Embracing outside influencers, part 3

Embracing outside influencers: Can this bring the change the construction industry needs? Part 3

Welcome to the last leg of this look into embracing outside influencers.?I do not want to give the wrong impression that this ends with the last word typed in this segment, because to be honest, after we finish here, I am hopeful that our journey can truly begin.

To start our journey, we must first accept the challenge ahead.?Regardless of which path you chose, you are choosing a challenge.?We can stay true to the familiar, to feel the pains we have always felt and hope they do not worsen.?Or we chose the path of the unfamiliar, with new challenges that we hope we can work through to truly solve the current issues and set us up for further advancements.?In other words, you can take your vitamin or painkiller.

You see, any path we choose we must embrace the uncertainty of it.

In life we are given choices.?We chose what to wear, what to eat, how fast to drive and what we drive, what we do for a living and where we live.?We are bombarded with advertisements on our phone, our computers, on the side of the roadways, on our TVs, and sometimes on our clothing itself.?But in the end, we must make the choice of what we consume and do.?

Choice is a welcomed thing for us as humans.?We want to make them on our own.?We do not want to be persuaded or pushed into something.?But with that freedom of choice, we must come to terms on our own and live with our decisions.

Our professional lives in design and construction is much the same.?We have choice after choice that requires a decision so that we can design and construct buildings.?Rarely is there a choice that does not impact something or someone either upstream or downstream??We must make choices without fully knowing the impact, even if it is familiar, uncertainty still exists.???

Does what we design and how we design it dictate how we build it and the type of labor force we need??Do architects and designers influence the means and methods of construction??

When it comes to prefabrication, they often do.?A single trade solution can be prefabricated and will have lesser impact on the designers or other trades.?The subtrade chooses to prefabricate because they know it is safer, more efficient, and higher quality, providing certainty.?So that is what they often choose.?When it comes to something like a multi-trade interior prefabricated solution, it will have an impact not only on the design team, but it can also have an impact on other trades.?This is where the unfamiliar lies for most, how we need to plan and design to integrate a multi-trade prefabricated solution.?Since this is unfamiliar, we often just stay the course and use what we know.

Let us go back to part 2 where we focused on the workforce.?If all signs show the labor shortage will worsen if we continue to build how we are today in the future, aren’t we the ones making the choices dictating that??Do we consider the potential labor shortage an uncertainty, or is it just familiar??Is there a different choice we could be making??And is our individual choice impacting others?

Disruption can be scary, and that is understandable.?Retreating to a comfort zone however can cause more damage than we expect.?Inaction does not come without a price.?In part 1 I mentioned that there are a lot of companies that dismissed opportunities, and either were slow to adopt or were completely disrupted and became irrelevant.?This happens because we often look at our challenges as failures and feel it should not be pursued any further.?That is the first sign of missing a real opportunity.?We also know failure only occurs when we quit and that difficulties are not failures.?They are necessary steps towards improvement.?As Jonah Berger expresses in “The Catalyst”, the opposite of bodies in motion stay in motion, is bodies at rest stay in rest.?Which are we truly causing based on our choices?

Our natural belief is if something seems familiar, it will bring us certainty.?And that is not always true.?We do not know if the choices we make, even if familiar, have a higher level of certainty or not.?We want to believe the tried and true will bring certainty, it’s ingrained in us because we have done it repeatedly.?The problem with the theory is that if the tried and true is creating most of our pain, should we not address it??Is the choice we are making to take a vitamin, or a painkiller?

If designing buildings with conventional methods is creating a drain on a shrinking workforce, thus increasing costs and time needed to build spaces, which means we must constantly value engineer items that can impact our clients throughout the entire duration of their occupancy of the space, then what action has to be taken to end this cycle??And are we truly comfortable with how it is?

If we asked a client whether they would want a space with more of their budget in materials and useful features than the portion of the budget on time and waste of materials, what would they choose if the total spent was the same??What is it costing our clients to stay with the familiar when designing and building spaces?

Asked another way, do we believe we are giving our clients the best we can stay on the course we are now??If giving them more came with less uncertainty and unfamiliarity, would you do it??How much less is acceptable?

So where is the data??This journey into embracing outside influencers is not about sharing data.?Data often feeds fuel to whichever side of the line you are on for that given topic.?Embracing outside influencers is about you making a choice.?It is about you creating data for yourself.

You see, project teams that resist a new process when it comes to prefabrication or when the integration team and manufacturer is not as sophisticated as needed, the project does not feel like a success.?On the flip side, the projects go well when the team accepts the challenge and works together, understanding the differences and collaborating.?Depending on our resistance or acceptance, we can either be the impediment or the stimulant.?This is true of whatever topic we investigate.?Data is not the answer to move us toward a choice, it just is not.?If it were, we would look at other countries where prefabrication has succeeded for decades or other industries that have succeeded from advancements, and that would be all the proof we need.

The reality and most difficult part of this topic is that it is personal, regardless of the role you play.?The industry is made up of a lot of talented, educated, and inspired individuals, who each must make a choice.?We cannot just eliminate the conventional methods; some need to remain because a blended approach is how we reach maximum efficiency and customization.?But it appears that having those available allows us an out to go back to our older paths for whatever reason we feel fits best.

You must be able to look inside yourself and ask if you are doing all you can to see if these new technologies and methods of construction can be effective.?You have to ask yourself if you are an impediment or stimulant.?Perhaps life has been moving so rapidly that you feel your only choice was to stay the course, simply out of necessity.?Ask yourself this though, was that truly a choice?

Change is not easy.?Staying the course is not either.?Ask yourself this, what do we lose if we embrace the change and endeavor into the world of industrialized construction??What do we lose if we do not??Which loss has the potential to be greater?

Embracing outside influencers is your choice, and no one else’s.?What you chose is acceptable if it is yours.?Neither comes without uncertainty, and neither comes without cost.?Embrace the uncertainty regardless of what you chose.

For those ready to embrace, I look forward to taking the journey forward with you.