Life is fuzzy, complex, and uncertain. It is not possible to predict the future or the exact outcome of our actions. Block a line of ants with your finger and try to predict what the insects will do. Will they go left and around, right and around, turn around and go back, up your finger, or will they scatter around it? There are things in life more certain than that. I bet the sun will rise behind Mt. Diablo tomorrow morning. I bet I’m going to die one day. But even these things are not certainties. There is a possibility the sun will not rise tomorrow and that I will live forever. As my thermodynamics professor used to say, “extremely unlikely, but possible.”
There are systems so consistent that we can predict the outcome with a lot of certainty for any practical purposes. If I press my finger hard over an ant, the ant will die. I can predict the trajectory of a projectile if I know its initial velocity and the force of gravity. The sun will rise tomorrow at 7:13AM in Walnut Creek, CA. We should not, however, presume we can take any system, observe it, and model it with certainty.
Life is a network of complex systems interacting with one another. My body, for example, is a system which can be broken down into subsystems: the nervous system, circulatory system, digestive system, etc. These subsystems can be further broken down into organs, organs into cells, cell into proteins, proteins into amino acids, etc. In the same way, but in another direction, my body, myself, is a subsystem of a larger one called family. My family is a subsystem of society, culture, species, mammals, animals, etc. Systems are nothing more than abstractions we create to understand the world around us. We group and classify stuff by function, color, size, DNA, and call it a system. The higher the abstraction, the larger the chain of sub-systems constituting the abstraction, the higher its complexity. Complexity compounds, multiplies, creates chaos. Complexity causes some to become nihilists, post-modern, and cynical.
What is it then? Is it order, or is it chaos? Can we transform the world around us even if we are part of the world? Where should my energy be spent to have any impact? The answer to the last question is important. Transformation happens upwards. Direction matters. The more fundamental and simple the system you work on, the larger the impact on higher systems will be.
Change happens bottom-up. Grassroots. Sounds cliché, it is common language in large corporations and politics, but it is rarely understood. It is a fractal approach to life and business. You improve a simple system and the higher systems will take care of themselves. Steve Jobs said (I believe it was Steve Jobs) that if you take care of the top line the bottom line takes care of itself. You don’t optimize profit. Profit is a function of sales. Sales is a function of your customers’s needs. The direction of cause and effect matters. I can spend a lot of time modeling a large complex system. The insight I will gain will not result in actions to improve anything. This is evident in construction projects. A well done gantt chart can help you visualize the components of a project, organize your thoughts around it, even report and show that you are on top of things to a steering committee. But a gantt chart is of little use to improve the execution of the project if all it is doing is showing the sequence of several complex sub-systems.
All tasks are co-dependent in construction projects, small and large. Building a 1000 square foot paver driveway (a very simple project) requieres certain tasks to happen in certain order. Try telling a building contractor that what he needs to increase his efficiency is to plan better, to update design drawings more often, or to communicate better with his peers. He will tell you what he thinks about that, maybe in his native language. The reason he can’t be more efficient is because he can’t get the resources he needs when he needs them.
Waiting is a big thing in construction. Everybody waits. The construction of a production plant (of any type) is a good example: the mechanical crew waits for the civil crew to finish before they can start, then the electricians wait for the mechanical crew to finish, the automation guys wait for the electricians to finish and so forth. If the civil guys are late because the base rock for the foundation did not arrive on time, it will cause the ready-mix concrete delivery to be pushed a day or two, which will most likely also be delivered late. This will cause mechanical guys to re-arrange the delivery of a big component, which will cost them a penalty in storage fees, and so on. Lateness in codependent tasks compound quickly, multiply.
This bottom-up approach, focusing on the most fundamental tasks in construction is what defines our business. Is what the guy with the wrench and the hammer needs everyday. Even one step down from that, it is what the contractor’s customer needs. Direction matters, change happens bottom-up.
Aggregates are ubiquitous in construction. Even the smallest of them will eventually need rocks. They are the foundation of everything built. More than 25 billion tons are sold worldwide every year. And yet, it is painfully difficult to get aggregates delivered when you need them, in the amount you need. It is common for new customers that do not have our App to ask me, when placing an order, “how does my schedule look like”, “when do I think I could deliver the product.” Building stuff is full of uncertainties. We are eliminating these from the bottom up, starting by making aggregates delivery as simple as pushing a button on your phone, and as reliable as the sun rising every morning.