Patrick Adams  

Welcome to the Lean solutions podcast where we discuss business solutions to help listeners develop and implement action plans for true Lean process improvement. I am your host, Patrick Adams. Hello, and welcome to the Lean solutions podcast. Our guest today is Felipe Engineer and he is a registered scrum master and trainer. He currently leads the Lean construction program for McCarthy building companies. Felipe is also the CEO and host of the EBFC. Show, a show that’s dedicated to lean construction. I’m excited to talk a little bit more about your show, Felipe. But you also were awarded the Chairman’s Award in 2019, for contributions to the Institute in the design and construction industry as a whole. Amazing. Welcome to the show. 

Felipe Engineer  

Thank you, Patrick. I’m honored to be here. And like I was telling you before we started recording, I woke up excited because I got to talk to you this morning. Well, I am all for zero dark 30 out here, but it’s gonna be a glorious day. 

Patrick Adams  

It is going to be a good day that the sun is shining here in Michigan, and we are together on the podcast. So it is definitely a good day. This is exciting for me, because I’ve never had a lean practitioner that’s dedicated in the construction industry on the show. So you are the first and I’m excited to hear a little bit about your background. And just you know, what got you into this industry, you know, how you got into the construction industry? Why are you still in the construction industry? And even, you know, obviously a little bit of background on lean and how you were introduced to lean and then you know how that connection came together? Yeah, absolutely.

Felipe Engineer  

So I actually trained as an electrical engineer. Back in the day, I was in school during y2k, I went to the University of Illinois at Chicago, which is just a car’s right away from you. It’s rather close. I think I’ve driven further in California for lunch than it is from Chicago to where you are in the beautiful state of Michigan. Yes.

Patrick Adams  

Right, right across the pond.

Felipe Engineer  

Exactly. I started in school as actually a computer engineer. And then when y2k happened, there was just a massive tech bubble burst. And I pivoted towards electrical engineering, which I’d love to. I always had a passion for electricity, and electricity works to control wireless communications and power. And it’s just starting to look at what’s possible to do as a career. A friend of mine said, Hey, come over here. Let’s go toward this construction project. I think you’ll be a good fit for this. Now, this was a mentor of mine, who’s a couple years older than me, he was a senior, he had an internship at a multibillion dollar construction company, it was Turner. And we toured his project. And I said, Man, this is actually really cool. And then later, there was a job fair, we chatted about what was going on, I got into it, I got asked to, to do an interview and a follow up interview. And then I took an internship which turned into a co-op, which turned into working on the same project that I toured earlier that year. It turned into me being the last person standing as we turned over the building to the university when it was completed. It was just perfect timing Patrick was just meant to be. And I got some really strong neck muscles because I was doing above the ceiling punch list. So I started my you’re gonna love this started my career in construction, by searching out and finding all the defects in the building. Hmm.

There’s so many ages. Wow, there’s pages. And it’s just in our business, that you think about this in manufacturing, it’s just the opposite. Like we don’t want any defects at all right? Construction. In traditional construction, we tend to have and this is not the case all the time. But we tend to have so many defects, that clients actually want you to tell them your plan to identify the defects, catalog the defects, have a system of tracking them, and then closing them out with a design team. So this massive process that takes a lot of energy, we call it just punch list as what we how we refer to it. So all your listeners that are in the business know what I’m talking about. For those of you that don’t this punch list process go on, even after the owner takes beneficial occupancy and starts operating their building, or whatever their project is. And some contractors could be there fixing these defects a year or more after the job is done. And which is like as you know, Patrick, it’s insane insanity, we should finish as we go and walk away. And so so we do, but that’s how I started in the business. I started as a field engineer working on a multi building. I think it was a more than 10 story building skin fuzzy now that was over 20 years ago. So I worked in the city of Chicago for a long time. And then I worked for another smaller general contractor and then came to work For McCarthy, just over 13 years ago, and it was at McCarthy, where I got introduced to lean construction. So all this time in school, Patrick knew nothing about Lean, never even heard the word, zero, zilch, nada. And then, um, so I’m halfway through my career, I didn’t know I was halfway at the time. But I was looking backwards. I was halfway through my career. I’m at a conference for the company, we’re an employee owned company. And a project director is talking about the successes they’ve had on their job. And this person had lean manufacturing experience. And the one thing that stood out to me as I was drinking my 13th cup of coffee, Patrick, okay, because I at the time, Patrick, you don’t know this. But at the time, I was working seven days a week, wow, for about nine months straight, with no end in sight as an assistant manager. And it wasn’t because McCarthy mandated it, it was just because that’s what I had to do to keep up with the way that I was working at the time. Sure. But this individual showed us this as another way, and the thing that really got me was that every person on their team was happy. And it stood out to me. And I saw the people like just offstage and on the side, and I was watching them, you know, versus me, and some of the other people and I was like, I think that I can actually have that. And so I went up to the individual afterwards, we got to talking. And he said, we have this little group. It’s like a little Think Tank. And we get together, like once a month, and we just talk about ideas that were trying these experiments, which I had never heard of doing experiments and construction like never heard, never heard. And he said, If you want to join the group, all you have to do is read a book. And I was like, Ah, man, I can’t, I don’t have time to read a book. Right? And he just asked me a couple of more questions. And like, as you know, we both have Katie Anderson’s our friend, we know how powerful questions are. Yes, he asked me exactly the right question. He asked me how I was going to sustain what I was doing. And how was my family, putting up with the way I was working? And those two things just caught me, Patrick. And then from there. I bought the book that night. It was lean thinking by

