Special edition about, teaching, learning and hierarchy
I talk about my experience teaching in a special class and Solibris rule-based quality checks on companies' knowledge management.
Yesterday I gave the fourth class with the same group. One “old” in his sixties and five guys in their late twenties. It was the standard program about project management in a digital age (BIM Management) and this class was special:
Usually, there is a more gradual age and experience curve.
Usually, the mix of backgrounds is bigger. This time participated mostly structural engineers and one construction company owner.
Only one person with company management experience and another one with a huge interest in modern agile concepts. The rest worked as a draftsman.
Now that you have the context, my findings:
I had to adapt my core message from:
Start with the end in mind, know what you want. To develop yourself and take it into your own hands!
Don't wait till your boss or project manager tells you what to do. When you know that it's better to give the construction company a model instead of the plans. Talk to them and give it. Don't ask for permission and ask for forgiveness.
We had many discussions about these lines. And I believe they were necessary, otherwise they would not be able to start with the end in mind.
They want to become BIM managers, and most of them know the BIM part through their modeling experience. However, the management and leadership part needed a lot of encouragement to take over!
It was not fear of the job that held them back, it was a lack of empowerment and this held the whole company back from learning and adapting to a new age.
When you think about it, we currently (need to) learn to communicate differently on three different levels.
Human to human: Instead of relying on hierarchies, power, and contractual relationships we need to communicate on an eye level and listen to the needs of the people doing the job. So from power to a servant leadership style. A big change for our industry.
Human to machine: Screen, keyboard and mouse, and programming languages were so far the main tools. Now we can use more and more natural language to interact on a machine level. Of these 6 participants, only one ever tried to chat with GPT (and it was not one of the young ones). This part is all about hacking the tools so that they serve you.
Machine to machine: Directly sending information and building automation/data pipelines is a completely foreign concept for most in the industry.
All these different communication styles are necessary for learning and making learning available on an organizational level and I want to give one more example of how human-machine interaction can help:
I remember the first time I used Solibri and I understood the implications for knowledge management. It is a tool I can ask my models how the project performs. I can create quality rules, document know-how, and reapply it to a new project. A living repertoire of best practices.
E.g. a staircase in a multifamily home should have at least 120cm between the handrails, therefore it must be at least 130cm between the construction.
There are hundreds of these heuristic rules and it's so easy to forget about them (or never know about them because nobody told you).
Imagine you can document this know-how about best practices in the form of rules and check new designs against them. Maybe not all of them will fit the new design, but just checking and when thinking about their applicability will increase design quality.
With this thought on heuristic documented rules I leave you and next week we will continue with the next chapter on the zero-sum game.