NBI was thrilled to partner with National Institute of Building Sciences (NIBS) to host the Getting to Outcome-Based Performance Summit in Seattle. Together with a handpicked group of leading thinkers and practitioners in high performance building design, construction and operations, we dug into what it would take to move our industry from anticipated energy performance to outcome-based performance.

We kept our agenda intentionally narrow to focus on three critical goals:

• Understand relevant motivations of owners, developers, institutions and design teams in relation to outcome‐based approaches.
• Identify challenges to implementation and possible negative impacts of outcome‐based approaches and policies.
• Develop strategies and framework for addressing key issues including near‐ and mid‐term actions.

We began by challenging participants to define exactly what we mean by an outcomes-based industry. What would it look like? What roles would stakeholder communities have? How would regional variation play in?We then got down to the brass tacks—how we get there from here? The attendees, all of whom demonstrated real commitment to bringing outcome-based approaches to the industry, agreed that despite the advances in high performance buildings in the past 15 years, the majority of new, purportedly high-performance buildings are still not performing as designed.  Since our landmark measured performance study in 2008, NBI has continued to push for outcome-based design, policies and codes.   While we’ve made good progress, there’s much work remains to be done.Summit participants agreed to follow-up actions on research, how-to application guides, policy- and project-level platforms, and scheduling follow-on meetings.  As a next step, many of us will be convening for Greenbuild session F12: Building a Bridge Between Design and Operations – A Workshop to continue the conversation and advance the cause.