Patrick Adams  

Womack and Jokowi. I was gonna ask you what, what book was it? 

Felipe Engineer  

Yeah, it was lean thinking. But Womack and Jones in the first chapter, when Womack lays out the differences between value added work, non value added work, but necessary, and then pure waste. With those three things. I now had a lens, I had glasses to look at my work that I was doing. And after chapter one, I no longer work weekends, because I had eliminated all the things that are non value add, right? Pure waste. That’s a no, no, it’s not. It’s like a lot of people make that a big deal in lean, and even in Lean construction. But I think it’s a great first capacity builder. And then from there, I got more into lean construction, I started participating in some local events with Lean construction Institute. And then I continued on with this team of people, we were volunteers from across projects, and even some other regions of the company. McCarthy is coast to coast, the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean, in the US. And so we are on these calls, and occasionally people from other regions would call in, and we’d have these interactions with people like in Vegas, or Phoenix, Arizona, sometimes in Atlanta, sometimes in Texas, and we’d have all these different conversations about hey, I’m trying, I’m doing these improvements on my job. And from there, I stayed with it. By this point, I became a project manager and started using more lean techniques on my projects. The company started an initiative in 2014. And they look for volunteer projects to start implementing Lean, like intentionally at a very higher higher level and to share it. So they approached me as one of the first volunteers and that was so successful on a traditional design, bid build project, which means the lowest, most qualified price wins the work. So it’s hard hard bid is what they call it in the business. And we instituted more than a dozen lean techniques and processes. We finished that job over a month early, with zero claims, and virtually virtually no punch list by the time the owner occupied. We’ve had virtually zero punch list items. That’s amazing. walkaway. virtually zero wasn’t zero, but it was close. It was close to zero. It was not pages and pages and pages. Like I had my first internship experience. Sure. And so that’s how I got into lean and on. And from that last project where I was a project manager, the company came back in 2016 and said, Hey, would you like to do this full time? And I said, Let me think about that. Yes. Well, I did actually sleep on it.

Patrick Adams  

You slept, you slept on it. Over the weekend of your two days of non working from removing your non value added work, right, that I’m actually curious to hear a little bit more about that, I want to go back to you, because you mentioned that you went from working seven days down to five days. And you know, there’s probably some listeners that, you know, are hearing that and going, Yeah, that’s me, I’m currently working seven days, you know, X number of hours, what are some examples of maybe some of the the, you know, pure waste, or the non value add activities that you were able to remove from your daily work that allowed you to free up some time on the weekends and be able to get back to a normal schedule. Now,

