Defining customer value to drive innovation in design and construction | Will Lichtig, Chief of Staff at The Boldt Company

Will Lichtig, Chief of Staff at The Boldt Company joins Technical Director Adrian La Porta on this episode of the Built Environment Matters podcast.

We learn how Will's twenty-five years of experience as a construction lawyer allowed him to see the failings of the design and construction industry firsthand. Will now uses this knowledge to reshape the construction industry in a way that promotes project success. In his role at The Boldt Company, he is now a recognised leader in the lean and integrated project delivery movements. 

Listen in to hear his fascinating story and why he believes that the first place to start innovating is around the definition of customer value and the range of options that might exist to be able to help a customer achieve that value. And that's well before you get into designing the facility. 'If you don't get in early enough, you're gonna foreclose many of the options that might otherwise exist to help the customer discover what might really be valuable to them.'

To learn more about Bryden Wood's Design to Value philosophy, visit www.brydenwood.com. You can also follow Bryden Wood on LinkedIn and X.

Transcript

Intro: 0:09

Hello, welcome to Built Environment Matters, a monthly podcast brought to you by Bryden Wood, an international company of technologists, designers, architects, engineers, and analysts working for a better built environment. Bryden Wood believe in Design to Value, to cut carbon, drive efficiency, save time, make beautiful places and build a better future.

Adrian LaPorta: 0:32

Hi all and thanks for joining us on this episode of Built Environment Matters, the Bryden Wood podcast. I'm your host, Adrian LaPorta, Technical Director here at Bryden Wood. In this episode, I'm delighted to be joined by Will Lichtig. Will is Chief of Staff and Executive Vice President Performance and Innovation at The Boldt Company and a recognised leader in the lean and integrated project delivery movements. He's been at the forefront in the development of the integrated lean project delivery process. In his role with The Boldt Company, Will has worked with teams to develop and implement lean process for target value design, lean production planning and control, built in quality and other key processes that provide innovative approaches to project delivery. He's also helped provide executive leadership in the development of Boldt's prefabrication and modular building program. We've been working together for a little while, Bryden Wood and Boldt, so it's a great pleasure to talk to Will in this environment. Welcome, Will.

Will Lichtig: 1:33

Hey, Adrian, it's good to be with you today.

Adrian LaPorta: 1:36

We've got a few questions to run through and I'd like to start by asking you a little bit about your background cuz you started off in law? What brought you to construction innovation?

Will Lichtig: 1:46

Sure. So you're right. When I came out of college, I then went to law school and after a couple of years working for a judge, I went to work in private practice and I pretty much straight out of that experience became a construction lawyer and for 25 years, the responsibilities I had were primarily around representing architects, engineers, contractors, construction managers and owners in development of projects throughout California and the Western United States. And then handling disputes for them when inevitably you get to the end of the job and there were disagreements that had to be resolved. So as I had that, as my background after 25 years, I was at one point I was handling a major dispute. I represented a mechanical contractor. They had a claim on a project for the University of California. They had submitted that claim to the general contractor, and the general contractor had tendered that to the owner, and the owner had then sued all the architects and engineers. So we were in the middle of a vintage donnybrook between all the participants on a construction project that seem to happen so often with major projects at the end. During one of our mediations, I asked the assembled group, why are we here? And the group looked back at me and said, well, we're all here for the second day of mediation. Why are you here? And for me, it actually became pretty personal because I could see that as, as lawyers and claims consultants, we were basically living off the waste of failed projects. And for me, I had developed a successful career as a construction lawyer, as a construction litigator. But at that moment in my career, I really began asking myself, I'm a great student of what makes projects fail and what to do when they fail. But what actually contributes to project success and how could we begin to reshape the construction industry in a way that promoted project success rather than viewed project failure as inevitable. And then we just go to work cleaning up the mess afterwards. So that was at a point in time, Adrian, where I began doing some research initially online and came across the Lean Construction Institute, which had really just started up in the late 1990s, early two thousands, and came upon the work of Greg Howell and Glenn Ballard at LCI. And began reading that information and seeing that there might actually be a better way to deliver projects if you coupled up lean thinking with the ideas that really had developed in the manufacturing industry around development of products, if you will. So that's really where it all started. And I was fortunate enough to be working with Sutter Health in California who had a major design and construction program so we began implementing those ideas within the Sutter construction process and the construction program that they had.

Adrian LaPorta: 4:49

It's fascinating coming from a background in litigation must give you, as you said, a real insight into where things go wrong and particular insight into where things can be improved.

