Lack of Collaboration & Improvement Culture

The construction industry's 'collaboration problem' is at the root of its change inertia. It prevents itself scaling up, sharing risk more appropriately and creating more business plan certainty. The industry is currently conditioned to using adversarial margin protection and expansion tactics referenced on page 24. This underlines the tensions that often exist between the industry and its clients that prevent more acceptance of collaboration within industry and between industry and its clients.

Industry-wide adoption of digitisation through media such as BIM (discussed further on page 36) is predicated on collaboration. The BIM model sits at the heart of any project and only functions fully if traditional design and construction barriers are broken down by multi-party liaison and working.

Lack of collaboration and joined up thinking also means the ability to use 'open linked / big data' principles to guide the industry on current and future skills requirements have not been maximised. The increasing importance of data means that such approaches would better enable the business case for investment in training and new ways of delivering by better aligning investment to a demand pipeline (see Case Study 8). This is mirrored on the demand-side in the real estate client community where there is often a reluctance to be too transparent or definitive on long-term development plans and timings as the financial markets then measure success or failure by deviating from such statements. The culture of 'data silos' within the industry needs to be broken as part of the wider societal democratisation of data.