Felipe Engineer  

one of the first things that if you’re listening to this, and you don’t have to read a book, I’m going to just give you the Cliff’s Notes right now, like Patrick’s, like having me, here’s the first gen, let’s understand and be clear on what value means when I say value added work, I mean, that I’m doing something where I’m transforming information, or materials, or combination of the two, such that in the supply chain to build this project, this product, deliver the service, somebody in the chain needs, what I’m doing so they can do their part so that ultimately, the client is satisfied and just satisfied, we’re not trying to like, blow the socks off of the client, we’re just trying to just satisfy them, right, or ultimately, some of us are so far along in the supply chain, where we, what we do directly goes to the client, or the client can directly benefit immediately from the things we do. So that’s the value adding, so do more of that. Now, there is some non value added but necessary, we’ll call that think like a traffic light. So green, green is go value is like green, like money, go do it. Nobody’s gonna question it, do more of that. Yellow is non value added, but necessary on the traffic lights, like EU caution, slow down, warning, you, you might be doing something that is necessary because of maybe legal regulations. But if the client had a choice, they would not want you to do it. But we might have to do it, those things could actually even be policies. Sure. So a lot of us working in large companies, we have policies of things that we must do, for good reasons. But the client doesn’t necessarily want to pay for it, or that doesn’t necessarily transform or benefit them directly. It might be regulatory. And then there’s the red, the stoplight, if you stopped doing non value added work, Patrick, if you just stop doing the things that nobody pays for, you will suddenly be free if you’ll have so much more time. It’s been estimated that the universities have done research does data and analytics, the University of Minnesota and McGraw Hill has published some smart market reports on construction, and they find that waste and construction. So waste by this red light definition non value added can account for as much as over nearly 60%. So some estimates that nearly 80% of all the labor effort is spent in design and construction. So if you think about that in a 10 hour day, if you’re working a 10 hour day, which I know none of you are, you’re all working more than that. But if you’re working, let’s assume 10 hours for easy math, eight hours is non value added in from the perspective of the end user or the customer, which means you have an opportunity to do two hours evaluate at work and then go home. But you’re not going to do that. So you’re going to stop doing the things that no one would pay for. And then do more of the things that people will pay for. That’s going to give you much more capacity. So to use that filtering system, give yourself at least 10 minutes. So if you’re listening to this show, when the show’s over, or you can just hit pause, give yourself 10 minutes and think about the next hour. Am I doing something that’s green value added? Am I in the yellow, non value added but necessary? Or am I going to go into the red? And if you just don’t do the read? Then jump to the next hour and do that stuff? You know, ask the same question. So you’re just always filtering. And you’re always creating more capacity for yourself. And if you do that enough, you’re gonna no longer work weekends like I did, I wasn’t the first person to do this. And I won’t be the last. So everybody listening, join us and reclaim your freedom. Yes. And it gets better. Patrick, when we talk about scramble, we’re not there yet.

Patrick Adams  

Right. Right. Now, I appreciate that. And actually would love to because in your you know, throughout your, your background. Obviously we’ve talked through that, but we haven’t hit on the VFC show. So I’m also interested to hear a little bit about that. Can you tell our listeners maybe I know what it stands for, but maybe can you tell the listeners what the acronym stands for? And then maybe just a little bit about your show? Yeah,

Felipe Engineer  

I’ll get some history on it too. So perfect. I am. Thank you, Patrick. I’m the host of the EBFC show, the easier better for construction podcast. And this show is all about bringing voices in from up and down the supply chain, including customers because they’re part of it. We bring them in to share stories about how they’re making the construction industry better today than it was yesterday. So we’ve had, you’ve had consultants on. We’ve had people from academia, professors, we’ve had people working in the mental health area, because mental health is a major challenge. In our industry, we’ve had designers on, we’ve had general contractors that trade partners on, I’m on every single show. So,

Patrick Adams  

so we need to come listen.

Felipe Engineer  

Yeah, so if you want to find the show, just go to the EBFC show .com, perfect, and you can find it or you can just Google my name Felipe engineer, and it should be one of the first things that pops up, we’re available or streaming on YouTube. And also all your favorite places where you listen to audio podcasts, but there’s always video available for you. And you can watch the video and listen to the audio and find all the places and streams from at the ebfc show.com.

Patrick Adams  

I love it. And obviously, for those that are listening, they can go there and get some really, really powerful information, guidance, you know, for construction professionals, or even people outside of the construction industry can get some really good, really good nuggets from the show. But I am also interested to hear, you know, for construction professionals, specifically, you know, what kind of guidance are you giving, maybe through the show and also through, you know, your own work that you’re doing with McCarthy? Just in general, what type of guidance do construction professionals often seek you out for?

