Transcript: Lean Construction Institute Congress Recap: Part 3

The best part I like about IPD is the integrated part where we're bringing all that I call extreme knowledge to the front of this discussion. We're not drawing anything until we talk to all the people involved in delivery of the project to the owner, the contractors, the trade partners. Everything else can be a variation. But the ability to bring a whole bunch of people together that don't typically get to talk early in the process and get them to the point where they're working together to deliver and achieve the same goals is just amazing for me.

I came from a litigation background in construction and had a reputation for doing large scale major construction litigation. And I don't know of any other project delivery system that is actually this low in terms of risk. Hello, and welcome to the Constructor Podcast, The Best Way to Build It, Episode Number 51. I'm your host, Brittany Campbell-Turner, and this podcast is dedicated to helping property owners have certainty in their decisions about their construction projects. We talk about fostering trusting relationships, help you to understand how to lower risk, be under budget and on schedule, and most importantly, exceed your end user's desires.

Last week, you heard from five guests highlighting the 19th Annual Lean Construction Institute Congress. You heard from Derek Browning from Lean Core, Andrea Sponsal and Bernita Bikeman from HKS, Dan Fouchet from the Realignment Group, and Greg Zinberg from Clark Construction. So if you haven't listened to it yet, check it out at constructor.com slash EP50. Today you'll be hearing from five more people. In the beginning of this recap episode, you'll be hearing from Mackenzie Moosen and John.

I'm a partner with NBBJ. NBBJ is a design firm we practice all over the world from really important large projects, small projects, and in many, many different disciplines. So we're in corporate, commercial, healthcare, science, technology, sports, civic work, so a lot of variety. That's Mackenzie Schien. He's a partner at NBBJ.

I've been practicing for 35 years, mostly large, complex projects, and that led to my interest in how we improve the process. You'll hear from Moosen next. My name is Moosen Lohani. I'm a principal with Lionacus. We are an A&E firm based in Sacramento.

We have around 200 employees, and my major focus is healthcare. So I run the healthcare market for the firm and work with a lot of great clients nationally. Next up is John Haymaker. He is the director of research with Perkins and Will. Perkins and Will is a global design firm.

We have quite a few practice areas. We're very strong in program complex projects, things like hospitals, science and technology. We have a fairly broad research program. We cover everything from material health up to urban resilience and sort of things in between. Some other topics are energy efficiency, water, design process, sustainable communities, human experience.

We have nine focus areas. They're called labs, where we're doing research and collaborating with universities and other researchers to kind of advance the state of knowledge and then really focus on applying it to our projects and understanding what's working and what needs more research. I ask each of them how do they get started in their lean journey and how they're currently implementing lean. Mackenzie talks about how NBBJ gets started with lean. When we started with this, it was really about kind of a culture of process improvement long before we learned about lean.

You hear designers, we're always about the customer objective. How do we make the highest customer satisfaction? So improving the quality of design was what we were all about. And we knew there was a lot of waste in what we were doing. And if we could take the waste out, we could improve the design quality because our designers could spend more time on making our projects better.

So that was the real motivator for us. So we started that back in 92 when we coined something we called process design. So you see the design word in there, even though it's about process, I can get designers to buy into it because we're designing the process. So it's all about design. So that's how we started with it.

And as we continue to evolve that, eventually we had a client really ask us to get into lean and said to us, we're in lean, we're committed to lean. If you're not committed to lean, you're not working with us anymore. So it was great incentive for us to say, oh, we better figure out what this is. Went through, hired experts, brought people in, and then discovered that we actually were a pretty lean organization. Mackenzie continues to discuss some of the obstacles he faces when starting his journey with lean.

Before he shares that, Musen will share a little bit about how his team at Leonakis is using lean and John gives us a sense of his personal background and how he got into studying lean construction. We have done and continue to do gaps analysis as far as operations, how we operate internally, how we deliver projects, lean delivery method. We have to be leaner, meaner, more efficient, reduce waste, and leverage the skill set of the team we have internally. And also another thing we implemented internally is the coaching and mentoring and training of our staff.

And how can we make that a two-way street? So the younger generation is learning from the older generation vice versa. My own personal background is in design technologies. So design, automation, optimization, and decision making, which obviously is clearly very related to lean. The work that I'm specifically doing that I'll present at this conference is around value and how do we define value and then how do we leverage a team and their tools to be able to systematically look at all of the alternatives, analyze them for all of the criteria, and then make the best decision that's going to lead to the best value for the owner.

