Transcript: Lean Construction Institute Congress Recap: Part 4

One of the most powerful lessons I've learned in lean is actually one of the first pillars, which is respect for people. And that philosophy, if it's not lived, it means that your gains and increased productivity is short-lived. But if that is lived, what I mean is that it's like a chorus, more people get involved, continuous improvement becomes a natural course because more people buys into it because there's respect. So I think if we can achieve respect for people first, then the byproduct of that is continuous improvement.

Our project teams have about 30% are engaged, active and happy. 50% are along for the ride and will do a good job if you tell them what to do, tell them how to do it, follow up and make sure they did it. Then you've got two drilling a hole in the boat. So we give people ways to help specify what does front of the boat behavior look like because most people don't know. So we have a process of having them watch and observe naturally what that team, how capture those front of the boat behaviors specifically.

So we know this is what it looks like in our team. We also have them capture the back of the boat behaviors and they talk about that. So once they get specified, you can actually manage that. But as long as they stay kind of these abstract Hallmark card type statements, they're hard to manage a team with that. I think that most companies will have knuckleheads like me who will be driving lane.

But if we go away, what have we left? Have we left an infrastructure in place that others can follow along? A lot of us are like the trailblazer with our machetes whacking away at the bushes and somebody else has got to come along and pave, make roads and widen the roads. And we're just whacking away and there's no infrastructure. Then the weeds will grow back up and there'll be nothing left.

And so that's another challenge too is that we have to be able to build the infrastructure in organizations. Things like as owners have to have that infrastructure in place. Hello and welcome to the Constructor Podcast, the best way to build it. Episode number 52. Hello, 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. Today I'm wrapping up my last episode recapping the 19th annual Lean Construction Institute Congress. Last week you heard from five guests, Mackenzie Skeen from MBBJ Architects, Steve Wilson from HMC Architects, Moosen Lahoney from Lionakis, Howard Ashcraft with Hanson Bridgett Law Firm, and John Haymaker from Perkins and Will.

So if you haven't listened to this episode yet, you're really in for a treat. You can find it at constructor.com slash EP 51. Today you'll be hearing from three more people. The first two that you'll be hearing from are Eric and Frank. I'll let them introduce themselves.

My name is Eric Alsturm and I'm with Amgen. Amgen is the world's largest independent biotech manufacturer. We do about 20 billion a year, small amount of money. I am the Lean Leader at Amgen, Senior Manager, and I've been doing this since about 2009. My name is Frank Barnes.

I'm Jamaican but I live in Trinidad. I'm currently the CEO of Uticot. Well Uticot primarily is a project developer and also we do facilities management. Recently we have gone into business development. We are developing our own projects.

I asked them both to tell me a little bit about how their Lean journey started. Eric starts by telling me about how long he's been part of the LCI community and his experience with it. So I've been coming for the last five years. It's a great place to network with like-minded people. There's so many different events and activities and workshops and they're all great and I go to as many as I can.

I'm also hosting several of them as one of the conference champions. Mainly to connect with a lot of my colleagues, a lot of people I don't get to see except maybe a couple of times a year to share ideas. Today I was in one of these panel discussions sharing ideas about how we're going to advance Lean in our industry and it was fun sharing ideas. I think for us most of us wanted to transform this industry. It's kind of broken and so a lot of us are trying to be the Don Cahote, tilting at windmills but we're hoping to make a difference.

How I got into Lean and that started somewhere about 2004 in Jamaica and I was doing some projects and we did the projects through partnering with small subcontractors and we got phenomenal success and I started to search to see if can I align it with any methods around and then I came across Lean Construction and then I had the opportunity to actually speak to Greg Orwell on Skype and then ever since that he has supported me and then also there's another Jamaican Lean practitioner called Dr.

Lincoln Forbes, he knows a book about Lean Construction and they gave me support through here so and then it's only when I started working in Barbados I got involved in a project that was really, really going south that we started to practice Lean more than last month system that went on, went back to Jamaica and do a project where we actually did it and did it exceptionally well and then now returning to Trinidad and getting the opportunity to manage Utica, I now have a responsibility to do what's best and I continue to practice Lean.

