I have spent much of my career trying to understand why construction performance can be so difficult to improve. Over that time, I have looked at the problem through different lenses: planning, project controls, Lean, organisational change, technology, human behaviour and, increasingly, systems thinking.
Each lens has added something. But I have increasingly come to believe that none of them, on its own, is sufficient.
Construction's most difficult productivity challenges do not sit neatly within planning, technology, leadership, skills or process. They sit in the interactions between them.
That matters because we have a tendency to isolate the problem we can see.
- If the programme is slipping, we improve the programme.
- If coordination is poor, we introduce another meeting.
- If information is difficult to find, we implement another digital platform.
- If people are struggling, we focus on capability, resilience or leadership.
- If productivity is low, we look for ways of making individual activities faster.
Most of these responses are perfectly rational. The problem is that the performance we experience on a project is not produced by any one of these things. It emerges from the system they create together.
Productivity is an outcome
We often talk about productivity as though it is something that can be directly improved. I am not sure it can.
Productivity is better understood as an outcome of the conditions within which work happens. A trade can only install efficiently if the workface is ready. The workface can only be ready if materials, information, access and preceding work are available.
Those things depend on decisions being made at the right time. Those decisions depend on people having the right information and understanding what others need from them.
Eventually the symptom appears on site and we call it poor productivity. By that point, the cause may be several interactions removed from the place where the loss becomes visible.
Stability comes before optimisation
One implication of this is that we may be trying to optimise work before we have created the conditions required for work to be reliable.
Construction will never be completely stable. Nor should it be. Projects contain uncertainty, changing information, physical constraints and thousands of interactions between different organisations and specialists.
Stability does not mean removing uncertainty. It means creating enough reliability around the work for people to make sensible decisions.
People are not separate from the system
This is also why I think we need to be careful about separating "people problems" from "process problems". We sometimes describe productivity in terms of individual performance: people need to communicate better, collaborate better, plan better or become more accountable.
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