very clear.

What hat are we wearing when we talk about it?

Because there are many, many, many hats.

If you are in the public sector hat, the government organizations or the private sector industry business, professional organizations, private sector, non-governmental organizations, academia, what are you talking about?

Research, creative work, scholarship, discovery, integration, application or academia learning and teaching.

And then we have all the world of public, private and academic engagement with society, with communities, with families and individuals.

So what hat are we talking about?

So it's not only the hat.

It also includes the shoes in which we walk.

And in the health arena, what shoes are we wearing?

Because the healthcare policy makers and regulators walk on very different shoes than the healthcare administrators, financing and insurance providers, healthcare planners, architects, engineers and specialty designers in health.

The same as builders in specialty contractors, the same as manufacturers and suppliers in the supply chain and specialists of all sorts.

At A&M alone, we have five different disciplines that have to do with health in the health science center.

So final question is, how do you eat an elephant?

And you eat an elephant one bite at a time.

And that is kind of the prelude to what I wanna talk about for the rest of this.

So one of my arguments and my fees and actually I've been writing and this talk was inspired by an article that I produced for the oil and gas industry and the energy on one of its inaugural new magazines, talking about silos, because we talk about silos all the time.

So I want to talk a little bit about the silos in the capital projects industry and by default because I'm equating that from the point of view of health.

So the use of silo in the context of this presentation does not really refer only to a physical structure, but to a silo mentality that occurs.

And that silo mentality can be captured in the following phrase.

When departments or management groups do not share information goals, tools, priorities and processes with other departments, that's what a silo mentality is.

It is believed to impact operations, reduce employee morale, may contribute to the overall failure of a company or its products and culture.

And we see that, we're seeing that right now, unfolding lies at a big place like Texas A&M in facing the big challenge of COVID.

Silos are perceived as a cause for slow procurement processes, burdened some amounts of effort and difficulty.

That's why the university is on a deep dive to reduce bureaucracy.

We're talking about fragmented supply chains, this spread and sometimes incompatible data and information management systems that eternal illusion of the internet of everything and that data transparency and interoperability.

We're talking about all stakeholders, they use different kinds of data.

They use different kinds of approaches, different kinds of violence of automation, increased levels of transactional waste.

I used to talk about the dysfunctionality of the industry.

And I used to actually, before it became, I became aware that it's illegal, I used to ask for a dollar from the audience.

And then I said, okay.

So if you're ordering a new hospital and I'm the industry and I say, it's gonna cost a dollar.

Can you give me a dollar?

And then as an industry, I break it in half, crumple one, throw it away and say, "I'm gonna only use this amount."

And by the way, I need more money.

And this was some time ago when we were doing productivity improvement and we do all the things about the industry.

That's what led to the CICE reports of the business round table in the early '80s.

And some things have not changed.

Significant inefficiencies and conflicts in disputes among project participants.

Lawyers will always win.

And I had respect for them, but they win whether you are right or wrong, it doesn't matter, they get paid.

So we live surrounded by silos and they are created by individuals.

You can have a whole team and you can have a team of silos, each one in their own world with their own beliefs, their own opinions, their own background, their own experience, their own academic preparation, their own view of the world.

They get together and then one discipline, they thought talk about only the discipline.

So civil engineers talk about civil engineering and the mechanical engineers and the electrical and the architects and this and that, communities, sometimes communities of practice, sometimes communities of people, public and private organizations or institutions.

So I wanna share with you very much quickly without going deep because I could go deep in each one of these, 10 types of silos in the capital projects industry.

And we have them here because that's part of what we deal with on a daily basis within the different curricula of our college.

So we have how silos among the four types of stakeholders and stockholders in the capital projects industry.

Stakeholders and stockholders are different for me because a stakeholder is anybody that can actually affect or be affected by whatever is going on in your project.

And that stockholder is whoever can make or break money because they have skin in the game and they can lose or they can gain.

So if you look at government and you look at industry and business and you look at community and society and you look at academia, they represent very different, very different type of silos.

So what you're gonna see on each one of these 10 is this little icon that says, you know, these are silos.

What can we do about them?

The second one has to do with what we do here at Texas A&M.

