This anecdote comes from Section I of my book. If you want to be seen as a desirable customer in the A/E/C industry, then it starts with Building Professional Trust (the title of Section I). In this story the banter between two people in a meeting (who were both on the ownership team) had a chilling effect on the rest of the design team’s willingness to speak freely. Construction professionals are knowledge workers, so the last thing we want to do is stifle the free sharing of ideas!
This anecdote comes from Section II of my book. If you want to be seen as a desirable customer in the A/E/C industry, then you need to pay fairly and punctually (the title of Section II). In this story I talk about a pair of consultants who went above and beyond to make a project great, working easily 50 hours each free of charge.
This anecdote comes from Section III. If you want to be seen as a desirable customer in the A/E/C industry, then you need to manage risk equitably. A project that had been going great for both the contractor and the client went sideways when a new inspector showed up to the site. Construction inspection is vital, but if our oversight is overzealous it can actually degrade the quality of the work, and the contractor may never want to work with us again.
Available for keynote presentations or on site group training.
Effective clients attract more talented project teams, get more for their money, and build better projects. Being a bad client is bad business.
To equip owners in the construction industry with the skills and knowledge to become clients of choice.
A TED-style talk about how we can feel helpless as our work gets bogged down by too much busy-ness, risk aversion, process, and technology. This presentation shares ideas for what we CAN do about these issues to help us accomplish more and be happier while doing it. This presentation was recorded live at the 2023 MHFD Symposium.
Are we creating infrastructure now that will be enormously expensive later when it needs to be repaired or replaced? Although land use decisions are generally intended to make our communities better, they can actually make our communities worse off if we haven’t considered long term impacts. This TED style presentation introduces the audience to the idea of unintended consequences and how to be a better systems thinker.
A visual journey into what makes working along our urban waterways and in our watersheds so important, beautiful, funny, and inspiring.
On this $9 million trail and flood control project there were two low bid contractors working side by side on the same project, simultaneously. The experience we had with the two contractors was such a stark contrast that we documented the experience in every measurable way we could think of. One contractor was great to work with. The other contractor was horrible, creating a myriad of problems throughout construction.
A TED style talk that looks at how an urban stream disintegrated as the watershed around it developed, why it disintegrated, and how to avoid similar outcomes in the future.
Addressing flood risk after an area has already developed is complicated, expensive, and messy in every way you can imagine. This video will recap a challenging flood mitigation project that was 20 years in the making and contrast it with the Mile High Flood District’s modern approach to urban stream design – an approach we call High Functioning and Low Maintenance Streams (HFLMS).
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