Transcript: Let’s Hear it From the Owners!! - LCI Congress Owner Take-Aways

Hello, I'm Brittany Campbell-Turner and this is the Constructor Podcast, Episode 21. Hello and welcome to this episode of Constructor. This podcast is dedicated to helping property owners have certainty in their decisions about their construction projects. Hello everyone, thank you for joining me today and listening to Constructor, the best way to build it. If you have been following us for the month of February, you've been able to hear from attendees at the LCI Congress.

You have heard from general contractors, presenters, and a recap from me on Chris Fossil's presentation. On this last Tuesday of the month, you will hear from the owners. I think, you know, in most part, I think the owners are big bulls. One thing that's interesting is that I was looking at the attendees for this conference and there's not a lot of, it doesn't seem like there's a lot of non-operations side folks and that's very telling of where, how maybe there's room to grow on people so you know how, that they can...

You know, when you're talking about these GC industry or these GC organizations, lean should be a part of that. What I sense is it's more of a push than a pull so what I mean by that is people come in, they have their consulting or their expertise and I know they want to share it but I think there's another step there that we deal with a lot is what is the voice of the customer, what do people really need to hear, what do they need to hear and what do they want to hear.

First, we will actually hear from Diane Anglin who works with Clark Construction. She doesn't work for an owner's organization as we call it, she actually works for GC. But she was working with the marketing department at the time. I include her feedback here because I thought her perspective reflects what all companies should be focusing on to bring lean to the marketing department. Listen in.

I'm in marketing and it's interesting to me that how to bring lean to non-construction side of organizations and so that's the journey that I'm on and I just came from a really interesting session on lean copy and how great that is, it's an easy way to get all different types of team members involved and engaged and learning those lean leadership skills that they can then take out to, you know, out of the project or in operations or just their department. So that was a lot of work.

That's awesome. One thing that's interesting is I was looking at the attendees for this conference and there's not a lot of, it doesn't seem like there's a lot of non-operations side folks and that's very telling of where, how maybe there's room to grow on people so you know that they can in all parts of the organization. So are you going to take this back to your marketing team? Absolutely. Not just marketing but you know maybe whole groups of people in the office, not just on the job site.

Next up is a fun and somewhat critical duo. Yavuz and Steve from Genentech. They had some critiques that included some comments about food. When you look at sagas and chayas. Even some experiences about getting through the presenter preparation as they were presenters themselves.

But I made sure to include the comments that I felt were most important here for the construction audience. It started Monday. Monday morning. So you were able to participate in some of the training sessions? Yes.

Okay great. Tell me which training sessions and you know sessions you thought were the best of the best. Well I tell you okay because I go to other conferences so I'm a good benchmark in terms of that. I'm a trainer as well in this field so I have a really great way to assess the quality of presentations because I attend several conferences every year technically that's right. I mean this one, I mean the quality of training is not at the level of other conferences.

I do want to stop here and give you a sense about Yavuz. He's a smart guy. And well he holds others to a high standard. He's not afraid to speak his mind, share his opinion, good or bad. He also likes to let others know that he's qualified to speak about lean.

He has been within lean for quite a while and is well versed in the subject. The quality of the presenters is not at the level of what I expected. Okay. You look at me, okay I'm a doctor, you know I have a PhD in this field, I worked at top notch companies implementing lean. So I have a great portfolio.

But when I look at the others I can't see that. And also what is it that you can take and then implement? It's simple. They want something that they can take and implement after 30 plus years of experience in the lean industry. You know it's hit or miss because I've been to three years now.

And I do believe overall it's getting better. I think the quality is getting a little better. But I still think there's a long way to go. I agree with Yavuz relative to other conferences I've attended. And I believe that also what I sense is it's more of a push than a pull.

So what I mean by that is people come in, they have their consulting or their expertise, and I know they want to share it. But I think there's another step there that we deal with a lot is what is the voice of the customer, what do people really need to hear? What do they need to hear and what do they want to hear? Because I don't get that same. I think Steve hit the nail on the head here.

Our friend Dick Beyer who spoke in the presenters episode of the LCI Roundup, he talked about the end user, the customer, the built environment as it serves the people. And I agree that this can be overlooked as the industry is going through its growth process in lean construction. You can identify similar conferences, go in there and see the quality of not only logistics but also the quality of knowledge building. That's the key. So a couple of things that is really crucial is you have to really categorize the trainings in terms of, for example, elementary level, intermediate and advanced, for example.

