From here to there.
A shape–V, W, U, L, or Swoosh–will plausibly describe the “getting there.” Don’t hold your breath awaiting the answer.
A duration–weeks, months, years–will define the span of time from shock to settling down to some future steady state.
Milestones–infection rates, dentist visits, mortgage forbearance second-derivative ratios, continuing unemployment claims, etc.–will map thresholds of confidence, normalized behavior, demand balance, and ultimately, they’ll define arrival from where we are now to where we’re going.
These are abstractions. But they are very real. Present. Meaningful. Fact is, a deep vale of unknowing creates a gap, from here to there, our minds, hearts, resolve, determination, energies, ideas, and practices try to bridge. They describe this great, good gift–mightily overrated, if you ask me … but no one did–of uncertainty.
Households, businesses, communities, regions, economies, societies, cultures–our world and its variable parts–face crisis upon crisis upon crisis right now.
A crisis in health. A crisis in livelihoods. A crisis in trust among one another as humans on a planet together.
A “gift” of uncertainty and crisis–even the most stressful and terrifying one–is that the moment upends all our presumptions equally. This means we can re-look at our aims, our expectations, our level of ambition, and, in some cases, raise them higher than they have been.
One leader in our business community–whom I regard as without parallel in character, vision, and purpose around which she sets rigor for her organization–puts it this way.
“You would not want a playbook for times like now.”
In a sense, the sentiment is right–who in their right minds would want skill-sets designed around leading and managing through an assumed unending, multi-layered minefields of health, economic, social, and cultural disruptions, convulsions, shocks, stresses?
Still, as much as leaders would be loathe to get ongoing practice at wrestling with challenges so dire, so pervasive, and so consequential, they also know that such challenges have happened before, they’re happening now, and they’ll happen again.
At a high level, firms, business sectors, the broader economy, and society as a whole face an emergent–profoundly humbling–common-denominator issue, which is how to be, how to call on a deep fund of knowledge and experience, how to pause, and how to step forward recognizing this: We know little.
In other words, the common-denominator challenge is to learn how to learn.
Basic.
But hard to do, especially in a society and culture that fosters confidence that we know so much about so much.
This is why the April 22-24 Building Industry Leaders Covid-19 Crisis Summit–stood up on-the-fly by Building Industry Partners (BIP), a private equity investment firm, and Webb Analytics, led by former ProSales editor Craig Webb–is a must-engage “master class” from the school of hard shocks. You can access an elegant, easy-to-navigate, on-demand digital replay of the summit here.
You won’t regret it., especially amid America’s “re-entry” phase, following a self-induced coma for a third or more of economic and social activity for the past 90 days or so. Fifty-four industry leaders whose practice, expertise, experience, and insight reach wide across the supply-side ecosystem of home building, building materials, distribution, etc. participated in the 3-day discovery lab. One-hundred-fifty invited operators and business owners in the LBM, remodeling, new home, and analytics arena participated as engaged, highly-interactive audiences.
As a participant moderator, I took away at least six high-level values from the Summit, essential to builders and their partners–which, again, you can access here.
- Here we are …. again: Nassim Taleb, coiner of the term “Black Swan,” begs to differ with those who call the global pandemic a “black swan” event. Importantly, it’s entirely predictable, and the nature of pandemics–viral or otherwise–makes their rarity less important and the fact that they happen more so. Business leaders’ game-plan needs now and forevermore to include multivariate hazard scenario planning. Taking the 911 attacks, the financial meltdown of the Great Recession, and a barrage of climate-related catastrophes, and modeling business fitness, risk, tactics, etc. is the “new normal” for construction’s leaders.
- A house divided … A widely-recognized phenomenon of the pandemic and concurrent crises is that the moment sped-up life to breakneck speeds. In housing and construction, discussion topics that had been areas of interest for a decade morphed instantly into “action items.” One such discussion topic–the coalescence of long-disparate, siloed resources, disciplines, and systems into a more cohesive and collaborative ecosystem–took its clearest form in united lobbying and policy advocacy initiatives in this session. A dire, common foe helped accelerate not only the awareness of the value and benefits of collaboration, but behaviors and mechanisms that put it into action. One corollary take-away here: Nobody individually in the Summit knew what everybody knew about the conditions, challenges, and circumstances. Nobody individually could learn what every participant–together–could learn. And no single expert or operator could do–given the still-unspooling repercussions and reverberations of the crisis–what every member of the business community could do.
