Transcript: Interviews with the Presenters - LCI Congress Presenter Take-Aways

Hello, I'm Brittany Campbell-Turner and this is the Constructor Podcast, Episode 19. Hello and welcome to this episode of Constructor. This podcast is dedicated to helping property owners have certainty in their decisions about their construction projects. On this podcast, we discuss how to help property owners, foster trusting relationships within their project teams, understand how to lower risk, be under budget and on schedule in your construction projects, and exceed your end user's desires. Hello everyone, thank you for joining me today and listening to Constructor, the best way to build it.

Please subscribe at Constructor.com, that's ConstructRR.com. Subscriptions and reviews keep me going. Welcome to this episode of Constructor and Happy Valentine's Day. So this month, the month of February has been dedicated to giving you key takeaways from the Lean Construction Congress back in October 2016. If you haven't listened to it yet, listen to the last episode, Memenials, Transformational Change and Entertainment, the LCI Congress General Contractor Takeaways.

You can find that episode at Constructor.com slash EP 18. As a reminder, the theme for the Congress was building people, transforming culture. The first two days of the Congress were training days and the next two days consisted of keynote speeches and breakout sessions. We were on the floor where people are passing through from session to session and you will hear people talking in the background on the interviews. This particular episode has interviews with three presenters, Ritz Seiler, John Kennedy and Dick Beyer.

These guys are really passionate about the topics they present and enjoy the camaraderie they get from the community. To introduce our first interviewee, Ritz Seiler, a Chicago native with 35 years of experience in construction, is a Lean coach and consultant at Unified Works. He also happens to be the founder and co-chairman of LCI Chicago. He particularly led the Gamble Walk training efforts, one training that has not existed in the realm of Lean construction prior. I started off by asking him if he had some advice for those who are interested in getting started with learning about Lean.

First of all, I would say it's real important if you are interested in Lean that you really must read. You have to start reading some of the stuff about Toyota Way and stuff related to that because that will really accelerate your learning. You have to do things. You have to never say I'm not quite ready yet to do something. Start it, learn by doing, realize that this is simple but not easy.

It's going to take time. People that I talk to have been at it a year versus people that have been at it six years or ten years. The conversation changes because you start to see different things and hear things differently as time moves on. It truly is a journey. It's a never-ending thing.

It's just a constant state of learning. Don't expect immediate big wins. It's going to be incremental. Just stay at it. Your blinders come off and you start to see, oh wow, look at that, oh wow, look at that.

I guess that would be my bit of wisdom. Do you have a book list, recommended books? You mentioned the Toyota Way. Toyota Kata, This is Lean by Nicholas Modig, Lean Thinking, Gamblewalks. There are some specific books related to lean and construction that are relatively new out there.

This is Lean Construction, The Goal, The Machine That Changed the World, just a few. If you missed any of these book suggestions, I've listed them in the show notes for your reference. Can someone get in touch with you? If they want to learn more about what you do or? Call me.

Okay. Would you like to share with people? [phone number removed], dial recklessly. Rich and I were on the Congress Planning Committee together. Are we on camera?

We're not on camera. Okay, good. Just microphone. I sound better than I look. Thank you.

It was a riot in those planning meetings. This next interview is with John Kennedy from Combat Brain Training. He did a presentation on lean thinking. This training was originally developed by the Marines to reduce casualties in combat and has been listed on the safety track. You told me you did a presentation about lean thinking just earlier.

Exactly. So tell us a little bit about lean thinking. So actually this is different than the lean thinking that's out there. It's something about how you can think of better processes. This is actually based on a program that the Marines contracted to develop for them to reduce casualties in combat.

So we apply lean thinking processes to the brain using neuroplasticity as the medium to change it. So we devised exercises that physically change the brain in as little as 20 minutes. Interesting. Faster and more focused. So it's interesting, our keynote this morning was Chris Bussle from Navy SEAL.