Value in this case can be quite broad. We can be talking about kind of typical time and money kind of things, but we're really trying to push ourselves to look at value much more holistically in terms of how is this decision going to impact the human performance of the people in the building or the resilience of the structure or its impact on the ecology and the environment around it. Mackenzie highlights some of the hurdles he faced in the early days here. So once we did that, we realized it was, okay, how do we overcome the barriers to full adoption of lean?

And it was getting over the reasons why, the key barriers. For example, our designers were simply unwilling. I don't want to do it. It's going to take time. And why would I do that?

Because I'm going to end up designing Toyotas because that's what Toyota does, right? They said, no, we want to design Ferraris. We're about something, you know, high design, all that. And we said, okay, we got to get through that one. Second one was all of the jargon associated with lean, Hoshin Konri, and all the Japanese terms were such that people said, I don't understand it.

I don't have any idea what it is, and I don't have time to learn it. You know, put those roadblocks up. We've got to get past it. So we did. What we said was, well, if we can take the waste out of the system, we've got better time for design, more time for design.

We can improve that. Second, we abandoned all the lean terminology. We used terms that they could understand and made it very simple. So that was kind of the base piece of it. But then we did apply what I'll call the behavioral side of how do we get people committed?

Because if they're just along for the ride, we're never going to get there no matter what kind of tools we have. So we looked at it. How do we inspire people to want to do this? And it became about full inclusion. Everybody on the team participates from partner to intern, everybody on the team.

And it's a very safe environment for conflict and for learning. Some of the things we talked about this morning in the keynote, those behavioral pieces were super important to building team. If you'd like to hear more about the keynote speech that Patrick Lencioni did on the five behaviors of a successful team, I give a recap of his talk in last week's episode. You can hear it at constructor.com. So we combine that with the tools of lean behavior.

So I would think of it as kind of the soft side, the cultural, and then the structure and the tools that lean provides. That became kind of our secret sauce for getting to a very, very successful implementation of lean. It is mandatory. It is every project. It is tracked constantly.

So we monitor all of our projects to see that we're actually doing it. So that's a little bit about how we got into it and where we are. Mackenzie talks about the mandatory implementation of tools as a part of their typical processes. If you listened to the last episode, you'd know that I'm very interested in the specific tools that companies were implementing on projects and in the organizations. Here are some of the responses to my question about tool implementation.

Well we tried to implement the lean tools, IPD tools that we use on projects as well. Especially for the operations, like choosing by advantage is something we use on projects. But also we're trying to internally talk about what are the different ways of us delivering projects more successfully with a high quality and more efficient. And we can go through those choices, let's break them down into small pieces that are measurable and achievable. And then we come back and revisit that and keep adjusting it as needed based on the performance of each team or team members.

And how do we also cross-pollinate the way we deliver things to be more standardized, more efficient, we do things the same way, and do things once and make sure you do it right. And that comes with asking a lot of questions and understanding the value proposition internally, operationally, and also on the project that we do, we need to make sure the client's value is very clearly understood by the entire team as a common goal. While we track utilization of lean planning, we created something we call process design, which has last planner in it, it has reliable promise in it, it has choose by advantage.

We have very, very many of the lean processes and tools built into a package that we call process design. And it's a four hour to one week session, full agenda, number of tools, step-by-step process that everybody follows. So it's scalable for any size project, any type project, mandatory that they do it. We track to make sure that they're actually doing it on every phase of a project. Because of my own background and biases, I do bring a kind of tool focus to the work I'm doing, which certainly by itself isn't very useful.

You need a lot of the cultural and organizational change that Lean also proposes around that. But I'll just drill in on the technologies a little bit. We've developed a workflow that we call design space construction, which is essentially a process of bringing all of the stakeholders together and stakeholder meaning fairly broadly. We want to know what are the major decisions that we need to make and then do that collaboratively. And then we'll value stream map to each of those decisions.

And that process involves first understanding the relevant organization, who are the relevant designers, who are the decision makers, who are the stakeholders are going to be impacted, who are some of the gatekeepers who can put constraints on this decision. And then it's really making sure we have all of the right knowledge in the room, which goes from senior management down to really Arc ones or early designers so that we can integrate all of the information into a technical workflow. One that explicitly defines performance metrics and then uses things like generative design or parametric modeling to generate a lot of possibilities.

