Utilizing conceptual theories as a reflection for construction leadership

By Gregg M. Schoppman, FMI Corp

Call it inspiration from the Three Body Problem. Call it a moment of deep thinking. Call it watching an episode of “Big Bang Theory” masked as deep thinking. There are countless theorems, hypotheses and universal laws that canvas the scientific world. Everyone has seen the memes or brilliant pearls of wisdom on social media that attempt to force the reader to think bigger.  Recently, there was a reference to Occam’s Razor. The casual viewer might have thought it was for the latest subscription for shaving accessories. Also referred to as the “Law of Parsimony,” it simply postulates that the simplest explanation for things is preferable to the more complex. For instance, as you lay in bed, you hear the patter of feet on your roof.  Is it that pesky reindeer herd making another trip or more simply those raccoons that plague the neighborhood? The simplest answer is more than likely the right answer. There is no shortage of “razors”, a name of which is drawn from the concept of shaving away details to lead to a conclusion. Razors and theorems abound in the world of physics and have a tendency to stretch one’s mind to the point of breaking. However, these same treatises can be applied to the world of construction, albeit with a little more fun mixed in.

Occam’s Razor

“It is futile to do with more what can be done with fewer.” William of Ockham may have been a construction leader, even in the 14^th century. His razor was simply an expression of how individuals over-complicate things or over rationalize.  Consider a contractor that is losing money, year after year.  It’s the market, it’s the weather, it’s the people, it’s the customers.  It’s some supernatural phenomena and confluence of forces creating a vortex of unprofitability….  No, it’s you. Sure, there are bad markets, tough markets and bad weather. How come in those same markets, there are winners? Great construction leaders need to revert back to the fundamental answer of how their role within organizations is being executed to set and act upon a strategic plan that has follow-through, rather than random chance encounters that may only have a tangential impact on performance.

Schrödinger’s Cat

Watch out animal lovers – this is going to sting a little.  Erwin Schrödinger was a Nobel prize winning physicist, and he developed a particularly unusual theorem. Consider a cat in a box with some sort of insidious device, say a toxin or nuclear material that will eventually, ahem, end the cat. When the box is closed with the material, Schrodinger postulated that the cat is both alive and dead simultaneously UNTIL the box is open for verification. This is a deep concept within the realm of quantum physics that this author barely can identify with. However, there are plenty of examples of Schrödinger’s Construction Projects that exist in this world.  Riddle me this:

1. How can a construction team be both PROFITABLE and yet UNPRODUCTIVE at the same time?
2. How can a construction project be profitable but generate no cash?
3. How can a project have the best team but still fail to be successful?

Whether it is superior crew performance/estimating errors in Case #1, a project that checks all of the boxes on purchasing and management but fails on collections in Case #2, or the complete misalignment of a project team with inferior communication in Case #3, the cat is definitely out of the bag. When Occam’s Razor is applied to Schrödinger’s Cat – which sounds particularly horrible – there are often firm-wide systemic failures that lead to misrepresentations, miscommunication and most importantly two parallel conditions that seem at odds with one another.

Borel’s Monkeys

Emile Borel in 1913 may have defined the ultimate machine of inefficiency or simply coined the phrase, “Even a broken clock works twice a day.”  Borel stated that if you have an infinite group of monkeys typing on typewriters (remember this was in the 1900’s, millennials), that group will eventually produce a document on par with Shakespeare.  This mathematical concept seems farfetched, but contractors engage in this insanity too often.  Consider the following:

• Law of Diminishing Returns – While not in the same vein as Borel, there is a law that states that simply adding resources will have a deleterious impact to output.  For instance, take an infinite crew and see if the output goes up or down. Borel’s monkeys had infinite space whereas most construction sites do not.
• Failure to Pivot, Adjust, etc. – Sure, Borel’s monkeys finally wrote the amazing sonnet.  How long did it take?  Could Monkey Construction have adjusted its strategic logic sooner rather than later before it landed the plane?

Unlike Borel, construction is a finite resource game played as Simon Sinek describes on an infinite timetable.  Time is not on any contractor’s side, whether it is on the project level or the enterprise level.

Ship of Theseus

Hoping for a Golden Fleece were you?  More likely a business will find the Minotaur amongst the swampy wastelands. The concept of the “Ship Thesis” is this – according to Plutarch, Theseus’s ship was maintained by replacing one board at a time.  As a board would rot, the ship’s facility manager would replace it with a new board. Eventually, every board would be replaced on Theseus’ ship leading to the question – is it Theseus’ original ship or a new ship entirely?  Sure, this sounds like some buildings that contractors work in, constantly doing “tenant improvements” over and over. The real theme is identity. Leaders within firms need to evolve. Reflect on Occam’s Razor.  Assuming things aren’t working, change is inevitable. Sometimes that change means individuals change, models change, markets change, delivery systems change. Does that mean Brand X Construction is not the same business or simply reconstructed, one person/software/etc. at a time?  In this case, firms must evolve or end up looking like a gaggle of monkeys.  

To simplify the construction universe, these reinterpretations may have done the opposite. There are rarely philosophers or physicists contemplating the construction universe one brick at a time, but sometimes it comes down to the easiest solution.  Spoiler alert – the cat lived.