I've trained Navy SEALs. In fact, my program was vetted and approved for Special Operations Command. Exactly to do that. So in my session we talk a little bit about how the brain works and we actually do one of the exercises. Which is a lot of people laughing and doing, but they notice an improvement very shortly after we start that they are a little bit more focused, they're a little bit faster and they have their memories a little bit better.

Is there something that you can give the listeners really quick as far as a quick test of how to improve their lean thinking? Well it's actually a very good question. There's a lot of things we can do. One thing is incorporate as many parts of our brain and our body into our thinking. For example, reading a real book instead of looking at a digital device engages more parts of the brain.

So our training does very, very simple exercises that make the brain make decisions, increasingly harder decisions, incorporating all parts of the brain. We start by saying it out loud, incorporate our hands, incorporate our feet and so forth. Because it makes you think faster, your situational awareness and focus improve pretty substantially. So I'm actually here as part of the safety track. So I've already talked to companies about having their teams, they do stretching and so forth before they start their job.

Do some brain training, right? Make the body better, get the brain sharper and more focused and the goal will be to reduce accidents which can be pretty deadly in construction sites. Absolutely and we want everybody going home. Exactly, safe. Plus, it creates teamwork and as a group they'll make better decisions.

The cool thing is, it's like if you put a faster processor in your computer, all your applications work better. The training helps not just the job site, but relationships at home. If they play sports, so I work with professional athletes, businesses, kids with learning disabilities, it doesn't matter. Our brains can change if we challenge it to change. That is awesome news.

Is there a specific location where someone can go online and find out more about this? Yes, good question. So my website is CombatBrainTraining.com. That comes from, because it was developed for the military. And I work with people and teams all over the world via Skype, in person as well as remotely in Skype.

So very, very easy to set up some time. They can contact me. My email is John at CombatBrainTraining.com. Happy to send them some information and if they want to make their brains faster and more focused, I can help. That's awesome.

Thank you so much, John. Thank you. Thanks very much. I ended up going to his training and found it quite fun. He gave everyone in the room a sheet of paper with arrows on it.

About 20 or so horizontal lines down the page, eight or 10 arrows across. The arrows alternated in four colors and the direction of the arrows changed in the four directions. As a group, we were led to quote unquote read the directions first. Next time around, the colors. We were supposed to read those and then a combination of the colors and directions.

Following that, he upped the ante and added direction, the polar directions and swapped out colors for fruit names. He alternated the expectations, asking us to increase speed and causing distractions. All I know is I was thinking about bananas going up south and green after the session and quite honestly, I was invigorated. I imagined doing this exercise at 2.30 in the afternoon to refocus on a day-to-day basis. If it could work for Navy SEALs, pro athletes and children with learning disabilities to improve their focus and intuition through increased neuroplasticity, surely this would help anyone hoping to improve their performance in their job.

I want to lead you now to the last interview you'll hear on this episode with Dick Byer. He was the first executive director of the Lean Construction Institute and he did last planner training at the Congress. He's also the president at the realignment group. He has consulted on over 100 lean or IPD projects through North America and Europe. He worked with numerous owners, construction and design firms, trade partners on Lean Strategy.

I recommend you take out a pen and pad to take some notes. When was the first day you got involved in Lean Construction? It was May 15, 2008. That's awesome. Yes, I know exactly where it went.

We were hired by my partner Dan Fochet. He and I started the realignment group in 2003 or 2004. We were a partnering company and we were hired by the California Prison Receivership Project to partner that project. We had three or four really successful sessions. Bill Proctor who ran that project said there's a whole bunch of lean people here but they don't know how to work with people and collaborate with people.

They have principles and stuff but they don't know much about this. You guys seem to really do a great job with people. So why don't you become our facilitators for the next 19 months? We were there every four days a week for 19 months after that. That's where we learned about lean.

We hadn't really heard about lean. But a lot of our principles on how we brought people together and built teams and destroyed silos and all of that stuff was really right in line with what they were trying to do. Okay, so at that time when you learned about lean, did you learn about the last planner system? Is that something that you were able to implement at that time? What processes did you implement?