And then to push those through things like energy analysis, cost analysis, view, or some of the more qualitative analysis and then doing a really good job of pulling that data together, understanding sensitivity, trade offs within it, visualizing it and helping the client to really weigh the priorities and make the best decision and then ultimately to communicate that rationale afterwards. So one of the benefits coming through this process is we have a very clear definition of who was involved, what they were concerned about, what they looked at and why they ultimately made the decision.

I like the fact that each of these guys covered that tracking utilization in measurable and achievable performance metrics is really important, but it cannot be done without the right people at the table and establishing clear goals at the onset, as John indicated. I asked them next about how these tools affect design. Well I think just linking your question back to IPD, we consider IPD as a tool to achieve a lean practice. And I think for us it's important that we have the tools like BIM, Building Information Modeling, the tools I just mentioned as far as CBA, Choosing By Advantage, A3, A4s for improving the decision making process.

We take the performance outcome of each aspect of the project that could be around schedule, could be around the budget management, it could be around the quality of the documents When we go through the integrated project review process, as a team, not just internally on the architectural engineering side, but also we include the trade partners, we include the general contractor, we include the client, and most of the time we include the authorities having jurisdiction to be part of that integrated project review to make sure we all working towards a common goal, which is the better quality for the project overall.

But the outcome of those integrated project reviews will be one of the measurements of us how we perform in delivering those projects and what are the gaps that we identify, what are the variances that we need to identify and how do we improve on the plan percent complete if you will, PPC that we do on a weekly basis. The way I've seen target value design applied, I feel like value can be a bit of a misnomer and that often when people do target value design they actually end up assigning a certain dollar value to a certain building system and then they work and trade off between those systems to create that value, but this actual idea of value, this broader notion of value beyond cost about human performance and environmental impact and all of that tends to not be explicit in a lot of the value definitions that I see on projects.

So I think we will do things like target value design, but with a bit broader notion of values or making those trade offs. It's not just about time and money, but about some of these other criteria that we're interested in as well. So I think that's where particularly these types of methods are really important where you're dealing with a lot of complexity, a lot of interrelationships and so the ability to model and visualize and analyze and understand becomes even more important in these types of projects.

It starts with our team to just get our collective act together on the architecture interior design side. Then we expand that to be all of our consultant team and so we start this even at a programming phase of a project. So we start then. As soon as we have a builder partner on, they join us as well. So they're fully integrated into it and the owner is brought into it as well.

And we have different swim lanes that go through all the different pieces and parts so that everybody brings in what they're planning to do and it really is simply a last planner system eventually. But you combine the last planner system with all of the, we have an individual goal setting. People come in and talk about their personal goals. We talk about the project design and vision and alignment on what we're all trying to achieve. So it's both the hard and the soft side of Lean.

I think that all three of these guys have connected the tools to the soft side, the team building and collaborative approaches so eloquently. I've asked them how do they do some of that bridging between the two sides? Yeah, I mean I'll drill right into this workflow that I've been describing earlier and that it really requires a different design process. I mean our designers, this comes just out of school, the way we're trained and everything. It's not, you know, we're not familiar with systematic performance based design processes that typically architectural problems are so vast and complicated and wicked that we're trained to use a great deal of synthesis and experience and intuition in order to get to good solutions quickly and guide the team to execute those solutions.

But we can't say when we execute those processes that we've done the very, very best for the client. I would say with confidence that we've delivered the best value that's possible in this site for these constraints and goals of the client. So that's really where we're trying to go with these types of workflows. But it really does retraining an organization to think and work differently to get our designers with 40 years of experience and kind of incredible knowledge to not pick up that fat pencil just yet, to not start drawing, to not start falling in love with certain design approaches, but much more data driven approach to really understanding the problem first.

It's a struggle. And how do we do it? It's kind of an ongoing exploration. We're doing a lot of developing of curriculum that can guide people through this process first for a very simple, small problem so that we can get people through it quickly and understand all the terminology and the language and how we work. And then we'll go into kind of longer workshop.

We'll bring in one of our projects and try to execute these new ways of working on those projects. We can kind of compare. This is how we did it last time. This is how it could be different. I guess one other kind of mechanism that we've been using, which has been helpful, has been working with universities a lot.

