Creating a sustainable experience to serve customers now and in the future.
In the 1800s, America was generally seen as a land of abundance and endless resources until Gifford Pinchot saw the truth. That the trees, water and nutrients of the land were being used faster than they could naturally replenish. He saw that future generations faced bare, corroding soil rather than vast wilderness if those resources weren’t used sustainably.
This same concept of sustainability can be applied to CX. When crafting a customer experience today, we may only be thinking about immediate customers. But what if we could create an experience that would impact future customers for generations, to create an experience that would last, use fewer resources and be re-used?
Today we’re taking a deep dive into sustainability in CX with Holley Chant, Director of Sustainability at Lendlease, a construction, property and infrastructure company based in Australia. Holley knows how to use environmental and social sustainability as key drivers to CX. Let’s talk about how to create a sustainable experience for customers now and generations to come.
Experience: Creating a sustainable experience to serve customers now and in the future
Inspiration: Gifford Pinchot, the father of forestry
Modern Day Execution: Holley Chant, Director of Sustainability at Lendlease
Three Takeaways
[16:57] Customer experience now will have implications for future customers.
[7:44] Environmental and social sustainability can become key drivers for an amazing experience.
[11:25] Sustainability has to be quantifiable with data.
Key Quotes
__
Thanks to our friends
This podcast is presented by Oracle CX.
Hear more executive perspectives on CX transformation at Oracle.com/cx/perspectives
Narr: Calls of “Timber!” ring out through the woods. A hemlock tree breaks through the canopy, dropping pine cones and sending needles splintering off as it cracks and hits the ground. Crews of men gather to shuck off the rough bark in long strips, dripping sweat as they go. They’ll use the bark to tan animal skins and leave the naked wood to rot where it lies - it’s no good to them.
The bark is rich in tannins. Soaked long enough in hot vats of the pungent bark solution, the hides turn a deep reddish brown color. It’s a color you only get from eastern hemlock. So prized for its imparting color, entire forests of eastern hemlock are left barren, peppered with stumps.
Meanwhile the leather business is booming in the northeast -- they say the world walks on Milwaukee leather. Tanneries from Michigan to New York to Pennsylvania were producing millions of pounds of leather a year and logging hundreds of thousands of hemlock trees - some hundreds of years old - for their bark.
America was generally seen by settlers as a land of abundance and limitless resources. But Gifford Pinchot [[ pin-SHOW ]] knew better. The 25-year-old Connecticut native had just returned from a trip to France in December of 1890 where he studied at their National School of Forestry. He saw that the hemlock trees were being culled faster than they could grow back. And as the only American to be formally schooled in forestry, he was an expert on the topic.
On his return, Pinchot was commissioned by a mining company to evaluate forests out west. During his trip, Pinchot saw the Grand Canyon and Yosemite, the giant sequoias in the Sierras and massive redwoods in California. He describes this formative trip as his chance to “shake hands with the U.S.A.” We can only imagine his moment of realization when he compared the vast wilderness of the west to the cultivated lands of the east, that the effects of civilization were destroying the natural beauty of the land.
Over the next few years, Pinchot was hired to manage New York’s Adirondacks as well as the estate of George Vanderbilt, getting acknowledged by both Presidents Grover Cleveland and William McKinley for his work. His biggest role was to come in 1898 when he was appointed as first ever Chief of the U.S. Division of Forestry and given carte blanche to care for the nation’s wooded lands.
Pinchot would spend the next 12 years growing the Forest Service with enthusiastic support from President Theodore Roosevelt. He also founded the Yale School of Forestry in New Haven, Connecticut and the Yale Summer School of Forestry in Milford, Pennsylvania. In 1905, Pinchot would win his greatest victory: the transfer of all national forest reserves from the Department of the Interior to his agency, the Department of Agriculture. Because of this transfer, Pinchot was able to grow the number of National Forests from 32 to 149 to cover 193 million acres.
