To keep pace with mid- to late 2020s new residential construction growth, homebuilding’s 1,000 or more strategic leaders well know one thing for sure. They need to alter the course and trajectory of human capability so that there’s a better, more predictable, more efficient match between frontline skills and the pipeline of residential projects, market to market.

That’s clear.

Further, what this means is that construction – unlike any other non-services and occupational field including agriculture – must step-change upward in employees and job creation while other manufacturing, mining, and other industrial sectors plateau or track downward due to automation, robotics, and other technological advances.

So much for the old news.

What’s still news – or at least an unappreciated recognition – is that it’s homebuilding successes and adaptiveness, not the business’ failures, fragility, and rigidness that tend to thwart efforts, isolate pockets of progress, and ultimately limit the whole from improving outcomes for its countless separate parts.

Let’s start with a common source of misunderstanding, three phrases used often to allege stagnancy and resistance to improvement.

“The way it is.” “The way we do it.” “The way we’ve always done it.”

These three phrases – certainly in good times and especially when things get more challenging – stand as American homebuilding’s punching bags.

The phrases and the stigma and ridicule they carry have knocked around in the business community’s echochamber for decades.

Consider though:

  • Image Source: “The Construction Industry as a Loosely Coupled System,” by Anna Dubois and Lars-Erik Gadde

    The complexity of the construction operations and the subsequent problem solving capability needed is perceived formidable. However, this problem is ‘in fact solved over and over again as new houses go up in their millions’.

    In 2021, builders started 1.13 million single-family homes and by July 2022, builders and their partners managed to hit a milestone of having hired 1.2 million builders and residential specialty trade contractors into construction fields.

    “The way we do it” – rather than being Einstein’s definition of insanity – in this case is a way that continues to work. It’s just that it may be working too well for its own good when it comes to attracting new talent and human capital into the sector.

    A community of practice stands as a sustaining source of given wisdom and knowledge from proven experience. Alternatively, a center of excellence might bring Nash’s game theory advantage, “considering the possible actions of the other players,” into play in a solution that could impact the business community at large, and thereby improve economic and financial opportunities for its separate parts.

    This is why we’re so excited by the linkages The Building Talent Foundation – under the leadership of ceo Branka Minic – is creating among a wider need of stakeholders and influencers in homebuilding’s ecosystem.

    Forming and strengthening these linkages can break the “prisoner’s dilemma” hold individual enterprises find themselves in, and create pathways along which they can both help themselves make money and help the industry tap into an expanded human capital pool make the entire competitive sector more valuable.

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