Time for Some Serious Talk About Waste

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.

So, they planned on saving multiple millions, but that isn’t the only point here. Well, it isn’t my only point or the only point of this blog. My point is the avoidance of wasted time and energy is necessary for our industry to be a good citizen in our desperately needed and potentially dangerous production of the built environment. We must behave better and generate good will to fight back the old Neanderthal idea that competition is the best tool available for control of a project. Am I going too fast here?

Lean Construction advocates, bless their hearts, are successful in getting project participants to work together to reduce waste and increase dependability. Pushing the concept of cooperation as an organizing structure of construction and adding in the waste reducing methods of Lean will give our industry the tools necessary to avoid becoming a burden on the society by building wasteful products that pollute our world with greenhouse gasses.

So, waste has got to go. Waste-free construction will save huge amounts of money. But that is just the beginning.
Waste-free construction will reduce solid waste pollution of the environment, reduce greenhouse gas production in the production, transportation and assembly of buildings, and generate a constant awareness of efficient use of energy in the development and use of buildings.

What does “cooperation” have to do with this? Why am I different from the many brilliant (if occasionally overly enthusiastic) advocates of Lean Construction? We need a moral structure, if you will. Cooperation will also save tons of money because of virtual elimination of combative attitudes in the overly competitive world of construction. There is a new reason to do this work, it is to make a cooperative effort to benefit society. It is not competition that has solely been responsible for the cost control of construction, it is a hundred other things, most important of which is the existing culture of cooperation is advanced societies. Do unto others, etc.

After we see that we can save mountains of money by eliminating wasteful contention, we can soon see that cooperation itself is a reason to do the heavy work of building the structures in our society. We build stuff for the purpose of having a project that can be built cooperatively. We go out and kill a bison together because we can do it together. It also brings in a mountain of food, but we get the chance to do something together in a cooperative environment as compared to working on those things that are best done alone.

As it has worked out, elimination of waste is the process that has lead the way to a new environment for the construction industry. While there are many who see elimination of wasteful contention as a main approach to waste elimination itself, it is just good juju too. And it is potentially a very big deal to eliminate the contentious portions of our industry.