What would it take to walk away from a 50 year old strategy of success?

Patrick Doyle, the new CEO for Dominos, shares how their company confronted the brutal facts about their pizza and began a campaign of change. It is interesting to hear the process.

1. Acknowledge reality – the pizza just isn’t very good
2. Change the pizza formula and process
3. Change the internal culture
4. Get the word out by going to the very channels that were criticizing them – social media

When the world forces change we all resist – at first.

Confronting the “brutal facts” is hard but also the 1st job of leadership.

In a recent ENR article a respected industry leader dismisses the rise of Integrated Project Delivery and calls it hype. Nowhere, however, is there any acknowledgment of the miserable track record of the 50+ year formula for design and construction. The formula once worked, and worked well. However, in an era of speed and complexity the old model becomes inefficient. That inefficiency leads to conflict and conflict erodes into systemic dysfunction. The by-product is tremendous waste and dissatisfaction.

I’ve been tracking IPD’s rise for five years along with the different emerging components driving change in the AEC industry.

First – it works. There are 18 case studies in The Commercial Real Estate Revolution showing the results of the various elements of IPD. The AIA recently published 6 case studies of “pure” IPD projects.

Second – any leader who challenges the reasons that owners are adopting IPD (because the pizza is lousy) needs to also demonstrate what they are doing to improve the poor coordination, conflict and waste in the current model.

I picked Dominos example because it parallels the kind of passion and willingness to confront the brutal facts that AEC leaders need – before a real dialogue can take place.

I also picked it because pizza makes the analogy simple. There are still skeptic – this is for them.

Click HERE for the video link.

Domino’s Pizza : Interview with Domino’s Pizza CEO, Patrick Doyle from Petrus Hansen on Vimeo.

We didn’t expect to win the GIA award for several reasons:

1. We were new to the process and not members of CoreNet.
2. Past awards seemed to be given to specific projects.
3. Some past winners hired PR firms to help with messaging. We were approached by a few but declined their services.
4. Our “trust-based” turnkey team proposition resonates with early adopters and those fed up but we did not think it would play to main street – at least this soon.
5. We had 10 minutes to make our case to the nine judges and then 10 minutes of Q&A. That works well for a specific tangible project. Its a bit challenging to convey an industry changing message in 20 minutes.

I asked four of the judges, “Why Mindshift?” My thinking went something like this:

• We either dazzled them with our brilliance or there is a shift in the zeitgeist (spirit of the times) of the industry that Mindshift connected with. Rule out brilliance.
• If the judges were attracted to our message then this is also a reflection of how other owners might respond.
• The judges were exposed to over 100 innovative initiatives. It will be instructive to find out what made ours stand out.

Here is the criteria they shared:

1. Many of the case studies involved millions of dollars in investment, technology and specialized skills. Some of the cases were brilliant and dazzling. But the judges had to ask, “How easy would it be for other members to implement?”
2. Some felt that the ideas laid out in The Commercial Real Estate Revolution were open to anyone.
3. Mindshift is scalable to the owner’s interest and resources; they could go all-in or benefit from the different components.
4. There was debate among the judges about just how revolutionary were our ideas? Our proposition is not rocket science. In fact its very simple, but not easy. This part of the discussion may have been the turning point. Different judges began to compare the principles we presented with their past experience. Each said that they had been on jobs with good teams displaying trust, respect and transparency. Communication was good, the results were great – AND – they had fun. One of the judges said, “So, why are we keeping this a secret? Where has anyone actually captured these qualities, framed it in an understandable system and backed it up with solid case studies?”
5. One of the judges shared that he agreed the industry needs to fundamentally change and the story we shared reflects the best attributes of our industry when it does work.

The back story is really the front story for where Mindshift began. Owners want reliable promises, good design without compromises along the way and collaboration instead of conflict. Suppliers are not out to thwart these goals. They want same thing. However, everyone has to work within a system that has evolved to a point where it does thwart all of our best intentions.

If you took a blank sheet of paper and wrote down all of the attributes of a successful team effort you might record:

• Respect
• Good communication
• Common goals and incentives
• An ability to deal with conflict
• Transparency
• Practice

You could say these attributes are nothing but common sense. So what can we do if we all know what makes a good team effort but must work within a system that destroys these qualities?

I think we won because we explained how to recapture common sense using some of the emerging ideas, contracts and technologies that are forcing the industry to change.

Now its your turn. How would you like to see your projects change? If you are curious about The Commercial Real Estate Revolution I’ll send you a free chapter. All you have to do is send an email to rexmiller.net and insert “Send my free chapter” in the subject line.

Mindshift began as a simple dialogue about the current and future state of design and construction. It took a little time for our conversation to get beyond the thinking that the current state was a simple fact of life. When we looked outside our current system we arrived at the following conclusion:

Conventional design and construction is broken. It seems obvious. We all say it to ourselves and express our exasperation at our various networking gatherings. The odd dynamic is that when you get a room full of stakeholders together – for the first time – we talk as if we came from some alternative reality. Our projects all go smoothly, on-time and within budget.

I like to quote one of the executives from our first Mindshift gathering; “We all have good companies, good people and happy clients. We begin each projects with good intentions and high hopes. For some reason there is something about the system that gets in the way of all of our best efforts.”

The system clearly creates a lot of waste and conflict. That seems obvious. What was less obvious is that this waste and conflict is the result of a system that is fragmented, assumes distrust and is designed to defend against that distrust.

So here was our “aha!” We asked, “How do you create a system that assumes trust and is designed to foster it and lead toward integration?”

That is the story told in The Commercial Real Estate Revolution.

This video enhances the theme – innovation through developing a capacity for the obvious. This is Paul Bennet presenting at the TED conference.