I'm talking about the three pillars of the academic mission of higher education institutions.

And we are charged to prepare the next generation of professionals in any field of study for the capital projects industry and they use a lot.

So the three pillars are what people normally call, education, research and service, but that is no longer enough.

We're talking about learning and teaching.

In our college, we're talking about research, creative work and scholarship and impact to society instead of just service.

You can serve all you want, but if you're not causing any kind of impact, what are you really doing?

And with the way that you impact society is through engagement.

Engagement with practitioners and engagement through outreach.

Yeah, outreach to even those communities that are disadvantaged and underserved.

And service because not everything is profit, profit, profit.

So the silos exist and those silos are real.

And even within the same institution, we have the silos of those that teach and those that research and those that do service.

Yeah, there are parts of our annual evaluation but in different kinds of proportions and they create different kinds of hierarchies and they create different kinds of auras.

And that's the reality of the academic mission.

And then we have silos that have to do with our interactions and collaborations among disciplines in both academia and practice in the capital projects industry.

So imagine that we have for a second five disciplines and those disciplines are all charged by the drivers for new knowledge and the development of good things to save the world, answers to questions and solutions to problems and satisfaction of needs and realization of opportunities and fulfillment of aspiration.

Well, that's what we do.

So when you ask the questions, problems needs opportunities and explorations, there are many, so who has the answer?

Well, we have multidisciplinary collaborations.

All right.

So we have discipline A in charge of the question, the problem, the need or the target of your want and you invite and other people to do that.

Hey, I need a hospital.

All right, so let's get medical people, let's get nursing people.

Let's get engineers, let's get the... but the focus is we need a hospital.

So guess what?

Again, here it is, the balloon is a silo.

Now at this point, I'm not saying they're bad or good.

All I'm saying is they're silos because all they do is reflect a mentality of people and they reflect how people interact with other people.

And you will see that this will get clarified.

But then and it was mentioned, one of my favorite people in the world, professor, an honorary doctorate, Harold Adams, is a true champion and he walks the talk of interdisciplinary collaboration.

Now that's very different to multi because in there, the problem is in the middle and it brings all the other disciplines together.

And in interacting with each one, each one becomes stronger and everyone learns from the other one.

So interdisciplinary collaboration is an exchange of knowledge that makes us better in multiple ways.

But even then we have silos.

So what's next?

Well, A&M is also a good example of cross-disciplinary collaboration.

So there is certain types of problems, questions, needs and opportunities that are at the intersection of several disciplines and there are tools and there are frameworks and there are technologies that can be used.

And one of my favorite examples of this is that you can have visualization, which is one of the the strengths of our college.

Understanding visually what the world is, so that we can then model the world and when you model the world, we can then do simulation.

And when we simulate with all kinds of parameters, we generate tons and tons of data.

So now we need to analyze it and you have data analytics and big data and all of that.

But how that happens in architecture or in construction is very, very different than when it happens in construction or in operations and maintenance.

So what we have is we get to know when we're chairing those models and those frameworks and those techniques.

One of my probably joys is that right now we were announced that our college has unmemorized our research dean and our college is leading an effort to be part of the Texas A&M Institute for data science.

So we are a thematic lab into that.

When was architecture ever involved in that?

Well, as a college we are and we have people in all our departments doing things in any of these areas.

But again, because we're talking about disciplines, we're talking about different kinds of silos.

And then we get the transdisciplinary.

Where you are looking at an imperative of unity of knowledge and that's one of the aspirations.

Transdisciplinary and yes, there are others like metadisciplinarian.

So other things but I like these because they relate to what we do.

There are silos within the discovery and innovation process.

You know one little way of looking at research is the fact that we always start with drivers, that the final current state and the status quo internally and externally, will always define outcomes, our vision, state of the future, external context, internal context and we connect those through a process of research that leads to development, that leads to demonstration that leads to deployment and back to research.

We sandwich that within dissemination and knowledge transfer and we signed it with another bond, which is the assessment and evaluation and peer review.

That's a very elegant thing.

This came from NSF long time ago and it has been modified through what I do.

But the reality is that there are silos in that process as well, why?

Because these are people that are specialists on doing baselines.

There are people that specialize only on futurism and visioning.

