4 Mistakes in Construction Innovation — And How To Avoid Them
As more and more construction companies implement programs focused on innovation and technology, they inevitably run into a big question: How good is your company at diagnosing business problems and developing solutions that fit?
There are two common approaches that construction companies take to manage this question:
- They hire an individual or group of individuals who have expertise in a certain area (like data science or BIM) and let leaders in the business figure out how to use them.
- They provide high level direction that a new technology or innovation process can be adopted, with practical use left at the discretion of each business unit or functional lead.
While the former is the “we’re here to help” approach, the latter cuts more “close to the business”. Regardless of the path taken, what many leaders eventually realize is that the construction industry has its own unique challenges that need to be addressed head-on in order for innovation to be successful.
These challenges include a field-based workforce scattered across many jobsites, a project delivery machine that’s constantly broken down, and a highly opaque and fragmented value chain. These unique challenges can lead to common mistakes if care is not taken.
Because of construction’s unique challenges, traditional approaches often don’t work.
In consulting building contractors on construction technology & innovation programs, I’ve identified four common failure modes that tend to sideline early innovation attempts.
These failure modes could help explain why a construction innovation initiative is failing to gain business lift. They‘re the most common blind spots in an industry that’s rapidly trying to figure out how best to serve its customers in a fast-moving environment. Let’s take a look at each.
1. Shiny ball-ism.
- What It Is: As new technologies constantly hit the market, many of them have tantalizing promises to solve all of construction’s ills. Unfortunately, many of these “shiny objects” have limited value because it’s unclear what business value is at stake or there’s an inability to communicate the value of the new technology to the business.
- Why It’s Important: Construction is in the midst of some pretty awesome technology trends converging on it. The problem is: given your limited resources, not every one of them merits your attention. Depending on the industry sector and customer needs, some trends matter more than others.
How It Ends: “Cool investment... So what do we do with this?”
- How To Avoid It: Continually ask what parts of the business process the solution is addressing. Where there’s promising but still unclear value, start small with a pilot and go from there. Top organizations are deliberate in developing a governance program tied to the business and bake in specific metrics to track progress against business targets.
2. First mover penalty.
- What It Is: The corporate cousin of the start-up world’s first mover advantage, the first mover penalty is corporate inertia and business-as-usual tendencies. In this organizational culture, people are incentivized to chop down, bureaucratically roadblock, or simply marginalize others who are perceived as straying too far from the status quo.
- Why It’s Important: By its nature, the construction industry is full of creative people itching to solve problems. If you’re like me, you’ve met some of the most intelligent and interesting people on your jobsites. Unfortunately, because of its challenging dynamics, most building contractors favor consistency in outcomes and an “if-it-ain’t-broke-don’t-fix-it” mentality that too often squanders creativity and either actively or passively empowers employees to do the same.
How It Ends: “We’ve been doing the right thing for 30 years and then, all of the sudden, our customers started going to our competitors.”
- How To Avoid It: Change agents are the people in your business who are the fountain of new ideas, who will inform your strategy, and who will put in the hard yards to experiment with new ways of doing work. They are the influencers across your business, who are viewed by their peers as the best sources of information, who are approachable and consequently in the highest demand as a social resource. Go out and find them.
3. Boiling the ocean.
- What It Is: Once the excitement of a new technology wins the collective imagination, there’s a corresponding enthusiasm to embark on wildly ambitious plans. The reality, however, is that there’s only so many people to implement a new solution, too many legacy processes to integrate with, and too many practical issues around usability that the plan often fails to produce any significant business lift.
- Why It’s Important: Business value in construction is often thinly distributed across complex value chains. Because of this, there’s very few one-size-fits-all solutions. Instead, you should more often than not take a lightweight approach that stays focused on feedback from core parts of your operations and find solutions that fit.
How It Ends: “We’ve spent millions of dollars on this initiative, but don’t have much to show for it.”
- How To Avoid It: Listening to end users and business needs is crucial to the success of innovation programs. Since there’s so much variability in construction project delivery, this can be especially difficult. Your initial step should be discovering the most important needs in your building process, detailing project personas to build competing visions of your organization’s future and addressing each in kind.
4. Unaddressed field workforce.
- What It Is: As companies get larger, they start to value the “process” over the “product”. But people who manage processes are not the same as the people who create product. So process leaders might determine that the time is right to introduce hackathons and design thinking classes and innovation workshops but seem to gain little traction in the process.
- Why It’s Important: The back office-to-field divide can be especially stark in construction, with both physical and cultural distance. But all roads in the project delivery machine lead to the field which means that the field workforce and actual process of construction can’t be an afterthought. Day-to-day field activities like work sequencing and constructability and manual processes are integral to everything the industry does.
How It Ends: “After all these lavish accelerators and business incubators, where’s the liftoff?”
- How To Avoid It: The challenge with construction goes back to the way that field talent is moved around each time the project delivery machine is broken down and reassembled. Construction innovation groups should make it their top priority to identify field change agents quickly. When done correctly, a change agent network allows you to identify your innovation audience and is a powerful tool for distilling down the complexity of dispersed field organizations into something manageable at a programmatic level.
Nate Fuller is Managing Director of Placer Construction Solutions, advising leadership teams to transform their organizations in ways that improve performance and agility at the field level.
He provides construction companies with a field assessment that delivers transformative information about their field operations and is proven to accelerate innovation & technology adoption for Top ENR contractors.
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