250 - Communicating fire science with construction professionals

250 Episodes And The Communication Gap

Hello, everybody. For the 250th time, I would like to welcome you to the Fire Science Show. What a journey it is. If I've learned anything from those 250 episodes, most of which were interviews, it is that communication in fire science is quite important thing, in fire science and engineering. Uh, when I started this podcast, you know, uh, it's not that, uh, communication was absent on my table. it didn't happen by accident. Many people told me that they enjoy my presentations and talks in the conferences. I had ability to have a lot of friends and, uh, chat with them a lot in various, uh, settings and had tremendous joy out of that and eventually figured out a way how those conversations could be conserved and shared with a broader audience, serving, uh, many people. So it's not that I've started with communication equals zero, but I must say I've learned a lot through experiencing those 250 episodes. And, I've actually made, uh, communication in fire science something that I'm perhaps known f-from today. I've been invited with my communication keynotes to many places. I've traveled across the world with that keynote. I've presented it to big events, and I've presented it at various companies' CPD events. I'm very happy to do that as well. And, just last week, I took this to a whole new level because we've been talking about the need for better communication for a long time, but we never discussed how we can communicate better. Last week, uh, together with Felix Fisner, we've organized a webinar, online workshop through the IFSS Research Subcommittee, which we are co-chairing with, uh, Felix and Professor Jennifer Wen. And, we've invited some guests, and we've put up a workshop to discuss communicating fire science with different groups of stakeholders, because there's different group of stakeholders. There's-- each of them requires a different approach. And, uh, I've enjoyed thoroughly, and I thought that today I will expand on what I had to say in the workshop. My fellow guests in that workshop were, um, Brigitte Messerschmidt from NFPA, Professor Guillermo Rein from Imperial College London, and, Steve Kerber from UL Research Institute. So I had a really trailblazer set of guests in there, and I promise you to bring them to the podcast to also explore their experiences in communicating fire science with general public, with legislators, with firefighters. Today, we'll focus on communicating fire science with construction professionals, because I'm a consultant. I work with construction professionals. I'm a part of built environment industry, whatever you like to call it, whatever broad you like to call it. And, uh, I've learned that communication in here is critical. And I've talked about this before in the podcast, but in this particular episode, I would like to jump deeper into the main message, which is we need to communicate with construction professionals better. And this is achieved through understanding three things. One is the context, the objectives of the building. The two is timeliness of our communication. And three is the way we communicate. And all three things will be covered in this podcast episode. that's a long introduction. Let's spin the intro and jump into the episode. The Fire Science Show podcast is brought to you in partnership with OFR Consultants. OFR is the UK's leading independent multi-award winning fire engineering consultancy with a reputation for delivering innovative safety driven solutions. we've been on this journey together for three years so far, and here it begins the fourth year of collaboration between the Fire Science Show and the OFR. So far, we've brought you more than 150 episodes, Which translate into nearly 150 hours of educational content available, free, accessible, all over the planet without any paywalls advertisement or hidden agendas. This makes me very proud and I am super thankful to OFR for this long lasting partnership. I'm extremely happy that we've just started the year four, and I hope there will be many years after that to come So big thanks, OFR for your support to the Fire Science show and the support to the fire safety community at large that we can deliver together. And for you, the listener, if you would like to learn more or perhaps even become a part of OR, they always have opportunities awaiting. Check their website@orconsultants.com And now let's head back to the episode. So actually, I'll start this episode by saying this is exactly why I've started the podcast. I mean, we just had a very fruitful workshop last week. We had 100 participants to whom I'm very thankful that they've spent their time with us. Uh, we've recorded the webinar, and as soon as I figure out how to get the stuff down from Zoom, uh, process it a little bit, we'll try to upload it somewhere in the Internet so the future generations can enjoy this first IFSS workshop on communicating fire science. But you know, that's it. We- we've done the workshop. We've had a great time. We've shared our thoughts. We've shared our interesting views on, uh, this very important topic. Each of us had a very new presentation on the subject of matter because we've never presented in this way It was genuinely nice. But, uh, that's it. We- we've done it. Uh, it's, it's done. If you have not been there, you're not gonna have a chance to be there. You maybe experience it when it's offline, but, but that's it. And in the podcast, you know, instead of having twenty minutes, uh, for the workshop, uh, presentation, which I've s- imposed on myself, I was organizing it, but I had to impose a limit. Instead of just twenty minutes and a PowerPoint, I have, uh, everything I want, and I can speak my mind freely. And this environment is really opening the discussion, giving it depth, giving it breadth, not chasing anything, you know, being able to