We all sat around and read the Toyota Way. Then over the years I've dismissed the Toyota Way as a completely ridiculous book for us to read. Oh no. Yes, but I do believe in the Toyota production system which is different than the Toyota Way. Because a Toyota engineer stands in front of the line and she knows exactly how much it's going to cost to make that car and exactly how long it's going to take because they own all the process and they own everything.

We don't own squat. We put together teams that are always new, almost, with people who have never worked in remote locations to build a one-off where we have little idea actually how much it's going to cost and little idea how long it's going to take, but we do have a customer. So we start with a customer and Toyota ends up with a customer. So what we do is really completely different. The question is what can we learn from their production techniques that help us in the things that we do and what do we have to invent because we're trying to put together teams that we don't own.

Do you actually own any of those events? I know. We're having an interview in the hallway. You can listen to this one, Jeff. It'll be posted online on iTunes.

So what aspects have you understood thus far, I'm sure there's plenty, that you can take from the TPS, the Toyota Projection System, and now mirror into the construction field? So there's two things that Taiichi Ono actually focused on. One was just-in-time delivery. Just-in-time delivery was only used in construction on tight sites, urban sites, but every project benefits from that because we reduce trade damage, we reduce injuries, we reduce stuff lying around that's not... Waste, right?

Exactly. Okay. And the interface between people and machines. So in Toyota it's how do you replace people with robotics. And in our business it is, because we're a people business and not a robotic business, it's really how do people interface with other organizations of people.

And so doing that is not an engineering trick, it's actually a social science, anthropology, culture, it's all kinds of things that come into it different than just engineering. A piece of work goes and then another piece of work goes and then another piece of work goes. It's very much what Chris Fusel was talking about this morning in terms of every trade does a complicated process, but uniting all those complicated processes together is complex. So at the heart of our industry is complexity. And we tend to treat it like it's complicated, try to speed people up, but speeding people up is not the point, it's not speeding it up, it is releasing work in the right sequence and focusing on the release of work.

So we do a lot of work that doesn't release any work. We do lots of reports, we create lots of documents, we do lots of crazy stuff that's not valuable to the project. And so the goal is doing work that only releases work. And if we do that, then we speed up projects all the time. So what do you think about the theme for this entire congress, building people, transforming culture?

Do you think that's in line with the culture change that you've identified as your second point? No, actually. I'm appreciative for your honest answer. Tell me why. Because companies have cultures.

Yes. Right? And Gilbaden's been around since 1895, Turner built the Empire State Building. It's very difficult to change a company culture. And in fact, the cultures of those companies are built for all kinds of different reasons other than just projects.

Okay. Every time we start a project, we can create a culture on that project. Because culture, I've learned over the years, are those processes that we think work well enough that we're going to repeat them, we're going to teach them, and they're going to be the fundamental system under which we operate. And when teams come together, they very rarely think about creating a culture among the teams. And so we don't have to go out and change the culture of all the companies and all the rest of that stuff.

We have an opportunity every time we put a team together to develop a culture. And that culture requires six values. Well, tell me what those values are. So you have to start with visibility and transparency. And if people aren't completely visible and they're not completely transparent, nothing else in our business works.

And that's the hardest thing for owners to come to. Well, that's funny. That they should be visible and transparent about their budget. And then we can take their budget and we can do great things with it, but we can't do it if they're hiding it because they think that we'll spend it all. Well, that's what a budget is, right?

So visibility and transparency leads to collaboration. People can't collaborate unless they think everybody's got all the cards on the table. You watch Texas poker matches and people don't collaborate. That's correct. They're not meant to.

They don't know each other's cards. So all the cards have to be up. And that leads to collaboration. And collaboration is the single one important thing in building trust. And that you feel like, wow, these are really good ideas.

I can begin to trust you with your ideas. And we can't, even despite the language action community and the circle of promises and commitment and all the rest of that stuff, we can't make commitments unless we trust each other. Because this is the most difficult industry in which to make a commitment because you You are so dependent on everything before you being done, before you can make a commitment. So you're almost asked to commit to stuff before you. So the strength of the last planner system is getting reliable commitments from people before you.