And then ask about some of the benefits they've realized once they've implemented Lean. One of the biggest things and as a coach also at my company is that when teams work together as teams they do better work and the whole premise of an integrated project delivery is that the teams truly are integrated, they're not infighting, they're working towards a common goal. As an owner I definitely want to see that because that's going to lower my costs. When people don't communicate, they don't share ideas, either we miss opportunities or we miss deadlines because people aren't talking.

One of the biggest things for us is that we do as an owner, we want better delivery with its cost or schedule or E all the above and we've seen that. Amgen, we've done 15 or 16, 17 the IFOA project, I've lost count and we've got several more in a hopper and we've seen good success. We've seen shared savings, happier partners and it's a lot more fun and it's a better working environment. Frank gives us an example of how they've also seen success when applying Lean on his projects.

While in Barbados, that's during 2008, 2010 to give you an idea of the time period, we used to meet at about 11.30 along a walkway and the guys used to stand in a semicircle formation and the supervisors and the project manager and the construction manager used to stand along the pavement and we'd have a 30 minute safety meeting. We found that was effective and then out of the blue one morning we said, why don't we meet on a Monday morning and then I said, but why don't we meet in a circle?

So it started off then. But because of the nature of the job and the problems we're having, bashing the guys and the spreading negatives would not help us. So we started a positive way, we started off with a prior and then we asked each of the supervisors of the construction foreman to speak about their people. They would applaud the people for what they would have done the previous week and then they would share the production numbers and then they would actually make a commitment of what they're going to produce for this week.

We would have a section where we have safety talks and then the last part of the meeting would be if someone is visiting, could be somebody from the bank, could be our director, could be the owner, we'd ask them to share what they have learned from the meeting and share something that can encourage the guys before they go to work. And then normally after that the project manager would close the meeting. But the construction manager actually is the one that runs the meeting. And it normally lasts about half an hour.

So we took the model because that was up to 2010, then 2010 to 2012 went to Jamaica and we took it to another level because in Jamaica we had a very controlled environment. We started the project right. The project had a strong start. So we were able to do it well there and then to the extent that our owners like from the UK because it was a foreign firm, when they planned their visits to Jamaica and they planned their visit to the site to come on a Monday morning to experience it, that was a phenomenal thing.

So as I was saying to you earlier, there's now part of the lean conversations that we have in the last one and I call this the sixth conversation. I ask them next about how some of the lean tools and techniques have been implemented on their projects. Well, the last one system and coupled with pull planning and so we use also the weaker work plan and daily work plan. So that's pretty much what we have been doing. It is also our intention to get the more collaboration with the contractors so we can move away from this bidding and competitive tender and that doesn't and move to more collaborative style of management which leads us to more rational contracts and IPD.

That's where we really need to go. So the philosophy is that if we practice the last panel, get successful at that, then we get the coordination and then by getting the coordination right, then we build trust among the contractors and then we can actually improve our specialization and then you get the alignment and you move into the IPD. So that could take a couple of years because currently our model is different. Like any organization, there are pockets. There are some parts of our company that may not be as collaborative but I think that our group as a whole, we're working towards a more collaborative environment and there's a saying that people often at times they come together as strangers and leave as enemies and that's something we really don't want.

We want to work with our partners and have repeat business with them and we figure if they learn how to work with Amgen, they won't have to relearn or we have to train somebody else on how to work with us. So their learning curve, repeat partners, we save a lot of time and money that way. If we had this big discussion today in our breakout, is it tools or is it methods and approaches? So we like using the term methods and approaches. So of course we use Last Planner, BIM, we have big rooms, we use lean coaches, whether internally with myself, coaching if I have time or I bring in other coaches.

We do team alignment surveys. We do a lot of things to look at how we're doing as a team. IFOA contracts, I mentioned that before but we feel that is the contract that more or less it contractualizes a culture of collaboration is the way I look at it and so far that's been very successful for us. Some of our teams have brought in A3s. Most of the stuff we've tried are pretty common and are implementing.

I don't know how good we are. We try to assess ourselves on an annual basis to see how well we're doing. Again, we only do that on an annual basis because it'd be like putting a radar gun on a glacier if we try to do it every month. But we are looking at ways of how well we're learning. So those are a few of the things we're doing.

