RIBA: An organisation for the Artisan or the Buisnessman.

The role of the Royal Institute of British Architects is one of my favourite subjects. Firstly I must declare I am a fully paid up RIBA member and have been for the past 20 years.

However I believe this institution has become increasingly elitist and out of step with the future direction of the wider construction industry. The institution itself can't be blamed as the institution is made up of its members and it is they who are steering the profession on its current direction.

Our profession continues to have an eroding influence and impact on the industry.

My main frustration is that architects are actually absolutely critical to the success of the construction industry as it is they who have the skills to design ,problem solve and communicate better than others in the industry. Construction is about to move into another period of growth and we find ourselfes faced with yet another skills shortage. This suggests to me we are training people with the wrong skills.

Architecture today has moved away from buisness or craft and has become an art form aligned more with painting and sculpture within Universities rather than the built environment. Obviously there is a place for this however construction needs pragmatic designers who can solve problems and work as part of the team.

Architectural practice has become a cottage industry and very artisan. The vast majority of architectural practices in the UK employ fewer than 5 people. These same practices complain that they do not get a share of the large projects being advertised by the public or private sector. This can be no surprise. Which organisation would take a multi million pound risk on a small under resourced buisness. To be able to invest in training, infrastructure and research and development architectural practices have to generate a reasonable level of turnover.

Only 3% of UK of architectural practices employ over 50 people. This means there are likely only 30 UK architectural businesses of a scale able to respond to the needs of the industry. It is therefore little wonder that the status of the architect in the design team is being eroded as project managers and BIM coordinators along with other professions look to fill the roles normally the domain of the architect.

The most successful architectural practice in the UK on any metric has to be Foster and Partners. This is a creative business with a global reach which is operated as a business. I have calculated that this one organisation is responsible for 8% of the total architectural revenue in the UK.

It seems to me that architects and the RIBA have given up on 21st century business and prefer to be associated with artists and sculptors.

This is not the profession I studied all of those year to be a part of. I want to make a difference to as many peoples lives as possible. I want to improve the industry and innovate so we can deliver more and better buildings.

I believe there is now an opportunity for a new profession for those who still want to make an impact and invest in the long term future of the profession and industry.

How about Robs Instutute of Business Architects?

Holiday reading....Creativity, passion and change.

It's that time of the year again where I get the chance to read the books I've amassed over the previous months. My reading choice is pretty one dimensional and for a lot of people would be considered boring.Im fascinated by business stories and the people who make business happen.

Every business has a great story. On this holiday I have an excellent line up. For some reason there has been a wave of new business biographies, most of them with a digital theme.

I usually like to run the parallels between construction and the book I'm reading. In the past this has included everything from Henry Ford to Tesco.

The fist book I've finished is Creativity, inc by Ed Catmull.This is the story of Pxar. The book tells how the company went from being a division of Lucas film to in effect being the animation studio of Disney.

It works because of the balance of skills across the three founders. One leading technology, one leading creativity and the other being Steve jobs. Steve jobs is very much a side story in this book but I am absolutely convinced that this man was a genius. 

The book is one of the best I have read in relation to how to truly develop a creative culture.Pixar lives and breathes creativity. When contrasted with what the Disney studio had become it is clear the difference culture makes to the success of an organisation.

The other major take away was the similarities in the digitising of construction. Obviously no one at Disney believed in digital animation and believed it had no future. They therefore ignored it and did not innovate. Pixar spent 20 year investing in the technology and proved how dated an analogue approache is. When Toy Story was released it was the beginning of the end for the traditional animation studios.

This is similar to those businesses who are not adopting digital technology at present in construction. The reality is analogue design and construction businesses will become artisan type organisation. This may work for some but at Space Group we want more. We want to rethink our world and make it better. To achieve this we believe digital tools and data are essential as Pixar did.

In the end Disney ended up paying nearly $8 billion dollars for Pixar with the additional embarrassment of the Pixar CEO and VP taking over the leadership of both studios. Interestingly with fresh creative leadership Disney studios has recovered with recent box office hits such  as Tangled and Frozen.

Pixar has also continued to be a success. A great read for anyone interested in creativity and real change.