live through our experiences as fire scientists and engineers and, share that with you, and you appear to like to listen, uh, to those things. So I just want to say I appreciate you being here with me for two hundred and fifty episodes, and, uh, this is exactly why we've needed a podcast in the world of fire science, even if from the marketing point of view, it does not make sense. It did not make sense back then. It does not make sense right now to start a podcast in the fire science space, yet here we are, and we're having a blast. Now, on the communication skills, as I said, I've kind of- try to build my name around the communication in fire science. I think I was doing this subconsciously for a long time, but the first time I formalized it truly was when I have received an invite, uh, to, to keynote SFP Performance-Based Design Conference in Copenhagen. That's a pretty big invitation, to be honest, you know? And It has been less than 10 years from my first ever SFP conference, which actually was in Warsaw. Uh, no, actually, I've been in Copenhagen SFP 2015. That was my first SFP event, so it started in Copenhagen as well. And, it has not been 10 years since my first visit to, to keynote, which I'm truly, truly thankful. A That's a huge token of recognition by the SFP. But, regardless, when I was invited to keynote the, uh, Copenhagen PBD conference, I was given free choice, whatever you like to talk about. And I was thinking perhaps visibility, perhaps wind, perhaps use of modeling, computational methods, you know, all the things that I would assign myself as a scientist. And then after a long, long time of contemplating it, I figured out that perhaps the most unique thing that I can give and share with people is this view on communication, because it's not awfully a lot of us who will be thinking a- and, you know, spending time looking into that, and, uh, I actually had. So yeah, that's, uh, how my formalization as a communicator happened, and I'm very, very happy with it. Now, why do I think we, we need to up our game as communicators in the build industry, communicating better with construction professionals? Because misunderstandings Misinterpreting fire strategy, you know, doing something awfully wrong can be a source of tremendous harm on the building. If you have a massive fire in the building and 50 people die in that fire, it's usually not because you've lost one minute of fire resistance or your stairs were not wide enough by one inch, or you've missed one meter of horizontal travel path. Now, I mean, those are important. They're-- those are especially important for compliance, and that's a part of the world we live in. But it's not those little things that cause catastrophes. The real issues that cause catastrophes are problems with fire strategies being, being wrong or misinterpreted. it's things that are written in the fire strategy but are never executed on the building because no one understood them. We had those cases in Poland. I've talked about them in the past. We had a very common case where, uh, there's a misunderstanding of what the smoke zone is or smoke compartment is. Many, uh, automation engineers think that it's something that envelopes smoke completely or is kind of smoke-tight, while we expect that it's just, you know, a region of the building where most of the smoke will be, and the smoke can travel out of it. And, uh, that creates some issues with scenarios not being locked. And yeah, we-we've seen that in many build... I've seen that probably in, like, 20 buildings. And each time, this is something at severity, I would say, is at level of life-threatening. And this gives me chills because it's a simple miscommunication, and a lot of people put a lot of effort to do fire strategy, to do design of the systems, and yet we end up with a life-threatening condition in the building, all because of miscommunication. So we really, really need to up our game and be better communicators. And I'm also, you know, of the belief that, it's our obligation to be better communicators. And I'm also of the belief that we are not the most important people in the building or in the build industry. Uh, it's not that I like to be masochist. It's not that I like to, I don't know, punish myself or give pain to myself or belittle myself. That's, that's not the point. I mean, we're very important, and fire safety is definitely a critical objective for everything. But It's not the sole reason the building is there. It's not the sole reason for a building to be built. There's a hundred reasons for buildings to be built. And we need to recognize that. We cannot replace the other reasons with fire safety. Fire safety can be achieved in a hundred different ways. Administratively, scenarios, systems, perhaps investigating fire strategy at a higher level. Perhaps this annoying little detail that makes some of the other professionals crazy is not even needed in your building. Maybe you're fighting for redundancy to redundancy. That often happens. We need to recognize that because there are times where fire safety is critical and you have to fight for it like you're fighting for life and you cannot let go. And you have to get that one thing done because you know if you don't, it can cause a loss of life. But if you're fighting for every single detail in every single project like that and you are just, you know, a waterfall against which no one else can swim. As I say, we don't get invited to parties, guys. We need to find a way to work with other professionals and not be the opponent on the design table. And I truly believe that if we learn how to do that, we can develop fire strategies and we can develop fire safety of buildings that actually gets implemented, that actually gets executed, that gets executed well, that works on a building, that works in 10 years into the building, you know. That's the point, not to have just, you know, a beautiful document