The National Forests Pinchot helped protect still exist today, more than a century later. But so, too, does his philosophy about sustainability and protection of the natural environment for future generations. Now known as the father of forestry, Pinchot warned that, “Unless we practice conservation, those who come after us will have to pay the price of misery, degradation and failure for the progress and prosperity of our day.” Dire as his warning seems, wise use of our resources is more important now than ever.
So take a deep breath of fresh air and hug a tree, because today we’re talking about the father of forestry, Gifford Pinchot, and how to build customer experiences that are designed with sustainability in mind.
Welcome to Often Imitated, a podcast about remarkable experiences from the past, and how they inspire people to create great customer experiences today.
This episode is all about creating a sustainable experience today for customers now and in the future, how Gifford Pinchot preserved resources for us, and how we can do the same for those who come after us. On this episode, we talk with Holley Chant, Director of Sustainability at Lendlease, about how they use sustainability to drive a joyful customer experience of the built environment. But first, a word from our sponsors.
Often Imitated is brought to you by the generous support of our friends at Oracle. Make every interaction matter with Oracle Advertising and CX. Connect all your data and empower your entire business to deliver exceptional customer experiences from acquisition…to retention…and everything in between. Learn more at oracle.com/cx.
Gifford Pinchot’s mantra was, “The greatest good for the greatest number in the long run.” And a true believer in that philosophy is Holley Chant, Director of Sustainability at Lendlease, an Australia-based multinational real estate company dedicated to creating beautiful, sustainable environments to live and work. Holley’s job is to make sure Lendlease is meeting environmental and social sustainability goals, and the same lessons apply to both. She leads development teams to design buildings and communities that have a low ecological footprint while providing a healthy and enriching place to live. Her true goal is to have people walk into one of the Lendlease environments and feel something.
Holley Chant: [00:02:35] So great places really start when a person has an emotional connection to a physical space and the resulting great experiences they have there. So, what makes us want to spend time in a place can be driven by a range of factors, including the physical environment, meaning like the nature that surrounds the place. It can be about the architecture, whether it's iconic or simple. It can be if there's public art, the kind of materials we've used. It can be about the history of the place, the education of the people who are in the place or how they might've been educated in that place. It is about activities, services, programs, and ultimately events. And this is how you achieve a culture of place. So Lendlease works with each of these aspects to really develop through working with the physical environment, looking at nature, how do we use amazing ecology and landscape architecture? How do we use really beautiful buildings or enclosures and public art to create a place that people just really want to hang out in and they might be hanging out to have a cup of coffee, or they might be hanging out to work for a few hours. And I think all of us, particularly this year in this past year because of the pandemic really came to value if we had a great place near us, where we could get outside and still social distance. But it was a place that you were physically comfortable, had an ability to work and really just thrive in that environment.
Narr: There are studies showing that when people are in the right environment, we are more creative. We heal better. We’re happier. Think about a place you’ve been where you felt good. What was it about that place? Holley’s goal is to create that experience, while also keeping the earth in mind.
