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May 22, 2024
153 - Fire Safety Engineer of the Future is a Great Communicator
A few weeks ago in Copenhagen, stepping onto the stage to open the SFPE Fire Safety Conference and Expo on Performance-Based Design, I took a bit of a gamble. I was invited to give an opening keynote, but instead of talking about my fire science and engineering, I've chosen to confront an often-overlooked cornerstone of our profession: communication. If you follow the podcast, it is not something new to you. I brought up this case multiple times - Fire safety is not just about the technical mastery of fire dynamics and code compliance – we, as engineers, need to be as adept with our communications so that our solutions are put into practice.
In this episode, I'm giving my best attempt to recreate my I share the insights from my keynote, focusing on articulating complex fire safety strategies across diverse competencies and the crucial need for innovation in our communication methods. The art of communication within fire safety engineering is akin to translating an intricate language for a varied audience. From investors to fellow engineers in MEP and HVAC, ensuring each stakeholder not only grasps but values the information is key to effective implementation.
By popular request, I hope you enjoy this talk for all those who were not able to make it to the SFPE conference in Copenhagen. And those who were there, this perhaps serves as a good refresher of that event and perhaps a point to restart some of the most interesting discussions that happened there.
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Transcript
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Hello everybody, welcome to the Fire Science Show.
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A month ago, something really amazing happened to me.
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A truly bucket list item has been ticked off the list.
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I was invited to give an opening keynote at a major fire safety engineering conference.
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That was the SFPE Fire Safety Conference and Expo on Performance Based Design.
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Many of us refer to it as the big SFPE conference.
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It happens every few years at the different continent.
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The last time it was in Europe it happened in Warsaw.
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Actually, it was a fantastic event.
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Many years ago I was a simple master of science back then.
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I gave some presentations.
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I wouldn't think the next time the conference comes back to Europe I would be giving an opening keynote, but yet it happened and I appreciate SFP, I appreciate the organizing committee for giving me a chance to do that and I truly hope I did not fail you.
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But based on the response that was given after the talk, the response was fantastic and a lot of people enjoyed it.
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I was given a complete liberty on the subject of my talk.
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So I thought about all the scientific topics I could cover regarding fire safety engineering and scientific side of the fire safety.
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But I thought, yeah, I've given a lot of talks on science in SFP conferences, and I think a topic that I can truly speak from my experience based on the thing that I'm doing right now together with you is communication, and I found out that, yeah, perhaps a talk on communication could be something interesting for the broader fire safety engineering community present at the SFP conference in Copenhagen.
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Yeah, it worked quite well.
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The feedback was fantastic.
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A lot of people requested me to share the talk which I am doing right now.
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I'm just gonna give the keynote to you, using the fire science show as my vessel, and I'll try to convince you as well why the future fire safety engineer is a great communicator.
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So, yeah, let's spin the intro and let's try and do this.
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Welcome to the Firesize Show.
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My name is Wojciech Wigrzyński and I will be your host.
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This podcast is brought to you in collaboration with OFR Consultants.
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Ofr is the UK's leading fire risk consultancy.
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Its globally established team has developed a reputation for preeminent fire engineering expertise, with colleagues working across the world to help protect people, property and environment.
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Established in the UK in 2016 as a startup business of two highly experienced fire engineering consultants, the business has grown phenomenally in just seven years, with offices across the country in seven locations from Edinburgh to Bath and now employing more than a hundred professionals.
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Colleagues are on a mission to continually explore the challenges that fire creates for clients and society, applying the best research experience and diligence for effective, tailored fire safety solutions.
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In 2024, ofr will grow its team once more and is always keen to hear from industry professionals who would like to collaborate on fire safety futures.
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This year, get in touch at ofrconsultantscom.
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Okay, let's do this.
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I hope I'm a good communicator because I'm about to give you a slideshow without showing you a single slide.
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I actually have the copenhagen slides in front of my eyes and let's try to give you as close experience to the keynote speech as possible.
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So, yeah, let's do this.
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So the fire safety engineer of the future is a great communicator.
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As I said, I've chosen the topic of communication over multiple scientific topics that I could give a speech on, and I thought the first question that people will have in their minds when listening to the talk, to the opening of the talk, is is why, why this subject is is this truly the biggest challenge we have within the fire safety engineering?
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Is this really something that requires a keynote, that requires a highlight?