Felipe Engineer  

Now, the number one thing is always some type of change management. Okay, so somebody wants somebody who is not satisfied? As we say it’s almost like a three, Patrick? Hmm, yeah. Have you ever done any three? Absolutely. Yeah. So I knew you would make your listeners very familiar with the threes, they shouldn’t be most of them. So that’s on a three is just a problem solving approach. It’s the scientific method applied in a very specific way. So you can generate some action and insights. And so what we always do when we show these stories, we share these stories, Patrick, we create this new current condition, people are just sharing their current state. So for all the listeners are like, wow, now you instantly your human brain will automatically compare. We don’t even tell people this when they compare themselves to the story. So if it’s a client talking about how they’re delivering integrated project delivery, as an example, which is a very collaborative project delivery method, you know, it’s compared to that hard bid, someone listening who’s only been on hard bid will instantaneously have a gap. And so they’ll see like, how do I get how do I cross this chasm? Well, having a gap is one of the parts of the three, you have a target condition now. So if you want to have high collaboration, what are some things that you can do, my guests will share things that you can do? Contract agnostic, it doesn’t matter what type of contract you have, you can increase the collaboration on your project, despite the contract that you currently are operating from. And you can start to close that gap and have some of those wins. So sometimes people get stuck. And they’re not sure what’s the first step to close the gap. So they’ll seek me out. And I’ll kind of walk through once you train yourself in this thinking methodology. You can, you can use this all the time. It’s just like in your toolkit, it’s just like, right there. Yeah, it’s like breathing. I know how to breathe when I’m above water. And I know how to hold my breath in and blow water. It’s the same with three problem solving, or applying this very simple, lightweight, but powerful way to engage people to close gaps, solve problems, do experiments, and learn, and then spread that learning across their teams and organizations. And that helps them to transform. So I would say most people contact me for some type of transformation, either personal, Project wide, or company wide. And then through the work with McCarthy, I do actually get to consult directly to some of our clients. We’ve had some large healthcare clients take advantage of that. So if you’re listening out there, all you gotta do is call me. And we offer that service free of charge, Patrick? Oh, that’s amazing. And we also do some targeted consulting with design professionals and trade partners as well. So I’ve had the honor and privilege of working with a couple of electrical contractors in their lean programs and transformations with some targeted engagements, as well as some design partners. And of course, I do project engagements as well. So I get probably the most call. The most often call is a project team wanting to implement a new lean tool new to them, a lean tool new to them. Very nice, such as Scrum, or last minor system of production controls, which is a visual Kanban pool planning methodology.

Patrick Adams  

Nice. And you just mentioned Scrum. So let’s dive into that a little bit. There. Probably people that are listening, that are not familiar with Scrum, or maybe they’re new to it, and I’d be curious to hear your thoughts, or maybe just your definition of Scrum and how It’s currently being used in design and construction.

Felipe Engineer  

Yeah, perfect. So scrum so surprised. I’m also the author of Yes, construction Scrum, the book very much. I love it. I lovingly call this the white book, Patrick. So for all your listeners out there, if you go to construction scrum .com, you can read the foreword, chapter one and part of chapter five for free on the website. And if you have Kindle Unlimited, or you’re like, how do I get Kindle Unlimited, you can read this book as a Kindle Unlimited book for free as well. Perfect. There’s a well, everyone who’s not already on Kindle Unlimited, there’s a free trial for 30 days, it shouldn’t take you 30 days to read this book, but it is nearly 250 pages. So okay, it’ll take some time to read. So we’ll put

Patrick Adams  

a link to that in the show notes as well, Felipe. So if anybody is listening, and they’d like to get a link to that book, we’ll throw that right in the show notes and they can get to it very quickly.