written off and be done with it. You want something that lives through the life of building and is there. And to be there, it has to be doable. It has to work with all other objectives of the building. And that was the first item on my talk at the IFSS workshop, that there are multiple objectives of the building. And I'm not sure if we recognize them enough. I'm not sure how it looks like in other fire safety engineering courses around the world. In Poland, when I was doing my master's, we've learned A little bit about the buildings? I mean, we, we had construction as a subject. We had structural engineering as a subject. There were m- multiple cases, water supply, ventilation that also ties to buildings. But we didn't really have a coherent building design as a subject. I've only learned that when I started work at ITB and I've started, you know, going to construction yards to see buildings being built and commission those buildings with hot smoke testing. I spent countless hours on those construction yards looking at problems people face and working together with those people to solve those issues. Uh, and I, I think there's-- that's where-- And also, like, countless, countless visits, hours, tens, hundreds, thousands of hours with architects, with other designers across the projects. That- that's where I've learned live. That's where I've learned how complicated is a building, especially if you're building a landmark building or a, a, a skyscraper or timber building. There's so many layers of complexity. And on those complexities I would like to start. So, I think first of all, we need to recognize that the building is built within some constraints that come from outside, like kind of external constraints. First of all, you're gonna have your law framework, judicial framework, whatever it is, you know, a building code, uh, whatever dictates you more or less how the building is supposed to look like. If your code says that it's full PBD, great. If it's full prescriptive, well, at least you have a starting point to work with. But, uh, there's a general framework which defines how the building works, and if you miss that framework, you're not able to develop fire safety for that building at all. No matter how beautiful my fire science is, if it's illegal in my regulation, uh, that's not gonna work. Then I would say a huge constraint on sustainability and energy efficiency. I put them so high on the ranking because they are the drivers of many of new things that we build into buildings, you know? Buildings look very similar for decades. The innovation was not that rapid in the building environment. It was there, but it was not as crazy as it is now. And if anything is the driver of innovation right now in the building industry, it's sustainability and energy efficiency. These are the items that bring photovoltaics in our buildings, that build battery energy storage systems to our buildings, that increase the thermal insulation of our buildings, that require us to use new facade systems, new types of windows, new types of doors, improve our HVC, install heat pumps, et cetera. Those are the drivers, and you need to recognize those drivers exist and broadly understand what they mean. Uh, then there's also another aspect of that, which is certification. Uh, many buildings, especially high-rise offices and larger towers, would go through specific certification schemes like LEED or BREAM. those define a score for a building or class of a building, and this class will largely determine the value, the perceived value of that building. Why it's important to understand them? Because- Those are usually index-based or you get points for specific items. And you need to understand why architects put, for example, openable windows in a skyscraper. They did because they want natural ventilation in the building and want to have additional points on, on a certificate perhaps. So you need to be able to recognize there's additional external driver to your legal framework. Um, there's local planning which will also dictate some aspects of your building which is important. Uh, this makes life of a traveling fire engineer very difficult because the local regulations will be different in local pla- in different places, so you have to be aware there is this local flavor to every engineering. There's a business model that's very important. It's very, very different when you build a building that is supposed to be sold as soon as it's built or perhaps you're just, you know, working on a design that's gonna be sold with a plot of land and the permit to build. We've worked on those. and it's very different if you build a building for, let's say, a European agency that's gonna live in that building for 50 years or 100 years. It's very different when you build, uh, for public. You build a tunnel which lifetime is perhaps infinite as long as technical civilization exists, as long we will like to maintain our tunnels. So this business mo- business model is critical to many choices. And there's aesthetics as my final external constraint. Aesthetics is a very important objective. Even in the ancient times, the ancient, uh, architect Vitruvius in his foundational treatise "De architectura," which is 10 books on architecture, claims three principles to a building, which is its strength, its utility, and its beauty. And, uh, yeah, nothing has changed in that regard. Beauty is still important in building design, and it's a driver of many choices. So many choices are driven by just aesthetics objective, and we can- cannot pretend it does not exist. You have to understand that it is an objective, and it's a very valid objective, and a lot of choices may be based just on this objective. Now, while we have those external constraints, they're not the only things that, that remind how a building looks, uh, every building is built within similar external constraints, but yet they are so different because of