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Welcome everybody out to podcast number 1313. In this podcast, I'm going to talk about having problems. Stay with us.

This is the Elevate Construction Podcast, delivering remarkable content for workers, leaders, and companies in construction, wanting to take their next step. Get ready to step out of your comfort zone with Jason Schroeder as he encourages you to do better. Live a remarkable life and expect more, let's go.

Welcome everyone, I hope you're doing well. This will be a short podcast. I promised the last one would be, but I, it accidentally went to 12 minutes, but this one will really be short.

Let me give you an update. Really cool things are happening at Lean Belt. The switch gear shop drawings are going through.

We've got the surveyor queued up. We're getting bids back this week for our early release trade partners. Super excited about that.

We're about to do bid leveling. We've signed our first MSA. It's exciting for a new construction company.

So in a project work order here pretty soon. And so everything's heading in the right direction. And right now we're just doing a thorough review of every single drawing in the documents to make sure that everybody on the team has what they need.

Oh, this is a really neat thing to talk about. I remember at Hensel Phelps doing what they had. They called them planning charrettes.

And I don't know if I've talked to you about this before, but a charrette came from Roman times when architects were going to present to whoever the powers were at the time to build something. They would be on their way in their caravan or their carriages on the way to quote unquote do an interview. And they would literally be brainstorming on the way to present how they were going to build the job.

And so it was an interesting word taught to me by Hensel Phelps. And I remember in San Diego, being a part of a large high rise, it was a Hilton hotel and doing a planning charrette. And the things were, it was run in a way where everybody would speak up and say, hey, we got to do this, this, that, blah, blah, blah.

And they would put stickies on the board and kind of tacked it out actually and put somebody's name behind it. And they were really swarming it. And one of the things I like to do is go through the drawings.

And if I see something like, hey, add this to the procurement log, testing and inspection register, and hey, we need these permissions and so on and so forth. Like there's always something that needs to be done based off of reviewing the drawings, right? And I've covered that in previous podcasts, I think pretty well. So I won't go over that again.

But the bottom line is that going through that and making sure that everything is whole is pretty neat practice. And it actually ties into today's topic. And so today's topic is we all have problems.

We can either deal with them late or early. And obviously there's two very different situations there, depending on how we handle it. Like for instance, I just talked to the owner for our current project, who's doing a great job and they're fantastic to work with.

And I was like, hey, we're tracking the permanent power feed to the project and it's starting to shift a little bit. Hey, what about these insurance requirements? Hey, what about releasing these trade partners so we can get procurement? Like we're always out ahead. We're trying to forecast and see problems.

And so on the other end of the phone call, it's probably like, damn, Jason and the team are just psycho. They're just like always worried about stuff and trying to stay out ahead. And really it's just that productive paranoia of trying to deal with problems early rather than later.

But it's working for us, right? Switch gear, procurement, figuring out trade part. You know, the other thing, here's another one. In our project, there's quite a bit of steel here and there and we asked to release or to go out to bid for the steel early rather than late.

And guess what? A couple of trade partners that we were counting on decided last minute, the day ahead of this happening, decided, hey, we're not, we mean the day before we were supposed to receive the bids, hey, we're not going to bid. And it's like, okay, that is not professional but I am not going to get after you in that sense. I am going to just be good enough to beat the ref and the way we're good enough to beat the ref is that we need to make sure that we're ahead of things, right, so we're dealing with problems before they can actually impact us.

And so we'll be fine because we'll have enough time to sign up that steel contractor and still be fine but that's because we're dealing with them early. So a lot of times people will just say this kind of productive paranoia doesn't help. This kind of looking for and solving problems early isn't effective, things will change.

We should just wait for the design, wait for instruction, wait, wait, wait. All this strategic waiting, which obviously you know pisses me off. Well, here's the deal.

You're going to deal with the problems anyway, meaning that it's your but. There's no, here's the situation. If the designers delay the design and then finally you start digging through the project to start looking for problems and then you find them and then there's an impact but you still have the same end date because nobody will stand up or step up to the owner and actually do the right thing.

Then you're, it's going to be you working weekends and being away from your family and getting a divorce. It's not going to be somebody else, right? So I just never understood how strategic or tactical waiting has ever helped anybody. It just doesn't make any sense.

In fact, I did a post today on the superintendent. By the way, we do quotes every day on the Lean Superintendent LinkedIn channel if you ever want to check it out. But it was talking about a good plan violently executed today is better than a perfect plan next week.

And so let me just close out by saying this. Everybody has problems. And a lot of times I rail against ignorance and incompetence and I think that's fine but I don't want to get the impression that any of us as humans are good at anything.

Jason Schroeder, I am not good at anything. You're not good at anything. We're not good at anything.

We're human beings. We're poorly evolved primates or we are fallen man and woman whichever perspective you choose to look at it. We are all both fallen and we have no business lecturing each other or we're all poorly evolved primates either way.

And however you choose to look at it we don't have any business thinking that human beings can do more than what we can do. So it's the process and the approach that will save us. So if we're like, okay, everybody's gonna have problems.

Everybody's gonna forget something. Everybody's going to tank it. Jason, everyone, then how do we deal with them? We look for those problems ahead of time and we get addicted to finding problems.

We fall in love with the problems. We switch every kind of agenda and every meeting we have to actually bringing out problems. And we become problem finders and preventers and then if we have to solvers.

So the way you can overcome your DNA or your fallen state from a religious standpoint is to find problems sooner and deal with them before they happen or early and don't do it later when it's too late and it's gonna cost you 10 times the amount. I hope that this has kind of, what do I wanna say? Like, sunk in a bit because I don't, you're probably like, Jay Money, I'm tired of hearing you talk about waiting and how much you hate it. You're annoying me.

Okay, fine, I'm sorry, first of all. But it is a big deal and we have got to stop it. And so that's why, like, as soon as you realize that, then you're like, now that makes sense why Jason wants macro level tech plans early on and zone maps and logistics maps and planning and all of these things because we can't find problems if we can't see something or review something.

So the bottom line is we all have problems and you can either solve them early where it won't impact you or you can solve them late where it's catastrophic. I hope you've enjoyed this podcast, on we go. Please join us next time in elevating the entire construction experience for workers, leaders and companies coast to coast.

If you're enjoying the show, please feel free to share with your construction colleagues and help us spread the word by rating, subscribing and leaving a review on your preferred podcast listening platform. We really appreciate it. We'll catch you next time on the Elevate Construction Podcast.

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