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This is really something we need to talk, and you must understand that it happened in a very particular moment, because just the day before there was this massive fire of a historical building in the middle of Copenhagen where we were all located.
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It was just a few hundred meters off the conference, so definitely the minds of fire safety engineers in the place were in a little different place than communication.
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So the first question is is communication really the biggest struggle in fire safety engineering?
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And yeah, of course it's not.
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Of course it's not the number one issue we do have in fire safety engineering.
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I've raised a list of things that I think are biggest challenges or bigger challenges.
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Definitely competency.
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If you've listened in any way to danger did hacketh of what?
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What Jose Toledo had to say after Grenfell, if you've listened to my episode with Michael Woodrow, for example, competency is something that we perhaps really struggle in fire safety engineering and something that we need to have established and forward.
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Next thing I've raised is innovation.
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Innovation and it connects with sustainability.
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Another thing on my list.
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Those two things are the big drivers in the built environment that require sudden, quick change in how fire safety engineering is performed.
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We have to adopt to complete new array of challenges that were never met, that we've never faced, and we need to find a fire safety way to deal with them, and usually most of the solutions that are innovative and sustainable for some reason burn down.
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They are usually quite dangerous from the fire safety engineering perspective.
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So, yeah, that's a big challenge.
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I definitely see a struggle with funding fire safety engineering, both in terms of funding the research in fire safety engineering and fire safety science itself, but also the endless struggle for funding fire safety science itself, but also the endless struggle for funding fire safety features of the buildings.
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It's a matter of cost optimization right now how what we put into our buildings and how we deliver fire safety in them.
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And, yeah, this, this is a serious challenge.
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How do we provide fire safety to population at large with the limited amount of resources that are available to us?
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And because the resources are available in a scarce amount, we need to figure out what solutions give us the biggest bang for a buck spent on fire safety.
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That's a true challenge.
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I've also perhaps have mentioned that architects are a problem.
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Actually, that was a little joke for my friend, paolo Ramos, who is a performance-based design fire safety engineer and architect.
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So, yeah, a little pun If you ever attended any talk of my own.
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I like to have them lighten with some jokes inside the next after architects.
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The next problem I seen was legislation.
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We live in completely different law orders in different parts of the world.
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The struggles are very similar, the challenges are very similar, the law framework is usually very different and we need to find solutions that will work in the framework we are.
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I've once said in the past that fire safety engineering is a skill to adopt global knowledge on fire safety into your local challenge, and I stay by that.
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And lastly, the uncertain future.
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What will happen in the future?
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I have no idea.
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We haven't seen facades coming.
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Okay, some of us did, and I appreciate those people, but at large we were not aware that perhaps the facades are as big a problem as they are.
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We have a certain future.
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We don't know which of the subjects that we're touching today, which of the solutions of the modern world, will become a fire safety problems of the future.
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If we did, we would be already looking for solutions.
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Of course, some of us are working on novel solutions for novel problems, but do we know everything For sure not, and one day we will need to find solutions for problems we don't even know they exist yet.
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That's a true challenge of Fisaf engineering of the future.
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So yeah, that's quite a list of pending challenges.
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Where's the communication in that?
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And here I raise the point that communication is a critical component of solving all of these challenges that arise with Fisafed Engineering.
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You want to solve competency.
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We need better education and we need continuous professional development.
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We need to share knowledge between people who know and people who might need knowledge, like what I'm doing here.
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That's the mission of the podcast to share knowledge, fire safety engineers.
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We need that if we want competency.
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We truly need that.
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Of course, education is another subject.
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That's a little bit more organized communication and of course, we need great education.
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But the people when they leave their school, they they are not yet the fire safety engineers that design buildings.
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They need, need experience and while gaining that experience, communication is critical.
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Good communication is critical in establishing the competencies in their design.
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If you think about innovation, sustainability, how can we solve that?
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We need to communicate with the people who innovate, with the people who design the sustainability features of our buildings.
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We need to participate, we need to be present at the table and not just be there.
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We need to listen.
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We need to listen, aggregate information that's given to us from those people, understand their position, their needs, their goals, then process those needs and present them a solution that not only works in a fire safe way but also does not underpin their goals and their objectives.
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Only in this way you can have a fire safe innovation.
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Only in this way you can have a sustainable future, with fire safe being a part of the equation.
