Most of us know of Washington Irving's "Rip Van Winkle", the story of a man who fell asleep and woke up years later to a changed world.
The old man recognized almost no one and was virtually unrecognizable to others. This also could be the story of today's construction industry. History and technology have moved on. Some sectors of construction look around with their foot-long beards at other industries that have kept pace with the times.
A respected industry colleague, Curtis Rodgers of Brick and Mortar Ventures, asserts the construction industry actually isn't an "industry." Rather it's a multitude of businesses in industries of their own: building products, engineering services, information technology, construction trades and so on. There are thousands of players in the ecosystem we call construction. That's part of the problem - complexity and fragmentation.
Construction is a multi-trillion-dollar collection of individual businesses that often don't visualize themselves as being associated with something bigger than themselves, or even with their immediate peers. Individual businesses often can't see a path to meaningful change. The current ways are what they know. Except for some innovation here and there, it is what it always has been. The thought of a broad-level transformation is complicated and overwhelming, and perhaps unnecessary.
Yet history demonstrates transformation occurs despite passive resistance, and the price is steep when we try to avoid inevitable change.
A revolution occurred around Rip in and he'd missed it while in slumber. Upon awakening, Rip had two choices: accept the new reality or fade into obsolescence. He missed the opportunity to contribute to meaningful improvement. Some of the construction industry may be snoozing its way into extinction.
An example of how the construction industry can transform itself is the emphasis on safety. The industry knew how to be safe, yet in the late 1980s, the aggregated Total Recordable Incident Rate (TRIR) of CURT and CII members was an almost inconceivable 7.19, and those companies were among the best. Standards were set and enforced, dramatic change began, and TRIR was driven to 0.27 as of 2020. This owner-led change released the industry to innovate and unleashed a culture of safety from which we will never retreat.
Without change, adaptation or collaboration, the construction industry may crumble faster than we can control. When that happens, when forced to choose among fewer viable projects, we lose opportunities, lose money, lose jobs and lose industry stakeholders. We won't be able to keep up with global infrastructure needs and population growth; people rely on the built environment for society to function.
The construction industry is a multitude of discrete entities, but our strength and survival lie in connection and collaboration. Collaboration technologies will connect us more rapidly and with less friction. Aligning goals and increasing transparency will allow us to serve our individual interests as well as those of the entire construction ecosystem. Rather than avoid the hard work of improvement, like Rip Van Winkle, we should wake up every day with the thought, "What can we do today that will help improve outcomes in our built environment?"
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