the design team. And on the design team, everyone has their own objectives. Everyone's busy. Everyone has a hard life. Everyone has a deadline which they're about to miss. Everyone's stressed. They have figured out their own stuff, and then there are you, fire safety engineer, telling them bad stuff all the time. We need to understand what others are doing in the building process, and if we understand that, only then we can help them. So I would say five groups, uh, that I work with usually, one would be master architects or as- architects in general. Those-- For me, those are the people who work around those external constraints and translate it into this vision of a building that we're designing together. They manage the client and the client's expectation. They usually handle coordination of the building. If there's certification, they're gonna handle it. Now, usually within this group, I also have people who are maintaining the budgets, the timelines, et cetera. And on top of that, they're also shaping the building overall, so, uh, the critical stakeholder in the process, which has a lot on their table and a lot more than just, you know, drawing and shaping the building. Oh, boy, a lot more. Then we have a very important structural team, which is critical for any building's success, of course. But, uh, outside of, uh- Creating structure that simply does not collapse, they have to take into account a lot of factors like weight optimization. Sometimes that's a critical objective, and sometimes it takes a lot of effort to, to get it done. They have to take account earthquake or mining damage. In Poland, we don't have earthquakes, but we have mining damage. That's a hell of a objective to achieve. Vibration, corrosion, wear, all the little things that may fiddle with your structure for the next 50 or 100 years. Um, wind load, that's an important one and, uh, quite the challenging. Snow load, if you are in my climate zone, welcome to the world of snow load, also a fun objective to maintain. And all the redundancies you need for a structure. So yeah, those guys have a lot on their table as well. Everyone has a lot on their table. Next group would be my mechanical, uh, MEPs, HVAC engineers, people who turn the, the structure into a building, and they do that by technical solutions, fitting building with different sets of devices and, systems in it, which have to be chosen, which have to be applicable, which have to be dimensioned. You have to provide them power supply. You have to provide them backup. You need to provide them water. You need to provide them gas if they need gas. You need to provide control and management over all those devices, and if you're building a bigger building, you probably want to have integration as well, or perhaps some smart building features. Hey, your residents want an app for their smartphone so they can make, the window tinted or something. You have to design that. You want, uh, systems in your building? Well, that, that's great, but they need to have emergency mode and normal operation mode, and both should work perfectly, and we need to be able to switch from one to another. That's a hell of work. Even the dimensioning the system, designing the maze of technical solutions in the building, that is a hell of a work which is very, very hard and, and having fire safety done in this hard environment is especially difficult Next group would be, uh, owners or investors. I always say you don't need a di- diploma or you don't need a certificate to have a lot of money. Perhaps you should, but it's not required. You can have a lot of money and know nothing, especially nothing about how the building works or how fire safety works. You have an idea of a building you want to be built and, yeah, you may work with the design team or you may work against the design team. I've seen both. Um, the investor will perhaps care about life cycle, LCA, uh, of the building. They may care about profit, which can be a direct profit, it can be long-term profit. If they're going long-term, they perhaps care about management, refurbishment, what has to be changed after 20 years, what has to be changed after 50 years. That's very important. They may also be looking at your building as a key piece in their portfolio, which m- means that the project suddenly gets to a whole new level of difficulty for everyone else. So they bring a lot of very important objectives on the table, and in the end, they are the ones to... they pay the bill. So, either you satisfy them or it's not gonna work at all. And the final stakeholder, fire brigade, uh, or AGJs, uh, different in different legislations, I would say they always care about fire safety, but for them, the fire safety may be expressed through code compliance. Maybe they don't want to deal with your PBD. Who knows? Maybe they don't like it, they don't understand it, or never been trained to understand CFD simulations. That, that's fair play and, uh, we have to adapt to them, either educate or find another way. Maybe for them, uh, code compliance is one thing, but, uh, they really care about operational site, firefighting water, access to the site, communications, training on site, who to call when the fire happens, where is the security office, where is the map of the building, et cetera. Those could be critical things for the fire brigade, and not necessarily your, uh, width of the evacuation path or horizontal travel distance, which we like to stress a lot around. So as you see, for the last 10 minutes, I was going through different objectives, and none of them was fire safety. We had 100 people in the plot, and we had 100 objectives in the plot. This is how a building works. It's a complicated ecosystem. It's such a complicated system that in it, we're not able to consider fire safety to be just a single objective, because it's not a single objective. It's not objective as valid as aesthetics or, I don't know, weight