When it comes to adopting innovation, there is a process that companies need to work through. There are positive experiences and negative experiences when implementing new technology. It’s human nature to try to avoid the negatives. People tend to shy away from risk. However, the ups and downs are opportunities to learn and improve. Failing is part of innovating, just as succeeding is. Failure is not the end of a process; it is part of the journey.
If something doesn’t work for you, you can reflect, then you move forward. At least you know how not to do something. Even the best companies and products out there have room for improvement.
By focusing on the future, your implementation process is grounded, and it gives your team direction.
It’s also important to work through implementations as a team, because each person has their own vantage point of what success and failure are. You should own failures (and successes) as a team. When you reflect on the disappointments as a group, it takes the onus off one individual and reduces the fear factor in trying something new. Another aspect of human nature is to take things personally. The team is your best safety net for new ideas.
The future of the construction industry begins with the way things are today.
Buildings are becoming larger, more complex, more technologically advanced. Multi-faceted projects have millions of components, requiring many equally-complex decisions. Owners are making more demands for building features, and the stakes are high. Contractors have to step up, get up to speed and keep up. Global trends are changing the face of construction, for example, alternative energy sources are becoming pervasive on new construction of large projects. Municipalities are adopting new standards for sustainability.
While these trends are part of the current scenario, more and more pressure is being exerted on the industry to produce more projects faster.
One of the answers to this that has been discussed widely is putting a manufacturing spin on construction. Thus, prefabrication has been predicted to become more common. However, in order for prefab to really become widespread, the technology needs to improve to make it easier to exchange information among the stakeholders via the building information model. A very organized system is needed to facilitate prefabrication.
There are also likely to arise “recommendation engines” to keep team members updated real-time with any changes to the project model. Likewise, there are already tools that monitor the model compared to field conditions, for example, and alert stakeholders to changes that affect their portion of the project. This predictive technology will make sense of and put to use a great amount of data around projects, increasingly facilitating decision-making in the future.
To minimize information overload, solutions are needed to take the complex and make it simple.
Listen today to episode 107 of Bridging the Gap podcast, where I talk with Greg Santoro of DADO about tech innovation, dealing with failures and the trends sweeping through the construction industry.
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