Failure is a Potent Teacher

Failure is a very potent teacher for construction contractors if:

D. Brown Management Profile Picture
Share
Leadership Tools: Failure is a Potent Teacher.
  • You don’t define failure just as CATASTROPHIC events that seriously damage your business.  
  • You define failure broadly as ANYTHING that is not adding value to the customer or slowing your progress.  
  • You embrace failure as part of the learning process diving deeply into the Root Cause Analysis (RCA). 
  • You develop a culture and systems so that everyone on the team thinks about the business as a series of interrelated cycles.  Consider all the interrelated cycles from the installation of a light fixture in the field to to the monthly project review meetings to the annual business planning process.  
  • Your whole team views each cycle as an opportunity to improve (PDCA)
  • You have developed structured processes for continuously updating your Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) as your team learns then rolling them out across the company improving the whole team’s capabilities.  

Book Resources:

The Five Elements of Effective Thinking

Thinking in Bets

Related LinkedIn Posts:  

Churchill - Failure is NOT Fatal

Fail 9 Times to Succeed




Resource - Negotiation (3 Prerequisites + 4 Perspectives)
Negotiation skills will enhance nearly everything your management teams do from winning work through building the project to working with your bank and surety. This is a collection of the best resources we've used to build these capabilities.
Zero to One - Advice From Peter Thiel
Construction as craft and as a business has been around for thousands of years. Contractors build and maintain the infrastructure that enables society to grow. That history comes a lot of pride. It also brings a lot of difficult to change habits.
Mental Models and Building Strong Businesses
The best builders develop a complex 5D mental model of the project, keeping it constantly updated. Through thousands of interactions with hundreds of people over years they “nudge” the project from concept through construction completion.