Holley Chant: When we think about being environmentally sensitive, it doesn't in any way have to preclude an amazing experience of a place. In fact, environmental and social sustainability can become key drivers for an amazing place. So I'll give you an example. If you do the technical analysis of a place, like the physical components of it, for example, the paving, the benches, the shading, enclosures, the buildings, all of these aspects of the materiality have an ecological footprint. We most typically talk about embodied carbon and materials, but really neat thing that we can do to create a great place that Lendlease is very passionate about and committed to is that we designed to be climate positive. So we make choices through design that actually are still really beautiful, but we very consciously use science to reduce the amount of materials we use and therefore reduce our overall embodied carbon footprint. So, you could have a place that has the same capability for people to sit, for people to have shade, to hang out and just do their work or enjoy their coffee, but it might actually have 50% less embodied carbon through that really conscious design of the place. So, in ecological terms, the environment usually enhances place. Another example besides embodied carbon would be, how do we use biodiversity? Every place that has a variety of plants and trees are usually the type of places, particularly if the pallet that has been used to create those places, if it's native and adaptive species like plants that really grow there well on their own without using a lot of fertilizer or using too much water, because water is as precious as reducing carbon is as a goal, these are ways that you bring in a sense of biophilia and a wonderful connection to nature that also creates a great place, but has a better ecological footprint than, for example, if you use biodiversity that's from another country or a different climate, which is not going to be as resilient. And from a social sustainability point of view, I think we all know that if we're in a place, for example, where there's little local restaurants and what we call mom and pop shops, maybe they're people that you've come to know over the years, those usually make us feel a lot better in terms of how we know our community and experience each other as members of the community. Then maybe just having big brand stores or places that may not have quite as a local nature. Now, those places are awesome as well. We all want to be able to go into these great places, but it's really wonderful when you also have a capability in a place to support local retail and local vendors for food and beverage as well. So those are environmental and social aspects of place.
Narr: While sustainability may seem like a buzz word, it has real meat to it. You can’t just call yourself “sustainable” without backing it up.
Holley Chant: Sustainability is all about quantification of your results. So there's probably a lot more in common with traditional customer experience monitoring or tracking than you think, because in, 2021 and beyond, if you say you're sustainable, you have to be able to prove it through having metrics and targets. So that you can really actually demonstrate and track things in a quantifiable manner to the degree that a third party could come in and audit. So for example, we talk a lot about greenhouse gases and contribution to climate change. Well, Lendlease has a whole roadmap for reducing our creation of greenhouse gases. And we actually do that in a way that we can track by reducing as much as possible the emission of these greenhouse gases. But then we also are able to offset them. So, this is a very precise science and we have science-based targets that we use. So the quantification of these environmental aspects are really how we demonstrate progress in the right direction for sustainability.
Narr: And sustainability is all about balance. Using resources in a way that doesn’t deplete them, but allows them to replenish. To go back to Gifford Pinchot, he would often get compared to John Muir, a naturalist and early advocate for the preservation of America’s wilderness. But while Muir believed that wilderness was best left untouched by man, Pinchot thought that natural resources could be used to benefit people as long as they were used sustainably. Holley says those natural resources can be used in so many smart ways in environmental design.
Holley Chant: I think it's really amazing the power that plants have to do remediation of toxic environments. So I think that most people probably don't know that in really diverse plant pallet, you might have a half dozen or so plants that actually can really clean and remediate the soil of any contaminants. So for example, if you're developing land in an area that might have had heavy industry, and now it's being repurposed to be mixed use, you could, in certain instances, use things like reed beds, you can use hemp, you can use poplar trees. These are all amazing ecological solutions for remediation. I mean, once upon a time, it was claimed that they used hemp at Chernobyl for remediation as an example. And there are some limited peer review studies about nuclear waste being able to be remediated through biomass. So I think that's kind of an unusual thing that you might be walking by a very urban park, but if somebody is designed with the intent that this kind of reed bed that's happening in a small water feature, you might not know that's actually really cleaning a lot of storm water and purifying it so we can use it again. We can use it for irrigation of lawns, we can use it in certain instances for toilet flushing, and it's a great way to save water because of course water is precious and also has a carbon footprint if we're using potable water. So I think that power of the plant is always surprising.
Narr: So what’s the process of creating a sustainable built environment?