optimization or earthquake It's I would say fire safety is a part of every other objective. It's not a standalone thing that's next to everything else which could be prioritized lower or higher. No, it's an item that is a part of every single objective on the table, and it has to be delivered as such. It has to be delivered in a way that it works with every other objective. Only then it will get implemented. Only then it will get executed. Only then it will be maintained in the lifetime of the building, and 30 years from now, it will still be there. If it's not a part of every other objective, it's not gonna work. So I, I, you know, highly, highly call for a shift of thinking instead of delivering fire safety as a standalone thing. I love to think about turning everything else into a fire safe thing, you know? Someone does dimensioning of a system, choice of the system, great. Let's help them choose a system that's gonna be fire safe. Someone tries to optimize weight of the building, hey, let's think about how to provide that structure with sufficient fire resistance that works with the fire strategy and find a way to cut weight but not cut on, on the structural fire safety. That's the way we should work, and, uh, I know a lot of us work like this. It's a matter of experience, a matter of, of ability. I would just like to-- that this way of thinking to be, you know, the main way of thinking. Now, while we have all those objectives and we want to provide them, the second key component to delivering fire safe building is to understand the life cycle of the building. I put a claim that for these elements that we've just discussed to be fire safe, for those objectives to be maintained, a successful fire safety communication, fire safety engineering communication has to be aligned with the stage at which it is applied. And, um, I also claim that simple concepts or, or simple ideas that encapsulate the fire safety idea of a building are more difficult to explain than a highly technical detail, which sounds more difficult, but in the end is, is usually easier to convey. And I don't like when simple core ideas are replaced with too much technical detail too early. So think about the life cycle of a building. It starts with an idea. It starts with a concept. It's in someone's head, and eventually it reaches the, the earth and, and starts being designed. That design might have a lot of stages. We may start with something very basic, just idea. It turns into something that's necessary for building permit. In Poland, that's quite a detailed project already, but still a general project. It gets turned into technical design, execution state design. At this stage, it's very detailed. Every single thing is known about the building. Then voila, building is built. It's commissioned, handover, opened, and that's definitely not the end because from that point, we have to manage it. We have to maintain it. And as it reaches end of its life, well, there are options. It can get demolished. It can get refurbished. It can get redesigned and get a new life. A lot can happen from that point, and here we're again starting with an idea. Now, with this life cycle of a building, what I like to say is that at the early stage And from the early stage till the later stage, from the idea till the end of a life of a building, the most important thing are high-level objectives, fundamentals, the drivers of the strategy, the basics of how this building delivers the fire safety, the story of fire safety of the building. Not in extreme technical detail, in general concepts what we want this building to give to its occupants in case of a fire, what the building shall provide to them in case of a fire in that building. And this, this has to be a high level because it has to work with a high-level concept that is being provided. It's not yet space for technical details. Those show up as we progress the design, uh, in an interdisciplinary team where technical concepts are brought, where we check if we're adhering to codes, we're implementing prescriptive things. Here is space for our performance-based design, for our simulations, analysis, expertise. This is where the high-level objectives, which are still there, are turned into technical concepts. And then as we get towards the end of the design process and as we are in the execution stage, the building starts being built, here is the space of technical details. We have to give, uh, pristine, exact technical detailing so everything's executed. So, you know, the high-level objective would be compartmentation of the building to prevent fire spread between different parts of a building. The technical concept would be fire resistance of walls of, let's say, two hours. That's gonna secure that objective. And your technical detailing is, you know, the type of, uh, wall that you're building, the doors that you're building, the penetrations through that wall that you're making, the type of, screws that you will use to attach the dampers to the wall, you know, the intumescent parts that you have to put around pipes, et cetera. The little technical details which have to be named and known and cross-checked if they have been executed to achieve the technical concept of fire resistance, which achieves the high-level objective of compartmentation. It's necessary to be able to understand this hierarchy, because if you're going to a high-level meeting and someone asks you, "Why are we using such an expensive screws to fix those damn things to the wall?" You can say, "This is required that I demonstrate the technical concept of fire resistance of 60, 120 minutes that is necessary to achieve my high-level objective of compartmentation." here you go. It's necessary, but you have to understand that with some people you have to talk with language of high-level objectives and technical detailing that's very specific to the end of construction. I see it messed up too