Will Lichtig: 5:02

For me, the root of project disputes really resulted from a lack of common understanding among the project participants of either the why, the what or the how related to the project, why the project was being built, actually what needed to be designed and constructed or physically how that was gonna be accomplished in the either stick building or the fabrication and assembly process on the project. And so we figured if we could begin to dig deeper at that route and get parties to work together differently to make sure that they had that common understanding, we probably could improve both the way that projects were delivered, but also in fact, the way people felt about their experience in that process. I mean, sometimes I've been known to say that part of the goal is to bring joy back to project delivery so that the participants are actually enjoying what they're doing rather than dreading having to go to battle every day.

Adrian LaPorta: 6:00

That's a great point and what a an absolutely worthwhile goal because we all enter this world of design and construction for good reasons. And people often talk about good projects and bad projects and if we can get to that point where more often we have a shared experience with a good outcome, then it's good for business but as you say, good for the people involved as well. So Boldt are leaders in construction innovation in the USA and combine lean construction that you've mentioned, integrated project delivery, the use of new technologies, both in design and in the field. What do you think drives this for Boldt and how do you see all those things fitting together?

Will Lichtig: 6:40

Well, that's a great question. It's interesting because The Boldt Company has been around for 135 years. It was originally founded as a cabinet shop in Appleton, Wisconsin by Martin Boldt. And when Martin moved to this country from Germany and opened the cabinet shop, he did so at a time when there were multiple cabinet shops in town and the economy had just been coming out of a sort of a depression or a recession and it was largely a farming community and so Martin began thinking about, what can I do to make my business different from the other businesses, the other cabinet shops? And what he did was he bought a horse and wagon and you might say, well, what's the innovation in in buying a horse and wagon? Well, he decided that most of those businesses that were in the cabinet business were cash and carry so that people would have to take a day off the farm, come into town, pick up their cabinets, drag 'em back home, and then haul 'em into their house. Martin bought the horse and wagon so that he could make a different value offer. He could deliver those items to the customer so that they wouldn't have to take time out of their f arming schedules and they wouldn't have to come into town to get the cabinets. So I like to think that innovation is really in the roots of what The Boldt Company has been after for 135 years. We've always been sitting looking at customers and what they need maybe not what they're saying they need, but trying to study where the gaps are between what the market currently offers and what might produce value for customers, and constantly looking for better ways to deliver that value to customers. So whether it's process innovation around some of the ideas that we've come up with that are now standard in the lean project delivery community. I mean, we did our first target value design job, back then it was called Target costing, basically in the early two thousands, which is at least what we've seen the first documented use of the target value design methodology. Or whether it's product innovation, the way that we began during the pandemic to really explore how could we modularise healthcare facilities to meet the urgent needs of the pandemic. We've just really been focused on trying to uncover unmet customer needs and try to figure out how to deliver better value to meet those needs.

Adrian LaPorta: 9:05

Thanks. It comes through, certainly in my experience of working with The Boldt Company there's a really consistent drive for innovation and delivery. It's been really impressive. We've collaborated on the application of design for manufacturing and assembly to industrial projects in particular. As constructors coming from the sharp end, how do you view the potential for DfMA?

Will Lichtig: 9:30

That's a really good question and as you've experienced with us some of the early work we had done had been in the building sector as opposed to the industrial sector and so part of what we had to do as we moved into the industrial sector was help people really understand the possibilities because it isn't exactly the same as it would be in a commercial building environment. So again, we think that there's a significant potential for really reinventing how design and construction happen, but you have to be able to get involved as early in the project as possible. I'll say when the owner is beginning to conceive what business problem they have, I think that one of the reasons that Bryden, Wood and Boldt have worked together so well is because we believe that the first place to start innovating is around the definition of customer value and the range of options that might exist to be able to help a customer achieve that value so that's really in that early phase and well before you really get into designing the facility, you're really helping the customer design the business case and then design the operational solution that you're then able to wrap in a physical solution, the building or the plant, but that if you don't get in early enough, you're gonna foreclose many of the options that might otherwise exist to help the customer discover what might really be valuable to them. And then I think, Adrian, when you get into the actual design for manufacturer and assembly for the last 10, 15 years, we've used the phrase designing for optimal production.

Adrian LaPorta: 11:12

Yeah.

