Building Complexity and the Construction Community of Practice

This “community of practice” is what makes it possible to construct buildings at all, but it also makes it hard to innovate - any new method or technique will likely face an initial period of being worse than conventional methods.

The construction industry overcomes this by relying on a set of shared standards, assumptions, and norms that exists outside of any one firm, and act as a sort of ambient coordination between firms with otherwise weak relationships.

In construction, on the other hand, relationships between firms are much weaker and shorter term. Project teams change frequently from project to project, and being selected for a project team is often largely a function of being the low bidder. As a result of these short term, transactional relationships, firms typically don’t spend time or effort... See more

Building production is also characterized by a great deal of uncertainty and factors outside the builder’s control. The physical environment is often difficult to predict (whoops, we got seven days of rain, whoops, we found a huge boulder when we were excavating), as is the cultural and regulatory environment (whoops, the zoning board is making us ... See more

These parts are put together in a specific way, in a specific order, by dozens of different workers. Assembly tasks are highly interdependent, and each step of the process depends on the previous steps being completed successfully - install the insulation wrong, and you’ll delay the installation of the drywall, which pushes back trim, which pushes ... See more

Buildings are complex artifacts: a typical single family home has somewhere in the neighborhood of 3,000 parts, and an apartment building might have 10 to 100 times as many depending on the size. For comparison, a typical car has somewhere around 30,000 parts, and a Boeing 737 has around 600,000.