Laying the foundations of a leaner industry

Roberto Priolo: Turner Construction started a leadership development program facilitated by the Lean Enterprise Institute, with a specific focus on A3 problem solving. Nine months later, what are your thoughts?

Charles Murphy: By developing coaches, we hope to create a cascading effect. We want the students to become teachers, so to speak, sparking people's curiosity and giving them all the guidance and mentoring they need. When we learn new things, we synthesize them to some extent; well, our hope is that our people will synthesize the lean message and apply it to Turner's daily work.

When I look at the experience with our first two classes of general managers and department heads who took part in this development program, I cannot help but think of all the things it has opened our eyes to. For example, this initiative is allowing us to engage with our team in a way we never could before. Across the five business units in the New York region, we are seeing the benefits of exposing people to different ways of doing things - both the coaches and the coachees.

Another thing we have learned in recent months is how much work and patience are needed to understand what is going on. Take the software we use to make sure that inadequate work is corrected before the project is completed, for example: I needed to access the system to work on my A3, and it was very painful to go and see and understand what the real problems were, and to think that our people deal with this every day! At the management level, we would never have realized how urgent it was to improve this IT tool if it were not for this development program. What happens in the gemba is not something we were normally exposed to. Now we have this opportunity, and the fact that we are not experts has allowed us to ask a lot of questions. That is a big change.

Tom Ehrenfeld: Looking at the first two classes, do you think there are specific characteristics that make people more or less predisposed to lean thinking?

CM: I think so. In general, if you simply accept things as they are and do not question the status quo, in my mind you are not predisposed to be lean. You need to be prepared to do the work necessary to find out, and not just assume. Most people in our two classes, after some learning, understood the difference. The class members who were more focused on completing tasks rather than answering the question "how do I know this?" were not as successful.

TE: Lean brought drastic improvement to the automotive industry. Are there specific challenges for Turner and for the construction industry that you think lean can help you face?

CM: As an industry, we are no more efficient in 2018 than we were in 1958. We have not made much progress. Bricklayers lay one block on top of another exactly as they did 2,000 years ago. We have seen improvements in quality and safety, of course, but not to the level where they should be.

The difficulty in improving construction is that every job is different. With each new site, you are looking at different subcontractors, different plans and specifications and different circumstances. Part of our challenge is finding ways to be more efficient in this scenario. The lean approach, for me, is an experiment, based on the feedback we receive about the improvement we introduce. In the 1970s, the relationship between workers and management would have been very different. There are still some companies with very little regard for their workers, their working conditions and their safety, and to me that is simply bizarre. Large builders like Turner have a role to play, because they can require subcontractors to behave in a certain way. We can experiment with our partners to improve production, safety and quality. As an industry, it is clear that we are looking for a new model, and I believe lean should be part of it.

RP: In fact, you are saying you would like to transform the construction industry, not just Turner. Could you say more about that?

CM: You have a big problem to solve, and usually nothing happens. So, to change the industry, we have to start with small problems. We are making small incremental improvements and seeing where they take us. If we can get people to think differently and develop a continuous improvement mindset, the benefits will be enormous for everyone in construction - no matter how long it takes to get there.

Ninety percent of the work we do is done by subcontractors, and these companies also work for many of our competitors. I cannot imagine them behaving one way with us and another way with our competitors. Whether it is about safety, quality or the production system, to me it only makes sense for us to contribute to improving the entire industry. Since we share subcontractors and their workers with our competitors, by default the industry gets better if we get better. If we can develop a lean culture here at Turner and solve the right problems as they occur, we will become a better company, and the industry will have to improve as well.

That does not mean we will stop competing in our markets. We will, but there is nothing wrong with having a common approach to things like safety. If we can make construction jobs safer, why not share that with the rest of the industry?

TE: The idea of safety goes hand in hand with the lean principle of respect for people. How are you using lean to build your safety initiatives?

CM: We have had programs that make work safer for some time now, and whether by design or not, these programs and our lean transformation are now going hand in hand. For me, lean is all-encompassing: if you can instill a lean culture in the business, you will become a safer company. That is the beauty of lean. The benefits lean brings you tend to add up - quality goes up, cost goes down, safety improves, and so on.

TE: During our visit to Turner, we met very impressive people who seem passionate about the changes they are making. Do you see a different way of developing thinking?

CM: Yes, I do, and it is interesting to see how different people learn when they take the time to analyze the situation and find out the root cause of a problem. Discovering problems and figuring out how to solve them - which people will do, if given the chance - is transforming the way people approach their work. Our project team for a new building at Columbia University realized that its lack of meetings with multiple participants was delaying the project. After analyzing the problem in depth, they decided to schedule a meeting a month in advance, which gave them a better chance of staying on track. They became aware of a problem they did not know they had and changed their approach accordingly.

RP: What is the next step in your lean journey?

CM: We want to keep tapping into the potential of our people and building on the success of the first two classes. We need to spread success stories, such as Doug Cooper's (in English), so that more people understand the benefits of adopting lean thinking and feel predisposed to embrace it.

We will start a third class soon and a fourth in July. Sixty people will have gone through the leadership development program, and we hope to develop at least 20 coaches. We hope to see everyone who took the course start working with their teams and sharing what they have learned. This will allow us to gradually build an organization that can identify the right problems and implement changes as needed.

As far as our production system is concerned, we will keep training people in the use of the Last Planner System® (30% of people have already been through the training). We are planning to have five classes of 20 people this year.

We are also trying to analyze value-adding work along the stream. If we can get 60 key subcontractors to perform better, we are confident we can change the industry. To do this, the plan is to involve subcontractors and unions to discuss together how to improve safety at work.

Finally, we want our management system to improve. This occurred to me during a recent visit to furniture manufacturer Herman Miller, and I was really impressed by what I saw there and by what the possibilities could be for our organization.

This interview is being published simultaneously on Planet Lean and on its partner, the Lean Post.