Will Lichtig: 11:12

And it really is the concept whether something is gonna be offsite fabricated or onsite fabricated, really understanding what is it that the craft would want in terms of the way for that component to be optimally produced. So how can it be the safest, the fastest, the highest quality and the lowest cost associated with that element, and ultimately with the entire structure. And I think that, you know, with the advent of BIM and other computer aid design technologies, it's really allowed for an exploration of what good looks like much earlier than what would've been in the past. So I think that the challenge then has been to help people identify how do they need to participate differently during the development of design to be able to express what it is that would be valuable for a craftsperson in terms of the way that they wanna build the structure in order to achieve the objectives because they're used to reacting to a design after it's been produced.

Adrian LaPorta: 12:18

Yes.

Will Lichtig: 12:18

Rather than being in a position to actually being able to influence the design.

Adrian LaPorta: 12:22

I just wanna come back on that, there's a lot in that response and I think a lot that we're very much aligned on, so at the start of your answer there, you said something which goes right back to the start of our discussion today, which is about alignment, about understanding why we're doing a project, what value we're going to deliver overall as a collaboration between the owners, the designers, the fabricators, everybody involved so that we'd of course completely agree that getting involved very early on and getting that business alignment is a really important step. And as you say, looking at it from the point of view of optimal production is something which I think again we're completely aligned with Boldt on that, and it's a good opportunity for us to work with you with this set of suppliers and collaborators that you have in the US. I think that's been a really good experience. You talked about the craft and Boldt puts its employees at the heart of its purpose and values both in the US and in the UK, the construction industry's got challenges in terms of the workforce. So the sector has highly skilled people working in it, but they're in great demand and the demographics are pushing towards older workers. So how do you think construction innovation and new technology can benefit the workforce, and how do you think they see it?

Will Lichtig: 13:44

That's another great question. It's one that we spend a lot of time thinking about because again, our people are at the heart of our why. So when we talk about it, Adrian, we actually think about, and I'll go back to this concept of joy. How do we get to a point where crafts workers who are either going into the fabrication facility or going into the field every day really feel like that they're able to enjoy their work. And I think that, again, when we've done it in that traditional way that arose with a design bid, build mentality and really that there was almost a battle between the field folks who were trying to get the work in place and the engineers and the owners who were potentially not providing all the information in a clear enough way. I think that part of what we believe is that as we move into this DfMA world where we're able to assure that there's a, a common understanding before we mobilise of the why, the what and the how. That it's influenced by the workers who are gonna be installing the work to recognise that they're being given the opportunity to do it in the safest and best way possible. It will also simplify the work in many ways, so that the number of workers that are needed, or the level of experience that's actually needed by the field workers, the craft workers out at site is reduced so that again, they can come to work, they can see their work out ahead of them every day. They can execute that work without the need to become frustrated by the fact that all the information is not available, or all the materials and equipment are not there for today so they have to leapfrog somewhere else. So again, I think by changing the way that they experience the work that they do in the construction industry will help make it a more attractive profession for young people. One of the things we actually pride ourself in is what we call a youth apprentice program, which is really an effort to enlist high school aged students to come in and look at what it would be like to be a craft worker, to be a millwright, to be a carpenter, to be an iron worker and every year now we have what we call signing day and so for in the United States, you know, one of the big college experiences is when the college athletes or the high school athletes come and they sign their letters of intent to join a football program or a basketball program and so what we've started holding are signing days for youth apprentices who are graduating from high school to sign their commitment to the labour union to begin in their apprenticeship program and we invite the families and the unions there as well as I'll call it our sponsors that are part of our craft leadership and it really becomes an event where everybody feels like this is an environment, a family environment where people can go to work, they can be safe every day, and they can enjoy what they do. They can make a good living, but more importantly, they can go home every day and feel like they got something out of the effort that they put into the field every day.

Adrian LaPorta: 16:40

That's great. I really like the idea of the signing day. That's very impressive. And of course, I guess what You're saying really is that the innovation, including automation, can really put the craft workers front and centre of the process and move away from what perhaps historically was tension between the designers and the constructors, which I guess we've all experienced even within companies you can see that tension and a lot of these Innovations that we're talking about I think, give us the ability to remove those misunderstandings and tensions between design and construction.

Will Lichtig: 17:15

Absolutely, and I think again, part of the reason that we are such advocates of integrated project delivery is it really promotes that level of collaboration and aligns the commercial incentives that people are being rewarded, if you will, so that they have every incentive to behave in the way that we wanna behave and to do the work the way that we want to do the work, because that aligns then with the way that all of us will succeed in making money on the job so that there's no more room for finger pointing because it really is collectively, this is our problem to solve and it's not your problem as the engineer or my problem as the constructor. It's our problem as the integrated project delivery team to raise the problem up, to figure out what's the best solution and to execute on that as efficiently as possible.