Felipe Engineer  

Perfect. I love it. So scrum itself is not an acronym. It doesn’t stand for anything that way. It was borrowed from researchers studying companies in Japan, they’re not going to talk to you CI. And they were looking at how companies this is where it gets its name. Look at how companies operate. And they found that the only place that ever sees everybody inside an organization acting in one direction is in the game of rugby. During what’s called Scrum where the ball gets put back into play. The players actually lock arms and connect against the opposing team. It’s like two triangles of people facing each other all at the same level, interlocking arms and bodies and full contact, putting the ball into play to move the ball down the field. The object of that is to put the ball in play, go downfield and score a touchdown, just like in football. So very similar. So it gets everyone acting in one direction. So the definition for scrum was Coke, one of the CO creators is Dr. Jeff Sutherland, Ken sway bar is the other creator. They design this as a system, a method, a framework, excuse me a framework. Sorry, Jeff. Scrum is a framework to solve complex adaptive problems that still allow people to bring their full creativity and their full selves into the voice of the customer. And deliver value. As Jeff says, under his red book, Scrum, you’re doing twice the work and half the time easier, better and faster, with less effort, kind of like my show. Right? Right. That’s a little bit of a relation there. So it’s a scaffolding system. So I always tell people, it’s a scaffolding system that you would use when you’re managing, working within teams, that you build up, modify to suit your specific needs and the capacity, and just where your people are. It’s not so prescriptive, it literally, if I had a whiteboard behind me, Patrick, I could draw the whole framework in less than 60 seconds. And three minutes later explain the entire thing to you. And it allows people to self organize, be autonomous, see, work long term, like far work in the future, short term work, stay prioritized, self organized, and deliver consistently on a very predictable cycle. And it doesn’t just because I said the word predictable doesn’t mean it’s less creative. So if and if to anyone listening, like if your work involves more than four people, you’ve already crossed the complicated threshold, and you’re into complex. And Scrum is one of the best frameworks out there to deliver on complex work and complex projects. I’ve been using it ever since the red book came out in 2000. Middle 2000s Not even a scrub itself is over 2526 years old now as the framework as we know it. And so it’s been used in its most famously known software because of the Agile Manifesto, the people that signed a manifesto they basically took a stand and said we will not be subjugated to poor treatment anymore. Yeah. And they came up with four values, and 12 principles that are all centered on a new way of working, which we’ve which was built on top of Lean thinking some of the work that Taiichi Ohno, Shigeo Shingo did so all the industrial engineers out there, it’s built on some good industrial engineering concepts and practices. So its roots go way back. And it brings all that into this very lightweight framework that you can literally a new team that knows nothing about Scrum within 20 minutes can be operating as a scrum team. And off they go. And so in design and construction, we’ve used this with both teams that are pre shovel, which is all pre construction, designing all the way to post shovel teams that are in the ground, coming out of the ground building something and then you can cross definitely can cross between both and either Use the system to stay organized. This podcast we’re having right now has been organized on my side using Scrum so that I was ready, very in at the right time.

Patrick Adams  

Now, what does that look like on a construction site Felipe is our other visual aspects are there to certain tools that are used and techniques. Can you just walk us through maybe what that would look like, you know, on a construction site.