I dug into the topic a little bit more with Eric and asked about the obstacles that he faced when implementing Lean, especially in his project teams. Well, I mentioned about leadership and again, they're under tremendous pressure. These guys are not always concerned about delivering Lean. They're more concerned a lot of times about, well, one, they got pressures on them from industry. They just got to make the numbers.

The other thing I see personally is institutionalizing Lean within the organization. In fact, this is another thing opposed today during a meeting. I asked this question, I think even last year when I was speaking at the conference, I asked the question, how important is safety? Is that one of the number one priorities? And everyone said, yeah, of course safety is important.

And I asked the question, then why do we need a safety organization? Now, let that one sink in there is that, well, you need somebody to point to true north. I think that most companies will have knuckleheads like me who will be driving Lean. But if we go away, what have we left? Have we left an infrastructure in place that others can follow along?

A lot of us are like the trailblazer with our machetes whacking away at the bushes. And somebody else has got to come along and pave, you know, make roads and widen the roads. If we're just whacking away and there's no infrastructure, then the weeds will grow back up and there'll be nothing left. And so that's another challenge too, is that we have to be able to build the infrastructure in organizations. Companies like us, owners have to have that infrastructure in place.

Big CM firms need to have the infrastructure in place to sustain the improvements that they're making. I followed up asking Eric, how does the implementation of Lean carry through his organization at Amgen? The alignment and strategy that it has to be baked into a Lean IPD approach needs to be baked into strategy that the companies fully have embraced and made public and are also rewarding people for taking that approach. And if they don't reward people, people only do, unfortunately, most people unless they really have a vision for something, only do the things that they're rewarded for.

So if you're not rewarded for doing Lean, then let's go back. It's easy not to change. Both Eric and Frank had a perspective on leadership and carrying out a Lean mindset. Here's what they had to say. I think one of the most powerful lessons I've learned in Lean is actually one of the first pillars, which is respect for people.

And that philosophy is not lived. It means that your gains and increased productivity is short lived. But if that is lived, what I mean is that it's like a chorus. More people get involved. Continuous improvement becomes a natural course because more people buys into it because there is respect.

So I think if we can achieve respect for people first, then the byproduct of that is continuous improvement. One of the biggest things is helping our leaders to lead. Many of them are just trying to make the numbers every month or the quarter and don't have the long sightedness to see that the industry needs to be transformed. In other words, we need to a different leadership mindset, Lean mindset, a mindset that puts people first in the sense of one of the Toyota things is respect for people.

And that's so important. And we spend a lot of time on our jobs. Why don't we enjoy it and do good work at the same time? What we've seen in those completed IFOA projects is we've seen better cost delivery and scheduled delivery. We've always asked for fast.

But when the teams are working together, we're getting, I think, a better quality product because we're actually allowing our trade partners to tell us when we're doing something stupid. In the past, we just tell them to go do something and they do something. And when we want it to be corrected, it was they said, we only did what you told us to do. And now they're saving us money by saying, you know, you could do that, but it's going to cost you more money. So we as an owner surprisingly are beginning to listen.

And so with that, we're saving money that way. We don't have to rework those decisions because we're listening so we can do it right the first time. You know, a lot of it is about the money. But I think for many of us who've been in this industry for a while, it's about a better experience. I enjoy our integrated teams because then we have a lot more fun.

I mean, it's stressful, but we are finding there's more fun. We are finding people are working together to deliver a common project outcome, not one that's just with self interests where people just making a buck. And that's not what our partners want anyway. It was crazy here that the overarching theme was to ensure that the mindset connects with an initial step of having respect. There are many principles of lean that the book, the Toyota Way by Jeff Liker talks about.

But I've been hearing this common theme about respect. I venture to say that I think that we in this industry connect with this pillar so much because we may understand that we have a deficit. I don't know, that's just my objective opinion. And we'll dig into this topic a bit more as we speak with our next guest. You'll be hearing a bit from Frank and Eric again, as well as from some of our past guests from other episodes.

But I'll let Rex tell you about what he does. He mentions three areas of focus to start with. Rex Miller, and my firm is called MindShift. So we do three things. We work on thought leadership and help companies turn thought leadership into market leadership.

