Issue 52 - STEM & Beyond - Joe Hart

Welcome to Issue 52 of the STEM & Beyond newsletter. Your newsletter shining a spotlight on those working within STEM careers and Beyond.

Interview with Joe Hart ...

About Joe

I am an Engineer and Researcher based in the North of England and specialising in fire and explosion engineering. I am founder and CEO of the Delta Innovation Group, where I oversee operations across multiple businesses working in the built environment, holding day-to-day roles as Head of Fire Engineering at Delta Fire Engineering, Head of R&D at Delta Research & Development and Head of Curriculum Development at Delta Fire Training. I am also host of the Not All Fire podcast and am currently writing a textbook on fire safety, to be published next year by the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET). Over the past few years I have founded and built several businesses, all whilst keeping my feet firmly planted in the Engineering world, and am a frequent presenter on the topics of both fire and building safety. Alongside my technical work, I am also Director of Bad Move Studios, a production company specialising in scientific education, where I am currently producing a documentary series analysing major disasters alongside other creative projects.

When you were a child, what did you dream you would be when you grew up?

Probably an astronaut or a lion tamer or a dog or something; certainly not a Fire Engineer! As a child I didn’t really have an eye on my future career, and I was probably 25 years old before I worked out what I wanted to do. If I’m totally honest I’m still not entirely sure what I want to be when I grow up! Priorities, interests and opportunities change all the time, and whilst I’m a meticulous planner in my day-to-day life I’m also a realist and know that plans very seldom work out perfectly. I’m really happy now being in a position where I get to work with amazing people and do amazing things – that’s all I could have dreamt of, really.

Who or what inspired you to pursue your career?

When I finished my degree I actually felt really uninspired by working in Engineering. Three years of studying concepts with no real context and memorising random facts for exams had, unfortunately, zapped any enthusiasm I had for the job and I ended up working in a fairly menial job in a biomedical lab. My job there was to process blood samples received from the local hospital in a centrifuge, extract the plasma using a pipette and freeze the tubes in a giant walk-in freezer. It took me 20 minutes to learn to do the job and I spent the next 6 months being bored and cold. One day whilst feeling particularly bored and particularly cold I decided to see what would happen if I put a sample of Yorkshire Tea into the centrifuge – trying to discover the right conditions to extract the milk from the Tea after if it had been stirred in. The results of this experiment were completely meaningless, but it was the most interesting piece of work I had done in that lab and I realised I needed to go and get a job where I was able to learn and experiment, which led me back to fire engineering. Years later, when I became a University Lecturer, I ensured that every lecture I gave had a practical example to support every theory I presented – it’s so, so important to keep students engaged and interested because a single lecture can influence someone’s entire career, whether that be positively or negatively; and I know that from personal experience.

What does a typical day look like for you?

I know it’s a cliché that will (quite rightly) cause people to roll their eyes, but no two days are the same for me. I work from the office every day (I really dislike working from home, and much prefer the separation that a commute provides – travelling into an office is the only way I can separate work from home, and I hate nothing more than having to work from my kitchen table or sofa). I spend a lot of my time doing business admin/team management, whilst trying to maintain one or two Engineering projects at any one time to keep my knowledge up-to-date. At the moment I’m writing a whole curriculum series of training courses, and leading six research projects so on any given day I might be in our training rooms or lab working on those tasks alongside my list of daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly tasks that are essential to running a business. Right now I’m completing this STEM & Beyond interview whilst on a flight to Los Angeles to study the California wildfires, an almost unfathomable fire event that none of us had even heard of five days ago. You, literally, never know what’s going to happen from one day to the next.

What is one quote or mantra that you like, and why?

Each chapter of my book starts with a quote, so I’ve been actively searching for quotes recently as I’ve been writing. One of my favourites is in the chapter about the History of Fire Safety which reads “We learn from history that we learn nothing from history”. I think it nicely sums up fire safety and sets the scene for the chapter perfectly.

For my actual favourite quote though I have to turn to Douglas Adams. The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy is the book I’ve re-read more than any other, but my favourite quote actually comes from it’s sequel The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. For me, it is a quote that is so philosophical but also so silly that it never fails to make me smile - I even named one of my businesses (Bad Move Studios) after the quote. It reads “In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move”. If you ever need a reminder about what’s important in life (quite literally life, the Universe and everything), go and read the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. The answer is usually ‘42’.

What has been your most memorable career highlight?

Signing the contract with my book publisher was a very surreal experience, and definitely felt like a big moment – I expect sending off the final manuscript in a few months time will also be high on this list. I recently completed the sale of two businesses which was a huge accomplishment, and one that certainly gave cause for celebration and would have to qualify as a highlight. I also get a great sense of achievement when those that I’m mentoring have successes – being able to share in their graduations, professional accreditations and career ‘firsts’ is always a highlight for me.