Felipe Engineer  

So one of the things that you will see people that are practicing Scrum, you’ll often see sticky notes, but it’s not necessary. When you read the scrum guide. It’s free too. So if you go to construction scrum.com, as Patrick put in the show notes, there’s also you can read the scrum guide for free. It’s there. It’s at scrum guide, Scrum guides.org, the scrum guide that tells you prescriptively, like these are the rules of how it works. It’s only 12 pages long, super lightweight, and a construction site, you might walk in to a trailer and you’ll see a whiteboard with some sticky notes. And you’ll see three columns minimum that say, a column of to do stuff, just like a to do list write a to do list of sticky notes for different people different tasks, a column of doing work in progress right now, that should be as narrow as possible to limit work in progress. Yes, and then a column of done, which should be equally sized to the to do list so that at the end of the cycle, all those things that you listed out that we should do actually get accomplished at the end of the cycle and get completed. And then for extra credit, Patrick, some teams will create a backlog column to look further into the future. And sometimes I’ll even just put a calendar that’s marked up with milestones of things that need to be achieved or have a printout of their construction schedule, with milestones and different work areas and structures that need to happen at certain times, or tie overs or things that are key to the project as it’s coordinated, and scheduled and planned. And so they can run all that through the framework. Because in construction, the natural cycle for large commercial construction is a 30 day cycle, a monthly cycle. Every month, we have, you know, billing, we get paid for work in progress. So it lends itself naturally to this 30 day cycle of time. But a lot of teams that use it for project management functions, will even break that cycle of four weeks into one week. And so you’ll see these scrum boards very much active and alive. And teams like putting tasks up doing the work moving the stickies across. And people are like, Why in the world? What I make sticky notes to describe my work well, when you don’t, you end up just jumping from one thing to the other, you start increasing your multitasking, you increase work in progress, and you actually dramatically slow down your throughput dramatically. Yes, it’s like I was just reading in the Toyota way. Second Edition shout out Jeffrey lenker. Powerful Jeffrey liker. Yes. And he said that approach one piece flow with caution. I was just laughing because all the times that we implement Scrum and people switch from multitasking or juggling so many things at once, to doing one thing at a time and getting it all the way done. It is such a departure from the everyday work, Patrick, the everyday work where people are working outside of a flow state, which is not optimal, right? It’s actually kind of sad. And what we talked about, we can talk about what it’s like to work in a flow state later. But when you make that switch, and you start doing one thing at a time and finishing things, you will 2x 3x 4x King tupple your throughput and all you’ve done and people were like Look No Look at these people, Patrick and be like, how are these sticky notes allowing these people to outperform? It’s like from a company’s perspective and those trailers on those teams. They use Scrum. It’s like having extra teams for free. Because the people have so much higher capacity, the throughput is so dramatically more that the people have time to cross train themselves. They have time to read books at work. Yes, I said that construction people are now reading books at work. And then if you get you could actually read this book. Do you know your work because it’s from the white book? Yeah. And they’re doing those things. And they’re starting to experiment more versus the traditional, a traditional construction project. Patrick, you walk in to the construction office, and you’ll see right away, people having lots of meetings, people moving around quickly, people locked into their computers, not a lot of talking. And then you walk into a site where they’re using Scrum and you will see people talking a lot more, dialoguing a lot more, you’ll see these visual controls, with the sticky notes showing progress. And you’ll actually even see multiple Scrum teams. If the project’s large enough, you’ll see teams breaking down by function. So they’ll have a functional team. maybe working on just the exterior. And they’ll do a scrum for those things. That could be a team just working on scope changes, because a lot of the design is incomplete once we start, and the design is being completed as we go. And so we’re always catching the design and pushing the design forward. And so those are some of the things that you’ll see. And some there are also digital solutions, but you’ll still see that the biggest difference I think, Patrick, that you’ll see is the level of communication that people have. And one of the things that you first start with Scrum is to do some, and I say a little, you start with just a little more planning. So like one of the first things I do every Monday, I’m on a five day cycle for my personal work. The podcast team runs on a two week cycle. So I’m involved in multiple Scrum teams. This is just two examples. So like on Mondays, I’ll do some intentional planning. I will plan for two hours on Monday, Monday morning, all I do is plan for two hours what I’m going to do for the next five days. And when I didn’t do that, Patrick, I barely did anything, right. I would just run from one meeting invitation to the other or go to some trip, you know, go subproject thing but if when I do that two hours of planning now I can do these change initiative things that are typically just put on the backburner that people don’t make time to get to I can bring those forward, and then dedicate time and then knock those out during the week make massive progress. With some people said it almost looks like I’ve been cloned and there’s five of me running around. No, that’s just one of me, just just evolved in over a dozen Scrum teams. That’s why it looks like there’s so many. And so it’s all scrums also used in research academia . When I got my Masters of Business Administration some years ago, Patrick, I scrubbed every single course, I would take the syllabus from the professor. I ran it through the scrum framework, and I got straight A’s. And I’m not a genius by no means people that know me. Well. Smart, arguably average intelligence. But with the framework. You can operate like a genius. Yeah, absolutely. Can.

Patrick Adams  

Yeah, I agree. 100%. Felipe, you mentioned that your Lean journey started with a book. And we heard you mentioned that people in the construction industry are reading books on the job. Lean is sometimes talked about as an academic exercise, and some people would argue that lean doesn’t work because it’s too academic. Right? So I’m curious to hear your thoughts on that. And you know, what would you say to people who maybe have given that argument or have said that lean, you know, doesn’t work because it’s too academic? What would you say to them?