much. I see it mixed too much. I see those technical details being brought to limelight at the earliest meetings in the building design, and this is not helping anyone, and definitely not helping the building or its fire safety. So please keep the level of discussion appropriate for each stage of the building and be able to refer to the high-level objectives as they are your escape to explain your choices, you know? This is how you communicate well. People don't just need, you know, an answer what has to be done. They need to have understanding of why you are doing that, and if you can provide them with how and why, they are so much more likely to execute it correctly in the building. I'm all in for telling people why specific decisions have to be taken, and this also gives me opportunity, you know, to bring fire science into the construction yard. And my experience is people are usually fascinated with that, so that's great. Now, one last thing about the timeliness. While this progress on the building happens, there's also progress in science and engineering, which is very fast right now, and you have to be aware of that. Um, the high-level objectives, they are set in the early stage of the building, but as new technologies are implemented into the building, you probably have to revisit them. Do they still work? Are they still enough? Um, in terms of technology, perhaps, uh, some years ago you did not-- in the earliest days of design, you did not have access to specific control units that you have now, or maybe new generation of pressurization systems came out and you'd like to use them in the building. that's all valid and you have to follow the market. You have to understand the change to be able to always deliver the most, successful or the best applicable technology in your building and, uh, that's usually warrants the best outcomes. Also, you cannot jump into technologies blindly if you don't know if they comply with your technical concepts or high-level objectives. That's not the point to always have the newest ones in your building. But you have to stay up to date, not just on fire safety technologies, but also on the technologies used for all the objectives we have just discussed in the previous segment of this episode. So understanding the objectives well and understanding when different levels of, of technical reasoning of fire science should be brought in the building, that's already getting you far, far into the project. And now let's move to the third part of this, communication, uh, episode, which is what actually works or what's my idea on what works and what does not work in communicating fire safety engineering at a building design or at the constr- construction yard? So what's funny, usually when I reach this point on any of the conference talks, I run out of time. I think I have like 20 minutes here should be sufficient for this segment for once. So the concepts that are good and bad in communication. Let's start with the ones that work really well and the ones that I've already brought up multiple times, which are high-level concepts that we use in fire science. One such concepts is ASAT higher than RSAT, so the available safe egress time is larger than the required safe egress time. In simple words, the building needs to give you more time for escape than it takes the fire to harm you. Think about it for a while. How easy is that concept? Like, you could have a conversation with a five-year-old if they ask you, Why are you doing those, those different, uh, sprinklers or wh- why are you doing those things in the building?" I do them so you have enough time to escape of the building in fire. In fire, stuff is gonna get worse, and before it's bad enough, you've already escaped, so you saved your life. And this simple language is really reaching far. It's, it's really allows you to communicate at a very high level with a lot of things, and especially the technical details that have to be explained. this avenue of being able to, to, to show the strategy through a simple concept is, is extremely powerful. I hate when we turn ASAT, RSAT into a mathematical equation. I have five hundred eighty-four seconds of RSAT and five hundred eighty-five seconds of ASAT, therefore I am safe with one second margin. That's not the point. The point is you've designed building in such a way that given the reasonable growth of fire, you have sufficient time to escape. That's the point, not how many seconds you have to escape. That's, that's not the point. I think this is great way to communicate fire safety engineering concepts. And there are more of those, uh, fundamental high-level concepts. In EU Construction Product Regulation, CPR, we have those. In the case of fire, load-bearing capacity can be assumed to be maintained for a specific period of time. Second, the generation and spread of fire and smoke is limited. The third, the spread of fire to neighboring structures is limited. Fourth, occupants can leave the building or be rescued. Fifth, the safety of rescue teams is taken into consideration. Those are copied into multiple legal systems as the baseline, and those work. Those are really well-crafted messages that In one sentence, explain a whole, you know, idea behind so many technical choices we do in our building. And you can use them to explain your reasoning, to explain your choices, to explain your decisions. You can use them in the decision-making process. You can use them with other stakeholders to cross-check if objectives of other stakeholders are met in a way which makes those high-level concepts constrained and satisfied. I think those are absolutely great vessels of communication. Could those be improved? Perhaps yes. Are those complete? I guess no. I guess you could put much more in there. ACID-ASID for sure is not complete and there's a whole scientific discussion on where we could go. I would largely prefer risk-based method versus ACID-ASID. But