Being selfish for a moment, a big highlight in my own career was opening our research lab (the Delta Fire Research Centre) last year. When I first set up Delta it was one of the key milestones I hoped to achieve in the first five years, and we did it in less than two. Our lab is purely R&D and is completely self-funded - we bought every piece of equipment in there without having to get external finance to fund it and it contains a prototyping workshop, 3D printers, robotics station and a fire testing lab. Since opening, we’ve worked on expert witness cases with the forensics team from Lancashire Constabulary, carried out fire tests in support of our FRAEW/EWS1 reports to assess combustibility of materials on existing HRB’s and currently have two patents pending for new developments in fire safety technology. It’s such a huge asset for our business and for our team, and is one of my favourite places to spend a few hours tinkering in the workshop space and the fire lab.

Are there any particular challenges to the work that you do? How do you overcome these?

There are different challenges depending on which hat I’m wearing. As an Engineer I find myself facing a packed work schedule with lots of meeting requests and deadlines to hit, as well as the technical challenges of working on complex buildings. As a researcher I find myself trying to find time to test every idea I have and facing competitive submission to journals and funding bids. As a Lecturer I’m constantly trying to engage better with students. As a business owner I’ve always got a tax return looming, or some new policy to write or review. As a conference speaker I’ve always got imposter syndrome lurking very close on my back. As an author I’m always trying to knock out another thousand words before falling asleep at my desk.

The way I deal with these challenges very much depends on what I’m facing – I like to keep busy so I’m constantly moving forward and this can sometimes work well as a distraction. I also speak to the people around me to help rationalise what I’m facing – it’s far too easy to inflate a challenge if you sit on it for too long and another person’s viewpoint is always helpful (it certainly doesn’t do any harm).

Also, and stay with me on this one, I’m weirdly good at knitting. A few years ago my wife got a ‘knit-your-own-scarf’ kit for Christmas and after a few hours of trying to knit her own scarf lost her temper and threw it across the room. Sensing a tense Boxing Day I thought I’d try to help by having a go and, I promise this is true, knitted a full scarf in less than two hours. For some bizarre reason I was incredibly good at it, and if there was an Olympics in knitting I’d enter it. True story.

What one thing could you not get through the day without?

Probably my phone. I work very long hours and do this almost exclusively from my phone, and even as I sit here on an 11-hour flight I’m anxious about what I’ll find when I turn it back on when I land. I try really hard to reduce the number of meetings in a day because if I accepted every meeting request I would do nothing but sit in calls all day, so I always try to answer queries via email in the first instance. My phone allows me to do this and also to work in an agile way, which I really enjoy doing. I also use the Notes app on my phone a lot which allows me to jot down ideas quickly and come back to them when I’m sat at my desk and can implement them.

I am absolutely useless at charging my phone though, and several times a week have to shout around the office to see if anyone has a charger I can borrow. It’s why my wife won’t let me buy an electric car – because she knows, as well as I do, that I’ll never charge it and several times a week I’ll be shouting down the A59 to see if anyone has a charger I can borrow. Another true story.

What excites you most about the work that you do?

My real passion is in Research & Development – I love being in the lab and testing ideas that we’ve come up with. It’s often in the middle of a conversation about something completely different that one of us will have an idea for a test that we’ll scribble down and go test it in the lab, and I think that’s a passion that’s really prevalent in Engineers. We’re constantly evolving the way we design buildings based on what we learn from R&D and that’s what excites me the most about my work.

What is the most unexpected thing about your work?

Again, this might depend on which element of the work I’m considering. Unexpected things in the business are usually negative, whereas unexpected things in R&D are usually interesting, so my definition of ‘unexpected’ might change depending on the title of the email, and who’s sending it! If I receive an email from a research colleague that starts “Now we’ve no idea why this happened, but….” – I guarantee that’s the start of a good day in the office. But if our accountant sends me an email that starts “Now we’ve no idea why this happened, but” – then my day is definitely about to go sideways.

Probably the most unexpected thing about my work is how structured my schedule is. I use the ‘blocking’ technique, so I allocate a certain amount of time each week to certain tasks, almost like a timetable, and we refresh this roughly every six weeks. This often surprises people, but it’s the best way I find to ensure I’m able to get everything done and also give some time to each commitment I have. Despite having a busy schedule, I actually manage to get most things done on time and also have a good amount of time off, which people always tell me they’re not expecting.

How do you stay up to date with industry developments and advancements? Are there any resources that you find particularly useful?