Holley Chant: Because my work is so much about working with design teams, so I start at the front end of a creation of a product. So at the, literally at what's called pre-concept. So it's quite a journey till we get to our end-user customer who might be a resident, might be an investor. So because I start at the very front end with the design team, I'm very philosophically committed to something called the Integrative Design Process, which is basically in simple terms on highly complex projects, it's about silo busting. And it's about a commitment to iterative work cycles toward excellence for end-user stakeholder positive experience. So, like siloed working on a big complex project would be where everybody is just kind of in a vacuum chasing their own goals. And maybe you get there faster and you might get more credit for what you've done but it's not really going to have that ultimate customer experience for the end-user. Whereas the Integrative Design Process where you have to iteratively collaborate and come together, consciously breaking silos, that's actually, when you're working with built environment which built environment is, by nature, quite complex. And because the projects that we're using can last 50, 75, 100 years in terms of if they're done with an excellent quality, that commitment to really taking time and integrating is something that's very powerful. And it's not something that a customer walking into an amazing building is going to ever go, oh, they were really committed to integrative design process. They're not going to see that. It's genetically baked in. It's really embedded. And it's about creation and collaboration with your colleagues and taking it slow, being committed to each other, honesty, being willing to revisit, and particularly when it comes to sustainability, whether it's built environment, any kind of industry, that kind of integrative process is key for us to really meet these global challenges that are related to sustainability. And I just always go back to sustainability because I believe that customers today in their experience actually want a sustainable solution. They want a sustainable product or experience or home or community. They want to feel great about it and not feel like that in any way their customer experience in that moment is someday leading to a negative customer experience for people down the line due to greater environmental problems.
Narr: Let’s talk about the financial side of being earth-friendly. How do we make it doable from an affordability standpoint?
Holley Chant: When we just tack sustainability on at the end, instead of using a front-loaded integrative design process, it costs more. First and foremost, it costs more. And that is just a disaster in terms of the area of stakeholder involvement that has to do with investment. So, if we think about that, there's this triangle and sustainability and I believe that's also the customer experience triangle of people, planet and profit. If your first thing is that you tack it on at the end and then it costs more, you've totally failed people and planet. So that's really why it's so important. And it's a big part of Lendlease's philosophy, to be an integrated development company is that we start sustainability, health, safety, other areas of our core company values at the very front, even though it might initially seem like there's a heavier cost burden at the front. When you look at the life cycle of developing a project, it's much less. And then of course, when it actually becomes the customer's home or community, the operational experience is so much better for the customer. Like they have lower energy costs, they have a better health experience. And in terms of the value of the asset, usually homes that are designed sustainably will retain their value longer and have an enhanced value in time. And we see that not just at an individual level now, but also at a portfolio level. You know, if you look at investment companies now, big REITs and other investment vehicles want sustainably designed buildings and communities because they know that they'll retain their value longer and not become stranded assets.
Narr: The goal is to create infrastructure that lasts. And that means that more people are going to interact with it and experience it. Just like the National Forests preserved by Pinchot are still enjoyed by people today. And part of what Pinchot taught in the Yale School of Forestry is about wildfire mitigation. His techniques are still used today amid historic wildfire seasons due to climate change. Lendlease is also designing for whatever the future climate looks like.
Holley Chant: Today is no longer just designing for the moment that we're in. Best practice has become about looking at climate related risks. So, for example, if our asset that we're designing is a building, and we know that building may have a lifespan that could in principle, for a major piece of social infrastructure, such as a museum or an opera house could last as long as 2100, we need to look at the implications of the environment in that life cycle. So for example if we're in an area where we're building residential product, and we know that perhaps if it's close to the coast or in an area that climate science and analysis of climate data tells us that there's going to be increased nuisance flooding or sea rise, maybe it's in an area of the country that's going to have increased wildfires. These are all issues that you want to actually use science to understand what the implications of the weather are going to be each decade that goes by and design to be prepared for that. So for example, air conditioning that's suitable today in Arizona is highly unlikely to be suitable 40 years from now or 50 years from now due to heat increases. So that, that would be an example of why you would want to look forward.
Narr: And so Lendlease keeps in mind the polarizing weather conditions. But they don’t sacrifice the experiential for the practical.