still, in communication, I would use ACID-ASID as an example of what we want to achieve in the building. So yeah, we can argue whether those are perfect or not. But as vessels of communication, I think they are excellent. Now, what breaks that communication? First of all, too much fire science breaks the communication. Especially if fire science in terms of scientific papers is brought up into the project or if a project is written like a scientific paper. Scientific papers are great vessels of communication in the world of scientific papers. They look like they look because that's the expectation of how a scientific paper looks like. They are written in a very specific way and if you venture away from that way, you're going to have a bad time. And I know that because I had a lot of my papers rejected and a lot of time I have received comments that I am dumbing down the science. I am providing obvious comments. Like in general, if I write a paper in a nice, approachable way, in an easy way, something that everyone can enjoy and digest That paper is not going to do well in the world of papers. It's mostly going to be devastated in peer review. You get penalized for writing papers in an approachable way, which is a pity, which is a huge pity because they should be accessible. A paper should have a public general abstract or something that just explains those concepts in the paper in layman's terms. But they don't. They unfortunately don't. And today, scientific papers are not excellent in communication. They're great if you need to establish your position. For me, that's very helpful. If I'm arguing with someone, I tend to send them some paper of my own. And that helps me establishing my authority on the topic, being the expert in the topic that we are currently discussing. So that's cool. I also like to send to, you know, make a point or just provide some proof that I know what I'm talking about. But in general, those papers are not best vessels of communication. Another thing that can break is too much fire safety engineering jargon. So we have those things that we love as fire safety engineer, which don't really work with people who are not fire safety engineer specialists. One of such ideas is the concept of design fire itself. What is a design fire? Design fire is a virtual tool that we use for design. You know, it's a concept against which we check the features of the building and that's it. This is not the way how the fire will look like in the building. Can the fire look like that in the building? Yeah, sure. Fire can look in a thousand ways. It perhaps can look exactly as my design fire. But that doesn't make my design fire any more likely than many, many other different scenarios in the building. The whole concept of the design fire scenario on its own is quite difficult to comprehend, to understand that it's not a real fire. It's just, you know, a threat against which we check our systems and objectives. And the second part that makes design fire so hard is that we love to express them in kilowatts and megawatts. And the problem is that fire is such a nonlinear phenomenon. Fire changes in such a way that is very surprising to a layman. A difference between 100 kilowatt fire from a one megawatt fire, from a 10 megawatt fire, from 100 megawatt fire, those are things from different planets. If you have not experienced a 10 megawatt fire on your own ever, you're missing on a hu- huge chunk of experience because, uh, this is a completely different beast to deal with. One megawatt fire versus 100 kilowatt fire. Probably the biggest fire p- person has seen in their life is something like a few hundred kilowatts on a large campfire. That's probably the biggest fire a person can relate to, and it's still far away, you know, from megawatts that we put in our design fires in buildings. People cannot comprehend how huge those fires are. And then we now translate them into concepts like visibility and smoke, temperatures, uh, radiation thresholds, et cetera, which make stuff even worse, which makes it very, very difficult to interpret for, uh, for people. We need to th- talk about this in simple manners like, is this enough to lose capability to way find? Is this enough to cause severe burns? Uh, is this something that will make person perish in a specific amount of time? This is more likely to work with a general audience rather than, you know, megawatts, PPMs, and kilowatts per square meter. Those are very difficult for people to comprehend And another concept of FSC jargon that I think is difficult is, is the fuel load. I personally dislike fuel load in-- as a concept in general because averaging the amount of fuel you have per square meter of your space is ridiculous. Um, we can talk about it for a long time, but yet it is the baseline of design for so many buildings. It's the baseline of design for an industrial building in Poland, so we have to live with that whether we like it or not. And it's also something that is very, very difficult to explain to people. Very difficult to explain that it is a proxy of a fire hazard and the fact you've lowered your fuel load from 600 to 400 megajoules per square meter and yet you have a huge stack of goods in the middle of your warehouse. As a huge fire hazard, even if you jump the class down or something, we need to learn how to not focus on number and threshold, but more on consequences of choices and, and to also make our, uh, colleagues, uh, who are working here with us understand those Um, we also tend to focus on, especially in Europe, I'm not sure how it is in other parts of the world, but we have this construction products regulation, we have the CE marking, we have our standards, et cetera. Sometimes we perhaps focus too much on the standardization and classes. While I find them very important and I recognize the need to have them in a modern built environment, it's, uh, something that definitely has helped