There are people that are specialists on knowledge transfer and communication and education.

There are people that are good in the money's there for research.

There is some money that is there for development.

Then there's a valley of death on how do you take that into demonstration and deployment?

So there are a lot of things that are caused by the silos.

Just go through a funding agency and you will see what I'm talking about.

And then we have the silos of the typologies themselves of what a capital project is.

We can have capital projects, residential, building, industrial, heavy civil and then mixed use development.

We can look at a capital project and I'm using the AEC because this came from there.

We can do new greenfield or brownfield problems.

We can do projects for rehabilitation of deteriorated facilities, expansion upgrade or retrofit of existing facilities.

And one thing that we're very good in our colleges, disaster recovery and reconstruction.

And guess what health is at the frontline of reconstructing and recovering and responding.

We have historical restoration, reconstruction or preservation and we have a great center.

Why aren't we playing in the health field with a center of our heritage conservation?

That's part of the question.

Environmental remediation and even at the end of a service line, we're talking about decommissioning, deconstruction or demolition.

And then you have all kinds of hybrids.

The problem is that each sector is a silo of its own.

The problem is that by project type, they're also silos.

And then we talk about life cycle.

I don't talk about life cycle.

The life span of a capital project, it will become a life cycle when we really realize the full potential of the circular economy, but we're not there yet.

Buildings have a service life and when they die, they get torn down.

And if you wanna readapt them and they were used like we did with Francis Hall, it's gonna cost money and everybody wants a new shiny thing.

So the lifespan is also a set of silos because we have the planning phase, the design phase, the construction phase, the operation phase, and in each one of these, we have different teams, the owner team, the design team, the procurement vendor supplier chain team, the construction team, the operations team.

And guess what?

In the industry, this is reflected by different types of organizations.

So who does what?

Again, silos left and right.

And then technology is the big ultimate savior for everything.

So I was 10 years on the board of directors of a consortium called FIA tech.

And this is about technology enabled activities in the lifespan of capital projects.

And why are they?

Hey, we have lots of technologies, procurement and supply, for design, for project planning, for job site, for operational part of the facility.

We have project and facility management, coordination, control.

We have materials, methods, products, equipment, workforce, data and information management.

And guess what?

There are all islands of automation.

And this was a technology roadmap that wasn't an elusive goal of FIA Tech.

FIA Tech was absorbed by the Construction Industry Institute.

But that's it.

And then we go into another part, number 8, we're almost there.

And that one is about the performance parameters in the lifespan of capital projects.

So if you are going to do on your hospital, one of the three questions that we normally ask, after we know what kind of hospital you want, the person that's gonna for it, is gonna say, how much is this gonna cost me?

how long will it take?

And what's the level of quality that I'm going to receive?

But the reality of the performance parameters of a facility is a lot more than that.

We have 12 parameters of performance in four quadrants and one of them is the product performance parameters.

Whatever you are building is, facility or whatever you wanna call it has to be compatible and respond to the physical and the nonphysical context.

It has to have functional performance.

A hospital that does not allow for good movement of the workers that do janitorial service without contaminating anything else is not gonna be good.

So functionality is part of that.

And obviously the physical and formal performance, the spatial solution that we have.

Where we normally focus is on the conventional performance parameters, quality, cost and schedule.

The reality is that we're talking about quality and reliability because the quality may be there on the first six months and then he just collapses because it was never really planned to last.

We're talking about lifespan cost performance and what's the problem there?

Colors of money.

TIC, Total Installed Cost is completely different than operations and maintenance.

So you have CAPEX and then you have OPEX and then you have return of investment of the whole thing.

They saw very different thing and you have heard from cost, life cycle cost analysis and all kinds of things there.

And then you have the delivery cycle time.

It's not the schedule.

I have asked this question to thousands of practitioners.

Would you put your life on the line on the budget that you prepared for that building that that is that cost?

Would you put your life in the line that that is that duration.

And I have yet to find someone that says, yes, I will bet my life that my numbers are the correct ones.

But then our wisdom, the industry takes a number of the cost, takes a number of the duration and puts it in concrete called contract.

And we measure how far we are on each one, which we know we wouldn't even bet the lives that they are the correct numbers.