Holley Chant: For Lendlease as a company, our business is totally devoted to creation of awesome built environment. A great customer experience would be that they use a building in such a way that it literally changes their life for the better. So what I mean by that, we've all been in a building at some point where we learned better. We healed better. We were more joyous. And that is the ultimate sign of great customer experience in a built environment that literally that building makes your life better. Whether it's a school, your home, a hospital, a museum, a restaurant or an office. So just something that would ultimately really increase your likelihood to have a positive change in your life.
Narr: It takes teams of people with a common dedication to environmentally conscious design to create these spaces. And Lendlease is a massive, multinational company that started in Australia, so Holley has a whole community of like-minded people to work with.
Holley Chant: Amazing customer experience in the built environment always tracks back to great teams. At Lendlease, we have a philosophy of collaboration that we call team of teams. Because we're a global company, we have this amazing benefit of our global experience in integrative development and construction. So literally if I want to understand what's best practice in Australia, I can pick up the phone or get online and contact somebody in Australia and understand how they've dealt with really innovative solutions for waste management or renewable energy or materials that look as amazing as any negative ecological footprint material, but is sustainable. So that ability to reach out to a team of teams is really phenomenal, but what I like even more about it, and I've worked internationally quite a bit before I came to Lendlease, I liked that Lendlease has another layer about team of team's philosophy that it's, yes, we take our global knowledge of the team of teams, but we also really focus intensely on localizing it. So we're very committed as a team of teams to this idea that we're going to have the best customer experience in terms of our end product if we really spend time in pre-concept, looking at the local area, looking at the regional, unique qualities. And that can be engaging with the local municipality. It can be engaging with academia. It can be engaging with community groups, with scientists, with creators of innovative materials and technological solutions. so that layer of taking this global amazing team of teams concept, but then localizing it is really what I call our secret sauce. I'm very proud of it.
Narr: Pinchot was also able to draw people together because he had clarity around his mission. That clarity came from an epiphany he had one day. He had taken his horse out for a ride to clear his head after a hard day of work and started thinking about the connection between land, water, air, wildlife, trees and all natural resources. He realized that the common issue among them was use, and that wise use of them was the key to the future. But he had to have buy-in from everyone. That’s something Holley has seen as well. Sustainability only works well when it’s a core mission of your team, not when it’s tacked on to the end.
Holley Chant: For sustainability to really stick, to really become part of a change of how we do all industry, it has to be a responsibility of every discipline. So, maybe I, for example, came into sustainability because I love the planet. I'm really just so into nature. But in fact, I've come to be the person who understands contracts and commerce better than some people who that's their core skill, because I know if I really understand how sustainability can make commercial sense and how we use contracts to make sure that it's executed in such a way that it's cost-effective, that is a much better way to win for the planet and to win for people by really nailing profit than if I just focus on environment alone. And that's another aspect of the whole team of teams philosophy within Lendlease that we do a lot of working groups where we focus on how people, for example, whose core skill is about cost work with people who might have an environmental or social sustainability focus and how we bring that knowledge in together to really have this very highly sustainable solution, which is then going to be the amazing customer experience in terms of our end product of the community.
Narr: What Holley shows is that sustainability can be an aspect of CX. And any company can make it a priority.
Holley Chant: If you're rehauling your customer experience for the first time or it's your first time leading an initiative that is really deeply focused on customer experience, no matter what industry you're in, I think using integrative process as part of that development of what you want to achieve in customer experience is a way to actually deliver it. I think that including sustainability as a core value in your customer experience, like really respecting that we are in an era now where most consumers and end users want to be proud of where they live. They want to feel good about what they purchase. They want to have experiences that are amazing and joyful, but are not destructive. That respecting that value in our customer experience has to be a key value from the beginning of your either creation of your initiative or your overhauling. And then I would say, really tactical strategies. Like do your benchmarking. Really take time to benchmark the local environment that you're working in terms of what has value at present to the community and yes, bring in great ideas from around the globe, but be sure to be sensitive to what matters right in your own backyard.