us achieve fire safety in many of the buildings. The classes can be misleading. I can bring up Euro classes for res- reaction to fire, A, B, C, D, E, F. the way how scale is made, A is non-combustible, everything e- else is combustible. So that's quite a jump from A to B if you had something that cannot burn and now you have something that can burn. That's a tremendous challenge. I don't think the jumps between the classes are as obvious and as big as people would think about in terms of general fire safety. It's a quite a challenging concept, and yet the stakeholder, the layman sees Euro classes as the ladder of products and may think that, um, Euro class B or C is super high because it's, it's a high Euro class, while in reality it's something that, that's gonna burn. So we, we have to be wary of that. Same with fire resistance. Fire resistance of 60 minutes, does it mean it resists fire for 60 minutes? No. It means that in a very specific standard test, a specimen built to s- the specification of its, of its, uh, product standard has met criteria of fire resistance, which we have just discussed with Piotr Turkowski in the podcast, for a specific amount of time. It does not necessarily say that it's gonna withstand 60 minutes of fire, unfortunately. It's a proxy. It's a proxy of fire safety, and we understand that very well, and we also understand that fire resistance of 60 minutes between different items is not necessarily equal. It's different, you know, uh, caveats to the test that make some of those tests different, diffi- different from each other. Yet in the world of architects, uh, 60 minutes is 60 minutes. That's the same wall. That's the same image you were showing to me. It's very challenging, and it has been extremely challenging, and an example is the world of timber and fire, where everyone focused on fire resistance of timber. Timber is more fire resistant than steel Yeah, sure, it passes the test. We shut down the furnace, so it-- yeah, it's different regime for sure. It's not apples to apples, and yes, it's one of the things that distinguishes timber. It has fire resistance due to charring, but that's not the whole story, and it kind of burns, by the way. That's quite a problem from the fire strategy point of view. Let's focus on that, and it was hard to make public focus on that. It was-- It's still very hard to have architects and designers focus on that because they want the resistance class. Uh, I, I'm really glad that things have changed. We had, construction timber guidebook, which we had a podcast episode in, in here previously, which I highly recommend. Stuff is changing, but this miscommunication brings us to, to troubles like that. So yeah, those were some of the examples. Now on, on some final words, how do we communicate well? first of all, we are not fighting anyone. We're not on a crusade. it's not that we're on a battle against any other stakeholder. We're not alone. We are part of the process. We're a part of the process, and we should consider ourselves as a, as that. We are the only ones in the process who can take the complexities of the build environment, take the objectives of stakeholders, and help them achieve those objectives while providing the expected level of fire safety, which works with the fire strategy, which defines the higher level concepts in that building. This is why we are necessary in the building process. This is why we are the only ones who can do that. We're the only ones who have the capability and knowledge to do that. We are absolutely needed there, and we have to work with everyone else. So if you want to communicate well, you have to be mindful. You have to respect that others will have different views and goals. Be mindful of what stage of the project you are. Be mindful with who you are talking with. Be mindful of what competencies the other stakeholder has. All of those will add, and all of those will be important in your communication. Be clear and concise. Present all the information. Don't presume of what others know. Don't hide knowledge from others. give them everything they need. Be responsive to their needs. Be responsive to their requests. Be responsive to their doubts. Treat them seriously, and you'll get much further. And please do not exaggerate. Be fair. Uh, explain the consequences as they are. Really, I, I l-- really don't like when we try to sneak the safety in by not providing full information to the other stakeholders by hiding the fire safety behind something or within something. That's not how it should be. It's not how it should be because even if you succeed to have that when the building is handed over, during the lifetime of the building, someone can revert that if it's not reflected in fire strategy, if it's not explicit, if the reason is not known. So if you think about longevity of your fire safety strategies and your fire safety solutions in the buildings, you have to be fair about them. You have to work with others. And in this, you will go much further. That's it. That's the expanded version of the presentation I gave to the IFSS Research Committee workshop. It's funny because it's always like you can give 20-minute talk, but if you really want to speak your mind, it takes a podcast episode. And I'm really glad I have a venue to do that. I have something that allows me to present those thoughts without any constraints. And I'm super happy that I was able to do this already 250 times. And I hope we will be able to do this many, many more times in the future. And yeah, for today and for those 250 episodes, I would love to thank you for being here with me. And if you want more fire science, if you're still interested in fire science after all those hours, well, next Wednesday is going to bring us episode 251. And that episode will bring more fire science your way. Thanks for being here with me. Have a great day. Have a great week. Thank you very much. Cheers. Bye.