So we'll take our kind of ideas of our workflow and our design projects into university studio projects and interact with the students, but just as importantly, the professors and the researchers at that university. And then they through a kind of 10 or 15 week semester recorder project will really do an in-depth dive of developing a new workflow and approach for one of our projects. And coming out of that, we find a lot of benefits. One, we're able to access new workforce, new students who kind of get this way of working and can kind of work from the bottom up.

We also have good case studies that we can then present to leadership, sort of explain, this is how it works. This is how much extra effort it might take. These are some of the benefits and savings you might realize. We're really trying to build up that argument in the safe sandbox of a university. The last benefit that we really get from that is there's amazing research going on in all of our universities.

It's kind of stuck there. And so this is one mechanism through our kind of lens of our projects where we can start to understand how it really gets applied and start to pull it into our projects. Along with John, Moosen also finds that you can only create that true behavioral change when there's constant training. And in addition to that, working with younger generations is hugely valuable. The professionals been in the market for a while have to better understand the goals and the value propositions for the millennials in order to be able to work together and to learn from each other.

And I think that's one thing that we all can learn by reaching out to the millennials and have that very transparent conversation of what is value to them and how can we align their personal goals with our organization goals and other organizations to come up with a common goal that's going to be win-win situation for all. And I think it takes a lot of mentoring and coaching and training, in my opinion, to get there on both sides. And we do a lot of mentoring and coaching internally.

I personally, been the best tool for me professionally to develop by coaching others. It's a two-way street. I have learned from my mentees as much as they have learned from me. And I'm going to continue on that path. I believe in it.

The collaborative method for tool implementation and cultural change moves the industry forward. It takes a commitment to creating a culture where all voices will be heard and respected and where value is established so that team members are ultimately held accountable. So I'm going to introduce two new speakers here. You'll hear from Mackenzie and Moosen and John a little bit later. But the primary people you'll be hearing from now are Steve and Howard.

I'll let them introduce themselves to you. Steven Wilson. I work for HMC Architects where I'm a principal at the firm. My area of expertise, if you will, or market is healthcare. So I lead large teams designing and delivering healthcare projects, typically medical office buildings, TI's, full-on replacements in some cases and greenfield projects.

We're putting in a whole new hospital narrative, never had one. My name is Howard Ashcraft and I'm a partner with the law firm Hanson Bridget in San Francisco. What I do is structure lean IPD projects and I do that across North America. A great number of projects in Canada as well as the United States and also internationally. The lean journey for both Steve and Howard coincides with a technology that we know well.

It's building information modeling, aka BIM. A few years ago, my company made the determination that they would go 100% BIM. What the opportunities in the industry might be going from a 2D to a design 3D world. The first conversation we had, amazing enough, was the need for a higher level of knowledge to work in a BIM world and what that would mean. That students coming out of college can't just be just entry level people.

That the amount of information that goes in a BIM is way higher than it used to be. And how would we deal with that? It's amazing that integrated project delivery was kind of the quick answer to that question because you not only had these individuals who were very good at the software and some good nods about how to put things together, experts who have been in the field for a long time could contribute to that conversation and make sure that the information in the models was good information.

Now BIM is progressing now, so not only are we designing what we're taking those models and fabricating with them, we're using them in the field to a much higher level of precision building than we've ever done. We hardly drill anything in the decks anymore. All the sleeves and everything are put in before we put the concrete, which I thought was never going to happen. We use class detection to make sure that we're getting a feel. I don't get an RFI that comes back and says that your pipe is going right through this.

Can you lower your ceiling so that we can work? Again, I think the stress for our designers is that you draw something, you put all this effort into it, it gets to the field, you get a thousand questions about what you did. BIM has gone a long way to remove that. You still get a thousand questions, but they're in design where they belong. The cost of making those corrections is much lower in terms of time and money than it is in construction.

I think that as BIM moves on from 3D elevation horizontal Zs to time and cost, 5D, and then on to facility management, which it has in a lot of places also, that now we have this continuous connection of what was done in design, the facility lifespan and expansion, modification and all those things. BIM has really changed the world. It's really changed how we construct. This made it allow us to do much more complicated buildings, taking a lot of the guesswork out of construction. I can't wait to see where it goes in the future.

