Session

Whether it is resilience, technology, workforce, healthy spaces, or net-zero future, we come together at conferences like this to explore how lighthouse innovation can be scaled into the mainstream so more people can benefit from it while outmoded, likely harmful practices fade away. This means that as a loose but effective “built environment” community is in the business of systems change. However, while prolific innovators, we have not seen as much systems change as we would have liked, and this session dives into the reasons.

We are at the cusp of a half-dozen opportunities that could materially improve the lives of people in the U.S. as well as boost the economy and regenerate the ecosystem. How do we pull individual successes through to large-scale transformational change?

Including her post-graduate research at Cornell University, Elena Bondareva has dedicated over two decades to distilling the building blocks of systems change: What differentiates continual from step-change improvement? What are the social, institutional, and industry factors involved? And how do we catalyze the positive change that is possible and yet seems out of reach?

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was the product of decades of a concerted grassroots advocacy effort. What opportunities for accelerating systems change exist in today’s real-time, globally connected reality? How can one know whether an issue is near its tipping point? What has to go right in order for a fringe issue to go past the tipping point where it is broadly adopted by society? And how does an organization like NIBS determine what role it should play for the common good?