Felipe Engineer  

No, I would say for most of the people that I’m in my mind, Patrick, I’m Rolodex and all the people I’ve heard say that because it’s, it’s a big list. It’s a lot of people, I’d say they’re like, the work I’m gonna go back and pull from academia right now, the work of Carol Dweck, who wrote a book called growth mindset. And people can be categorized in the spectrum, between having a fixed mindset where you think you’ve, you figured it out, you’ve maybe become a subject matter expert in a field. And people come to you for solutions or direction, all the way to the opposite end of the spectrum as a growth mindset, where you’re always in the state of constant learning, exploration and adaptation. And human beings can at different times be categorized one way or the other growth or fixed. People that say that Lean is too academic typically lean closer to a fixed mindset, where they’re not actively learning every single day. And they think that they’ve got it figured out, and they know exactly what to do. But they incorrectly see themselves in a simple, or at best complicated environment. When in fact, modern construction today is always complex. It’s always complex. And if you’re not adapting, if you’re not learning every day, if you’re not experimenting every day, the project complexity will get the better of you. And you will lose in success factors such as being on budget, operating within your estimated cost parameters, or meeting the time that the project allows. So most of the people that say it doesn’t work will often try something like a secondhand telephone game, or hear some story. That’s not even true. It’s like a bar story. Rather than experimenting themselves and trying these things. And that sound or, or sometimes, Patrick, to be fair, they’ve hired a consultant that may not be qualified. Not all consultants are made the same, Patrick, as you know, some are really awesome. Yeah, case in point Hello.

And then some are just not so awesome. But maybe they’re being applied. They’re applying themselves in the wrong situation. Sure. So people could have had a bad experience. There could have been a bad experience or no experience and hearsay or fear of trying something new Fear of trying something new is more often the root cause of why they say it’s too academic or don’t want to try it, right? Because the research, you know, researchers, they write research not for, like you and me, the lay person, they write research for other researchers. So, you as the layperson, if you do get into reading academia and research papers, you’ve got to make some translations and get it to be like, what can I experiment with? And so if you’re listening, and you think I’ve tried that before, and it didn’t work, well, no, you tried something, something about what you tried didn’t work. Hopefully you learned, you should continue to adapt, try again, change how you’re operating, and reap the benefits of your experiments. failing. A friend of mine said that failure is just an acronym for the first attempt in learning. Fai, first attempted learning, it’s great all of us. I tell everybody, Patrick, that when we’re born, we start off as highly adaptive machines we don’t know or individuals, organisms, people, we’re not machines, organisms. Super awesome. So we come out with amnesia. And we learned language, culture, and mobility, moving through our environment, all by trial and error, constantly, right? Children fall and get up falling get up, like Katie says, fall down six times get up seven. We keep adapting and changing all the time. That’s the natural state of a human being. The natural human is a highly adaptive, complex organism. We live in all environments on Earth proof positive, that that is the case. So just to remind those people that say, we don’t want to try that, it’s okay to make mistakes. And sometimes Patrick, I have to actually come in and give permission for people to have safe to fail experiments. So we can take a big change, and break it down to something small, so we can have a safe chance to fail. If this experiment goes sideways, it’s not going to cost us money, or it’s not going to get people hurt, we can do things in a safe way. And that’s sometimes where people have these bad experiences, they try to go too big and change too much at once. And that’s going to fail, there is a limit to how much change people can sustain in a given day. I learned from one of my coaches and an amazing consultant, Mr. Rex Miller, who taught me that the human organism sustains easily 4% of change per day. 4% And when you go too far past that number, people tend to revert back to old habits, like a rubber band, she has been overstretched. So that’s a good thing, as people like to break things down smaller. Yeah. One of the easiest things to do for all the naysayers, that lean doesn’t work. Look at your look at your week, right now, how much time would you say you spent planning your work, versus just being called to the work being in the momentum of the stream of the work that you’re involved in, if you can pull yourself out of the stream, like the fictional stream of the water flowing river, stand on the bank for a second, and plan how you want to get down downstream. In just the next five days, that little act of planning will radically transform your workweek. It’s right, and you can do it in 10 minutes, you start with 10. Like you don’t have to jump all the way to what I do at two hours, you can start at 10 minutes, and then expand, see if that works for you. Try it. But I’ve seen construction professionals, Patrick, that don’t do that. And they have like these journal books. These notebooks have like all these things to do. And when you watch them operate, like what are they doing now they have to flip through like 1020 30 pages back and forth like things are crossed off on page 25. But then the thing they’re working on right now is on page 37. And then somebody comes in ask them for something, they go all the way to page 80 where they’ve got some whitespace. And they write this new thing down. Now they’ve got this massive inventory book. And all they feel is stressed and lack of accomplishment. Because they’ve got this massive inventory book that the little To Do List journal is actually a stressor and a source of pain and frustration. And it doesn’t have to be that way. Right.