Well, I've been doing construction law since 1979. However, I started getting involved with building information modeling before it was called that back in the early 2000s and started recognizing that if we wanted to use the technology the way we could really gain benefit from it, we were going to actually have to change the way we executed projects. That got me into looking at how to optimize project delivery. Then sometime in the mid-2000s, I started working with a number of other folks on what eventually became called integrated project delivery.

It was involved by the American Institute of Architects California Council, writing what was actually the first formal statement in the United States, which is a document called IPD, a working definition. There are some complicated definitions, but from my standpoint, IPD is the process of creating a virtual organization to execute a project that is aligned to the project objectives. And so structurally, what we do differently in an IPD is we bring in all the key participants. We go through an alignment process to make sure everyone understands why we're doing the project and agreeing upon what that is.

We develop a governance structure that's appropriate for that type of project. And then it all gets wrapped up into a single contract where the parties have their profit risk and they can make additional profit depending upon project outcome or they could lose all the profit depending on project outcome. But they do it together. And one of the key issues is they manage the project together, the finances are together and to a great degree agree that there are no disputes among them. It seems that they both understood that BIM was going to shape their industry and that the current way of working was not working.

The current way of working needed to be transformed to an integrated approach. As part of my lean journey, if you will, we've had the opportunity to be integrated project deliveries that encompass or embody the total gamut of lean tools, including and up to IFOA, which is the integrated form of agreement. So we've been in full contracts in every variation thereof. You actually get in there and start looking at your true risks. You can now actually, and you see them and you identify them.

You can now do something about them. And from that standpoint, I think that could be helpful. The problem with the anticipated regret is it usually keeps people from making the decision. So they actually never go into that particular environment. The other thing, this is a very difficult problem, but an anticipated regret, by the way, is Paul Slovic, University of Oregon.

There's a lot of background on that research and that what I'm about to tell you now is in personal opinion. I don't think people actually change because of data. A lot of people think if I just give people data, they will change. But in fact, they have to believe. And that's actually a step beyond data and often requires actually experiencing and doing things.

And until you do that, you can show a lot of people data and they won't change their behavior. Once they've actually done something and actually experienced it, the behavior starts to change. What I really mean to say is that change is an emotional state, knowledge or let's say knowledge is a mental state or a data state or an intelligence state, but it's not enough. You have to get to that emotional state if you want to get people to change. You know, having the people who are actually going to build it be a part of that conversation that we found is a big benefit because we don't draw things or add things to documents that provide no value.

We only want to put things in there that one, the agency needs for approval, the contractor needs to build, and that operationally will do operationally what the owner intended for it to do. In the past, creating documents that once they get to the field are not inundated with RFIs and changes are probably one of the biggest ones. We always just allow them. We know when a document goes to the field or goes to the contractor for bidding, the very next day we're going to get a whole bunch of RFIs and a whole bunch of change orders associated with that.

On my Lean IPD projects, that doesn't happen because the contractor is part of the conversation from day one and all his ideas and all his suggestions have been included in the documents. So it is really refreshing. People have no idea what it's like to wake up one day and not have 500 RFIs and 500 change orders show up the next day. Unless you've been in an IPD, most people don't realize that. You send your documents off a bid and you hold your breath.

It's the estimate that you assume for the project. I don't have those concerns anymore. It's all decided when we started putting the documents together. We can do all that, not waste time with things that don't contribute to that final delivery. We are happy.

I find that to be pretty fantastic. Most people perceive risk in two ways. One of which is that they think that anything which is different is a risk. Yet, in fact, the question you usually see is what you're about to do riskier than what you're currently doing. And most people never self-assess current risk.

And when you look at that, the real risks of construction have to do with the ability to actually create a facility or a project which actually meets the needs and let alone meets it within the budget and the time required. We do very poorly on that risk. We tend to be over budget, tend to be late. We tend to have a lot of bad projects. That risk is very high and that's delivered by most traditional project delivery.

When you move to IPD, that risk goes down and most of the recent data tends to back that up. So, from that standpoint, risk is actually less. But the perceived risk is it's different. And because it's different, people actually have to take ownership for making a decision and ownership doing something in the future. There's a great concept from in terms of people who've studied risk perception called anticipated regret in which they start regretting making a decision before they've actually made it.

