Building Complexity and the Construction Community of Practice

But even with project managers, cascading failures remain a risk due to the nature of construction. Construction has the unfortunate combination of building mostly unique things each time (even similar projects will be built on different sites, in different weather conditions, and likely with different site crews) and consisting of tasks that are c... See more

A manufacturing process, once in place, can be repeated thousands or millions of times. But it’s very difficult to decompose a building in such a way that it can be produced by a sequence of repetitive movements, and it’s difficult to mass produce large numbers of identical buildings.

Building is a journey into randomness. By venturing mindfully through a wealth of data, collective histories, and economic considerations, there are remarkable synchronicities to be discovered.

The internet and software is only accelerating this trend: as coordination costs get lower, it becomes easier and easier for companies to use outside services instead of building capabilities internally, concentrating knowledge in fewer and fewer organizations.

Construction is a $10T industry with several very big problems. As an industry, it consumes the greatest amount of resources and energy and contributes the largest amount of waste. We build everything as if it's unique, have unacceptable worker injury/fatality rates and collect sparse data.