After reading the Pixar story I was compelled to read the Walt Disney story. Another great visionary and someone who had a burning passion for animation. He seemed to have little interest in business and was more interested in ideas. The business and money followed. Reading between the lines his brother Roy was the steadying influence in the business and gave his brother the space to be creative and to follow his dreams.

Two great stories about creativity, vision and passion.

Results from a bold Strategy

Laing O Rouke issued their company results last week.

What I love about LOR is their vision and their boldness in rethinking construction. They disregard everything which is established as a tier one constructor. They have looked to where they can add value and most importantly invested heavily.

Even the fact they their CEO is a woman is a great statement in itself in a narrow minded industry.

LOR see themselves as an Engineering Enterprise and look for clients who see the value in this approach. This may mean they have to travel the world to find them.

Their Design for Manufacturing Assembly is a bold strategy. They invested in their concrete plant just at the wrong time when the market dipped. They continued to hold firm to their strategy and funded the factory through recession. I have no doubt that this strategy will catapult them ahead of the field over the next decade.

They have a fantastic programme in investing in their people and teaching them new skills which is often talked about but not acted upon in construction.

In the notes to accompany the results Anna Stewart made some great comments which I feel sum up the vision of the business. If any Teir 1 contractor is going to achieve vision 2025 it is LOR.

The following is an extract from the CEOs notes which for me give a clear articulation of where they are going.

"We are confident that following our strategy for Design for Manufacturing and Assembly and transferring as many activities away from construction sites into controlled factory environments, will ensure we are less impacted by the skills shortage in traditional trades and will not be driven to engage a lower skilled inherently less safe workforce."

Music to my ears!

Generation Z

Regular readers will be well aware of my interest in the differences between the generations from Baby Boomers, through to generation X and Y. 

The next generation I'd generation Z which due to their age there is little information.

"There is an increasing number of people starting to research this generations and set out some initial thoughts. This week there was and excellent article in the Times about this very subject. I have copied it here...

Get ready for Generation Z: a more driven, less vain, more puritanical cohort that is poised to make its mark on the world.

Precise parameters are disputed, but “Gen Z” is broadly said to include those born after 1995, a group that includes two billion people worldwide. Brought up in the shadow of 9/11 and amid a great recession, they were raised, say researchers, “in a socio-economic environment marked by chaos, uncertainty, volatility and complexity”.

The challenges seem to have moulded a new maturity: studies suggest this group is brimming with prudent, if rather puritanical, socially-aware, self-starting entrepreneurs. They have also been called the “first tribe of true digital natives”, or “screenagers”.

Gen Z members, it is said, are smarter than the baby boomers born in the wake of the Second World War. They also appear quite distinct from the slackers of Generation X — born roughly between 1960 and 1980 — characterised as “stuck in a terminal cynicism”.

A report by Sparks & Honey, a US advertising agency, highlights a number of defining Gen Z characteristics. It suggests they are more driven and less narcissistic than the millennial generation, or Generation Y, born between 1980 and 2000. Most say they would rather save money than spend. They drink less and smoke less cannabis than their elders, get into fewer fights at school and have less “risky sex”.

They plan to change the world for the better: 60 per cent of Gen Z “want to have an impact on the world” through their job, compared with 39 per cent of Millennials. A quarter of America’s Gen Z are already volunteering. More than 70 per cent would like to start their own business. A separate survey of 11,000 Gen Z children, cited inMaclean’s magazine, found 69 per cent would rather be smarter than better looking.

Sparks & Honey suggests that the 16-year-old activist and author Adora Svitak fits the Gen Z profile perfectly. Her writing ability made her a media star at the age of six, and she has campaigned to promote literacy and feminist values. A talk she gave, entitled, “What Adults Can Learn From Kids” has been viewed more than 3 million times online.

Other prominent members of Gen Z include Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani 17-year-old who defied the Taliban to go to school and was shot by them – only to emerge as a globally recognised activist. Logan Laplante, 13, also fits the profile: while being homeschooled in California he designed his own progressive curriculum. A talk he gave on his “hackschooling” philosophy has been viewed more than 5 million times.

Meanwhile, researchers have suggested that The Hunger Games is the perfect Gen Z film. Depicting a dystopian future where teens get slaughtered, it reflected their bleak post 9/11 world – and the need for coping mechanisms to deal with it.