So, for people looking at change, they're thinking, what if something went wrong? I could be blamed for that. But if I don't do anything different, I can't be blamed. They regret a decision they haven't yet made and it tends to keep them from making the decision. The second issue is a lot of people think you can shift risk by writing something down on a piece of paper.

But in fact, that doesn't really work. If it really worked, then the federal government would never have a project which was late or over budget because they do a great job at shifting risk on paper. But those risks don't go away. You're better off if you're talking about managing risk, actually managing and mitigating the risk or managing, avoiding and mitigating the risk, not trying to transfer it on paper. Usually also the transfer goes to someone who can't do anything about it, which is dysfunction.

Most people in the design-build world, I'm amazed at how many people are still reluctant to this kind of a process and feel like they're giving up something, realizing that whatever they may be giving up, that there's a huge return, not just in terms of cost savings, time, but just peace of mind. Most people don't get to the stress, personal impacts of the living process and how tough that can be on individuals. I'm happy that, you know, typically you can always make a profit. Relationships are great at the end of a project.

I still have get togethers with teams that have delivered IPD projects because we had so much fun. I can always look back and know that they were totally stress-free. For me personally, that's a good thing. That's a good thing. I've seen people get stressed and never want to come back.

This you want to come back to. Now I don't know if this hits you like it hit me, but the communication about wanting to work with the same people and working without stress, it makes me want to be a better person so that I can be that person that other people want to work with. It makes me want to help create and contribute to this environment that's just fun. I mean, how does it make you feel? Moosen validates this and he talks about working with repeat clients.

Next. For us, almost 85% of our business is a repeat business. We know that the performance is the key indicator for our success. Our philosophy at Lionoc as we chase clients, we do not chase projects. The success of the client, we consider that the success of the entire team, including ourselves.

If we can exceed the expectation of the client, especially in the healthcare environment, to make sure we help the clients to deliver a better quality care to their customers, which is patients, ultimately save lives and positive impact on the communities that we live in and we serve, that in itself is really the rewarding piece for us as healthcare architects. And if you do that very well and efficient, then I think the business comes, but it repeats itself if you keep the quality at the high level.

I ask about the use of specific lane tools and Steve and Moosen give the responses. First started doing our IDPD, we use pole planning, our last planner, as it's called, I called it pole planning back then, 5S, retrospectives. We use a few different software trying to work out the collaborative part of delivering projects where we track our documents and organize our documents in a way that's beneficial to everyone. I like to say that the processes of problem solving, A3s, become a normal part of my life.

You know, typically if I get an RFI request from an owner, I respond with an A3. I choose my partners to deliver work through A3s. Every project I have, we try to do pole planning, whether it's contractually required or not. I try to convince owners to always bring as many of the key players to the front of the contract as I can, depending on what contractually what they can do. Obviously public entities are a little less cooperative, but everybody else in some way, shape, or form is fairly cooperative.

Design build is, I used to say, you know, design build is a variation, if you will, of collaborative delivery. It's just you're still not getting the full benefit. It's still a step in the right direction. It's moving towards what they call progressive design build, where they're doing a lot of things that IPD does. So call it what you will, as long as the processes and the attitudes are the same.

That's all that matters. The tools are important for tracking and the process part of the lean and IPD, but the behavior of the team is more important. The culture that you have to instill in the team to make sure they all understand the behind why we're doing what we're doing within the lean and the IPD environment, which also translates into building the trust and the confidence among the team members. That's in my opinion is the most critical piece of success in an IPD environment. Again, the tools become the facilitators to improve the process.

It's interesting, right? Clients want what they want. They have these projects. They have ideas. At the end of the day, our part of this project is a blip in the delivery of their final facility.

We're one year, two year, three year, four years, a part of a 50 year commitment on their part. Sometimes we have to realize that our value proposition to the owner is that we're going to help you get this thing delivered as fast as possible for the value that you want and that it's going to achieve what you want it to achieve when it's completely done. We don't want to be a hindrance to that. Once the nails are in, the screws are done, the concrete is dry.

It's technically a fixed permanent deal. I think it's very expensive to change. In talking with my owners and having them understand it, we want to make sure that you get exactly what you intended to get and that everybody agrees before we draw anything that that's what you're going to get. Howard provides his legal perspective about this. The dispute metrics for our projects are extremely good.

