In the Mood

Charles Spinosa Chauncey Bell Relevate VISION Consulting

At Relevate we strive to be always learning and growing..? For the past five years, as a company, we have read and discussed what we consider important books.? In 2024, we read Leadership as Masterpiece Creation by Charles Spinosa, Matt Hancocks and Haridimos Tsoukas.?

The authors claim that defining moments for leaders come in the midst of “Moral anomalies.”? They characterize the situation in this way: “A moral anomaly is a recurrent situation where we think we know the right thing to do and do it, but the situation does not get better….” Anomalies, they say, show up when standard approaches and understandings are insufficient to resolve the dilemmas we confront.?

If you follow construction, it is not hard to see situations where the standard approaches are insufficient.? Declining productivity, late projects, and blown budgets are much closer to the norm than exceptions.?

I found the book compelling (and challenging):

1. It looks at subjects and industries outside of construction that seem to suffer from similar maladies.
2. It offers a diagnosis that is outside most of the conversations we have about improving construction.

One of the reasons the authors provide for the ongoing presence of moral anomalies is “excessive criticism from the “postmodern” society”.? At Relevate we understand what they are saying as the people are living and working in moods of cynicism and resignation.? Fernando Flores and Chauncey Bell tell us that those moods are “assessments that people make about the future that are always present in the background of conversations but rarely visible.”??

A popular term in the business world today is “Manifesting.”? The claim is that focusing thoughts and intentions on a desired outcome can help bring it into reality.? If your project team is operating with an assessment that the future of the project will be negative, the team is “manifesting that outcome.”? This is equivalent to the old “self-fulfilling prophecy.”? The difference between the prophecy euphemism and the idea of moods is that many times people on construction projects can behave this way without noticing their participation in the quality of what we might call the “atmosphere” of the work, because it lives in the background mood.? “Bad moods” are silent killers of projects.

One simple and powerful way that leaders can improve project outcomes is by observing the moods of the teams involved and cultivating moods of curiosity and optimism on project teams.? Simple here doesn’t mean easy. If you are on a project and sense the mood of the team is negative, act on it with the same urgency you would with negative float on the critical path.? The results will surprise you.

We recently started an engagement to provide scheduling and planning for a company building affordable housing.? For several weeks we struggled to get the project team to accept our help and try our approach.? Finally, the president of the company came into a meeting and declared, “we haven’t been finishing projects on time and we hired Relevate to help us fix it.? I expect you to listen and work with their approach.”? In the spirit of the Masterpiece book, he let his team know that business as usual was insufficient.? He made this declaration in a way that turned around the mood of his team.? He was forceful and optimistic.? From that day forward the mood of his team changed.? They are manifesting different results and having different conversations that the previous moods were not allowing.? I am very excited to see how this team will improve.

For myself and Relevate, we commit to continue to take the kind of risks required to change the industry.? This is what we founded the company for and what we continue to strive for.? The risks we commit ourselves to include:

• Speaking the truth about the current system and likely project outcomes to people seeking our help
• Making sure that every project we are on is collaboratively planned
• Working to focus all of our efforts on making construction better for the actual workers and real value creators
• Striving to eliminate the negative and confrontational incentives in existing contracts and contracting strategies.

When we do these simple things we know that construction can be reliable and rewarding for all parties.? If you are tired of the fight to get things finished, late projects and blown budgets please feel free to reach out to us about how we can make things better.? It takes risks and courage but is possible when we stop accepting the status quo.