Use The Best Ideas And Focus On Delivering Better Outcomes
In a series of articles, CEO Andy Steele will be looking at how the current crisis will affect the way we do business, and whether it will foster new thinking and new ways of working to help the construction industry address its deep rooted challenges on productivity and value.
I think most of the industry is now on the same page when it comes to the value of collaboration. I’d go so far as to say that deeper and more widespread collaboration is the route to better productivity and quality. It leads to a built environment that works well for everyone. Little surprise that collaboration is a central theme in the Construction Playbook.
But collaboration can be a bit abstract or even idealistic without a concrete purpose. I’d sum the purpose up as creating a culture and contracting framework that promotes innovation and in which all partners look beyond the confines of their own organisations, tasks and deliverables. In other words: contracts and partnerships are structured so that they consistently use the best ideas and focus relentlessly on broader outcomes such as lifetime value and end user satisfaction.
Contracting and subcontracting arrangements become less transactional. Instead, there’s a partnership formed with the single-minded mission to deliver the best outcomes from every project.
Where Does Innovation Come From?
Nobody has a monopoly on good ideas – they are not exclusive to the customer or contractor side of the relationship. Similarly, we all know what we know: the opportunities we can envisage are limited by our own experience. If we want collaboration to be meaningful and productive, finding ways to discover and use the better ideas should be our starting point – which means looking outside our organisations.
The task of improving collaboration isn’t just a technical one. The keys to success lie in standardising information and delivering behavioural change. If project reviews feature too many instances of: ‘if we’d known then what we know now,’ then collaboration has failed. The task should be to find somebody who already knows more or something different than we do so that we catch every opportunity and sidestep every potential glitch.
The industry faces plenty of challenges, from Covid recovery to zero carbon and skills shortages. We don’t really have time to waste on trying to fix everything on our own. Collaboration will lead us into unfamiliar places and new types of relationships – but that’s something we should embrace rather than fear.