We've done structured over a hundred and a quarter. I haven't updated our list, but it's probably closer to a hundred and thirty at this point in time. And of those, not a single one has yet to get to a mediation, which would be the first step at dispute resolution. And obviously none have ever gotten to arbitration or litigation. I do know of one project that I'm even aware of that got to a mediation and it wasn't one of our projects and it was on a fairly minor item.

From a standpoint of litigation risk, it's extremely low. You also have to understand that I came from litigation background in construction and had a reputation for doing large scale major construction litigation. And I don't know of any other project delivery system that is actually this low in terms of risk. And the best part I like about IPD is the integrated part where we're bringing all that I call extreme knowledge to the front of this discussion. We're not drawing anything until we talk to all the people involved in delivery of the project owner, the contractors, the trade partners, everything else can be a variation, but the ability to bring a whole bunch of people together that don't typically get to talk early in the process and get them to the point where they're working together to deliver and achieve the same goals is just amazing for me.

You have to do some research. When we wrote the book, which is published by Wiley this year called Integrating Project Delivery, and I, along with Professor Martin Fisher, also a tool consortium, DPR, Dr. Tool and Dean Reed, the initially the book had focused on basically a structure and process. And we also focused on the ability to use technology. And one of the things we recognize is that you actually have to execute that through people.

There had to be a whole discussion in terms of what might call the softer side, but in fact are actually the elements of how you actually get collaboration to work and provide the energy that go into those processes and systems. About a third of the book deals with those issues for that reason. But there's a lot of other material out there as well. I wanted to give a special thank you to Howard for contributing to the AEC community through his book. You can find the link in the show notes.

Now it's that time again, the last and my favorite segment of the episode where all of the guests have the opportunity to talk about where we're going to be in the future. And last but not least, how do we shift our mindset to be more lean? Our industry is ripe for transformation. And we're probably one of the least efficient industries in the world. We have to find ways to dramatically improve our process.

So we're looking at all types of disruptors about how we can change and improve our design. The whole supply system, supply chain about how we design and build buildings. We think in 10 years it's going to be quite different. I think data is going to be a big influencer. So data, AI, there's so much that's going to change what we do.

To complete supply chain changes such as no longer what I'll call kind of the mom and pop approach to construction. I expect that we will see more manufacturing oriented, more prefabrication, more kit of parts approach, less than stick built in the field. So I think we're going to see a rapidly, I think LCI is on the right track to bring the waste out of it, but we're going to have to think very differently than we are right now. Well, I'd like to think and I hear rumblings about this at this conference an awful lot.

I'd like to see us move towards more performance based contracting. And again, I'll talk about value more broadly where we're not writing typical IPD contracts, which are just about cost and time delivery, but that more performance metrics become explicit in these contracts in the way we're delivering so that we're not so much delivering not drawings anymore, I hope, or not even just a model, but we're actually delivering a service of performance. And I think that's where owners will start to quickly see the benefit of thinking and working that way.

And I think teams can then really clearly organize around those performance metrics and that will lead to much more efficiency in the industry. Obviously, it's hard to predict what's going to happen tomorrow. But from my point of view, we have made a lot of progress as far as IPD and lean delivery method, at least in the AEC industry for the last 10, 15 years. And what I anticipate happening is it's going to continue to grow. It's going to continue to become a normal practice, a standard practice for us for years to come.

But I think in order for us to speed up the pace of further developing this wonderful delivery method in the industry, we need to really make this part of curriculum for the high schools and colleges and make sure we target the younger generation that becomes a normal practice for them. Because for us being in the industry for a while, change is always difficult, but change also brings opportunities. The transformation for us has been a little more difficult to get into the mindset of getting into a lean and IPD delivery method and changing the culture versus if we just hit the younger generation, that challenge should go away.

You have to really start from the colleges and the schools, in my opinion, to accelerate the progress of an IPD and lean delivery method. Information and our ability to write software to deal with situations. Again, I liken it to apps. Now anybody can write an app to solve a problem. And when you get apps up to, what, 300 millions, now we have this ability to take software like that, solve problems on the fly.

I'm amazed how people try to use one piece of software to address a fairly large continuum of concerns. I think it's going to get down to small bashing again, where at a minimum they talk to each other and they solve problems along the delivery chain. I think we'll be using technology to solve problems at a much larger scale. I think connectivity will change. Things will be a lot more integrated.

