Transcript: What to Do & What NOT to Do: Military Lessons Applied - LCI Congress Chris Fussell Presentation Take-Aways

What if we could simplify our complex construction projects and make the execution less complicated? What could be learned from military covert missions to improve our communication strategies? Believe it or not, there are a lot of things we can learn. We learned quite a bit from one of our keynote speakers at the Lean Construction Congress. But first, let me tell you a story about Dust One, otherwise known in military speak as Duty Status Whereabouts Unknown.

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As a podcaster, I listen to other podcasts for entertainment. And to learn about the tricks of the trade, of course, I tend to find amazing podcasts that tell either really interesting stories or interview really interesting entrepreneurs. As we tend to develop Constructor, I will reference from time to time good podcasts that I like to listen to. One in particular is called Cereal, and it talks about the Dust One status of a Bo Bergdahl. In the middle of the night, Bo Bergdahl grabs a notebook, snacks, water, and some cash.

Then he quietly slips off a remote US Army outpost in eastern Afghanistan and into the dark open desert. About 20 minutes later, it occurs to him. He's in over his head. But what does this simple act, walking off an US Army outpost, tell us about Bergdahl? As Sarah Koenig puts it from the Cereal podcast, the one idiosyncratic guy makes a radical decision at the age of 23 to walk away into Afghanistan.

Now, I don't want to downplay the fragility of Bo's life as he was captured by the Taliban. But let us talk through what could parallel to this act in our market. For instance, have you ever had an architect or engineer design scope without collaborating with each other? How about with the owner? Have you ever worked with a mechanical contractor who didn't submit a request for information until after they installed their equipment, when they knew they had a question before they installed it?

Now, we call these instances acting alone. And as simple and non-threatening these instances may be in the field of construction, it creates inefficiencies, it creates rework, it creates slower reaction times, it raises distrust amongst the project team and our clients, and reduces the morale of the project teams. Chris Fussell, former Navy SEAL and consultant at the premier managing company, the McChrystal Group, outlines the major challenges they faced in post-9-11 conflicts and what they did to redesign their communication and decentralize at the Lean Construction Institute Congress back in October 2016.

He talked about Navy SEALs and the success rate of their missions. It happens to be that because of their intense training, they were executing their missions at 100% success rate. However, they recognized that they were not as effective against Al-Qaeda as they should be because every morning they reviewed and wondered why they were waking up to the news about deaths that took place the night before. They recognized that the challenges faced were caused by three drivers. Now, the first driver is that Al-Qaeda was extremely interconnected in their communication internal to the organization was very fast and accurate.

Number two, there was a thinking internal to the US military that was not designed to react to the conflicts caused by Al-Qaeda. The communication was siloed in the US military. Now number three is there was a need to close the communication gap. As the organization was developed similar to a typical organizational chart, this leadership style was still in place and it adapted to the industrial revolution. What was understood is that it needs to change.

It is outdated and needs to be improved. Where did that thinking come from inside the military? We go all back to the industrial revolution. There's constant interplay between industry and military and government, etc. feeding each other knowledge advancements.

Anybody remember who Frederick Winslow Taylor was? The father of the industrial revolution. He's known for walking around factory floors as a young man with measuring tapes and stopwatches and literally saying if you stood here, if you swung that hammer eight times instead of 15 times, if we condensed the time on the line between these two people, he would design an entire master plan for the factory floor, bring it up to senior leadership and say, here it is. Every day, 24-7 if you want, and I guarantee your output will be exponentially higher than your competitors because they're still playing in this pre-industrial mindset.

They're not maximizing the ability to capture energy and the factory floors that we've designed with this artisan mindset that says, sort of, leave me alone and let me design my own thing. The through foot goes through the world. It changes the course of the United States throughout the 20th century. We bring this mentality into World War I, World War II, et cetera. But one of the corollaries to this is the adoption of org charts, right?

So everybody can find themselves in here somewhere. We've all lived inside of this. This wasn't new, right? You can look at the Roman army was structured the same way. But Taylor's argument was this is more than a way to just sort of categorize the people in your organization.

This is actually a leadership model because his thesis was if I've designed the perfect plan on the factory floor, if vertical A talks to vertical B without going through senior leadership to solve what may be a near term issue, improve a product, identify a safety issue and fix it on the fly, that could be a good near term solution. But it creates unpredictability in the output and senior management shouldn't tolerate that. It's better to assume the risk of keeping them siloed and deal with the consequences later because that way you can control the entire plan.