“Gen Z is already being branded as a welcome foil to the Millennials, who have been typecast as tolerant but also overconfident, narcissistic and entitled,” said Maclean’s magazine.

However, it also warns that their aptitude with technology means that “this is the first time in history kids know more than adults about something really important to society”.

The result, it suggests, “could well be the most profound generation gap ever” -- between parents at odds with the internet the their kids who driving a new type of digital society."

So who pulls the So who pulls the strings?

I wrote an article recently titled "No more boom and bust." In it I referenced the problems companies such as Balfour Beatty and Sir Robert McAlpine had had with difficult projects which subsequently have impacted upon business perception and performance.

I talked about how the culture of the industy was wrong and how we have been approaching things in the wrong way for too long.

The article has been published in a few places including my own blog and on linked in.

The response has been phenomenal. So many people took the time to support and add to the article. I even had responses from senior directors at Balfour Beatty supporting the sentiment of the article.

Also when I deliver talks or speak to people generally there is huge support for change.

What is puzzling me is that if there is so much support where is the support and drive coming from for how we do things now. Who is pushing for the adversarial approach? Who is promoting disjointed procurement.

It seems to me that actually no one really believes how we do things now is the right way. I suspect there are thousands of people in the construction industry who keep doing what they are doing and what they know day after day. The reality is they neither agree or disagree they just do their job.

 

I think it's fair to day they suffer from chronic apathy. This apathy was rife in the 90s and 2000s when it was easy to do things as we had always done them particularly when this made money.

What is different now there are people passsionate and supportive of change. There is little resistance as there aren't any supporters of our current culture

There is a new breed in the construction industry today who are passsionate about a better way and who will not tollerate current behaviours

We need to continue to disrupt the industry and grow adoption by example. Those who are apathetic will then change or die.

?

I wrote an article recently titled "No more boom and bust." In it I referenced the problems companies such as Balfour Beatty and Sir Robert McAlpine had had with difficult projects which subsequently have impacted upon business perception and performance.

I talked about how the culture of the industy was wrong and how we have been approaching things in the wrong way for too long.

The article has been published in a few places including my own blog and on linked in.

The response has been phenomenal. So many people took the time to support and add to the article. I even had responses from senior directors at Balfour Beatty supporting the sentiment of the article.

Also when I deliver talks or speak to people generally there is huge support for change.

What is puzzling me is that if there is so much support where is the support and drive coming from for how we do things now. Who is pushing for the adversarial approach? Who is promoting disjointed procurement.

It seems to me that actually no one really believes how we do things now is the right way. I suspect there are thousands of people in the construction industry who keep doing what they are doing and what they know day after day. The reality is they neither agree or disagree they just do their job.

 

I think it's fair to day they suffer from chronic apathy. This apathy was rife in the 90s and 2000s when it was easy to do things as we had always done them particularly when this made money.

What is different now there are people passsionate and supportive of change. There is little resistance as there aren't any supporters of our current culture

There is a new breed in the construction industry today who are passsionate about a better way and who will not tollerate current behaviours

We need to continue to disrupt the industry and grow adoption by example. Those who are apathetic will then change or die.

No more BIM

The term BIM or Building Information Modelling has been in "general circulation" since around 2006/7. The term has done wonders for moving the construction industry towards a digital revolution. We have benefitted from improving hardware and software and emerging generations who don't see technology as an add on but a necessity.

 

Whilst the term BIM was not first used by Autodesk they invested in the term and promoted it as it very effectively communicated what they were trying to achieve with technology. Clearly with a better understanding of the value of their software and its value sales would increase.

 

From someone who has spent a career fighting against many of the things considered acceptable in the construction industry BIM and all of the associated software was music to my ears. We bought our first copy of Revit parametric software back in 2000. This was even before Autodesk had bought the company.

 

The marketing of the term BIM pushed everything up a level with the final vindication being in May 2011 when the then Government Chief Construction Advisor Paul Morrell mandated that a 3D coordination and data or BIM should be included in government projects by 2016.

 

Coupled with the mandate the government invested in the BIM Task Group who helped to define the specific requirements and what level 2 actually means.

 

Within the public sector it is still work in progress however huge strides have been made within early adopter departments such as the Ministry of Justice.

