We’re trained to believe that construction is all about tangible outcomes: tasks, transactions, technical inputs, BIM, outputs, all eventually leading to buildings. We can measure these, they motivate us, and so we value them highly.

This is a bias, of course. We love the tangible at the expense of all the other things that make a project successful. In particular, we have overlooked the importance of the so-called ‘soft’ skills of relationship management and team integration. Behaviours that, working in harmony, could solve the construction industry’s wider low productivity puzzle.

There is one underused tool in the toolbox, and the industry has toyed with it for many years: collaborative working. We are agreed on the need, since Egan and Latham in the 90s, and more recently with the Infrastructure Cost Review, Farmer’s ‘Modernise or Die’ report, and the Construction Sector Strategy, the need for collaboration is high on the productivity agenda.

…