A lot of the problems we tackle are large and complex. And so our model is to bring multiple stakeholders together and work collaboratively for a couple years. We find that complex problems take a long time to understand and that traditional single experts tackling an issue get part of it right, but oftentimes don't get the whole picture right. So it's been successful model. The first major problem we tackled is why capital projects are consistently late over budget and people hate each other at the end of the project.

So that was a project that started in 2007 with 18 organizations, included the American Institute of Architects, GSA, Gensler, Turner, a lot of large stakeholders. And we looked at what drove the system. Actually, we didn't start out with We asked the problem, what's wrong from your seat on the bus? The first things that we heard, Tom Gerlach from Turner said, if only the damn architect could deliver plans on time, we'd be okay. And I had two architects in the room.

And they said, if only the contractor knew how to read the plans, and understood design intent, we wouldn't have these problems. And then the owner, if only the owner would make up their mind not change. Only the developer would give us the right budget. So that's the nature of a complex problem. From your seat on the bus, it looks like somebody else is the problem.

So we began to see that everybody feels frustrated for different reasons. But for also for the same reason, we asked the question, what's going on? And Tom Gerlach came back again and said, we have good companies here. But when a project begins to go sideways, we don't know how to pull it back together again. And someone else said, the system causes good people to do bad things.

And so we asked, what does that mean? And it means that when an owner puts a bid out, low bid is the primary way to win. So you read the bid to look for any loopholes, anything wrong, anything missing, because the documents not a complete document. So you win. And then after you win, you play another game.

And the game is protect your margin or build your margin. The owner knows the game. So they hire a third party to manage and beat people up. So we looked at, okay, there's a system here, there's a game. And the system has a game and it has rules.

So what are the rules? And what we determined is the system is designed to create distrust. So the next question was, what does a trust based system look like? And who's doing it? So that began the thought leader process.

And so we traveled as a collective group quarterly to places that were doing breaking the rules and getting great results. So Sutter Health, for example, or a small little firm called Solidis up in Connecticut, or Signature Center. So we looked at 18 different projects that really defied procurement practices, the way they onboarded teams, they did it differently, but they got better results. And we started seeing the common denominators. And those were teams do better than single individuals, early is better than late, common language, so basic stuff, but they had to overcome the system to do that.

So we wrote a book about it in 2009, won awards, and it's become kind of a primer. It was written for owners, written at an eighth grade level. And so that began our practices of business. And then after that, we had to learn how to deliver on this. So we worked hard on organizational design, healthy culture.

I worked with a firm, TAG Consulting out of DC, clinical psychologists that bring that practice to organizations. We started seeing the inner dynamics, human dynamics, that systems drive bad behavior. And so how do you deal with the human dynamics? That then led to another research project in the industry that Balfour Beatty participated in, and Hayworth as a manufacturer. And it was why do people hate going to work?

Why do 70% of people, why would they rather be someplace else than work? And then, as those of us in the built environment, we see companies all the time, we help them take their cultures and manifest it into space. Could we be having a different kind of conversation with owners to help them address and see how to align culture with business strategy, with environment, to be more effective? And so that was another book that came out in 2014 or 15. The new project is happiness and health in the workplace.

And what can we do about that? So the second component is delivering that. And then the third component that we work with, I provide adult supervision for adults that can't get along. So project teams, leadership teams. So those are the three components.

So to summarize the three areas of focus, REX, coaches on thought leadership, happiness and health in the workplace, and hands-on organizational or project team coaching. So if you're interested in learning more about the books that MindShift has produced, then I'll have the links listed in the show notes. It was fitting that REX facilitated the training workshop called Creating the Culture of High-Performing Teams. I asked him to give us a crash course of what they covered. Last few days, we've had some workshops on high-performing teams.

We had an owner's workshop, which is very interesting. The owner's workshop, we had, for the most part, there were some really experienced people in there, like Sutter Health, but most people are just new to this journey. And it was news to them as to how much waste is in the process that they have. It was news to them that they could actually begin to implement this with traditional procurement practices. It was news to them to bring procurement or legal into the dialogue to understand the problems they're dealing with.

