What Einstein can tell us about retrofit!

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results….

The Warm Homes Social Housing and Local Grant stats for the first year don’t make for pretty reading. Roughly 1% of the target for the programme after a third of the time is … disappointing. There are a bunch of reasons for this and there is a lag in lodging and reporting, but even then we seem to be way off where we need to be. And it just means the rest of the delivery is even more compressed into the next two years.

Despite some great examples of successful delivery (HT to some of our partners), endless panel sessions and articles about “retrofit at scale” and two and a bit rounds of similar funding we don’t seem to have hit on a reproducible, scalable approach that is consistently delivering for landlords and residents. Instead there seems to be a pattern of repeating what we already know and hoping it will work better this time. Not least as construction is a conservative and cautious industry.

Einstein is often quoted as saying “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” Unfortunately, there is no evidence he ever said it! But his actions speak louder than misattributed words and he was responsible for one of the biggest mindset changes in science that perhaps speaks more eloquently than an internet meme.

At the end of the 19th century physicists were marveling in Maxwell’s remarkable unification of magnetism and light - electromagnetism - in his famous equations. But they were also confused, because in Maxwell’s equations the speed of light appeared as a constant, and that conflicted with everything physics thought it knew about waves and motion from Newton’s equations.

In this context, Einstein’s genius was to make the mental shift to accept this strange fact as true and then follow where that led him. Some thought experiments about clocks and fast-moving trains later and you have his paper on Special Relativity that transformed our view of space and time, and through reconciling Maxwell’s theory with classical mechanics laid foundations for particle physics, quantum mechanics, and general relativity. 

In short, by thinking differently, he changed the game.

The lesson from this, and numerous other examples from science and history, is that transformation comes through thinking differently, from innovation, from not doing the same thing over and over again.

All projects slip to the right on a timeline, even with the most rigorous plans, and sometimes because of them. I would argue that the only thing that can stop this, that can move the plan to the left, is innovation, doing something different or new that is quicker, easier or less costly.

Take for example, AirEx’s smart air brick. Through thinking differently about the problem of heat loss from suspended floors, by addressing the airflow instead of the conduction of heat, the AirEx system transforms the problem of insulating suspended floors. It turns a disruptive job that is time consuming, costly and highly dependent on resident acceptance and home suitability into a 1 hour job that the residents barely notice at a fraction of the cost. How many other measures can you fit into 5 or 6 homes in a day?

Our partners who have adopted AirEx have found a repeatable, scalable approach that helps them meet their targets and help their customers.

So the lesson that Einstein would teach us is that the only way to accelerate delivery, meet our targets and get to retrofit at scale is to think differently, act differently, get over construction’s conservatism and adopt innovation at greater pace. It’s a lesson for clients, contractors, Government, regulators and standards bodies.

Not to do so, to keep doing the same things over and over is, frankly, insanity. Even if Einstein never said so.

Richard Kemp-Harper, Chief Strategy Officer, AirEx