And then I would work really diligently to map out a, what I call a terms of reference for your customer experience. So everybody has a tool, no matter what they do in the company, that they can have access and really can experience what your guidance is so they can achieve it so they can share it among the team. They can share it with consultants, they can share it externally.
So, and then the last thing and really key is you have to have a tracker. You have to have a dashboard. Because we all know what gets measured is what matters. And particularly if your customer experience is something that you want to iteratively develop and be able to go back to your team of teams, you need to have that data to see where you need to revisit and evolve. And also in terms of, if you make the decision to embed environmental and social sustainability, you have to have quantifiable data to really be able to communicate to the world that you've succeeded. Because it's just no longer a time where, oh, yeah. part of my product, part of my customer experience is that it's sustainable. No, it has to be, how is it sustainable? How have we reduced carbon. How have we reduced water? How have we reduced waste? How have we improved public health? How have we created opportunities for local communities, et cetera? That all requires data. So that overhaul definitely needs the tracking dashboard as well.
Narr: Holley is clearly passionate about all of this...for good reason. Because what I didn’t mention is that Holley actually has a personal connection to the father of forestry.
Holley Chant: I grew up in the most amazing, pristine environmental place called Milford, Pennsylvania, which is in the Pocono Mountains. And Milford, Pennsylvania is home of America's father of conservation, who was named Gifford Pinchot. And so as a little kid, as part of my schooling, we always had curriculum about Gifford Pinchot and every year we would go to the Gifford Pinchot Institute to get to study the environment because Pinchot was really into forestry. So from a really young age, I grew up in a place that was really not very dense. It was definitely not urban at all. It had a winter population when I was a kid in the village, it was probably 10,000 people. But it was just amazing. So I just had from a very young age this incredible connection with nature, and it's something that like, I have visual images that have stayed with me since I was literally five years old, throwing myself back in the snowbank and looking up at the trees while I was doing snow angel. And first, that power of nature has really stayed with me as I grew up. And I'm a disruptive career person. I started out in the arts and the performing arts. And of course that nature and that sense of emotional tie to it is something that I used through all of my work in the arts. Then I started getting really into design, originally from set design and then that kind of grew into, well, I don't want something to just be temporary. I want it to be forever. So I got into houses and communities and that love of nature went into that. And then at a certain point, I was really lucky. I had a client when I was doing design who had a young child who had really serious asthma. And this lady was convinced that building materials were triggers for her son's asthma. And so I went down a rabbit hole with her to understand about public health triggers and public health is actually a very big part of sustainability. So, that led me into this kind of interest in the correlation between health and environment, and then that led to another rabbit hole. And eventually I just completely retrained to be an environmental sustainability lead in built environment projects. And so now I've really been in that filter over 20 years. I mean, maybe the first few of those 20, I overlapped with my two prior careers, which was kind of interesting. but sustainability is my favorite career. I feel really good about knowing that I'm making a positive impact and creating a positive story for families and kids and. animals and all the things that we love about life.
Narr: So how can you make a positive impact on current and future customers? How can you do it while being mindful of the resources you’re using and the environmental impact? As Holley taught us, both can be done at once. And it’s worth it. So future generations get a chance to see the giant sequoias and redwoods and “shake hands with the U.S.A.” too.
This is your host, Ben Wilson, Head of Content of Caspian Studios. thank you for listening to another episode of Often Imitated. If you like what you’re hearing, tell a friend or leave us a five star rating and review on Apple Podcasts. This podcast was narrated by me, Ben Wilson and produced by Meredith O’Neil and Ezra Bakker Trupiano. You can learn more about our team at CaspianStudios.com
This podcast is brought to you by the generous support of our friends at Oracle. Make every interaction matter with Oracle Advertising and CX. Connect all your data and empower your entire business to deliver exceptional customer experiences from acquisition…to retention…and everything in between. Learn more at oracle.com/cx.