Continuous Professional Development is really important, and I take every opportunity I can to learn. I have a great network of people around me who I constantly pepper with questions, and am never afraid to ask a question in a meeting if I don’t understand something (chances are there’s someone else wondering the same thing who will be grateful you’ve asked!). I do a lot of travelling and try to maximise this time by listening to podcasts and talks, as well as taking a little time each week to study. At Delta we give everyone in the team 24 days per year for professional development in addition to the usual annual leave, bank holidays etc, which we call DeltaVersity. The DeltaVersity programme essentially grants everyone in the team half a day a week to study, read up on a topic that’s of interest to them or to spend some time in the lab learning a practical skill. It is one of the greatest achievements we’ve had in the business and I’m so proud that we’re able to commit the time and of the work the guys have achieved in their DeltaVersity time.

What can we do to educate younger generations on the importance of Fire Safety?

I think the importance of fire safety has entered the public consciousness more in the past few years, which is a positive shift. I also think there’s a way to go to educate people on the actual prevention of fires, and this should really start with younger generations.

On a recent podcast episode I told the story of being in a service station and there was a medical emergency where somebody had collapsed in the bathroom and sadly passed away, despite the efforts of the staff using a wall-mounted defibrillator. I sat there in those services with around 50 other people and not one person was able to offer anything to the situation, and the event stuck with me for weeks. I’m a fierce advocate for two things to be taught in primary schools – fire prevention and first aid. They’re life skills that everyone in the world should know, and I’ve never quite worked out why they don’t form part of the early years curriculum.

What are some of the most common misconceptions you come across within your role and industry?

That the engineering field is all about complying with guidance. In the built environment we have established guidance to help design buildings, but as an Engineer it’s not just my job to advise on meeting these Codes. Ultimately the role of a Fire Engineer is to design buildings to uphold life safety, property protection and the environment, which may be written into a piece of guidance but more often than not isn’t. There’s a huge lack of guidance for fire safety and the guidance that we do have, often, isn’t suitable so I often find myself having to explain to people what an Engineer actually does. We design buildings to protect people from fire, we don’t simply advise on how to follow a code of practice; and if I can demonstrate that the guidance is wrong (which is a very simple task for lots of fire guidance) then I will intentionally deviate from it if it results in a safer condition. That, for me, is the difference between a Fire Consultant and a Fire Engineer. Engineers need to have a passion for designing things and be excited about operating in the areas where there isn’t an established piece of guidance to follow – that’s where we get to solve problems and do some real Engineering.

What challenges do you think lie ahead for the Fire Safety and Fire Engineering industry?

The fire industry is undergoing a massive culture change, and has been for a long time. There has been some progress in the past few years but there is still a long, long way to go. For me personally, the Phase 2 Inquiry Report into the Grenfell Tower Fire (published last year) was a seminal piece of work that should push the dial towards better practice, but unfortunately I do still see poor practice and ethics rife within the industry.

For me I think the biggest challenge is in getting people to understand their roles better and where they fit into the overall culture of building safety. A few years ago we faced a massive skills shortage in fire engineering, and that was overcome by increasing the number of courses purporting to teach people the necessary skills to be a Fire Engineer. Now we’re facing a crisis of people carrying out work they’re simply not qualified to do, and a shortage of appropriate skills-based courses and qualifications to upskill the industry as a whole. The biggest challenge for the industry in the coming years will be getting people qualified to an appropriate standard, and improving the quality of education to ensure that the programmes people are sitting are suitable and appropriate.

I believe the thing that underpins this challenge is ethics – personally, I am driven by really strong professional ethics about the work that we do and will always call out poor professional ethics where I see them being displayed. In the past, in a slightly extreme example, I have removed people from the organisation I was in charge of based solely on conflicting professional ethics. As soon as someone utters the phrase “I know it’s wrong, but it’s just the way it works” they lose my support immediately – my expectation of every professional is to be the change you want to see and to never compromise on what you believe to be right. Otherwise, you’re in the wrong job.

What changes would you like to see within the Fire Safety and Fire Engineering Industries?

An improvement in ethics and quality standards, coupled with a move away from prescriptive guidance. For me, these changes are fundamental to improving safety standards and prioritising what’s important in fire safety – the people, property and societies we protect in the work that we do.

Don’t get me wrong, there are some incredible people that I admire deeply in the fire industry, but I always think professional ethics is a great leveller. The example I always use for this is the journey from the first day of your career to the last day of your career. Whilst your knowledge will expand and change throughout that journey, your professional ethics should never change – they should be solid on Day 1, and solid on the day that you retire. They don’t change, they only reinforce.

Outside of your day job, do you have a hobby or passion? Why is this important to you?