This is really critical. If you're a new one coming into this field, probably you should be able to select the areas where you want to build your capability and then level of complexity. This is very, very important. Much of the feedback has been good regarding the lean construction in Congress. If you listen to the past couple episodes, overall it has been good.

But to be fair to ourselves, the industry has some work to do. And I do want to include some of the comments about what more they are looking for as far as content. The other thing is I'm thinking now this year I didn't notice tracks, but I'm not sure maybe there were tracks? Tracks exist, yes. There are tracks.

There exist. But I think, and I know this is hard, I'm not, it's just like, this is a stretch goal, right? Yes. It's easy to have a track with a bunch of stuff in it that seems related. It's another to make that track link together in a continuous flow that makes sense to the person on that track.

Understandable. I know that's hard, but if they could try that as a strong desire, I think it would really help people because there are people who have expertise, right? And they want to learn more, that's they come here to learn more, but they can't attend everything. So if they can go on a track that really fits their needs. At times I got the sense that they didn't attend many sessions, though they had grounds probably for not doing so as I understand it.

Quite honestly, it appeared to me in retrospect that they were interested in more topics for owners in the intermediate or advanced level. It appears they felt like they were in the minority and the sessions maybe didn't apply to them. Tell me your response about the theme for this particular time. The theme is? You know what the theme is?

Transforming, transforming. Building people, transforming culture. Transforming culture, building people. Okay. What do you think?

I'm trying to... You expect that, right? Because the key theme is culture, right? For Lean to be successful, those people and soft skills have to be ahead of everything else. That's the foundation.

If you don't have that culture change, it's not going to be successful. It doesn't matter which Lean expert, master Black Belt or others you have, unless you focus on the foundation, which is the people and the culture. After so many critiques, I was happy to hear that Steve and Yavuz agreed that the theme was a good starting point. And building people and team culture comes paramount. Yavuz does go on into his perspective about what's next as far as the process.

You really do need to see what next steps are down the road after you establish building people and team culture. Really, I mean, you say, okay, well, this change the culture, change this, but the how is the question. That's what I'm saying. It's not like you have a tool enabler. I mean, I looked at some still this industry is new, right?

Applying Lean to construction is very new. I'm coming from manufacturing and operations, right? Even it's newer for me, but there's still lack of standards in this area. It's lacking. How you apply last planner, for example, is fuzzy, right?

It's more effective in construction. But then they say we can apply to design, but there is no standard in regards to how. So one of the things you just said, something that I was thinking of, Yavuz, is what you'll see a lot of here is a lot of independent consultants come in and they each have their own view. And I think what's different than like reliability conferences, because of their more standards, they align with those standards, whereas here it's more disjoint because there aren't those fundamental things that drive them.

Yep. So then somebody comes in here and they say, this is the way we do it. Yeah. Okay, oh, we do it this way, you know, and that makes some variability and variability is bad. And I think I think that the board understands that.

And why I say that is because you see the books coming out. Yeah. Okay. And last year's books were very good. We are referencing the This is Lean book by Nicholas Modic.

And the other book that Lean Construction Institute has on their website, which I can totally include in the show notes, is Transforming Design and Construction. I'll also put a link there for their section on getting started with Lean. I want to give you a pluses. I mean, the volunteers are really good. One of the good practices.

I like all the volunteers. Yes. They're very good, energetic. I want to give the good stuff too because I want this conference to be successful. The volunteers were great.

This made me feel good as I had some small parts of playing at all. A special thank you to all of the volunteers that were involved at the LCI Congress. And we are looking for volunteers again. I'm not in charge of it, but I do know who is. So if you reach out to me, let me know and I'll put you in touch.

Given the challenges they posed to LCI, I figured I would give them a little challenge myself. A challenge to them a bit on their expectations. Another quick question for you guys. Who would you recommend as next year's keynote speakers? That's a very good, interesting one.

You're saying quality level needs to be higher. Wow. Well, you know, here, let me just throw out one wild suggestion. Maybe think of it more from who are the people here, who do they serve and who are their stakeholders. Could that person come on day one and challenge everyone?