All of the time research has focused on delivery performance and safety and security have been researched.

Today, a project has targets zero accidents and we have procurement and constructability.

So procureability and constructability.

And then one thing that we're also known for here is continuous commissioning.

So we talking about commissioning startup and the turnover in easy ways.

But we also look at the long term.

So the fourth one is life cycle performance parameters.

Are operations and maintenance and security, are they performing like they should?

Indoor and outdoor environmental quality, how much stuff are we putting in the air?

How much stuff are we putting in the water?

How much stuff are we putting in the land and how are we affecting the health of our workers inside?

And then sustainability, which I could talk for hours but I'm not.

So guess what?

Each one of these, another set of silos.

Nine is the elements of project definition.

So if I wanna do a capital project, I begin with the owner team that does project business plan.

We have a project definition package.

We have the project team definition.

We get the people that we want then we do a project execution plan.

And then we involve the project area and site.

Site selection and all the analysis of the physical and non-physical context.

We then look at external parties that might be affecting our project, local ordinances.

What kind of codes, what kind of politics are local and all kinds of wonderful things.

And then we get the design team in whatever form we want and they are supposed to deliver an integrated design package which defines the product of the project and they also define the building systems commissioning plan.

And technically at the same time, we should be thinking on how to build this.

So you have a construction team and the construction production process plan and the resource procurement plan.

And they all come together bringing in the vendor and supply chain in the work breakdown structure and the advanced work packaging, that AWP which is very important these days that we're not teaching that in architecture, but they are teaching not in construction.

And then we have four models, 3D, the financial cost, the time and the production process.

This is definition.

Once we have defined all of this, then we can go to project execution.

So we procure all resources.

We build and we commission, we turn it over.

We started up and then the facility does what it has.

And guess what?

Every single one of these is a silo as well.

And I'm gonna close with a supply chain because we sometimes neglect to include it in our analysis.

And there was a gentleman called Don Roberts long time ago from CH2M Hill.

And he was talking about the circular economy without that name, long time ago, we're talking about early '90s, late '80s.

So we have extraction and use of primary resources.

We have non renewable and nonrenewable.

We have production and use of energy.

We have processing in manufacturing.

We have technology systems, products, materials, equipment, for facilities and civil infrastructure systems.

We transport, we commercialize, we use and consume and end of service life decision.

Along the line, hey, no problem.

We have resource depletion and degradation.

We have environmental impact and degradation.

We have waste generation and accumulation and we have impacts to humans.

Construction industry has always been the villain in the eyes of many people in the environmental arena because we consume a lot and we create a lot of waste and all kinds of things.

I don't subscribe to that, but the reality is that the perception is still out there.

So when you start connecting these and the disconnect is really who the people that can provide those technologies, that's a different life cycle.

For new technology systems products and materials, what you have is feasibility studies, research and development, testing validation.

You have manufacturing, you have commercialization, transportation use and everything.

So the materials themselves have a different life span than what we are producing.

That creates more silos.

And those silos are real.

So now that I have your attention, let's shift directions.

Let's look at the opposite dimension, converting the silos into a vibrant ecosystem of interactions and collaborations.

So now we're gonna look at the silos, individuals, disciplines, teams, communities, public, private organizations and institutions, some consider there's a need to break down these silos.

Why not?

Let's just tear them down.

Boom.

And that actually is not necessarily the best course of action because silos actually provide a sense of belonging.

A sense of shared identity, values, culture, traditions and of complimentary interests, expertise and specialization in a similar way than a tribe provides to its members.

So if you break the silos and take all this away, you may actually get the walking dead.

Who am I?

What do I do now?

Where do I go now?

Where are my colleagues and peers?

And I have seen colleges try to break down departments and try to break down programs and that is what happens.

So instead of breaking the silos, there's a need and an opportunity to actually build connectors.

So if you leave it up to me, the first thing I would do is windows, because we don't get to see what other people are doing behind the silo.

But if we got to see what they're doing, yeah.

And that's one of the advantage of your dean circle for the center of health systems and design is that gives you a peek at what they're doing in public health or what they're doing in medicine or what they're doing in engineering or what they're doing in geoscience.