So it was an interesting workshop on how do we bridge those gaps, and then how the owner really sets the tone for the project team. We shared Google's recent research on high-performing teams, that psychological safety is the number one criteria for a high-performing team. Psychological safety is feeling safe to tell the truth, to say, hey, I'm having trouble on meeting my schedule on this. I need help, and not feel like you're going to come in and get beat up. So we asked the owners in a traditional project, if a subcontractor is falling behind or over budget, what do they typically do?

And the answer was, well, they typically lay in the weeds, or they wait so that they can blame somebody else. So that was the example of the opposite of a psychologically safe environment. Then we shared a story at Sutter Health, where one of the subcontractors said, I'm going to be late on the schedule, and I'm over budget already, I need help. And in the big room that they had, the team came together and started trying to solve the problem. And one of the contractors really was grilling this sub, have you thought of this?

Have you thought of that? And it was pretty intense, but it was to solve the problem, it wasn't blame. Afterwards, we asked the Sutter Health project manager, who was that that was so intense and trying to solve the problem, and it was the concrete sub. So how many projects do you know that a sub from a different trade would jump in to try to help a sub from another trade? So part of it was the compensation structure.

But part of it too, was they created an atmosphere that we were singularly committed to the outcome of the project. And if you have a problem, tell us early, bring it to the table, and let's solve it, as opposed to hiding and laying in the weeds and dealing with it at the back end. We start out by first helping people see each other as humans. So the intro, instead of the formal introductions, we go into a little more background on who the person is, where they came from, what energizes them, what drains them, what they're the go-to person for.

You kind of get a flavor for what their formal role is, but what they really do. You know, some person may say, I'm the supervisor on this project, but what I really do is I herd cats or whatever. So it gives kind of a, instead of just name, rank, and serial number, you get some personality, you get some background, you get some context. So first of all, we work on making people human, because it's a lot harder to just blow off on somebody that you know, than it is somebody you don't know.

Then we work on baselining trust. And we have a trust matrix that we have everybody rate. And we typically have them take their last project, and we talk in terms of trust being an asset. And you either have a surplus or a deficit of trust. So we have the teams go through, so what does a deficit look like?

Well, deficit looks like checkers checking checkers, too much paperwork, people holding their cards to the chest. And we ask, so what does that cost a job? Then we look at the positive side. If you have a dividend, a surplus of trust, what does that allow you to do that you can't do differently? So we rate all that based on the last project.

And we typically find most people have had a negative experience on the last project, where trust broke down, and we break it into categories. And then we ask, so what could we have done to have improved that, if you had a bad experience? And what can we do to build on it if you had a positive experience? So that's another part of it. So part of the importance of doing that exercise is that at the beginning of a lot of project meetings, we try to set a tone, trust each other have open communications, but really no process of trying to baseline it.

Everybody comes into a project with either baggage from the last job, or a halo, you know, they had positive or negative experience. We assume when we talk about trust, everyone's on the same page. So what the matrix helps us do is understand where people are coming from. And if they had a bad experience, we can address it, put it on the table. If they had a good experience, we can learn from it.

So that's another part of creating a high performing team. Third part is profiling people. So whether you use Myers-Briggs or disk, we use Strengthfinder. And that becomes a real valuable tool to help us understand what people naturally do best and enjoy most. And so getting to know that also lets us know where people might have some natural friction.

So someone who's strategic and a big thinker and wants to move forward could collide with someone who's more analytical and right on the ground and wants to manage things. If you don't know that ahead of time, you're going to collide in a meeting and just feel its personality when it's really people wired to look at the same thing different ways. So now you can have rules of engagement. One of the teams I was on, I'm strategic, so I tend to see ahead somebody else was analytical and they tell me I tend to leave people in the dust.

So here's a little catchword for me, if I'm working in a situation and getting ahead of some people, you dusted them. And I have a little catchphrase for that person if they tend to get too far in the weeds where it's just not value add. And I just say, hey, the first four letters of analytical is exactly the way I feel right now. We're getting a bit anal on this, aren't we? So every good team has kind of language, locker room language or kitchen language, back of the house language that helps them function.