Here are the problems I face. Here's what I need you guys to solve. Now, what can you learn over the next four? Before, they had, it was in San Francisco. James Hereford is the CEO of the Stanford healthcare system, I believe.

So he was talking a lot about what is a hospital need in terms of construction in order to support effective hospital design. And it's patient-focused. And it was excellent. I mean, I talked to him afterwards, got his card and everything. And we even want to have him come into Genentech.

I don't know if we, then somebody went off and was going to contact him and do all that. But the point is, is that he really gave a lot of that. And I thought, this is really good. And I think it was helpful to some people. And then I think at the end, we also had Billy Bean talk about, it was really good because he's talking about baseball, the Oakland A's.

And how they used on-base percentage instead of the traditional way to recruit players. And it was fantastic. I loved it. I'm a baseball fan. It's just stuff like that that I think that was a really good one.

And I realize that sometimes it's more challenging to get speakers like that, depending where you're at. But just somebody who can give the customer's point of view and really drive home the fact, here's the need for change. Here's why, what we're really, even be a little bit edgy and confrontational a little bit. And challenging. I like that.

I do too. You, Luz and I both really like that. So we challenge internally. So let's raise a bar a little. Let's make our industry better.

One of the key elements to collective genius that I actually wrote about in one of my blog posts, are you the smartest person in the room, is creative abrasion. What is creative abrasion? In innovative organizations, they amplify differences. They don't minimize them. Individuals in innovative organizations learn how to inquire.

They learn how to actively listen. But guess what? They also learn how to advocate for their point of view. They understand that innovation rarely happens unless you have both diversity and conflict by Linda Hill. Our next interviewee here is from Disney.

I didn't actually catch his name, but he has some great insight. Well, I'm with Disney. So I bring, you know, I represent, you know, but my perspective is a little bit different though because I don't necessarily want to tell the contractor how to build the project for us. They should be figuring this stuff out on their own. You can see there's a lot of representation here.

So they all believe in the main way of doing things, which makes sense to do it that way. So I really want to become the experts of this stuff so that we can just be a part of it. Because we're a piece of the IPD world. We have to be good partners with them and know our role. So was that your focus for this particular Congress, you know, learning about things from that perspective?

How can we work better with the project team? Yeah, it was. And not only that, but we've been doing the IPD for a while now. We've done a few projects that way. And, you know, we've had a lot of lessons learned and we've had some successes as well.

And the lessons learned, you know, we want to come to an event like this and see how we can make it better next time. How did we learn? You know, are other people experiencing the same thing? And if so, what did you do to deal with it? What did you do to combat it?

From an owner's perspective as well, they do offer a couple of special sessions for us that allow us to, you know, to always speak to the owners and get their perspective and whatnot. But the other sessions more fascinating. Really? With all the GCs. Okay, that's really helpful.

I think, you know, in most part, I think the owners are big believers. Yeah. So they want to see it be very successful. Because anything to save us money and help the GC be more profitable, that's the key. Absolutely.

That's the key to them wanting to keep working and keep working in the industry. Yeah. Make as much money as they can. I'm also a member of AGC as well. Are you?

Yeah. You know, when you're talking about these GC industries or these GC organizations, I don't know if Lean should be its own. It should be a part of all of their ways of doing this and their organization. He says, I don't know if Lean should be its own organization, but it should be a part of all of the organization. Maybe the owner is feeling underrepresented, underserved.

They want more standardization and want to be, or want Lean to be integrated in all aspects of their businesses. We have a tall order. So what does this mean for Constructor? For those of you who have not gone into the website, I'm going to ask you for some feedback. First, you can email me.

Email is fine. Email is fine. You can email me at Brittany at Constructor dot com. That's B-R-I-T-T-A-N-I-E at Construct double R dot com. For those of you who have not responded to suggest an interview on my website, I'd really be appreciative for your feedback.

You can go to Constructor dot com, click on the About the Show tab, and suggest an interviewee there. We want to make this podcast valuable to property owners, whether you're in your corporate real estate, design and construction, departments or facilities management. We want to spotlight individuals and companies that are fostering an environment of empowerment through collaboration, trust building, exceptional productivity, quality service and social responsibility. So next week, we are actually going to be interviewing an owner. It is with James Pease from Sutter Health.

I'm looking forward to sharing this interview with you guys. All right. Talk to you guys next week. Thank you. Thank you.

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