And they're only reliable not because of the way they say things. I mean, it is important to articulate them in a fashion that people understand what they mean. But they're not reliable just because people say them. They're reliable because you've learned to trust them because you've collaborated with them on the project. Now from those commitments, the making and keeping of commitments results in achievement.

That's how we build projects. We make commitments and we keep them. And when we can't keep them, we notify everybody right away and we recommit given the current situation. So we become adaptable. And we're not efficient.

Frederick Winslow, think about it, Lean really is the last child of Frederick Winslow Taylor in a more efficient process. And that's really destructive in construction. And so Lean is a bad moniker for what we do. What we really do is collaborative project delivery. I prefer using terminology, integrative, collaborative.

We're talking about collaboration in the built environment. And that's what we're really looking at. From life, from the old Ben Casey, life, death, birth, infinity, that's what we're doing. We're collaborating in an environment with people we've never met before. And we have to develop relationships with them so that we can actually trust that they'll do things.

And our current practice actually discourages us from having relationships with people on projects and thinking of it as a team. And yet a team builds projects. Companies don't build projects. Teams build projects. And so you've got to create that culture on the team.

So that leads to achievement. And from achievement, we gather knowledge. And we have to use that knowledge to make those processes better. So when we talk about respect for people and continuous improvement, which are ideas that came out of the Toyota way in some senses, but also are not representative of what Toyota actually does. So we've taken them in.

I think we've given new meaning to them. And so when we talk about Lean, it was an easy way of talking about kind of how we're looking to reduce waste and construction, but it really is not manufacturing. And if we do that, we will fail in delivering projects. So Kaizen and Kanban and Konnichiwa and Ohio goes Amish and all the rest of that stuff really has very little resonance with people in our business. But I mean, Kanban is just making stuff visible, right?

But it's not a countdown clock, a tack time, about how fast you do a process. It's really what Chris Fussell didn't talk about, but that's in the team of teams, where they created a big room where they shared every bit of information. Because the information that they shared connected with people in different ways. And that allows them the adaptability to go out and do it. And in fact, in the book, they talk about we're not after efficiency anymore.

We used to be really efficient. We're after effectiveness. And sometimes we have to be less efficient to be more effective. This is true. We have to share more information.

We have to be more open. And we have to try things that don't work so that eventually we can be effective. And that's what drives speed, lower cost, better quality, and safety on the road. Well, thanks for giving us that synopsis. That was excellent.

That's the buyer theory. And I've come to it over, you know, for doing this for a long time and understanding how teams come together. Yeah. You really speak to the, I think, the wisdom that we've learned from kind of testing the Toyota Way model and then understanding now these are the steps that we've tried. They're not applicable.

Let's weed out the stuff that doesn't work. Let's focus on these six things. You know, paramount adaptability, trust. Those are the things that our owner doesn't really think about all the time. It's a good thing to be very aware of because contractually you have to be able to transition in your mind and say, okay, well, I need to be able to have this commitment between all parties.

Right. Well, fundamentally contracts don't work very well because contracts do not promote or even encourage behavior. And behavior is the end result of values. Right? So if we believe in these values, then we want people to behave that way.

If we have an American culture and we have a democracy, which is one of our values, then people have to vote. This is true. And if they don't vote, that's the behavior you're trying to create. Right? We're trying to create a behavior of treating people with respect because we believe in tolerance.

And when we lose those things, that's not how people behave, as we're seeing. This is true. In front of our eyes. So creating a system that allows you to promote certain kinds of behaviors is really what you're trying to do. And at the heart of the big room, and people have a really hard time with big room management because they just throw a bunch of people together and hope something happens.

And that's like having your eggs on the counter and a skillet and some butter. And you go, go, make me breakfast. It just doesn't happen. I mean, somebody has to tend it like a garden. Somebody has to cook it.

