Master and Novice; Three Stone Cutters, who do you aspire for in your team?

Everyone wants Masters on their project and they need to have novices as having team of only Masters is not realistic.

Christopher Alexander writes an insightful perspective in his Pattern Language book on what is a master vs. novice.

•The difference between the novice and the master is simply that the novice has not learnt, yet, how to do things in such a way that he can afford to make small mistakes.

•The master knows that the sequence of his actions will always allow him to cover his mistakes a little further down the line.

•It is this simple but essential knowledge which gives the work of a master carpenter its wonderful, smooth, relaxed, and almost unconcerned simplicity.

Another way to look what a master is the story of three stone cutters popularized by Peter Drucker.

A man came across three stonecutters and asked them what they were doing. The first replied, “I am making a living.” The second kept on hammering while he said, “I am doing the best job of stonecutting in the entire county.” The third looked up with a visionary gleam in his eye and said, “I am building a cathedral.”

The master is 2nd or 3rd stonecutter. The 1st stone cutter is what happens all too often as the system is focused on the money paid for work.

We have all seen the first man, he’s there to make a few bucks, and may be the easiest to motivate because he is so obvious with what drives him. He won’t waste time on something that he won’t get paid for and can be highly productive. However, he can be a mercenary and have little loyalty or connection to your purpose.

As projects get bigger and more complex money as incentive to work shows its limits as the number of people who game the system to maximize money over power those who are like the 2nd and 3rd stonecutters.

What if the 1st stonecutter said “I am making a living as a novice and aspire to be a master and be a valued member in the team.”

Blind men and the Elephant - two ways

Part of what I enjoy chatting with Pete Kangas and Chris Heger, the two smartest guys I know in construction is how our different perspectives are shared and we learn. Many times we do not get the other perspective immediately and it takes time to understand the other ideas. We trust we are blind to the other perspective, and with time we could see things from other’s perspective. To explain this concept the bilnd men and the elephant comes to mind.

The blind men and the elephant is a story illustrating how 6 people could see one thing differently and none are right, yet each is so convinced they are right and others are wrong that it blinds them to the truth.

In all the years of know this story I did not know there was a version of the story that tells a deeper story that applies to issues many organizations face. For example, here is where the six blind men argue about elephants are.

The old men argued day and night about elephants. "An elephant must be a powerful giant," claimed the first blind man. He had heard stories about elephants being used to clear forests and build roads.

"No, you must be wrong," argued the second blind man. "An elephant must be graceful and gentle if a princess is to ride on its back."

"You're wrong! I have heard that an elephant can pierce a man's heart with its terrible horn," said the third blind man.

"Please," said the fourth blind man. "You are all mistaken. An elephant is nothing more than a large sort of cow. You know how people exaggerate."

"I am sure that an elephant is something magical," said the fifth blind man. "That would explain why the Rajah's daughter can travel safely throughout the kingdom."

"I don't believe elephants exist at all," declared the sixth blind man. "I think we are the victims of a cruel joke."

And as they sit to compare their views they argue each is right, defending their view and attacking others.

"An elephant is like a wall," said the first blind man. "Surely we can finally agree on that."

"A wall? An elephant is a giant snake!" answered the second blind man.

"It's a spear, I tell you," insisted the third blind man.

"I'm certain it's a giant cow," said the fourth blind man.

"Magic carpet. There's no doubt," said the fifth blind man.

"Don't you see?" pleaded the sixth blind man. "Someone used a rope to trick us."

Their argument continued and their shouts grew louder and louder.

"Wall!" "Snake!" "Spear!" "Cow!" "Carpet!" "Rope!"

Sounds like many meetings and disagreements in organizations that are standard ways of doing things.

When this version continues it shows there is a different way. A way where the six blind men change perspective and are asked to work together.

"Stop shouting!" called a very angry voice.

It was the Rajah, awakened from his nap by the noisy argument.

"How can each of you be so certain you are right?" asked the ruler.

The six blind men considered the question. And then, knowing the Rajah to be a very wise man, they decided to say nothing at all.

"The elephant is a very large animal," said the Rajah kindly. "Each man touched only one part. Perhaps if you put the parts together, you will see the truth. Now, let me finish my nap in peace."

When their friend returned to the garden with the cool water, the six men rested quietly in the shade, thinking about the Rajah's advice.

"He is right," said the first blind man. "To learn the truth, we must put all the parts together. Let's discuss this on the journey home."

The first blind man put his hand on the shoulder of the young boy who would guide them home. The second blind man put a hand on his friend's shoulder, and so on until all six men were ready to travel together.

We are all blind in some way, and the key to see more is to work with other’s perspectives. This is where diversity of the team is a key strength. A homogenous organization or a strict hierarchy of top down can be lik the blind men.

Nov 13, 2019 The Day Pete Kangas and I discovered the other path

On Nov 13, 2019 in Seattle chatting over a couple of pints of IPA, Pete and I were strategizing on what steps we should take in engaging a specific client with innovation in construction. The approach of presenting a technology based solution to the staff to the central headquarters we both agreed would not work. Why? Because any good idea would be a wasted effort as the corporate bureaucracy would attempt to take over the idea to preserve their fiefdoms of power and control on how things should be done and many other reasons.

Even the executive at the client who we both know agrees coming in as an outside innovator will not work. So we shifted the problem to what could we pitch as a budget that would get approval for an innovation project in the field far away from corporate. Being isolated for innovation works as demonstrated by Xerox PARC, Lockheed Skunkworks, and many other stealth developments.