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Because if we do what many people do, we just ban or we just forbid, or we turn their objectives upside down.
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The fire safety engineering is not a part of the solution.
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Back then, everyone works around it.
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Everyone works to get rid of this nuisance and, yeah, if we want to truly be a part of the solutions, we need to communicate better.
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If you think about funding, well, to get funding, you need to build a support for your ideas.
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You need the funding for your research grant.
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You need to give a reasonable explanation of why this research is important.
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That's communication.
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You need to get funding for a specific fire safety solution in your building.
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Yeah, sure, you need to design it, but then you need to communicate why this particular feature over the others, why it makes sense to fund this particular aspect of fire safety.
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That is communication.
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If we talk about legislation, how do you get good legislators?
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You need to educate them Again.
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Communications you need to teach them on the projects that are happening in your area.
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You need to show them the modern fire safety solutions and explain them why these solutions are better than other ones, and that's how you get a good legislation in your country.
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It won't happen randomly, and if people start taking clauses of codes from all over the world to clamp them into one megacode of your country, you're not going to have a great time as a fire safety engineer.
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You need to educate and to educate them Again.
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Communicate and uncertain future well, here, my friends, is where we need to communicate with each other.
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When someone sees something new coming our way that no one else does, we need to communicate.
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We need to sit down and figure it out together.
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It's not going to be solved by a single person.
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We need to talk among fire safety engineers and if we do that, then the uncertain future is lesser of a problem, because I'm sure in a world where we communicate between each other, we will be able to solve a lot of things that are coming our way.
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So let's say that's the end of the part one of my keynote, the rationale behind giving this talk, and I think I've built a compelling case of why communication is important.
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Now, in the next part of my keynote, I gave hopefully as well compelling evidence why communication in fire safety engineering is so difficult, and for this I've built a very visual example of rulers and on those rulers I've marked the level of competency of different stakeholders.
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So first I've put a ruler and very high on the level of competency I've placed you, the fire safety engineer.
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What I mean by this analogy is that, yes, we are a competent group of people.
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I would love to believe that we are a competent group of people who can solve fire safety issues and if you think about fire safety challenges, we are the people who are capable of solving that.
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In our everyday work we meet other fire safety engineers, sometimes better than us, sometimes less experienced than us, but in essence we meet other fire safety engineers, sometimes better than us, sometimes less experienced than us, but in essence we work with fire safety engineers and that's the easy part of the communication, because we are talking to someone who is pretty much on the same level of understanding fire safety challenges.
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It's very easy to convey fire safety strategy or a specific technical solution to another fire safety engineer.
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I don't say they will agree with our opinion.
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I'm not saying that we will all come up with the same solution.
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That's not the point.
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The point is it's easy to communicate about them and have a technical discussion about that, but it's not.
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The world would be beautiful if we only work with fire safety engineers, but I'm not sure if we would build a lot of buildings if the world was only designed by FSCs.
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So there are many, many other stakeholders.
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There are investors, and I would say investors are usually clueless.
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Unfortunately, they are usually on the bottom of the competency scale and there are two reasons for that.
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Or there are two groups of investors that I've met and both will be clueless.
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One group would be investors who are there with the money and they don't care.
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They just want the building be delivered and fire safety engineering is the nuisance.
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Just get rid of that.
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They don't care, just solve the issue and they have no technical understanding of the fire safety features of their buildings.
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And the other group of investors would be ones that are very into the process of building a building, the ones who have a really good technical understanding of the building, who are very involved in the process.
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But I also don't think this would be very competent in the world of fire safety engineering.
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Because if you try to understand the building, there are hundreds of objectives.
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There are so many things to understand from the sustainability perspective, from the acoustical perspective, from the even.
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You know how pretty is the building.
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That's an important feature of buildings.
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There are so, so many objectives.
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How pretty is the building?
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That's an important feature of buildings.
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There are so, so many objectives.
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And unfortunately fire safety engineering is not on the first page of the sexy objectives and definitely is in among the top three of the annoying objectives.
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So usually they would rely on people to solve their issues for them, and I very rarely meet investors who would be very competent in fire safety engineering, even though if they are very involved in the design process and they're very involved in their investment in other way.
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Then another group of people, authorities having jurisdiction.
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In some countries this would be firefighters.
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In some countries it would be some local authorities.
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In other countries perhaps it's a third party that's given the right to to act as an authority, and it will change by country to country.
