And very many of them were excellent.
A few of them didn't go well.
And I think in part, some of the ones that didn't go well was because the client was
incompetent, and the construction supply chain took advantage of that.
Now what happened in Australia, was that the auditor general
in one of the states really decided that this was unsatisfactory,
it wasn't transparent enough, he couldn't see value for money clearly enough.
And so he decided to push back against Alliances.
And he did that in a number of ways, but
firstly, he got a report written which was actually very biased.
They only looked at failed Alliances, and
they tried to purport those failed Alliances to be typical of all Alliances.
And when I really analyzed what happened in that whole process, what had happened
was that the client had thought that, we don't have the people to do this work.
Let's just get an Alliance and they'll just take care of it.
So they just passed the ball right over.
They didn't have the competence to oversee their own interests.
And what's important for
every client is that they have to have the skill either in-house or hired in, but
they have to have the skill to make sure that their interests are well-protected.
These are complicated projects and
for me, human nature is such a complicating factor here,
because just as there are individuals who we can't trust,
there are also companies who sometimes or teams who we can't trust.
And yet, the tension is that if we give trust, we get the best out of people.
But the client has had the responsibility of maintaining control, and
that's a management tension.
The empowerment to get the best out of people in teams.
But the control to make sure that our interests are being protected.
And so, both parties have responsibility here.
And in the Australian case, the clients didn't act responsibly and
some teams took advantage of that.
And that gave it a bad name.
So, we need trust, but we also need control, and
clients have to understand that tension between those two.
What I see has happened, which is really interesting.
In construction, we started, well there's this great
American term which I didn't used to know, but the low-hanging fruit.
And it just seemed, it was realized that the flow of work on projects and
in design, and even still, is often too unreliable.
And so that was the focus of work.
And so for possibly the first ten years of the Lean construction movement,
there was a huge focus on Last Planner.
I actually, being a cheeky sort of guy,
I thought at one stage the whole movement suffers from Last Planner-itis.
But really we were teasing out this problem,
because this is a complicated problem, and it's very much about collaboration.
It's very much about building trust.
It has a real strong association.
We started there, but has happened is the movement has matured.
What we're seeing is that all of the other aspects of Lean,
which are in manufacturing and in service industries, are coming into construction.
So we see that companies who are mature in their practice of Lean now,
they're getting ideas from all of their employees.
They're empowering their teams,
they're doing value stream mapping to improve their specific processes.
They're getting structural designers to work with steel,
the fabricators and the installers, to get the beginning and
the end together, to get better solutions that are more buildable.