But if you see something interesting, you also need doors.

There are some silos that are almost like prisons.

You cannot leave.

You leave, you're not part of us anymore.

You are banned, you're exiled, how dare you?

And all of these, by the way, I have anecdotes, I can prove it.

So you need doors that allow people mobility among the silos.

And that's one great thing about the fellows of the center of health system and design.

It allows you to navigate without really losing the loyalty and the allegiance to your normal silo.

But we also need bridges because the C-suite likes the C-suite, middle management likes the middle management and the ground force likes to hang out with ground force.

From Scots to margaritas to beer.

So when you have this kind of mentality, you also need bridges.

That's just nature.

But if you have bridges and you have silos of a certain hierarchy, you will also need stairs.

Not only inside a silo, to allow people from the bottom, assistant professors to associate professors to full professors or whatever rank or hierarchy you want.

And you need stairs to move from one to another one.

I used the stare to move from the silo of Purdue, Assistant Professor through Georgia tech.

Associate professor.

Well, I thought, I did not have tenure and I did not have promotion before I left.

I got promotion and then I got tenure.

So basically this is based on reality.

And there are some people that just don't like to be seen working with others.

So you also need tunnels.

And those tunnels is what allows the under belly of the ecosystem to actually work and actually get some things done.

So what happens when you have this?

You have to also add and identify interrelationships, interdependency, synergies, redundancies and gaps.

So the 10 things I just showed you, they can all be connected.

And at this point, I wanna time check, how much time do I have left?

- [Man] One minute.

- One minute already?

Okay.

All I can tell you and I will finish in one minute, every single one of these and you can have these slides, can be connected throughout rows.

Everything is there.

For example, the three pillars of our academic mission goes like this.

Every single one of them has already a solution.

How do we work together?

And what we are doing here is, in this particular case, getting rid of all these silos and connecting them in a spiral of continuous improvement.

Typologies, basically you have one single big thing here and you connect them one way or another through best practices, lessons learned insights.

Lifespan of the capital project does not have barriers.

It's a seamless beginning from start to end where everybody works with everybody.

And the technology-enabled.

There's a technology roadmap for that.

This slide on purpose just wanted to just showcase that there are answers out there.

This is how integrated life cycle performance looks like.

And with the technologies we have today of AI, augmented by all kinds of utilization, it's a lot easier.

And the last one is the elements of project definition, which they can also be connected.

That has been my research study for years.

And then even the supply chain, what you need to add is context and the relationship and the mechanisms to actually overcome all the negative impacts.

So if you connect the silos, you're actually getting the ecosystem of interactions and collaborations within the capital projects industry.

So how do you leverage this?

Very simple, what problems could be solved with that kind of ecosystem?

And I can tell you, there are a lot.

Respect, trust, confidence, conflict, litigation, waste, risk, risk aversion.

Why do you think we must leverage silos?

Because we're wasting a lot of money.

We're increasing awareness and understanding of the full skull.

We increase the levels of respect, trust and confidence.

We reduce conflicts, we eliminate waste.

We eliminate risks and we are much more effective and efficient.

So I'm gonna leave you with one little thought.

Imagine what the capital projects industry in the world and by extension healthcare could be and if instead of being populated by silos, it was truly a vibrant ecosystem of interactions and collaborations stemming from integration, collaboration and communication between an among all individuals, disciplines, teams, communities, public, private organizations and institutions but anchored on awareness, understanding, trust, respect for each other.

Common shared values and common and mutually beneficial goals.

Just imagine for a second, what the capital projects industry for health could look like?

Well, I can give you a preview because we have it right here.

This is one of the drivers that we have in the college of architecture, through the center of our health systems and design.

And with that, I wanna thank you for allowing my meandering ramblings shared with you today.

Thank you.

(audience clapping) There we go.

- That was excellent and thank you.

- All right, 1:30 through, I was not that late.

- It was worth listening to every word and we have a few minutes for questions.

It's hard to see who's out there but if some of the students or faculty or anyone would like to make a comment... - By the way, these slides are available for anybody that wants them.

(indistinct) by creative comments and I don't have any problem in sharing that.

- It was very thought provoking because I think every one of us could see that we could do things better as a result of getting us to think, which is often not done.

