Pay It Forward: "Don’t Let Perfection Get in the Way of Progress"
"The best advice I received was to speak the language of the individual/industry you’re trying to influence," says Breana Wheeler, director of US operations at BREEAM.
Breana Wheeler, director of operations, US, at BREEAM, San Francisco
Breana Wheeler became the director of operations for the US for BREEAM in May 2016 with a mission to provide a credible, rigorous, science-based option for existing buildings to understand their sustainability performance, set a pathway to improvement and to certify performance where there is value in doing so.
Area of expertise or focus: Sustainability in the built environment.
What has been your biggest challenge in your particular role and how have you overcome those obstacles/? Shifting the narrative of green building certification from being focused on gaining ‘green premium’ in niche markets to seeing sustainability as a business risk and opportunity lens.
What about your current role at the company are you most happy with? Working with so many different clients, each with their own challenges and paths to forge. BREEAM provides a framework for the journey and being able to see our clients reduce their environmental impacts, boost health and well-being and begin to tackle resilience in a structured way is really rewarding.
I am proud to be part of BRE — an organization that has facilitated effective and meaningful solutions for the built world since 1921 — and seeing BREEAM’s growth to the US including the doubling the number of certified assets across the country in 2021.
Additionally, our team has recently expanded our educational resources by launching a new webinar series featuring expert insights on several sustainability-focused topics, commencing with a panel on Exemplifying Leadership Through ESG in 2021. BRE continues to lead insightful and actionable conversations in the real estate sector, and I am grateful to be in a position through which I can challenge my peers to think critically about the environmental and social impacts of their asset’s performance. I was extremely honored to have been named a GlobeSt. Woman of Influence in 2022 and am excited to continue working to deepen conversations about the critical importance of transparency and accountability as it relates to sustainability performance and ultimately work to build a stronger, sustainable future.
What is the best piece of advice you have received that has helped you succeed in your industry? The best advice I received was to speak the language of the individual/industry you’re trying to influence. I come from a sustainability background first which prepared me for understanding the environmental impacts of business activities but didn’t always prepare me for how to engage decision-makers who were not sustainability specialists to make better choices.
Do you have any advice specifically for the next generation? My advice to the next generation: Even with sustainability having it’s “moment” right now and budgets expanding, hone your influencing skills. Understand where your decision makers are coming from and learn their perspectives so that you can better craft your message so that it is heard and understood.
Would you advise younger professionals to begin a career in CRE and how did you get here? I definitely would encourage young people to work in CRE. The built environment is a critical part of world, housing our economy which could deliver widespread benefits or have significant negative impacts. CRE professionals have a choice and drive whether CRE can be for the good of humanity and our planet or not and the significant impact we already know it has shows that CRE can be a great place to make a huge impact on the direction of our world.
I came into CRE pretty much by accident but once I arrived, I was intrigued. I wanted my career to make a difference and I could see the scale that was possible with CRE. It’s funny to think of how little I gave thought to buildings on a large scale before – now I see it all interconnected and how critical it is to so many aspects of our lives, many of which we all take for granted.
Please share an initiative that you are working on that you are most proud of. We have established Core Technical Teams to explore and enhance themes across the BREEAM family of standards. I am the senior sponsor for two: Resilience and Social Impact. They are closely linked and while BREEAM focuses on the asset level, these connect so directly with our communities. Assets sit in blocks, in neighborhoods, in communities; they employ people who live and spend money in those same units. How they operate fundamentally impacts those around them.
Meaningfully measuring that impact though is an emerging area of practice. With resilience, we’re seeing an evolution in the methodology of evaluating physical risk, with more precise considerations and now incorporating climate model scenarios. A lot of this is being driven by the insurance industry as they are now pricing in climate risk.
Transition risk though is still quite new; we’ll see this developing quickly in the next five years as the existence of transition risk is better acknowledged throughout the industry and the consulting community gets more experience in this area.
With social impact, it’s really early days. While there has been a focus at what CRE organizations are doing, there has been little connection made specifically to how assets are directly connected. As it was with sustainability, it can be tempting to see Social Impact as a ‘do gooder’ activity or something linked strictly to employee retention. This unfortunately limits it’s value to an organization and can be on the chopping block in harder times. Our goal is to demonstrate how it specifically enhances asset value. It’s a longer term goal, as this topic area evolves, but we’re excited to be on the forefront of the discussions with CRE around the world.
In your opinion what takeaways did we learn from the COVID crisis? Two critical things: First, that we can take the hard decisions when we need to. Shutting down the global economy was not taken lightly but in the face of significant risk, we coordinated globally and took the decision that people mattered more than money.
Second, the economic battering that happens when we have to make a hard and fast decision like that. The ripples from these decisions are going to echo for a very long time and has changed the course of our economy and society.
Third, planning and preparation matters. If we had properly planned for a pandemic – a foreseeable event through human experience and science – the impact could have been significantly reduced and 1+ million American lives along with millions of others around the world might not have been lost.
All three of these things are a warning to consider how we respond to climate change. We know we could wait until the last minute and then make the hard choices but it will wrench our society, wreck our economy and be incredibly costly.
Climate change is happening now and like with the pandemic, the science makes many serious consequences foreseeable (and we don’t even know how much more serious it could be). If we want our society and economy to not just survive but thrive, we need to start transitioning early to keep the costs and economic disruption down.
What three statements would you use to describe your work mindset?
- Individual steps make the journey – creating the future we need to protect people and planet is a daunting task but it starts with moving forward in the first place. Small steps may be needed to set the foundation for the bigger pieces.
- Don’t let perfection get in the way of progress – we’re all going to make mistakes or go down a dead end in this journey. Like with science, failure only comes from not learning from the experience.
- Stay humble. Listen to others, share knowledge, collaborate with others to drive forward the collective understanding. We’re all in this together and we need each other to make this transition.
