The Construction Technology Handbook. Hugh Seaton
will be able to use in the future. There is no reason you cannot use both mindsets, because they are not really in conflict.
The digital construction mindset separates the physical from the digital, understanding that each supports and requires the other to function. Understand that some problems are for the gut, and some are for the analytics. These two higher‐level toolkits are critical, and they also overlap.
Intuitive Problems
Processes and problems that you can directly see are always going to be where experience and intuition are primary. No machine or software can compare to the sophistication that a seasoned professional brings to a real situation.
This is true for a few reasons, the most important of which is that no software has been invented, including the much hyped artificial intelligence (AI), that has an understanding of context. Humans are highly context‐driven, and we understand not just what's right in front of us, but also how it relates to what happened yesterday, how it might relate to the specific men and women on the job, and other factors. Digital technology cannot do this.
But context doesn't only come from what you've heard or seen, it can also come from digital technology – reports and analyses of a bigger picture, that help your intuition do its job.
Digital Problems
Intuition works by simplifying the world, by mental rules of thumb, so that we can take all the information in and do something quickly. We evolved to be fast on our feet, to see issues immediately, which is why we are so good at managing what we can see.
However, modern construction involves huge numbers of people, across months of work and multiple sites. That is too much for our brains to handle directly, so we either use reams of paper and tons of meetings to keep it all straight, or we change the domain of technology we use to digital software.
Digital problems, involve lots of data, either because of a large scope of information, or really fine measurements only a machine can make.
For example, tracking events and progress across a company, or even a job, will include thousands of points of data, over weeks and months of a project's lifetime. This is not what our brains are good at, and this is where digital technology helps – with what we cannot directly experience with our senses.
The analyses that come from digital software can show us patterns that we would not otherwise see, and at least as importantly, create proof that these patterns exist, so we can discuss them with management and start to create improvements.
But just as analytics can provide context for intuition, intuitive “gut‐checks” on data and software are absolutely critical. There is no software in existence that can really correct itself when it has bad data or other unexpected issues. Human oversight of software, robots, and other digital technology is essential.
Our mindset shift, then, is to accept digital technology as a tool for seeing the scale and scope of information that cannot be directly seen. We need to build trust that these technologies can do what humans alone cannot, but also understand their inherent limits.
We'll develop a clear understanding of what technologies can, and cannot, augment how you already do things. Just as today's manufacturing includes all of the experience, intuition, and “gut” from experienced managers and applies it to incredibly advanced machines, software, and analytics, technology as a part of your construction toolkit only makes sense if it adds to what you are already good at.
Nothing can replace the almost magical ability of the human mind to understand what's going on and with deceptive ease, know what to do next. This is a book about technology, but the most important technology of all is how you think.
This construction technology mindset will change how we build the world. Let's see how, with an example from manufacturing, specifically the Lean mindset.
How the Lean Mindset Changed Manufacturing
Car manufacturing in Japan is actually where all of “Lean” came from – based on the innovations of Kiichiro Toyoda and Taiichi Ohno, the bosses of Toyota motor company in the years after World War II. Faced with almost no capital in a capital‐intensive industry, workers with limited skills in a skills‐intensive industry, and almost unbeatable competition from Detroit in a competitive market, Toyoda and Ohno had to find a new way of looking at their business.
They did this by going back to first principles, and questioning everything about how cars were manufactured, to see how they might invent a new way. The first thing they questioned was how success was measured on the factory floor – traditionally this had been driven by the fact that the big pressing and assembly line machines were (and still are), enormously expensive. So the goal from a financial standpoint was always to make sure you maximize return on investment (ROI).
Following this ROI mindset, traditional car company managers and floor operators worked to make sure that each machine was used as much as possible, which meant producing as many parts produced per hour as possible, so the cost of the machine could be spread out across those parts. In this ROI‐centered mindset, managers valued machine efficiency more than the efficiency of the whole process.
Think about what that means if you have, say, five machines in a row making a screwdriver. The first one extrudes wire, cuts it, and passes it on. The next one bangs the front end into a flat blade, and bangs the back end to make little anchors. Step three dips the metal rod into a plastic mold to create the handle. Step four applies paint and glazing, and step five polishes and preps the newly minted screwdriver for packaging.
Remember that the classic way to look at this process is that we wanted to run each machine as much as possible, to our magical ROI. What if each machine, each part of the process is a different speed, producing a different number of outputs per hour? What if one of the early processes wasn't producing high quality parts, that then went through the rest of the process?
Obviously this happens all the time, and most pre‐Lean factories were a mess of waste and quality issues as a result.
Back to our screwdrivers example, what happens when you run all the machines at top speed, each producing as much as possible, is you get lots of metal rods sitting around, waiting for the plastic molding step, or you get lots of half‐finished screwdrivers waiting for the polish step. That gums up the factory floor, costs money in inventory, and pulls focus from what the factory is really supposed to be doing, which is making things people want to pay for.
It has been reported in more than one study that over 90% of construction supervisors think their jobsites are inefficient – clearly some of the same issues that pre‐Lean manufacturing faced are going on at our jobsites.
The pre‐Lean mindset was to focus on getting the most out of the machines, when it should have been making the most defect‐free products as possible. The machines cost what they cost, whether you run them 100% or 50%. That's fixed. But you can control how much inventory you've created, and if you're focused on the whole process, you're going to ask if each machine really needs to be set at 100% speed, or maybe if you can balance things so that each step only makes enough for the next step.
Managers who understand the lean mindset understand that the factory's job is not to make the most of its machines. The factory's job is to make the most of its process, of its total collection of workers, materials, and machines.
The real change, though, is in the role of top‐down versus bottom‐up planning. You see, once that mindset was changed, it was realized that front line workers understand the day‐to‐day process much better than managers, so they were given authority to stop the line and make adjustments, set short‐term plans and make improvements.
These same workers were collected into small