It's what often has done is just getting us to repeat and that's not learning.

So anybody out there?

Hello?

Yes, Greg.

- [Greg] Sir, I have a question.

You outlined a very strategic pathway as a provocation but not necessarily a plan to action.

- [Vanegas] No, that's correct.

- [Greg] So, as we're being educated in this institution, we're doing research for forging new boundaries.

How do you see that transition from idea to implementation?

- Well, you can take almost every single slide that I have and I can trace it through our research project.

It is not lack of knowledge.

It is not lack of research.

It's not lack of papers.

It's not like lack of citations.

I'll tell you the two things that are missing for the call of action.

Most of what we do does not build capacity and we need capacity that allows us the lead ways to actually spend the time.

We are all overworked, we are all overloaded.

We are all all over this, right?

And chasing the dime because we don't have our own resources to support the research enterprise.

So as long as research is an add on on a workload that's already super full and we are not capitalizing on the value that we generate through every single thing I did, think about it.

One thing I did not mention is one rule of thumb that I learned a long time ago.

It takes $1 to put up a facility.

It takes $10 to operate it and maintain it over its service life and that facility enables $100 in terms of profit, in terms of salaries, in terms of production by this economy.

And where do we spend our time in the $1 making facilities cheaper, faster and that's the problem.

So we need to change.

One of my main drive for 40 years has been, how do you change the paradigms of a very entrenched industry?

And I'm not saying that industry is bad.

It's just that we have not been able to slay what I call the sacred cows.

And I have been involved from the beginning of the Construction Industry Institute.

I have been involved with the FIA Tech.

I have been involved with construction users (indistinct) I have been involved with ECC.

And well, you're still talking about the same thing.

So part of it, Greg is very simple.

Let's stop talking and let's start doing.

And it's a matter of not telling people what we're gonna do, because the first time you do it, you're gonna get everybody saying, you can't do that, you can't do that and you can't do that.

Or somebody says, "Hey, that's a pretty good idea.

Let me go and do it myself."

You just need to do it.

And I think that we have all the ingredients.

So in addition to that capacity, what's also missing is the will because there are a lot of people that just don't want to put their neck out there.

They don't wanna alienate their plans that do not believe in a certain thing.

So you're a company that embraces the values of climate change.

How many owners are gonna support you if they don't believe in climate change or any of those things.

We are in a polarized society.

So my view is very simple.

We need to stop going at the surface of the storm and dive deeper, where there is nothing in a submarine.

That's what I'm planning to do (indistinct) sustainable communities.

I don't know if that answers it but it's another rambling thought.

- But a very important discussion, I think for our college and for people in this time, we're at a juncture.

Are there any other questions I forgot to introduce Zach Larry, who's President of the Student Health Environments Association.

Is he here?

- [Man] Zach is over there.

- Yeah, okay.

And you're sending out things, anything you wanna say to the group about your activities?

- [Zach] So we are (indistinct) information on the next few weeks, if you're all board members and then if we're gonna be promoting this lecture that I get very important, whether you're interested in doing healthcare, (indistinct) can apply to anything.

So we're looking forward to this lecture series.

- Well, thank you.

And good luck, Zach.

You got off to a running start.

Any other comments?

So I felt that this was something worth trying.

It was not easy.

And I hope we start knocking down more walls and really talking more and this was a fantastic presentation that you've put together, Dean Vanegas.

I'd like to thank Ray Pentecost for all you do in assisting and Greg Luhan and Harold Adams is a man of vision by putting it out there for us, with these four professorships one in each department.

I also would like to thank and I forgot to do this.

I've had a wonderful relationship since I came to A&M and working with, Ron Scags, Joe Sprague and Craig bill for their support.

So there are a lot of people involved and we hope there'll be more people.

And it's been tough getting things done for all of us now, but hopefully things will get better.

Next week, we're gonna have people from the different departments, just introducing themselves from construction and landscape.

And I thought you brought up some important points that we can adjust in our future lecture series.

So thank you.

Let's give ourselves a hand and I won't be likely present but I'll be on Zoom because I wouldn't miss this and I wish you all good health, take care of yourselves and let's give each other a hand.

(all clapping)