Adrian LaPorta: 18:08

Yeah, so the transition of industrial economies to a sustainable future requires massive capital investments across lots of different sectors in a compressed time scale. It's the challenge of our times. What role do you see for construction innovation and Boldt in this transition?

Will Lichtig: 18:29

That's another good question. I mean, when you look at our industry, it's actually an incredibly wasteful industry, both in terms of energy, in terms of effort, in terms of materials. And again, I think that by using the kind of innovation and processes we've talked about, even if we just stay with traditional construction materials, we're going to be able to find more efficient ways to get more value for less inputs, if you will, so that there, there'll be less waste going to the landfills and less energy consumed as we begin to move things forward. We also think that by moving work from field to factory, it will again, improve the efficiencies that we can achieve as an industry and again, help to move those things forward. I think the other thing that you find is that there's a receptivity in the customer segments that are focused on sustainable futures, there's a real interest in going fast and being open to new methods of producing their projects. So again, I think that we can marry up the process and the people that we think can accelerate the future of construction within the customers that are looking for new kinds of products, for us to develop, marry those together and really create a platform for them to be successful.

Adrian LaPorta: 19:48

Yeah, it's tremendously exciting and also tremendously important and it's true that in many sectors we see very disruptive, but big players like you only have to look at the car market for instance, to see how new entrants tackled manufacturing and construction in different ways. So I think it's absolutely true to say that those new players are gonna be open to new ways of doing things and also have that need to industrialise new processes really quickly at a scale, which is not what we've seen in the last 50 years, but something that's probably akin to electrification in the early 20th century.

Will Lichtig: 20:31

Well, and it's interesting you mentioned electrification because I think that the other thing we're experiencing is, I guess I would call it collateral disruption, so, in the automotive industry, you've seen the move to electric vehicles. Well, there's no infrastructure that exists to be able to support the charging capacity that would need to be distributed in order to make that happen. So while there is a disruptive technology that is more sustainable in terms of the carbon footprint by moving to electric vehicles, it now creates this opportunity to create the entire network of EV charging capability, and that now becomes the throttle on the ability to achieve the objectives around many of the states and other jurisdictions that are setting goals for electrification. It's not that you can't produce enough vehicles, it's can you produce the infrastructure fast enough that will allow that number of electric vehicles to actually occupy the road and be functional in terms of the ability to charge and recharge, if you will, as they move across the highway. And for us we view that as a significant opportunity because it gives you the ability to take an industrialised approach to the development of that infrastructure because it gives you the ability to standardise and stabilise and again to move really quickly in the ability to move that forward in some ways you can develop I'll call it the playbook for what that kind of infrastructure might be in instead of being a builder or even a fabricator, you might be a technology licenser by having developed a playbook and then being able to do contract manufacturing for the various components or even the whole facility that needs to be put in play. So I think in terms of transformation of what it means to be at, I'll call it at the hub of this kind of effort, it's like changing what it means to be a constructor.

Adrian LaPorta: 22:30

Absolutely and I think that's as I said, very exciting place to be because we move away from traditional concepts of design and construction and move into fabrication and then designing the supply chains and it all has this moral imperative sitting behind it as well. I'm just gonna ask you one quick question before we conclude. What's the one innovation that you think will make the most impact in construction in the next 10 years?

Will Lichtig: 22:56

I think it's gonna be some variant of generative design. So I think that again one of our bottlenecks right now, to the extent that we're having to use just human power to look at design alternatives. I think that it both narrows the number of options that we're able to generate and potentially limits us in terms of what we can achieve. So I think that now that we've sort of stabilised the DfMA platform and the ability to visualise solutions, I think that the ability to go from concept of fabrication documents much more quickly and to benefit from generative design is something where we think that there'll be significant challenges, but also significant opportunities as we move forward.

Adrian LaPorta: 23:40

Well, you won't be surprised to hear that we agree with you on that one, so it's an area that we're working hard at. Will, thanks very much for taking the time to talk to us today. It's been really interesting.

Will Lichtig: 23:51

Adrian. It's been a real pleasure. Thanks very much. I appreciate it.

Intro: 23:54

Thank you for listening to Built Environment Matters, a podcast brought to you by Bryden Wood. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your favorite podcast, and you can follow Bryden Wood on LinkedIn and Twitter.