The Construction Technology Handbook. Hugh Seaton
the world. And you learn through your career to use those effects to motivate, manage, or just navigate other people. For example, you learn to check up on people frequently because you know that accountability makes people more focused on the job – an effect you leverage to get the job done.
Managing is a technology every bit as complex as artificial intelligence – in fact, as someone who has done both I can tell you managing can be harder because it is a never‐ending balancing act. Management as a practice has evolved over time to use different methods, each using a different effect in the world – we used to rely solely on hierarchy and power, which relied on a fear of losing one's job. But we realized that stifles critical information flows and causes worker disengagement. So we've swapped the underlying effect to one of a feeling of involvement and achievement, which is what Lean Construction is focused on. Changing the effect a technology is based on can be very powerful.
Back to our hammer example, what happens if we separate the work to be done, driving the nail into the wall, from how it gets done, the centrifugal force of a swung piece of steel hitting a stationary nail head? What if instead we put the nail in a tube connected to compressed air, and “shoot” the nail into the wall?
We've changed the effect being exploited to get the same work done, from a human arm swing to mechanical air pressure release, and in the process have dramatically improved the efficiency of our nail‐driving workers, significantly improved their ability to keep driving nails without fatigue or arm injury, and hopefully spared their thumbnails.
Technology Domains
When we think of technology as a chain of these effects being used, we can more easily understand how to integrate new pieces. Technology is just a tool that is an extension of human power and action, no more, no less. By keeping in mind that any technology is there to extend your power and action, you can put it into a context that helps both assess how good that technology is, and understand why new technologies might be better than old ones – they are using a newer, better effect to help you. In fact, it is more often the case that the tools you use are exploiting a bundle of effects to work, and the part you will care most about, the effects being exploited that matter to you most are human and organizational effects.
And by understanding all technology as being part of a chain you are part of, you can be clearer with the creators of that technology about how they should develop and deliver real products. What is happening in construction now is that parts of the chain of technology, starting with your skills and extending to the tools you use, are being added and changed. Understanding modern technology not as a separate class of things, but just the latest in a series of “modules” that can be swapped into an existing chain is a much better perspective, because it keeps technology under the category of “tools” – not something alien.
Technologies themselves are always a collection of other technologies. Even something as simple as a hammer is the result of plastics, metallurgy, metal working, factory design, automation, ergonomics, and even packaging. Knowing that technologies are themselves composed of interlocking, lower level technologies, makes it easier to understand how our tools keep getting a little better, cheaper, and safer every year. For example, Milwaukee Tool has been making tools like torque wrenches for years, and over time they have swapped out some controls that were mechanical, like a direct lever between the trigger and the electrical motor, with electronics that give the user more operational fine tuning.
Milwaukee has recently added a new feature, their “One‐Key System,” that wirelessly keeps track of all the tools on a jobsite. You can look at this as just another feature, actually a pretty cool one, or you can look at it as Milwaukee swapping out the paper and pencil, or perhaps spreadsheet technology that relied on observation, memory, and making the rounds to keep up to date, with an automatic, real‐time inventory reporting tool. Your chain of technology has not changed, but the tool you use to do a part of it has.
Thinking of your job as a chain of tools, from your own skills to the external tools you use gives you, the professional using these technologies, the power to think creatively about what you're using, combine products and technologies in new ways, and demand that providers of technology products keep working until the products do what you need them to.
This idea of changing out one kind of technology for another is often referred to as changing the “domain” of technology being used. In the hammer example, we changed a manual force domain for a pneumatic force one. In the Milwaukee tools example, we changed from a manual inspection and reporting domain to a wireless, automatic updating domain.
This “redomaining” or swapping of one technology domain for another in human activity has been happening since the dawn of time. These new domains tend to come in waves, and as they do, there is an inevitable process of blending the seasoning and judgment of industry professionals with the new processes and skills that these new technologies bring with them. That's what we're in the middle of as an industry, replacing physical and industrial‐era techniques and technologies with digital domains.
From the examples above, human work was replaced by machines. Fears abound in the specialty trades, and contractors more generally, that technology is going to cause people to lose their jobs. We will address this very specifically in the AI and Industrialized Construction chapters, but for now, keep two points in mind: the first is that machines and software replace skills from the very bottom, starting with the most mindless tasks. Some of those tasks still require skill, like using a hammer well, but those skills are a small part of what makes a carpenter a professional. The second point is that what does make a carpenter, or pipefitter, or mechanical contractor a professional is the ability to solve problems, and to come up with solutions to complex obstacles that involve schedules, contractual terms, team dynamics, and many other things.
Domains Versus Products
It can seem that changes in technology are inevitable, and when looked at as a collection of solutions and products, there is some degree of truth in that. Science will keep producing new effects and insights we can leverage. Companies, driven by the designer to outcompete each other, will keep refining ways to exploit those effects.
But there is nothing inevitable about any given technology. We in the industry can absolutely affect what products are out there, and more importantly, how they work for us, and with us.
An example of this contrast between a kind of technology that was probably going to happen no matter what, and specific products that were very much not inevitable is the VHS/Beta battle in the 1980s.
Starting in the 1970s, film and TV were revolutionized by digital storage, which became video cassettes. There were two product options: Betamax and VHS. Beta was higher quality video, because its developer, Sony, assumed consumers would want to enjoy their movies and TV at the highest possible visual quality, which they achieved by limiting the playback to one hour. Panasonic's VHS, in contrast, provided lower visual quality but up to 2 hours in length when first introduced. Since most movies are over an hour, Beta didn't fit the market as well, and ended up losing the consumer market to VHS, which became the standard for about a decade.
Two things were at play – a standard and a product. In this case the consumer videocassette market became dominated by the VHS standard, and specific products were all VHS.
Prior to this, the only way to view a movie at home was when a broadcast network chose to air the movie, which they did rarely and in highly edited, kid‐friendly form. The home video market was thus “redomained” so that the way consumers viewed movies at home went from a broadcast‐centered model, to a videocassette‐centered model. The new domain was going to happen, but the specific products would win or lose based on how well they fit the market. And you, dear reader, are the market. You decide who wins or loses.
This matters more than it might seem, because when a new domain emerges, there are often a ton of options for a little while. Some of them fail, some get bought or merged with others, and a few will win. Everyone knows about Facebook, and some might remember MySpace. But do you remember Friendster and the 40 or so other social