My dad left this world in late 2016. He’d have celebrated birthday number 95 this week, so he’s been top of mind. A doctor who lived a long and mostly-healthy life, his relationship to his own and his family’s sickness and pain shapes the way I look at physical challenges today.
If my sister, one of my brothers or I didn’t feel well, his solution was simple.
“Go to bed.” That’s it. If a day or two passed with no improvement–which was extremely rare–or if the trajectory of discomfort shot up during bed rest, he’d step up attention and action. Otherwise, we only fessed up to feeling ill when we were ready to accept temporary banishment and quarantine to ride out whatever was going on absent of any diversions.
The same went for him, particularly as regards pain. Whether it was a common cold, with its aches and pains, or an injury, or some other cause of discomfort, his first response–therapeutically–was minimal. At the onset of pain or discomfort, he wasn’t quick to alleviate symptoms. His priorities were, first, to understand what an ailment’s underlying cause was, and then let the body do its thing to respond appropriately.
After days of enduring whatever it was, if a pain lingered without easing, he’d consider taking two aspirin, and … go to bed.
This is by way of looking at four areas of friction–or pain–that plague builders. Friction, by definition, is the resistance that one surface or object encounters when moving over another. Chafing, grating, abrading … in other words, pain comes with friction.
Where, again, are those friction hot spots for builders?
- Resistance in the myriad hand-offs we call the construction lifecycle today, from start to completion of a home.
- Resistance in the home buyer’s experience, from the time he or she decides to buy to the closing.
- Resistance among municipal, county, and other local agencies that–by slowing or stopping development–raises costs to produce and, ultimately, local prices.
- Resistance to bringing a new, next generation stream of human talent into the field.
Familiar and chronic as are these aches, they’re symptoms, not causes.
Treating them–for relief–is like aspirin was for my dad. It can delay, or possibly interfere with healing, whether it’s the body curing itself, or calling for a precise therapy.
Builders tend to treat the four key friction areas for relief rather than a cure.
Our Builder 100 conference, for top executives of the leading home building enterprises across the nation, will give its participants a new set of tools to get at root causes of these frictions, and do something about them. [Click here to check it out and register now].
Did you read this highly instructive profile by Jerry Useem in The Atlantic, “Why Ford Hired a Furniture Maker as CEO?” If not, you should, partly to get what we’re going to be up to at Builder 100 this May. Here’s a snippet:
“Our lives are made up of human-machine interactions—with smartphones, televisions, internet-enabled parking meters that don’t accept quarters— that have the power to delight and, often, infuriate. (“Maddening” is Hackett’s one-word description for 90-button TV remotes.) Into this arena has stepped a new class of professional: the user-experience, or UX, designer, whose job is to see a product not from an engineer’s, marketer’s, or legal department’s perspective but from the viewpoint of the user alone. And to insist that the customer should not have to learn to speak the company’s internal language. The company should learn to speak the customer’s.
LinkedIn lists tens of thousands of UX job openings; the role has become a fixture on those year-end “hottest job” lists. If you want to study UX, you now have the option at some three dozen institutions in the United States, including Carnegie Mellon and the University of Washington. But Ford is one of the few major industrial companies in the U.S. to put a UX guru in charge.
At present, the question hovering over the car industry is basically whether high-tech entrants such as Tesla and Google can learn crankshafts and drivetrains faster than Ford, GM, and other carmakers can learn software and algorithms. But [Ford ceo Jim] Hackett reflects Ford’s bet that the winner won’t be the best chassis maker or software maker, but the company that nails the interaction between man and machine. “One of the things that drew me to Jim was his commitment to design thinking, which puts the human being at the center of the equation,” Bill Ford, the company’s executive chairman (and great-grandson of Henry), explained to me.
Hackett’s embrace of design thinking is transforming Ford, and it can do the same for enterprise home building organizations. Hackett has looked at the friction in what he calls the “design gap” which is a divergence between what Ford is growing more skilled at producing and the organization’s intimate understanding of customer needs, and chosen to see it as an opportunity to heal. Not simply relieve.
How closely does your sense of challenges for your organization match those Hackett expresses here?
“If you look at business history, the winners are almost always those that get their user experience right,” Hackett said, though he allowed that putting a UX person in charge of the whole show has its pitfalls. “There’s a part of me that would want to spend all my time in here,” he told me while we were in the design studio. “I get so much joy and lift from thinking about the potential of things. But when I walk out of here, I have another kind of accountability, which is, I’ve got to—we’ve got to—deliver results. We have shareholders. That’s a design problem unto itself. How do you weld the two together?”
When home builders face the challenges of the four key frictions in their business today, there’s two hard choices to make, both of them trade-offs (in each case, you can’t have both).
- Relief or cure?
- Design or default?
Have a look at the description of one of our sessions that specifically addresses the issue:
Design Better UX Or Bust: People are moving less and looking for longer term solutions for their living spaces. Robotics and technological advancements are allowing spaces to be transformed multiple times a day to meet the needs of the user. How are you thinking about the user experience, the digitalization of the physical world and making it easy so you aren’t adding a cognitive load to people’s lives. Ori Living ceo Hasier Larrea will present.
Be with us this May 11-13, at Builder 100, at the Ritz Carlton, Laguna Niguel, Dana Point. We’ll work with you to give you tools to make the right choice in both cases.