So this helps us understand people individually, give us language to help deal with somebody when we're not being effective and also give us an appreciation for why that person is so different and it may be uncomfortable for me or even frustrating because I'm not wired that way, but at least I understand it and can give them some room. The next level we do is we look for giving people an active team role in addition to their functional role. So in a project in Florida, a hospital project, we were going around just looking at what people naturally like to bring to the table, what they contribute.

Some people are good at keeping us on time. Some people are good at making sure we've got the right equipment here. Some people are good at making sure we've got actionable items. One person said, I hate the food we have here. We always have bad food here.

And if you looked at his profile, you could see he likes to make group experiences great and he's a foodie. So the next day he brought in this fried chicken from a little shack that he knows and it was wonderful. It was great. The team loved it. But more importantly, he found a way to contribute.

He felt good about it. And it improves the overall team. So we oftentimes don't look at the social capital that we can build. We look so much at functional stuff that we don't look at the social capital side. And so that's another area we work on for high performing teams.

And then there's how do we deal with conflict and we do that as well. We look at engagement on project teams. Most project teams have about, and we heard it this morning, about 30% are engaged, active and happy. 50% are along for the ride and will do a good job if you tell them what to do, tell them how to do it, follow up and make sure they did it. Then you've got two drilling a hole in the boat.

So we give people ways to help specify what does front of the boat behavior look like. Because most people don't know it. Project teams set these criteria for satisfaction or constitutions or values or things like that. But nobody knows what they look like. We're going to treat each other with respect.

Okay. So your idea, my idea. So we have a process of having them watch and observe naturally what that team, how they behave and capture those front of the boat behaviors specifically. So we know this is what it looks like in our team. We also have them capture the back of the boat behaviors and they talk about that.

So once they get specified, you can actually manage that. But as long as they stay kind of these abstract hallmark card type statements, they're hard to manage a team with that. So those are the primary things we do for high performing teams. I asked Rex if he could dig into some of the tools that they use to track their team health. And that's the biggest problems is that teams have good intentions.

And on the front end, they say we want to spend this time, quality time. Recent project I was on, large project. The team had great intentions eight months before the project. We're going to come in and do a couple days of team building and then do it quarterly. As we got closer to the project, within a couple weeks of having this team building, I got a call and said, can we cut the two days down to one day?

And then two days later, could we do a half day? And then the weekend before, the Friday before I was supposed to come out and say, could we just do a 90 minute conference call? But that happens so often that the good intentions get pushed. Back to your reason, because they're not tangibly measurable on the front end. So part of what we do is we have teams develop what we call a team health dashboard.

What are the leading indicators that are going to show that we're working well together? And then measure them monthly and report out quarterly. So you have leading indicator metrics versus lagging indicator metrics. So healthy things are leading indicator metrics. The results are the lagging indicator metrics.

So we focus on how do you make this tangible? And so you can measure behavior. We'll typically do, and so one team that we worked with, they came together like once a quarter. And it was a project, but everybody came from outside the marketplace, all the supervisors. And one of the things they said they had trouble with is that we tend to come in, do our thing and leave.

So we don't check in with people. We called that close the loop. We define what the solution was. How do we close the loop or connect? That was another criteria.

We don't connect. So we said, okay, let's measure how well we're connecting. And this team developed their own metrics for their project based on the challenges they were facing or what they wanted to improve. And then they tracked it over time. When they got together, they'd say, how are we doing?

What do we need to do? Well, they found that one quarter, the numbers kind of dropped off. And when they dug into it, they found that they onboarded three new people. And so those people didn't feel connected. They weren't engaged in the process.

So they had come back and say, we need a better onboarding process. So that's how they used it. But each team should develop their own. There's no universal set of metrics. There's common principles, but no universal set.

Rex talks about the future of LCI and how they are planning on providing resources to the LCI community in the near future. LCI has grown rapidly. And so it's come a long way in terms of having quality programs, quality events. But what they're starting to look at now is that if our vision is to transform the industry through lean practices. So this is kind of an audit.

It's not a where do we go yet, but it's an audit as to what is the content we're providing compared to the vision that we've set. And so do we need to shift the content ratio from very tactical tools and best practices to more leadership or more innovative thinking? So those are kind of the three buckets they're looking at and asking questions about what is the ratio and then looking at the different venues to do that. Is Congress the place to do out of the box stuff or is it the place where we want to be the big tent to bring lots of people in and get them introduced?

