I have been a little unsettled about the public health crisis, of course. I live in LA and the pandemic situation is even worse than ever, as far as the statistics go. You have heard all about it, you aren’t reading this for news on the health crisis. This disease is a disease of uncertainty. Not a good thing for the construction industry, and I haven’t been able to write coherently about it. Here are some serious concerns.

The responsibility of the industry arises partly from the amount of consumption of resources. We, the construction industry are the fifth largest industry in the country in terms of overall budget. $ 1.2 trillion, yearly. Employing 6.7 million people. That is only 4% of Gross Domestic Product but 6% of the employees. It takes a lot of people to build a building and that is a good thing. Except now when there is a shortage.

My observation is that this idea: that science and technology have no conscience of their own is universal in its application.

Indeed, our utilization, in the construction industry, of science and technology has no conscience of its own. We gobble up an immense amount of time, materials and energy providing our product. It is a conscience that is needed- a new conscience, driven by our intention to set sail on a new sea. This sea will have of limited resources, dangerous industrial processes, increasing demands of the societies that we serve and an aching need for an organizing principle.

Waste is the enemy of the Lean Construction movement. They are incredible in their systems and organization for construction projects. I attend their meetings and local group (Communities of Practice, COP’s) as much as I can. The presenting reason for eliminating waste is, of course, saving money. As, I have discussed previously, my first introduction to Lean was a “Superconference” presentation in 2011 by the designers and builders of the Mission Bay complex for the University of California Medical Center in San Francisco. In an amusing sidelight for me, my Granddaughter was born there in February 2019. (she and Mom are doing fine)

This is all fine, in fact, wonderful. In the presentation in 2011, the team was estimating, I think, about $ 950 million. The original engineer’s estimate was, I think, about $1.2 billion. They were looking at a $250 million savings over the engineer’s estimate.

It turns out that Cooperation is fairly difficult to measure in day-to-day interactions between construction professionals.  There are tools and guidelines for cooperative behavior, but how are we going to tell if it was the cooperative attitude or some other factor that influenced the project? 

PON is the Harvard Program on Negotiation. This is an extraordinary program with a rich and long history. I republish their discussion about first impressions to give you a taste of the resources available to build cooperation. Believe me, even in the most cooperative constructions sites, there will be much negotiation needed. I’m just saying, let’s do it well.

https://www.pon.harvard.edu/tag/pon/

The Lean Coffee was the most organized meeting I have attended in years. It was a generally skilled set of attendees. all interested in Lean, but there are many topics to be discussed in everyone’s projects and Lean in general. With a very organized system of selecting topics, one got the feeling of a Lean job site. These were skilled busy people with problems or issues to discuss and they wanted to get the best use of their time.

The construction world is moving toward significant improvements in the areas of my concern. Lean Construction is growing quickly. Articles and seminars about coordination, collaboration and cooperation are growing as well. National attention has angled over to politics and I am as susceptible as anyone. The next series of posts will be much more focussed, positive and informative about the reason that you came to a website named cooperative.construction.

Lean IPD is a website, https://leanipd.com/ with the best general energy and the specific information or the future of the construction industry.  The site is the home for the following authors and leading thinkers about where our industry is going.  

Not to over-state things, but there is one guy, Richard Sennett, who has thought more about cooperation than anyone else in shoes. 

This general concept of Cooperation being a new organizing principle for construction or other large projects, was developed while I was a Masters Candidate in Architecture at CalPoly San Luis Obispo, in 2012 through 2014.  I discovered that Cooperation was an organizing concept for certain set of new school projects built in California in the period. 

"Either owners aren’t getting best value or the team is not making a profit."

Wrong!

Please allow me to post some comments about 3 seminars, from Construction Users RoundTable, (CURT) the Engineering News Record, (ENR) and Lean Construction Institute (Lean)  I learned that we need a giant push to get collaboration over the net and into our industry.  

The Jan-Feb 2016 Harvard Business Review cover showing an article called "Collaborative Overload" caught my attention right before a cross country flight.  Feeling like I had plenty of time to dive into an HBR article, I courageously made a commitment to myself to read it.  

Did you know that 75% of best performing projects engage key stakeholders before schematic design starts compared with just 28% on typical projects? The resulting benefit… of those best projects 28% complete early and 63% complete under budget compared with just 9% of typical projects completing early or under budget. 

Well, most of us have seen leadership in a construction team. There's no mistaking it.  Many times it seems that everything goes wrong, yet the project seems to get done on budget and in time.  When this happens, it  is easy to see the leadership process circle around many times.  We've also seen prjects where the leadership had to change to get the project done.  Oddly, that is the process that brought John Marshall highly honors.  He would replace Generals until he found someone like Eisenhower.  Of course we don't have this luxury but we aren't trying to win the largest fight in human history, we are just trying to build a strip mall in Syracuse in the winter.  

You've been to these parties.  The steel frame went flying up in just a few weeks,  Extra hydro cranes were on site and the tower crane was running all day.  Then, the last piece of steel went up and if it was near Christmas, maybe someone tied a small tree to the top beam. 

Every two years, the Department of Energy puts on the Solar Decathlon, a spirited competition among academic institutions to build energy efficient housing. They use the word "sustainable" a lot there and there are different aspects of the competition that probe that word and its application to architecture, engineering and even appliances.  

"Construction spending posted positive results in January, with the value of completed projects rising 1.5% from December’s level to an annual rate of $1.14 trillion and 10.4% year over year, the U.S.  Census Bureau says."

As I started a study of cooperation in school construction in 2014, it occurred to me, and I heard someone say, that some projects just have the right people there and all the problems get solved quite efficiently, leaving not a lot of room for improvement by some lofty organizing principle.