When an innovative project gets big, keeping the bureaucracy away is a significant investment in budget and resources. So, we asked what is the problem that needs to be solved that the bureaucracy would ignore. That is what got us to see another path to take, but we did spend a of time on what I will call the well worn path.

This worn path is built over decades of what has worked in the past in what you do in the present and future. We started down this path in 2015 and looked at what we could do better. Build a mobile android app with AWS could services. We used a graph database approach to create the relationships with the data, and after using various AWS services, our developers built their own graph database in 2015. In 2017, AWS announced its graph database Neptune which we would probably use now, but those SW developers have long moved on to other efforts.

In 2017 is when we had everything in the Mobile app done which we called “Elysios.” It had been tested at one of Chris Heger’s construction projects. We had all thumbs up to go forward. This is the version that we discussed with one of the clients Pete, Chris, and I know of as one of the innovative teams in data center construction.

But the presentation did not go well. After two weeks of reflecting, the reason why it did not work became clear. The problem is the assumption of workers wanted innovation in construction is invalid. Many people are like 70 year old people who want to keep driving a Ford pick up truck, or Chevy, or Dodge. They have habits, behaviors which are the way they do things. This means even if a Mobile app is perfect and free, there will be signification number of workers who will not use the Mobile App Elysios. There needs to be a critical mass of users across all the trades to create a useful amount of information to support innovation. Even if 10% are not using the mobile app and they are in critical functions it can compromise the team’s innovation.

On that day on Nov 13, 2019, nine years after Pete and I connected on LinkedIn we figured out the better path. In Summer of 2020 is when we tested the concepts on a test group. A small group of UW construction management summer interns were presented the ideas, and they loved it. We cheated a bit in that we used Fortnite as a way to explain the different paths that could be taken.

Chatting with these summer interns gave us so much insight on the potential of taking the other path.

Two smartest guys in construction - Pete Kangas and Chris Heger - a great learning experience

Pete Kangas is now retired and he has updated his LinkedIn Profile. Pete and I have known each other for over 10 years and we have regularly discussed so many topics over this time.

In 2012 Pete said let me introduce you to the smartest guy at Turner Construction. And I met Chris Heger.

When I met Chris the first thing he did was discuss Industrial Engineering ideas for 10 minutes. Mogensen, Gilbreth, and many other topics. After 10 minutes, it was clear that Chris was not your normal construction person who had the aptitude to change the way construction works. To accelerate the discussions I told Chris that I was an Industrial Engineer and knew well his concepts. For my time studying Industrial Engineering at UC Berkeley I do not think I ever heard anyone say get a job in construction. I decided to take my IE degree and go into High Tech and worked at HP in logistics.

What does a guy like me who worked at HP, Apple, and Microsoft who spent no time in the real estate, construction, or facility operations group know about who the smart construction people are. Well, I know lots of smart people from those the companies and how they work. When it comes to construction that was not my expertise, but I got a good introduction to construction working with Olivier Sanche while he was at eBay and Skanska was the construction company. Skanska wanted help and decided to hire me to work with eBay and that was when I got an idea of how construction companies work.

So why do I think Pete and Chris are the smartest guys in construction. I find this quote summarizes it well.

Because when it comes down to it, what I think makes someone smart is their desire to learn more, and their desire to use what they’ve learned to solve problems moving forward.

https://www.psychreg.org/what-does-it-mean-to-be-smart/

This is the 1st in a new series of blogging I plan on spending the month on and probably longer.

For those of you know Pete, you can send your congratulations on his LinkedIn Page.

Pete is here in Seattle as well as Chris. We regularly discuss ways to change construction and how to use information technology. And with Pete’s retirement we will continue to have many more discussions on how construction can change by solving some really hard problems.

One example of being smart is the following. The idea of choosing a better way to do things could be explained with the “Fork in the road” metaphor.

A fork in the road is a metaphor, based on a literal expression, for a deciding moment in life or history when choice of presented options is required and once chosen the choice cannot be reversed.

Computerizing the fork in the road does not work, but you could if you choose a smarter way to model the paths possible as a Directed Acyclic Graph. (DAG)

In mathematics, particularly graph theory, and computer science, a directed acyclic graph (DAG or dag /ˈdæɡ/ (listen)) is a directed graph with no directed cycles. That is, it consists of vertices and edges (also called arcs), with each edge directed from one vertex to another, such that following those directions will never form a closed loop. A directed graph is a DAG if and only if it can be topologically ordered, by arranging the vertices as a linear ordering that is consistent with all edge directions. DAGs have numerous scientific and computational applications, ranging from biology (evolution, family trees, epidemiology) to sociology (citation networks) to computation (scheduling).

…

Sometimes events are not associated with a specific physical time. Provided that pairs of events have a purely causal relationship, that is edges represent causal relations between the events, we will have a directed acyclic graph.[38] For instance, a Bayesian network represents a system of probabilistic events as vertices in a directed acyclic graph, in which the likelihood of an event may be calculated from the likelihoods of its predecessors in the DAG.[39] In this context, the moral graph of a DAG is the undirected graph created by adding an (undirected) edge between all parents of the same vertex (sometimes called marrying), and then replacing all directed edges by undirected edges.[40] Another type of graph with a similar causal structure is an influence diagram, the vertices of which represent either decisions to be made or unknown information, and the edges of which represent causal influences from one vertex to another.[41] In epidemiology, for instance, these diagrams are often used to estimate the expected value of different choices for intervention.[42][43]

There are only a few people who get the idea of a DAG in construction. Two of which are Pete Kangas and Chris Heger. Can you name another?