Patrick Adams  

And I love the advice that you’ve given during the show today. I mean, there’s so many little tools and techniques and nuggets that you’ve given to the listeners that they can begin applying right away. And so I really appreciate that. And again, not just for construction professionals, but for I’m even thinking I have a board that I’d like to put up in our office today just based on this conversation alone and thinking about a project management board that maybe we could add for our office. So thank you for that. But I also am curious to hear you know, as we close today, any closing advice anything that you would say you know, listeners could start doing right now today They could get off the show and start improving their work right away, what would you give to us, in addition to what you’ve already given us

Felipe Engineer  

The first thing that I want all the listeners to understand is that you are a beautiful human being. And one of the greatest things that you can do to implement any type of change, no matter what industry, you’re in his honor, the human. So respect for people is one of the foundational elements that we often hear, in these continuous improvement circles. Sometimes we don’t hear enough, I was just looking at Patrick on LinkedIn. And one of my friends that’s across the country actually did a post. And the comment back on the post was we need to increase respect for people, there isn’t enough of that, in the work that we do. And I completely agree, that’s why I put it right here on my heart, embroidered on my shirt, respect for people, it’s above continuous proof, continuous improvement, which is the second pillar of how you’re going to do these things. These things work together, when you honor and respect the beautiful human being that you are, you’re increasing your self esteem, you’re increasing your self worth, this is where you want to start, you want to make a change, honor yourself, first, respect and value yourself first, whatever level that is level up, you can go higher, when you start to increase that now you’re going to be able to have some capacity to put your arms out and bring somebody else with you find one other person that you can start to do these experiments with to improve, help them increase their respect, respect them more. And then this will create a chain reaction through your entire organization through your entire project through your family. When you do this, it sparks families to Patrick, this is like there’s no limit where you can apply more value for human beings more value respecting each other. And then from there, now you can start to experiment, now you’ll have capacity to make these little changes. The second thing is because you value yourself because you respect yourself so much. Be patient with yourself. And if you know something, if you’re out there listening to Patrick’s podcast, and you know, some tool or technique or method framework, that the people around you don’t know, be patient with the people and show them with enthusiasm, why it would be good to try something different. Why would I try something different, be enthusiastic, and your adoption of it. And then they will follow you. Those are two nuggets that are going to just grease the wheel of change. So you can have some smooth flow, power and improve how you’re working

Patrick Adams  

powerful. Oh, Felipe, I appreciate it. And I would love to have you back on the show. Maybe we can dive into a topic in your book, or, you know, another topic in the construction industry. But for anybody that is listening that’s interested in more information. Can you just I know you gave us a couple of websites earlier? Can you just give us you know, how do people get ahold of you? Is there a specific webpage that you want to identify and then we’ll pop these into the show notes again, so that people can get a hold of you or or get a hold of your book, or whatever it might be.

Felipe Engineer  

That’s really the ebfc show.com the word my podcast is has all of the links to my social media perfect as well as links to the construction scrum book, the two things linked back to each other. So if you find me on one or the other, you will find ways to contact me on either one. I’m definitely active on social media LinkedIn the most and links to that, you can just find me at felipe engineer, on LinkedIn, or just find me through the show, there’ll be a LinkedIn button, you can just click. So that’s where I would say, get me get hold of me there. I do interact with people, Patrick on LinkedIn, at least once a day. Very nice. So we’ve had some really good dialogue with people. If you’re thinking about something or you’re stuck, and you want a quick little phone call with me, I’m always open to that. And we can definitely get you moving in the direction you want to go. Or you just want to send me a message or you just want to like a post that I put up, you know, to throw a throw like on my post, I’ll happily smile for all the likes that I get. If you could do that. That’d be amazing. So listeners do connect with me, stay engaged, and do dialogue. I’m very approachable, super easy to talk to as Patrick, my witness to that. Yes, absolutely happy, happy to be engaged with people making change in the world.

Patrick Adams  

Well, it’s been great to have you on Felipe. I really appreciate it. I look forward to chatting with you again on a future show.

Felipe Engineer 

Thank you Patrick, have a great day.

Patrick Adams  

Thanks so much for tuning into this episode of the lean solutions podcast. If you haven’t done so already, please be sure to subscribe. This way you’ll get updates as new episodes become available. If you feel so inclined. Please give us a review. Thank you so much.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai