The NCC Wood Academy is an experimental learning process designed to assist one of Northern Europe’s largest builders to change in less than 5 years from 100% concrete and steel building to 50% biosourced structures. Aimed at their interdivisional leadership class -who left school long ago, and have very little free time- it transmits knowledge, but also enthusiasm, confidence and creates new networks of cooperative virtuous action across Europe.
Cross-border/international
Denmark
France
Member State(s), Western Balkans and other countries: Austria
It refers to a physical transformation of the built environment (hard investment)
No
No
Yes
As an individual
First name: Andrew Last name: Todd Gender: Male Nationality: France If relevant, please select your other nationality: United Kingdom Address (country of permanent residence for individuals or address of the organisation)<br/>Street and number: 12 Rue Saint-Sabin Town: Paris Postal code: 75011 Country: France Direct Tel:+33 6 08 89 75 55 E-mail:andrewdtodd@gmail.com
The NCC Wood Academy is an experimental learning process designed to assist one of Northern Europe’s largest builders to transition in less than 5 years from 100% concrete and steel building to 50% biosourced structures. Aimed at their interdivisional leadership class -who left school long ago and have very little free time- it transmits knowledge, but also enthusiasm and confidence whilst creating new networks of cooperative virtuous action across Europe, within and outside of the company. Applicant Andrew Todd is Director of Learning of the Academy from its inception in February 2021 to the present.
In the field of construction –responsible for up to 40% of energy use and resource extraction- learning virtuous skills, methods and encountering sustainable networks of supply tends to be focused at the beginning of careers. Sometimes the most effective agents of change, however, are those already in positions of responsibility in process and supply chains. The NCC Wood Academy aims to ‘convert’ established players within the organization, so that they become agents and vectors within their existing roles, thereby also amplifying the Academy process.
The Academy aims to go far beyond the norms of ‘continuing education’ (which is often fact- and skill-based) to produce a holistic upheaval of enthusiasm and self-motivation in the general quest for decarbonization. It aims to empower industry leaders with the desire and the orientation to effect change by themselves in every aspect of their professional lives.
Decarbonisation
Biomaterials
Pan-European
Step-change
Corporate
The principal sustainability aim of NCC Wood Academy is to bring about a massive and immediate reduction in the use of concrete or steel and an increase in the use of carbon-capturing materials in future construction projects. NCC Denmark have announced an objective of 50% use of biomaterials in five years, compared to 100% traditional materials as of 2021.
Biomaterials (especially wood for use in structure, facade and fit-out) have the benefit of being carbon-capturing to the value of their self-weight in CO2e, compared to the 0.9 x self-weight emissions of concrete. They also offer benefits regarding the ‘externalised’ drawbacks of traditional materials (transport -due to 4 x weight- of wood-, local noise, runoff and dust pollution during construction, extraction of non-renewable resource (sand and water)), and significantly faster construction times leading to less disruptive and emissive building sites.
These objectives require holistic transformation of the organisation of NCC relating to skills, procurement, innovation, networks (internal and external), knowledge, team structures and vertical integration of process. Success is measured in the number of biomaterials projects won at tender and delivered (requiring therefore both marketing and delivery competence, as it may be the case that NCC will propose variants to traditional materials at bid stage). The first major projects ( 50,000 sq. metres of floorspace) are currently under way, with more in the pipeline.
The NCC Wood Academy acts dynamically on all these questions, using knowledge transfer (through lectures, online learning and symposia), motivation by encounter with role-models (through direct structured introductions and intense study tours), mentoring of team members through design exercises and pilot projects, and the creation new networks of procurement and exchange through strategic presentations to industry leaders. It is the sole comparable process acting in its region and sector.
As far as end-users of projects assisted by the NCC Wood Academy are concerned, it is now clearly, scientifically established that developing the skills to allow biomaterials to be broadly present in the workplace, the home, the streetscape and in institutional buildings has a number of virtuous circle effects. The presence of wood, clay plaster and other natural materials creates a more healthy environment from the standpoint of physical and mental health (hygrometry, vastly reduced VOCs, thermal comfort with low-inertia finishes, presence of biomaterials proven to reduce stress).
It also helps creates circuits of kinship with the suprahuman world, creating a generalised presence and witness within contexts that were formerly entirely artificialised. The Wood Academy builds the capacity and the confidence to increase the presence of biomaterials in the everyday context.
As far as the producers of these environments are concerned (i.e. students within NCC Wood Academy processes), their quality of experience is increased in numerous ways, whether moral or physical. The new skills needed for building with biomaterials generate new patterns of care and precision from supply to site; they also reduce the repetitive strain injuries, noise and dust characteristic of impactful materials. Recognising that one’s materials are a ‘treasure’ (as architect Kengo Kuma has said) creates new, rewarding circuits of virtue, and affinities between workers (at all levels), their output, and its provenance as part of a universal process.
The NCC Wood Academy is exemplary in that it foregrounds pride in, responsibility and care for the environment as drivers of a sometimes very technical process. It seeks to instill principles and non-reversible paradigms as weapons in the daily combat around questions of price, business-as-usual and obstructive regulations.
The NCC Wood Academy aims to be inclusive within its specific context, developing the diversity agency of minority, female, variously able and LGBTQ+ participants (of whom there are some). It should be stated, though, that significant inclusivity is hampered by the overwhelmingly male and caucasian nature of the construction industry, of which this initiative is entirely tributary.
However, within the existing hierarchy and structure of its host company, it can be said that the initiative is breaking norms, creating horizontality in communication, and team-building across rank and discipline; this is a particular effect of the holistic challenge of biomaterials construction, affecting every element of the value chain.
A particular emphasis has been placed on enhancing the potential and presence of these virtuous solutions by their generalization, which is commonly hampered by conventional market cost considerations. A key driver for knowledge development and innovation has been (and will remain) the careful application of biomaterials (with frugality and ingenuity) in order to secure their burgeoning place in a construction market driven by cost and biased by inadequate and unjust conditions of total costing for carbon impact (direct and indirect subsidies for fossil fuel-dependent materials, biased regulations, failure to account for externalised costs).
In the context of a rigidly hierarchical corporate structure, governance of the Academy is exemplary because collegial, involving all the participants. A small steering group with rotating membership deliberates on proposals from the Director of Learning for action paths, and also evaluates priorities with respect to other activities within the group. Budgeting is flexible and according to task and need. The aim is to remain responsive to opportunities and connections, planning in detail only a few months ahead (allowing, for example, to visit building sites at key junctures, to attend conferences, etc.)
Whilst the core processes of the NCC Wood Academy are inward-focussed, developing skills, capacity and methods within a private company, the general aim remains to provide benefit to society in general (especially building users and neighbours) by allowing great increases in decarbonization and also witness and presence for biomaterials buildings in the societal sphere. A particular emphasis has been placed on reducing the negative impact of the building site (noise, dust, transport) by developing skills, networks and capacity for prefabricated assembly/modular construction.
There are symbiotic approaches under way facing processes benefitting from Wood Academy energies, such as NCC new buildings with their discrete outreach and communication networks, their protagonists becoming informed by the Wood Academy process.
It is hoped that further in the Academy journey there will be a more direct implication in facing outwards, contributing cooperatively to the development of sustainability-assisting building regulations at a national and European level. This process is due to begin in 2023 with diffusion actions at major international industry conferences and early dialogue with regulatory bodies and academic institutions.
The NCC Wood Academy process seeks -as a fundamental aim- to situate one large-scale economic actor as a fully-aware, self-actualised, co-dependent team player in a (hitherto latent, now manifested and empowered) network of stakeholders at various levels across Europe. These stakeholders can be economic partners, role models, channels of knowledge and capacity, small-scale suppliers and political agents, and sometimes all of these at the same time.
The process has engaged these stakeholders in an explicit and structured manner, contrasting the insights from political leaders in exemplary third-party countries (such as France) with leaders of industry, as well as individual consultants, fabricators and suppliers whose knowhow and methods are either of direct applicability, and/or directly transferrable to the NCC context. Introductions being an important part of the Wood Academy process, initial encounters are treated as significant events with careful preparation and staging (visiting people in their own context, choosing the right interlocuters within the student body). In many cases already (since February 2021) these connections have become fully-fledged partnerships, sometimes representing tens of millions of euros of sustainability-driven exchange.
An emerging strain of work in the third year will be the cooperation between countries to produce a sensible and virtuous set of building regulations relating to wood in the Danish context. Network members will assist across borders, both with process recommendations and direct benchmarking.
A noted collateral benefit of the NCC Wood Academy has been the transformation (vertically and horizontally) of communication within a large company, due to the fact that biomaterials require holistic implication by the entirety of the value chain.
The internal divisions and disciplines which are constantly present and represented at every juncture in the process (and who -normally- rarely communicate outside of highly task-focused endeavours) include cost, project management, site management, risk management, structural and component design, procurement and compliance. Besides ‘receiving’ the pedagogical materials generated by the process, these agents have been consistently empowered by an expectation that they engage, comment and innovate themselves. Interviews with individual actors (often relating to personal aspirations and priorities) are included for general attention and exemplarity in the various Workbooks For Wood. Methods and processes arising from the initiative also branch across and downwards through the hierarchy, optimizing safety and installation procedures for workers and agents involved in delivery and storage of components.
External agents are also broadly implicated in the process, and include a range of actors including political leaders (e.g. the head of urbanism and chief of staff for the Paris mayor), other corporate leaders in different national and cultural contexts, leading engineers, suppliers, consultants in advanced digital development, supply and fabrication chains.
Every level of interaction has added value, whether directly quantifiable (in terms of technical resolution and capacity) or more broad (in terms of confidence, sense of possibility, belonging and mentorship).
It is difficult to compare the NCC Wood Academy with peers as it is a pioneering activity in its region and sector. The only comparable process we are aware of (within a builder-developer of similar scale: Bouygues in France) has been observed and encountered as part of our benchmarking; they have a larger scale of application, are apparently more traditionally pedagogical in terms of basic knowledge transfer, and address -exclusively- a somewhat more evolved local market context. We -instead- are writing the very first page of the history of engineered, large-scale wood building and capacity in Denmark, and are facing outwards across Europe in order to learn how to do this.
Perhaps the most distinctive aspect of the NCC Wood Academy -overtly welcomed as such by corporate Director of Innovation Martin Manthorpe, who verses the process- is the recognition that virtuous actions towards greatly enhanced sustainability have also proved highly effective in general management and motivational terms. Biomaterials embody a transverse objective within the group, driven by a sense of passion, responsibility (and -to a certain extent- guilt); they have already broken down silos, creating new forms of cooperation and sharing, and have spontaneously produced new forums of research and innovation within the company.
In theory the entire process can be mapped onto other actors in different contexts, and this may well become an ultimate aim as the Academy reaches high competence and autonomy in its participant people and entities (perhaps in two years’ time). We hope to share the fruits of the process, in the same way that many external actors have generously reached out and shared sometimes privileged insight with us along the way. This would not, however, happen in an abstract manner, as the process is embodied in a discrete nexus of people, time and place. It would involve giving back, sharing stories, building up from the attained level of experience, which is necessarily conditioned on the specificities of a culture rediscovering wood in its new guise as a mass, industrialised building material.
More generally, the elastic, improvisatory, reactive character of the initiative -which depends on the use of parallel, synchronous methods and diverse modes and tools- may well prove to be exemplary, even beyond the disciplinary confines of biomaterials construction, or indeed construction in general.
The process has resembled at times a rehearsal room, with people learning new roles, experimenting new ways of acting together, sharing secrets and risking failure. It must maintain something of the discretion involved in this process: some external mentors have agreed to participate based on restricted dissemination, saying (often deeply useful and insightful) things which would not normally be allowed owing to their professional self-interest and discretion towards other actors. It is hoped that we may be able to isolate the beneficial conclusions of these examples for further broadcast and utility without compromising the confidence of the protagonists.
NCC Wood Academy aims to become a self-sustaining process of learning and development. It has four principle methodological areas:
Knowledge transfer: online or IRL lectures, online learning modules, publication of Workbooks For Wood (3 so far) on specific themes and/or milestones in the journey.
Visits, encounters and conferences: twice-yearly group travel to significant events and locations for exemplary and emerging biomaterials practice (Vorarlberg, Paris, Forum Bois Construction, WoodRise). These major occurrences also serve for structured introductions, lectures and technical deep-dives, as well as intense team-building and synergy exercises.
The constitution, identification, development and maintenance of a pan-European Community sustaining the initiative: people and entities we meet are adopted into the process in the longer term, kept informed through various channels, invited to Denmark, etc.
Project-based learning: without interfering in discrete building projects (which are necessarily privileged and somewhat siloed), the process extracts stories and key waypoints for the general process of the Academy, empowering feedback loops and sharing. Theoretical projects are also examined as a way of developing skills, motivation, capacity and communication without direct economic and technical risk.
Blending all of these methods, a general arc in the first years of application has been consciously deployed. The participants have been introduced firstly (through all methods) to the highly-developed, nurturing and reassuring context of western Austria; in year two, a sustained encounter was developed with the more problematic context of Paris (privileged site visits to the Olympic Village and high-rise buildings); in year three, the participants will themselves begin acting as protagonists, sharing their own work in the context of international conferences. The process mirrors a journey from childhood through adolescence to maturity.
The global challenge addressed by this initiative is the extraordinarily high carbon impact created by emissive construction materials. The construction sector is responsible for up to 40% of emissions and resource extraction. As energy consumption efficiencies are increasingly taken into account in new buildings, reducing the embodied carbon in their materials becomes the primary challenge.
The process reflects the fact that -even within the context of a large corporation- the only real change is grass-roots, individual-led, engaged and holistic. The Academy aims to equip individually responsible leaders and agents across disciplinary boundaries with self-perpetuating enthusiasm, motivation and thirst for knowledge.
Local solutions require the development of bespoke practices and capacities, as the regulatory situation for wood in Denmark is unclear, and expectations for sustainability are high from an idealistic political and investor class. The process will also seed the growth of local economic actors in production and fabrication (although the local supply of wood remains rather challenging, Denmark having sacrificed its forest centuries ago).
The scope of progress of the NCC Wood Academy has been designed as a multi-year curve for its first class of participants comprising approximately 40 transdisciplinary leaders. The general design has been to move from innocence to experience.
Initially there was a build-up of base material with lectures on first principles, followed by a three-day study tour to the Vorarlberg in Austria including building visits and structured encounters (lectures, seminars, debates, workshops) with a wide range of protagonists in the sector. The emphasis here was on creating reassurance and confidence: if they have verifiably succeeded, we can too, albeit in our own specific conditions.
The emphasis of year two has been a ramping-up of technical capacity and broad range of challenging examples involving some failure and difficulty. Paris has been the case-study for this, with many significant large-scale buildings and ensembles at various stages of construction. We were able to benefit from the insights of the protagonists of these projects in terms of public (political) and private (operational/development) spheres. The relative failures the projects present, or shorftalls in sustainability achievement, have sharpened ambition and critical capacity for the participants within NCC. A core group have spontaneously founded a wood working group meeting weekly to look at questions of feasibility, price and technique (including optimized hybrid structures).
Year three (leading beyond this application) is intended to look outwards to regulatory issues, developing networks and alliances within industry and government to overcome fossil fuel-friendly regulations, transferring knowledge, capacity and experience from the French regulatory, certification and testing authority (FCBA) to the Danish context. At the same time, central figures in the Academy will begin the processing of witnessing outwardly their process and achievements, speaking at global wood conferences during 2023.
GreenComp has been a template and an inspiration for the NCC Wood Academy process. In all humility, we feel that we have not added anything new beyond the 12 competences, which are crucial and compelling. It might be worthwhile to indicate the importance we have observed in making the competences work intensely in parallel: our ultimate deliverable may well be an exemplary fusion of these competences, producing a self-sustaining process led by critical inquiry, collaboration and a sense of personal and collective responsibility and possibility. Education, after all -in terms of etymology- does not involve filling empty vessels, but leading them through (edu-care in Latin), showing the way for continual self-realised achievement.