 

The private sector has identified the value itself and has embraced new technologies and processes largely off the back of the good work carried out by government.

 

However now the term BIM is far too generic and can cause confusion. It is so commonly used now that it can lose impact. This is similar to the term Partnering which was adopted in the late 90s. Many people used the term but how many people truly understood it and worked in this way.

 

We have all heard people and organisations say yes we do BIM or can you do BIM. The term is now working against the vision and objective and we must be far more specific and less generic.

 

What BIM actually was, was the catalyst for change across the construction sector. We are now in the middle of a revolution to Digitise the Construction Industry. We have to be more specific about what we are doing and what we are trying to achieve.

 

For example we will author models or federate them. We may extract data which can be used in the operation of the building. We may use the federated model to extract quantities or link elements to the programme. All of this could be referred to as "BIM" if we adopt the term how it is currently used. We often end up with lots of debate about what is BIM and what isn't or is this level 2 or level three.

 

Who cares? This is all theory. We are digitising the Construction industry so we can improve our product, process and perceptions. We must deliver better value to our clients and demonstrate we understand their business and their issues and that we are able to respond intelligently and positively.

 

 

How mad is the construction industry?

Balfour Beatty announced another profit warning to the stock exchange this week for £30million only 8 weeks after the last one.

Balfours are a great business with a fantastic heritage and some great people.I know better than most having worked with them over the past 20 years.What is happening to them is a symptom of the boom and bust of the construction industry. The challenges which Balfours are facing is why we want to "rethink your world" at Space Group.

We can't go on like this as an industry, swaying from boom to bust, gambling on who will win and who will lose. It is ridiculously expensive, stressful and means we lose any consistant improvement or skills development.

If we want to change we need to change something! 

The industry needs to fundamentally rethink its whole culture. It has nothing to do with BIM or technology but is all about culture, procurement and contracts.

I have written extensively about the different generations and their impact on change. The baby boomers have held the reigns for many years now and it is time for them to hand over to the young gen X and emerging gen Y.

If we take the Balfour Beatty story as an example to demonstrate what the construction industry goes through. In 1997 a new Labour Government was elected and on the back of a financial boom and growing tax receipts there was a public sector building boom.

By the late 90s clients had been convinced that a design and build contract reduced their risk and improved value. Builders became "contractors" The clue is in the name. It was all about the contract and the sub contracts and how these were played out rather than the process or product. Main contractors built pre construction teams who were excellent at bidding and winning work.Their delivery teams managed the subcontractors as they jettisoned their direct labour. At the same time their commercial teams grew. The risk moved to the main contractor from the client and design team which meant they held the power.

As public sector spending grew through the 2000s main contractors started to win the construction gamble. D and B is all about risk and with large budgets from government they were making huge profits. Sub contractors were squeezed so we had little skill development or investment in the industry but main contractors we becoming cash rich as they held onto cash as profits grew.

These cash piles were then invested into PFI and again they won big when clients wanted bidders to take interest rate risk. With falling interest rates PFI became hugely lucrative. This was a fantastic business model and through the 2000s shareholders of companies such as Balfour Beatty did very well.This was more of a financial model than a construction process. At Balfours Ian Tyler,accountant rather than a builder, was in charge and helped Balfours to grow revenue and profit,

However when the spending slows and the cash reduces the strategy falls apart as it is not a sustainable  model. An early example of this was Jarvis who were using cash receipts from rail work.

Construction companies have burned through their working capital over the last few years and have not been able to invest. To cover overhead projects have been bought with low margin. Again this is a  gamble and unfortunatley it is more likely you lose in a falling market. It is particularly tough on subcontractors who are squeezed at both sides. This is what has happened to the Balfour Beatty M and E business. They have gambled and lost. 

The mad thing is, that for Balfours to keep going they are selling their assets. These are the PFI assets they invested in during the boom. So by the end of this decade Balfours will have sold all if the assets which they amassed through the 2000 and will be back to where they started 20 years ago.Boom and Bust!

So who has won and who has lost.

The winners are the shareholders through he 2000s. The losers are the great staff of Balfours who unfortunatley have been through all of the pain of the past 5 years. The other loser is the construction industry. We have not moved forward, we have not improved and we have lost skills.

There is a different way. I think I will leave that for a future blog.

Rethink your world.