Our health is not integrated. It's freeing us to do other things. I used to worry, or people used to always worry, as technology comes, what does that mean for us as humans? Jobs are lost because technology is taking place. As humans, we always find something else to do that the technology has not addressed yet.

Information is keen. One guy told me that he can give away the most information. It's keen, not hold it to give it away. I'm intrigued and I just can't wait to see what's coming in the future. Well there's I think two, maybe three kind of important things.

And also let's recognize that nobody's really good at predicting the future. If you look at sustainability, sustainability requires a deep involvement of all stakeholders at a very early stage. If you're going to go to a high-stability building. Lean requires something very similar. Technology requires something very similar.

So I think there's sort of an overwhelming trend towards collaboration. That will definitely increase. The second thing is that the tools are going to start driving change as well. The input of technology will also probably result in changes that we haven't seen. Both moving things in terms of prefabrication, modularization.

That's what we can see in the short term. But in fact, for instance, there was someone I was talking to who was saying startup was developing robotic framing. And I said, why are you thinking robotic framing? Because mechanical and electrical all intertwine. You actually should be robotic everything.

The whole complete center. He said, well, we only can do so much right now. But I think we start seeing really transformations where we're working. I think we'll also see some consolidation. Because the other way to avoid some of the problems we have is we're overly fragmented at the present moment.

And if we can consolidate that to some degree, that will actually improve outcomes or make it at least easier to make change. So I basically see moved collaboration, technology changes in ways that we don't even yet understand. And that probably see an increase in vertical and horizontal integration. Don't be afraid to lean. Lean is actually something that you can get past the hurdles of it.

It's very friendly and it's very effective. I mean, the outcomes for us have been great. We've ended up with better design, higher client satisfaction, happier teams, more efficient teams, and they're not busting their tail. They're not working day, night and weekends. They have a better quality of life.

Basically, everybody ends up winning. So don't be afraid of it. Dive in. I think, as I mentioned earlier, it's about engagement. We have to engage millennials at the much broader aspect of the industry, the seaside.

And it takes some commitment and effort on our end to make that happen. So we have to first believe in the process of getting millennials engaged to basically pass on the baton in the industry to them, but make sure they take it to the next level. And it takes us currently in the market to help them get there. And I know as an industry, we still have a long way to go, even though we have made a lot of progress and it takes all of us to get there.

So let's continue to partner, work with each other, share knowledge, leverage knowledge, learn from each other. And if we all do that, the sky will be the limit for us. Talk to people and go see it being done. A lot of the times when we have new teams that we're starting working with, we try to make arrangements for them, go to a big room or go to a Colo site and actually see how people are working and see it actually happening in front of them, rather than just talk about it and talk about the theory about it or focus on what they're going to do.

See it being done. And that's really a fairly powerful thing to do. And then talk to like minded people. Owners need to talk to owners and understand what the owner's experience is. Contractors need to talk to contractors.

Trades need to contract for trades that have that kind of experience. So they can understand it from those perspectives as well. And once you start doing it and start getting it to work, you start believing that maybe it will work even better and you can kind of start going down that path. But it's the doing it that actually starts getting people to change. Try it, make it happen.

Learn. And then the other thing is you have to be committed. You have to recognize that the first time you do almost anything, it's not going to be 100%. Use it as an opportunity to make the second better and the third better and the fourth better still. If you are committed to the process, you will in fact get results.

What you sometimes see is people stub their toe and back off. Stubbed your toe, you should move forward. Stub your toe, you should move forward. Go and see for yourself. Take the first step.

Who wouldn't want to get better design, higher client satisfaction, happier and more efficient teams? I recommend that you make a commitment to becoming more lean today. Take on some of the methodologies. Take it, understand it. Share that knowledge with everyone around you.

So let me know if you enjoyed our discussion by connecting with me at Twitter at Brittany underscore CT or find me on LinkedIn. Or you can just email me to at Brittany at Constructor dot com. Again, that's B R I T T A N I E at Construct double R dot com. So next week, you'll hear from three more guests. You'll be hearing from Eric Alstrom, Frank Barnes and Rex Miller.

You're really in for a treat. Don't forget to subscribe at Constructor dot com to get email updates from me. If you haven't already subscribed to the podcast, you can do so at any of your listening platforms. So please leave a review to show your support and let me know that you're enjoying the podcast. I look forward to talking with you guys next week.