You can continue to optimize for efficiency and you can turn up the speed or slow it down depending on how you view the market. Let us parallel for a moment and compare and contrast how these challenges might be faced in construction. Number one, there are ever changing design elements to be taken into account when delivering any project. The needs of the owners or our clients shift every day as market needs shift, as new products or services are offered, as company divisions or teams need to upgrade their technology.

Growing organizations change quickly and the decisions about budget, design finishes, sustainability they all can be impacted by many stakeholders in large organizations. Does that sound familiar? There's an ever changing mechanism here that sounds very familiar. Maybe like our last number one. Number two, there is a thinking typical to many organizations in the construction industry that is not designed to react to design conflicts, to changing needs, to market changes for the client.

Communication is siloed. Number three, there is a need to close the communication gap. As this organization charts leadership style through traditional contract methods needs to adapt to the current technology and capability to deliver construction projects. Now I believe there is a lot of parallelism although this may not hit every aspect of the construction management world but there are some things certainly to consider. Now getting back to Chris's presentation, he suggested that the leadership style needed to change.

So the military thinking often uses this sense of heroic chess master. And this model has been in place for generations inside the military. Entire schools of creating senior military leaders in Europe that we learned from, etc. that spread around the globe over hundreds of years were based on the idea of creating single leaders that could develop such an understanding of the battlefield that if they brought the right forces to bear you couldn't defeat them because they just had a better sense of terrain and weather and supply chains and all the boring backside stuff that makes a war actually, a force actually effective on the battlefield.

And so it's pretty easy to tell in this picture who's in charge. The tallest horse, the leader in the blue coat dictating what's going to happen on the battlefield. And on the other side of the field there's one other person doing the same thing. Of course they've got their lieutenants and they spread information but for generations this worked really well. And this is why Alexander the Great could overthrow the world when he was 23.

He was just a better senior leader. He understood all of these other factors and no single individual, no other chess master could defeat him. Coincidentally, Bo Bergdahl and Alexander the Great were at the same ripe age of 23. The problem is in today's environment it doesn't matter how good you are. If you're 10 times smarter than all the other pieces but the pawns are interconnected and they can move 16 times for every one move you make, you're never going to get ahead of them.

They will swarm even the smartest chess master in today's environment. So another term I never used in the SEAL teams, the idea of leading like a gardener really became sort of the norm inside of people's thinking. We've described it like that in retrospect. But the sense here is what does a gardener do? Does a gardener grow tomatoes?

No, tomato plants grow tomatoes. A gardener sets an environment. They have to understand the conditions. They have to tend it. They have to protect it.

They have to do all the external things that the garden and the plants in the garden can't do for themselves. And then they just, they protect it. Which is what our senior leadership started to do for us. Their point was I can't tell you how to do these things. They're moving too fast.

I will create the environment where you can share information, where you can access information from me, where you can distribute resources at your level as you see fit, all to solve the problem. What I'm going to tell you is a shared understanding of what this constantly changing problem looks like and I will expect your actions to be A, independent and B, accurate. And so I will set the environment in which that can happen. Everything else is going to be up to you at your level. Leading like a gardener led to transparent communication between even other intelligence agencies.

They continued to live in this organizational chart setting from their industrial past, but they shared pertinent information on a 24 hour cycle. So every morning they were able to share a global video conference for 90 minutes, which allowed for them to gain a shared consciousness across the entire military organization. They were then able to roll out missions, learn on the ground and take that information that they learned, the most pertinent information and share it back with the group in that 90 minute session the following day.

We can create these windows of shared consciousness. In between, we can then decentralize and create opportunity for empowered execution. Let's look at what empowered execution looks like. When they started in 2003, the McChrystal team that Chris Fussell was part of, they executed missions, one mission a week. After the organizational changes and the shared consciousness worked quite effectively, in they were able to increase their efficiency to 10 raids a night.

This is what shared consciousness and empowerment looks like. That's at least 20 times faster. In conclusion, let us not be the Boberg dolls of our construction projects acting alone and venturing out into enemy terrain by ourselves. Let us all consider ourselves either gardeners or partakers of the shared consciousness, making each other accountable to share independently and accurately in order to execute the mission at hand. Check out the book developed by General Stanley McChrystal where Chris Fussell has contributed.

The book is called Team of Teams, Rules of Engagement for a Complex World. You will be able to find a link for this book in the show notes. As a reminder, the month of February has been dedicated to giving you key takeaways from the Lean Construction Congress. If you haven't listened to them yet, listen to the last two episodes, episode 18, Millennials, Transformational Change and Entertainment, and episode 19, Interviews with the Presenters. Go and check those episodes out and we'll talk to you next week.