So those are more of the questions that are being asked. And I think it'll take time for them to come to what kind of that next stage or next iteration is for them. So they've hired Kristen Hill and so education and research, those are becoming big priorities. So they're going to begin gleaning the expertise of these people and finding ways to turn them into workshops or books or some kind of content. And also LCI has this deep reservoir of past content that needs help being curated.

So there's a lot of work going in that area and I think you're going to find Renee and Kristen bringing a lot to the table there that's going to help leverage kind of this hidden treasure that LCI has captured. As Rex has mentioned Renee, here's some insight into her philosophy based upon the research she has done on behalf of LCI and IPDA. You know, doing complex successful projects is not easy. So you're putting the time and effort somewhere. You know, if you're going to spend X amount of energy on a project, if you can spend it on the positive planning, this is what we want to have happen strategic level and less time on the putting out fires level, I think you're going to be more satisfied the project's going to be better.

And I think too we're going to start looking at tapping more into thought leaders, existing thought leaders and helping them get more work published. And so build that voice so the LCI has a broader voice in the marketplace. Much like in the last few episodes, I talk about the future of the industry in the next 10 to 15 years. Here are the responses from Eric and Rex. We are about 20 years behind manufacturing and manufacturing you're seeing lean manufacturing being for any company that's staying in business in the US, most of them are adopting a lean mentality and lean approaches.

So I would say that for construction in 10, 20 years, we'll be doing the same think that there'll be a new leadership, younger people coming in with a more collaborative mindset. I think the old command and control, those of us who are old enough to be command and control probably fade away, retire, and then there's a new group of leaders I hope will arise and we're seeing it with people here that will lead in a collaborative fashion, be more innovative. The industry hasn't changed in 50, 60, 70 years.

I think the new batch of leaders that will help do that and hopefully some of us older people will help mentor and see this next generation be very successful and do the things we hoped to see, which is wide-scale adoption of lean. We were talking earlier about blockchain so I googled it and I thought, oh this could you know speed up our level of collaboration and our how we do contracts. One of our projects, we just finished signing an IFOA. It took us about a week or so of back and forth getting wet signatures.

Well if you're doing that e-signature we haven't done in a day. Well that's speed chipping away at those things that are holding, hosting up so technology could speed up our ability to deliver. Lots of different drivers. So the drive for talent, companies are finding it hard to get talent so they're going to have to figure out some solution. So it may be a drive towards technology, prefabrication.

The big challenge though is that construction projects by and large come in late and over budget, unpredictable outcomes and that's been consistent since 1964. So it's still the only non-agricultural industry that has lost productivity. So that's a huge area to look for innovation. The industry is going to have to go upstream if it wants to get true innovation so that means procurement practices, policy, standard you know. We've got so much fragmentation.

Every county has its own kind of regulations. At some point in time we're going to have to look at this as there's some common base practices that can be applied across construction projects in general. I like companies like Adidas that are coming into the market. These are, these were originally software engineers that want to hack the inefficiencies within construction. So they're doing three P's, public private partnerships in other places and they're bringing in some interesting thinking and interesting approaches to construction.

The challenge we have too is the risk model. We still distribute risk and so I think the companies that can get a delivery platform that integrates the services so that they can have higher predictability. They can go from managing risk as IPD but owning risk is full integration so I think that's a future opportunity and there's some small firms that do that. We wrote about a firm in Connecticut. It's a small firm but basically what they promise is they commit to the cost, they commit to the delivery date, the move-in date, they promise no change orders and they have a one-page contract and a two-year warranty.

So the reason they're able to do that is they do so much front-end work with the owner that they drive out a lot of the risk and so again it gets back to more work on the front end and the big challenge we have is we've got so many different players doing their own thing. We've got AGC, AIA, LCI, CURT, CII and at some point in time connecting the dots is going to get us closer to the future than trying to just go off and do our own thing.

To give you some insight into what is happening, I spoke with Steven Mulva from Construction Industry Institute or CII in a different episode and I found out as a joint effort that LCI, CII, and the Construction User Roundtable are working together to research the new operating system which is called Operating System 2.0 or OS 2.0. So what they're doing is they're curating the best practices in terms of the future so that we can disrupt our own industry. You can check that episode out at constructor.com. The last thing that I ask is how we can get started.

What are your recommendations to the audience? You first start with your own small team so and I'm a good example of somebody who kind of came from the trenches up into the system and LCI several years ago had a speaker by the name of Paul Akers. He did the book called Two Second Lane and his basic philosophy is see something that you're frustrated with and fix it. Anybody can do that. So I would take the same philosophy, see something that your team sees as frustrating and let your team fix it and influence the surrounding by, you know, leadership is by influence, it's not by power.

So you know I'm an example of somebody who was a subcontractor and saw a big problem that I couldn't solve by myself but if I brought people together that have a common interest in that, collectively we can solve the problem. You know not everybody will do that but anybody can do that if they want to. Making a difference where you can make a difference. For those who are listening and haven't been to one of these conferences or the next one following to register, get to meet some of the people here, when you do come to a conference my recommendation is to reach out when you're sitting at the tables.

If you're an introvert, get out of your shell and meet some great people here, are people that have same, they're here for a reason and your commonality and conversation is well what do we do to do different and I've met a lot of great friends here, you know networking it's fantastic. You can listen to stuff online but there's nothing like being here that like they say live music is best. So some of my key takeaways from my guests from all of the 19th annual Lean Construction Institute Congress recap, they're the following.

Respect goes a long way but you can't respect people if you don't know them. It doesn't take a lot to get to know someone, it takes the desire and making sure that you want to take the steps to do it. No professional sports team would ever go into their championship game pick your particular type of sport and try to play against the other team when nobody knew each other, they had never practiced together, they hadn't developed any plays and yet that's what we do in construction in an average project.

The conclusion many people are coming to is it's not a there's no bad folks in the construction business it's just a bad system. Working in a collaborative way in integrated teams really makes people want to come back and work together again. If you can create an environment where everybody's voice matters in the sense of a meritocracy you're looking for the best ideas and you don't care where they come from then in general you get a better team environment and you get people rowing in the same direction.

Leaving something for the next generation behind us is really really important. If you guys haven't noticed I'm a millennial and yeah I'm really close to the cusp and the borderline of the GenXer but I have a soft spot for the next generations since the knowledge transfer needs to take place in order for us to continue down the really great positive approach that is already taking place in this industry. There's a lot that has to change societally for us to deal with these issues and as you know as much as construction is trucking and many other industries that simply cannot locate, cannot secure technically qualified personnel but there's also a lot of job openings for carpenters and mechanics and welders and machinists and hegan air condition professionals and pipe fitters and all the rest of it and a lot of those are middle income jobs and interesting

work. Work of which one can be proud. So what would make us more attracted to the best and the brightest including the best and the brightest millennials? Is it nicer office space? Is it a shift in schedules?

Is it you know willingness to pay a certain amount for tuition? The best and the brightest if you bring them on board can also use the latest technology. So how do we map our improving human capital to our improvement in the use of technologies that are emerging? There are some construction firms out there that basically operate like technology firms. So I urge you to think in terms of recruitment and retention.

Technology is definitely one thing that we have to keep our eyes on but that's not the only thing. You really have to focus on team building and people dynamics. By far that's the thing that will make the biggest difference for this generation. If you like this episode share it with anyone you think would value it. Spread the message.

If you have any comments or questions for me find me on twitter at britney underscore ct or find me on linkedin or you can just email me too at britney at constructor.com that's b-r-i-t-t-a-n-i-e at constructrr.com. So next week I continue my discussion about relationship building through what is termed a vested approach with Kate Vytacek. She talks with me about building teams with a long-term relationship building approach in mind. The vested approach is growing because the understanding is that it's not the people that are the problem it's the process that needs to be changed.

So look out for that episode next week and as always I will put the links to all the previous podcasts referenced in this episode. Don't forget to subscribe at constructrr.com to get email updates from me. If you haven't already subscribed to the podcast you can do so on any site you listen to podcasts. Please leave a review to show your support and let me know you're enjoying it. So I look forward to talking with you guys next week.

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