Anna Stoll

Business Development Manager, Amey

  1. What made you interested in working in the Built Environment?

Coming from an anthropology background and working as an archaeologist on large infrastructure sites, I have always been fascinated with how we use place and space to support our daily lives, interact with the environment and create histories. The Built Environment is such a large and diverse landscape that combines both tradition and bleeding edge innovation making it a very stimulating and challenging sector to work in. With anthropogenic mass now exceeding the dry weight of all life on earth, the Built Environment is mission critical in helping to solve significant environmental and social issues– this makes working in the sector both professional and personally important to me.

 

  1. Why did you join the Built Environment Change Makers?

I joined the BE Change Makers to collaborate with like-minded industry advocates, by drawing upon the resources, innovations, and networks at BE-ST to generate accessible resilience-geared skills, development within and communication to the sector. Joining the BE Change Makers allows me to be part of joining the dots for person-centric change enablement and empowerment by watering the cracks in the pavement to grow the seeds of inclusive, open, and sustainable change within the built environment at a grassroots level. The BE Changemakers provides an important platform to use action-based approaches and systems thinking in breaking down pre-existing biases and challenging the status quo of working in the built environment ‘looks’ to nurture improvement and diversity in talents and abilities that reflect our population in a way that is relatable and circularly valuable to us as individuals, communities, and societies. 

 

  1. What are your top 3 knowledge areas that you are bringing to the Built Environment Change Makers?
  • Innovation and Knowledge Management
  • People and Organisational Development
  • Digital Transformation

 

  1. What are you hoping to achieve?

I am hoping that through our work we can create an appetite and actionable ability to centre sector change around developing a young and pre-existing talent pool and diverse fabric to connect direct impact and decision-making. I hope we can begin to dismantle what it ‘looks’ like to work in BE to encourage creativity, the elevation of meaningful alternative career pathways into BE and to push for the professional empowerment of trade-based vocations. I hope our work can achieve synergistic partnerships with academic, BE industry entities and communities to develop industry-relevant skills, and knowledge and shape real-world outcomes based on lived experience to shape future policy and innovation proposals.