Back in the day when conferences were held in big rooms, I muscled my way into the APM’s half day event on collaboration in 2019 as one of the speakers.

My talk was titled, “We need to talk about collaboration”; they recorded it and I’m publishing the video, along with some of what we talked about.

But first, the title

One of my favourite films is We need to talk about Kevin, starring the brilliant actor Tilda Swinton. Kevin is a little boy and his mam (Tilda) keeps saying “we need to talk about Kevin, there is something not quite right”. His dad constantly brushes this off saying he’s just a normal little boy.

Kevin grows up and does something terrible. It’s a harrowing story, though a great film. Have you seen it?

What’s that got to do with collaboration in the construction industry? Well, successive UK governments have been urging reform for over 50 years, and the thing that gets mentioned most is working together, partnering, collaboration in order to deliver value more productively. Collaboration is marbled through the latest tome, The Construction Playbook.

Some years ago they said, “Right that’s it, collaborate because if you don’t, you won’t get any government work”, so I wrote my second book, We need to talk about collaboration, inspired by the film. Terrible things were about to happen to those not heeding the warnings, and they did.

And so we talked for an hour in the conference room back in 2019. You can watch the video; here’s an overview of the themes.

Point North

After 45 years in the construction industry I’d say the people in it are brilliant, hardworking and out to get stuff built.

They come to work every day to do a great job but they don’t know where north is. So they are working hard but in different directions, causing divides. To collaborate you have to get everyone pointing north so their hard work multiplies.

Stress

Cooperation is more stressful than competition – it’s true, I heard it on the radio. And I’ve been trying to get my head round it since.

Acknowledge that. Anticipate that. Collaboration is not easy.

You don’t have to understand why it’s stressful, just that it is and you need to work through it. Collaboration is a process rather than a happy clappy team-building event.

Relationships

People tell me that construction should be easy – “It’s not rocket science”. And yet it’s not easy, it’s highly complex.

Mostly the technology is well known, we have all the experts we need in soil mechanics, structural calculations and how to set up a tower crane.

But construction is a people industry more than it is a technical industry. And relationships are what gets things done. Relationships are foundation of results and you can’t collaborate effectively if you don’t get on.

Straight

Eighteen years ago, while working with the leadership team of a “partnered” project, I discovered that they thought partnering was about being nice with each other.

Eighteen years on, I have to say it’s the same, people think you have to be nice with each other to collaborate.

This is wide of the mark. Effective collaboration demands we are straight with each other, no holding back.

But how do you have straight conversations while at the same time strengthening the relationship?

Trust

Trust is vital for collaboration. The NEC form of contract’s core clause says the parties ‘shall work in the spirit of mutual trust and cooperation’.

Notice that trust comes first: cooperation can’t happen without it.

People talk in general terms about trust and it’s usually something somebody else has to do first. I think if you want to build trust you have to be trustworthy.

And the engineers cry: “How do you measure that?”

Well, here’s a tool – The Trustworthy Tracker. Download it and use it to test the other’s trustworthiness.

And what about when they test yours? And then have a straight conversation about what you discover about yourselves.

Confidence

What can you do when your confidence is high? Anything.

What do you actually get done when your confidence is down? Not much.

How do you protect your confidence?

How do you protect the confidence of your people? Because if their confidence is down then not much is getting done and this is your business going down the drain.

If you lack confidence in the people you are collaborating with then you are not collaborating.

Systems

No matter how well you are collaborating amongst yourselves the forces coming in from the outside are going to conspire against your efforts and bend you out of shape.

Success needs more than your internal collaboration. To win, you have to look outside to the bigger systems of which you are part, all the way up to the Solar System, and envisage what may stop you.

Then get proactive and experiment, rather than waiting to be the victim of events. We’re talking Systems Thinking here.

Ultimate

Possibly the ultimate collaboration is how we humans work together to avert the climate emergency.

I read a book which states the economic theories that shape the policies we are governed by are wrong and have been proven to be wrong for at least two hundred years.

And yet they are still being taught in universities and deployed by economists and politicians to shape our lives.

The book is a great read and gives me hope. I reference it in the video.

So, we need to talk about collaboration – is that enough stimuli to get our conversation going?

What else?

See the conversation we had on the day along with supporting resources (see end of article) in the video here:

How to access the resources attached to the video