- Virtual’s outer-limits The shocking bi-modal nature of Covid–the fact that it doesn’t discriminate between buyers and sellers in any market–quickly exposed two learning opportunities. One, it exponentially unleashed an array of new virtues of technology, data activation, automation, robotics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning, and two, it revealed important, under appreciated limits. Organizations–as merchants, operators, channel nodes, etc. in the complex maze of expert “hand-offs” that make up residential construction–quickly learned they could do far more than they ever expected via a remotely distributed sheltering-in-place human network. They pushed virtual limits and tolerances to new levels, and found them to be elegant, purposeful, and functional. They also learned–however–what “secret sauce” ingredients make construction a “people business,” where human scale, presence, and an array of traits that add up to trust go on in an in-person way that Zoom or other virtual meeting platforms can not–to date–make up for.
- “We won’t be fooled again…” A big “lesson-learned” of the Great Recession–expressed in various ways among Summit participants–took the form of wildly underestimating risk and of waiting too long to make structural business changes to account for it. This time, however, the unvarnished and existential fact and immediacy of the shock triggered operational, financial, organizational, and communications processes put in place as safeguards after traumas past. Challenge and to some extent adverse conditions that came with the painstaking work-out of the Great Recession, had helped make businesses more fit for the Covid convulsion. Now, it almost goes without saying that firms capable of withstanding the most stress and shock, and still find a way to thrive, will be most fit for a more catastrophically challenge next normal.
- Problem-solving … puzzles vs. mysteries The false equivalency of “lives vs. livelihoods;” the disciplined search for evidence and data vs. acceptance of the absence of data, the heroic claim to high-ground as “essential” work at a moment that meant both mitigated financial risk and heightened health risk … each of these illustrates a case of the kinds and approaches people in building take to problem-solving,. Data and evidence support puzzle-solving, even at its most complex. Lack of data and evidence mean “mystery-solving” chops come into play.
- Consumer value proposition Homes–an assemblage of money, time, talent, products, materials, and property–are a construct in people’s minds and hearts. They enclose air and they offer protections, benefits, solutions, and services that comprise householder’s sense of well-being, belonging, and ability to prosper. At that mid-April moment, boundaries fell between people living, working, playing, eating, sleeping, sheltering, hunkering down, etc. and the people who assemble resources for constructs we call home. The value-proposition–now dialing-in health, sanctuary, safety as preeminent essentials–is both fluid and timeless.
Panelists in his virtual clinic in crisis leadership included the chief executives of U.S. LBM, Kodiak Building Partners, Hancock Lumber, Ganahl Lumber, Franklin Building Supply, Alexander Lumber, Central Valley, Brand Vaughan Lumber, Parr Lumber, Millard Lumber, the National Association of Home Builders, the National Lumber and Building Material Dealers Association, CBUSA, Misura Group, and LBM Advantage.
The sessions covered:
- Keeping our people safe and our supply chain open
- The near-term sales outlook Will our economic and housing recovery be V-, U- or L-shaped?
- Government lifelines and capital structure considerations
- Sales and marketing strategies
- Managing expenses and working capital
- Leadership, culture, and communication during a pandemic
- “Silver Lining” opportunities emerging from the crisis
- Individual and collective action for policy impact
“For three days, many of LBM’s greatest leaders shared questions, challenges, wisdom, and ideas in navigating these unprecedented times,” BIP Managing Partner Matt Ogden said. “They explored how to navigate economic uncertainty and take action in all parts of their companies. And they did all this with realism as well as resolve, knowing that great challenge inevitably creates great opportunity–to learn, to adapt, to innovate, and to evolve.”
Here we are, nearly 60 days later, beseiged and beleagurered by as many unknowns as in mid-April. We’re mystified and gratified by what has surprised us–thus far–in the resilience of the housing and construction economy. And we’re deeply anxious–as ever–about what lies beyond our ability to understand what’s ahead.
That’s the “gift” of uncertainty. It suggests we become our best selves–or as Abraham Lincoln noted, “our better angels”–to deal with it. The Summit stands tall as a mindfully-produced experience on how our construction industry ecosystem can learn how to learn, and do it fast.