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In some countries you will be very lucky to have other fire safety engineers acting as your authorities having jurisdiction, and in that case the communication is easy because you can communicate on the same level as you are.
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In some countries you would have authorities that are clueless and just like with the investor, communicating with someone who has very little comprehension of the fire safety features of the building.
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Communicating the fire safety strategy and your solutions is very difficult because you need to present them in an easy and approachable way, without dumbing them down because you're not going to get your point across.
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But then again you have to convey them in a way that a person without a good technical knowledge can understand.
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That's a true challenge, that's a true struggle of communicating fire safety across different competency level.
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And you may also have authorities who are above the scale you know on the competency level, at least from their own view.
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You may have authorities that don't care what you say to them.
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They have their divine law to define what's good and bad in their jurisdiction and no matter how great communicator you are, you're not going to be able to convey your message.
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Not saying that you should not try, and educating them is a good strategy to get your projects approved, but it definitely gives another challenge to communication.
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And then you have a whole bunch of people in other branches of engineering.
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You know MEPs, hvac architects, other engineering branches, which will be a different level of competencies all over the scale.
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Technically it depends on how many projects with fire safety engineering in them they've done in their lives.
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That's pretty much an experience-based factor because they would rarely be formally educated as fire safety engineers.
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So depending on how much fire safety they've seen in their lives, that's how competent they will be.
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And it means you have to convey your message across all the levels of competency out there.
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So what I've built with this graphical illustration of competency is that you are a fire safety engineer who has a great comprehension of fire safety engineering and on the other side you will have people ranging from absolutely clueless to people who are absolutely sure they know more than you do.
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But those rulers of competency or those levels of competency also work in a little different way when you change the area of competency.
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If you think about mechanical design, I don't think fire safety engineers at large would be very competent in choosing the engines for ventilators and choosing the size of the cables for the ventilators, for example.
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I don't think fire safety engineers would be very competent in choosing HVAC solutions for the building based on their expertise in fire safety engineering their expertise in fire safety engineering.
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You see, when the area of competency changes, it's us who go down the competency ladder and suddenly we are the less competent than others, and it also requires a specific set of skills in communicating.
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You need to understand the level of comprehension of the technical subject that you have.
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You need to extract the information from the other side that you are able to process.
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It's not about nod.
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You need to extract the information from the other side that you are able to process.
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It's not about nodding your heads to all the information given to you, but you truly need to understand what's happening in the building, what's happening with the particular technical subject being discussed at the table, and you need to process that information and give a fire safety solution to the information you have received.
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That takes a hell lot of communication skills.
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If we are unable to communicate across all of those levels of technical competencies, we'll not be able to design fire safety solutions for our buildings because they will simply not work.
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And another challenging aspect of this competency and communication overlay is that priorities for different branches may be in a place that you don't really recognize as a priority for yourself is in dimensioning fans and the shafts and electrical cables.
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Perhaps architects are really struggling with balancing the sustainability objectives of their buildings.
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Perhaps the fire brigades really care only about the external water supply.
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Authorities may care about city planning, not just your one particular building.
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The investor may think about selling the building in five years and thinking about, you know some sort of lifecycle analysis and how they will be able to market the building on the market.
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And structural engineer could care for, for example, about the width of the building.
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That could be a very powerful objective for the design and that makes fire safety engineering very complicated.
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You have to be aware that there are overlaps and competencies, overlap of goals and you absolutely need to be able to communicate across them.
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So that was my case on why communication is actually quite difficult, why we sometimes struggle as fire safety engineers communicating with other branches and being a part of the building design.
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It's not easy to communicate at different levels, but it's a skill set that we all need.
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To get my next part of the next few slides in my presentation.
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The next case that I've brought.
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It was an example, a visual example, of what happens when the communication fails, and for this I've brought an example of a smoke, hot smoke test carried out in the shopping mall, a case that actually happened to us and it's a real building, real project, real problem.
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We were performing hot smoke tests within a compartment that's connected to a mall.
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So the idea for the system was pretty straightforward you extract the smoke from the compartment into the mall and in the mall you have a mechanical smoke extraction and you basically extract the smoke a very typical solution you would find in any shopping mall.
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Now the mall itself was compartmentalized into smoke reservoirs with automatic smoke curtains again a very typical solution.
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So so far it's a normal project that you would have very generic solution, I would say, for fire safety engineering.