I’m not sure this qualifies as a typical ‘hobby’, but I’m currently studying for my Solicitors Qualifying Exam (SQE) which is taking up a lot of my free time. It may seem like an odd definition of a hobby, but I’m not sitting it because I’m being made to or because anyone has asked me to, I picked up the revision guides to upskill myself a little in what’s called Functional Legal Knowledge (FLK) and it snowballed to the point where I’m now sitting an exam in it! It’s not quite as abstract as it sounds – I spent three years teaching fire safety law and a good proportion of my work is in expert witness – but I’m really enjoying studying old case law and the development of legislation over time. Why is it important to me? I would really like to be involved in building safety legislation amendments, and learning about the underpinning legal theory is a great way to understand this.

I’m also a pretty terrible astronomer, but do enjoy doing it. When it comes to astrophotography I’m the definition of all the gear and no idea. A couple of weeks ago I set up my telescope in the garden, attached my DSLR camera, spent about 40 minutes tracking the moon so it was perfectly in frame, opened the exposure for 10 minutes and meticulously tracked the moon across the sky for the full 10 minutes (which involves very, very slowly turning two dials so it remains perfectly framed). I then spent about an hour post-processing the image and proudly sent it round everyone in my phone. One of my mates then simply pointed his phone at the sky, took a photo and sent it to me on WhatsApp. His was far better and I now go out to the garden every night to try to capture a decent photograph of the moon. Why is it important to me? Because my mate Fred annoyed me and I will never forgive him. Vengeance will be sweet and one day I’m going to send him a giant canvas of a perfect photo of the moon that I’ve taken from my telescope.

What advice would you give to your younger self??

That every experience is formative, and not to consider so many things as being ‘useless’ or ‘time filling’. I still use skills today that I learnt working in a supermarket when I was 16, and without all of those formative experiences accumulating you may never achieve the high-level things that you were striving for. Also to not worry about what other people are doing – I spent too much time when I was younger comparing myself to other people and I realise now it was just wasted energy.

Oh, and if you put too much milk in your tea just spin it through a centrifuge at 2,300 RPM for 10 minutes and start again. Maybe that research all those years ago was useful, afterall. Come to think of it, maybe everything that feels meaningless at the time might become useful in the future. You never know.

At school, what educational subjects are most related to a career in Fire Engineering?

I talk about this a lot, but Fire Engineering is so multi-disciplinary that there are lots of educational subjects that are relevant. In fact, when I first started putting together the contents for my textbook I started to list out which topics I wanted to cover and ended up structuring the book around each of them – the sub-title is A Multi-Disciplinary Approach to Fire Safety and each chapter provides an introduction to a different subject such as chemistry, structural engineering, architecture, history and psychology. We rely on knowledge in each of these subjects when doing fire engineering and it’s useful to have a good knowledge in all the core sciences as well as maths, psychology and structural engineering as a base.

Whilst sat at Heathrow airport this morning I was finalising a results report for some fire modelling I’ve recently completed for a residential building in London. The report determined the required extract rate of a fan in the corridor (mechanical engineering) to clear smoke at the appropriate velocity (physics/fluid dynamics) to ensure the toxicity in the corridor (chemistry) didn’t exceed tolerable limits for humans (biology), or cause undue stress to occupants evacuating (psychology). When you step back and consider the number of disciplines involved in even a relatively simple piece of work like that, it’s clear that a good base in multiple subjects is needed.

What advice would you give to someone considering a career in Fire Engineering?

I honestly believe there has never been a better time to start a career in Fire Engineering. The industry is undergoing such change that to be starting out during that time is such a unique opportunity and is really exciting. It is a career that offers such scope to make a difference and is so varied that you can specialise in a huge number of sub-disciplines. It also provides the unique opportunity to combine theory with practical concepts – for every day that I spend sat at my desk writing reports, I get to spend a day setting fire to things in the lab or in California studying wildfires.

The first thing to do is to gain some experience, and I would personally look for a good mentor. They’re hard to come by, but if you find someone that inspires you ask them as many questions as you can think of and don’t stop until you know as much as they do. Work hard, study, keep asking questions and don’t compromise your ethics – that’s all there is to it, really.

What would you like to see from ‘STEM & Beyond’ to continue to inspire and empower future generations?

Keep going! I’m a big fan of STEM & Beyond and have been since it’s inception. It’s inspiring to read other people’s stories and learn from their experiences, so I’d love to see more interviews and more inspirational STEM Ambassadors share their insights.

To anyone thinking about contributing – do it! It’s a great opportunity to reflect (and to kill time on a flight, if you have one coming up). And to anyone reading, I’d recommend reading the whole back catalogue and absorbing as many insights as you can. It’s, truly, a great resource.

Thank you Joe.

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