So it's those pieces together. And that's really the management and complexity that we're talking about. And both in military operations in here. And we haven't learned very much from the military that we could. I know general.

So take a P6 schedule that has 25,000 activities, because right down to every little thing that's being done by everybody. So what general would ever say to a squad of soldiers, here's how you're going to take out that machine gun nest. We always leave it to the squad to figure it out. They know how to do it. They're in the line of fire.

This is what they do. But saying we've got to get rid of Al-Qaeda, that's the strategy. So our strategy is to build this facility that actually works. And if we back up to that philosophy, how would we build it? Well, we do so many things wrong because we make all these assumptions that aren't true.

Way in the beginning and don't get that buy-in from all the last planners. We don't even think about the system. Like somebody today was, you know, this evidence that we have that lean is better. It's all about on time, on budget. From Dodge Analytics.

Good quality. Yeah. And so that's not really the point there. That's almost the price of admission. If you can't deliver a project on time, on budget, great quality, and great safety, you shouldn't be doing it.

Right? So the value of a building is not that it was done on time or on budget or with great quality. The value is that it serves neonatal kids who have been born in six weeks and we're trying to save their lives. That's what that building does. It doesn't represent a landmark.

We're the only business in the world that celebrates completing a contract. Nobody celebrates. You go to Haganaz and they make an ice cream cone and you pay them money. Nobody celebrates that at the end of that transaction. Because it actually happened, right?

And it just happens routinely and it happens right. And people complain if it doesn't happen right, but they don't celebrate it. They celebrate how wonderful the ice cream is or how good it makes you feel or whatever. And that's what we should be celebrating. So we're concentrating kind of on the wrong things.

That's an interesting perspective. I like it because a lot of people, at least I'm finding just in my own experience here, whatever their goals are, the client's goals, whoever they're ending up touching as a result of their services, those are the things that we need to keep in mind. And that's what's going to drive the entire vision for that construction team. But it hardly ever does. Because what happens is an owner will say, well we need a new building.

And they may have thought about it and they may not. They may have, oh we didn't consider renovating some other building, renting space, all the other options that you have. But if they thoughtfully concentrate on we need a new facility, and they say here's what the facility needs to do. Here's the value properties for this facility. We would design the building from the inside out to fulfill that mission.

And yet what they want to see are elevations of what the building is going to look like before they proceed. And that's the last thing we should be looking at. So I mean some of the data they did report on this morning was about getting involved in the project earlier. Right, engagement of teams. Absolutely.

So I think they got that piece right about how that impacts. I don't know clearly. So I think they're going somewhere with that piece of information. And I think that's something that we can take moving forward. It's hugely important for owners to know that projects are three times more likely to finish on time and twice as likely to finish on or under budget the more you engage teams early.

Co-location, the more you allow the teams to actually work together. So to what purpose? To the purpose of bringing you the value properties. And knowing that they can complete on time and on budget now frees you up to actually make sure that the building works. It's functional, it's effective for the purposes that you want to get.

I haven't come from a construction litigation background. Most of the projects that I had in court were projects where stuff didn't fit because they designed the building and then they couldn't fit. They took two inches out of floor to floor height so that they could supposedly get to a lower budget which never actually worked. Only to find out that none of the stuff fit. And now they're doing changes around fitting stuff.

And the systems don't work very well because they cut out systems in value engineering. So if you design the building from the inside out, if you choose the air handlers and coolers and everything else in design, then you know that they actually work and they fit and you don't have a submittal process. There's so many areas where this seems to be applicable. And really quick for the listeners here, how can people get in touch with you if they want to reach you? Well I'm at the realignment group so we're at projectrealign.com and I'm Dick at projectrealign.com and that's how they can get hold of me.

Appreciate it. Thanks so much. Thank you. Throughout the rest of the month I will have more LCI takeaways from owner companies and myself. If you like this episode, definitely check out the last one at constructor.com slash ep18 and don't forget to subscribe at constructor.com.

Talk to you guys next week.