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So where's the failure?
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Where's the problem with communication in this generic design?
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When we were performing the hot smoke test, obviously there was a lot of smoke produced and the smoke was entering the mall where it was extracted.
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Obviously there was a lot of smoke produced and the smoke was entering the mall where it was extracted, but between the gaps along the smoke curtains, small amounts of smoke have leaked into the neighboring smoke compartment and that, again, this is something you can expect.
00:22:40.237 --> 00:22:44.259
Those smoke control zones are not leak-proof.
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It's not that any smoke cannot escape them.
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For me it was just yeah, that's how it works.
00:22:50.346 --> 00:23:01.507
Now the issue was that as soon as that smoke reached the smoke detector in the next zone, the system has triggered in that zone and it actually switched off in the main zone where we had the fire.
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The operation of the system moved into this new zone, that neighboring our zone, and then a few minutes later, when the smoke moved into another zone, it triggered another zone and suddenly the system works in a completely remote part of the building, not where the fire is.
00:23:18.592 --> 00:23:21.133
So, yeah, that's a massive failure.
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That's a failure that could be actually life-threatening in some cases.
00:23:25.876 --> 00:23:29.295
So why it is a communication failure?
00:23:30.366 --> 00:23:37.153
It's because the automation designer of the building they've been told here's the building is separated into smoke compartments.
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They have not understood what the smoke compartment is.
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They had assumed that the smoke is sealed within the smoke compartment and, come on, it's a reasonable thing to assume.
00:23:47.673 --> 00:23:52.256
Actually, they've never been told that they have to block the systems or the stearings.
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Perhaps they were told, but they were not explained the importance and urgency of this decision.
00:23:59.615 --> 00:24:04.428
So I truly believe this is a communication failure and a failure that could perhaps be very dangerous.
00:24:04.428 --> 00:24:13.728
And if we think about where this communication failure comes from, it perhaps is because of not recognizing that you need to talk with someone at a different competency level.
00:24:13.728 --> 00:24:26.958
Perhaps it's not listening to the objectives of the automation, perhaps it's failure in oversight of the work done by that branch, and definitely all of those failures are related to communication.
00:24:26.958 --> 00:24:33.118
So here I bring a very strong case that bad communication can lead to a very bad outcome.
00:24:33.118 --> 00:24:35.884
And in fact it was not an isolated problem.
00:24:35.884 --> 00:24:39.901
We've observed the same thing happen in numerous buildings.
00:24:39.901 --> 00:24:44.516
We've seen that in metro station, we've seen that in stadia, numerous buildings.
00:24:44.516 --> 00:24:46.099
We've seen that in metro station, we've seen that in stadia.
00:24:46.119 --> 00:24:50.876
It's a big challenge to work with fire automation where people are not completely aware how, for example, smoke control works.
00:24:50.876 --> 00:25:11.228
We really need to communicate better to avoid issues like that on buildings, and indeed that's perhaps one of the main points of my talk Every single time we engage with other stakeholders in the building process, we communicate Every conference, talk, presentation, call, meeting, even an email.
00:25:11.228 --> 00:25:13.198
When you need to explain something to someone.
00:25:13.198 --> 00:25:21.027
That's communication, and you have to be good at that communication to make sure that the effects of that communication are correct.
00:25:21.027 --> 00:25:37.863
Every activity in which you engage with someone and from which a collective experience can be gained, this is communication, and we need to be good at this communication so we build a collective base of experiences that make every next project easier.
00:25:37.863 --> 00:25:42.165
This is how we develop a better fire safety engineering at large.
00:25:42.974 --> 00:25:53.086
And now, in the let's say, final part of my talk, I wanted to share some good and perhaps bad examples of communication in fire safety engineering and fire safety science.
00:25:53.086 --> 00:26:03.901
So I start with an example of ACET-RCET criterion Available safe evacuation time should be larger than the required safe evacuation time.
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I think this is genuinely a brilliant communication because it explains an idea.
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It is something that a fire safety engineer can understand, but it's also something a layman can understand.
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The building needs to give you more time to escape than you need so you are not endangered by the fire.
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Of course, there are weaknesses in ACID-ARCID and I've criticized it in the past.
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I know the Vito's paper and, yeah, it's a part of scientific discussion, for sure, but the concept itself, how it is presented ACID must be larger than ARCID.
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