What can the construction industry learn from the Tour de France?

My primary source of fitness is cycling. During the week I sneak in solo rides before work, while the weekends are reserved for group rides. I find that group rides can vary in their styles and goals. Most rides are casual and are designed to get everyone back to the bike shop safely. Recently, I started riding with a new group of riders with similar (or better/complimentary) fitness and skills to my own. This new group rides in a more race-like style which gives me a taste for the dynamics at play at the professional level of the sport. Through this experience, I began to see how the construction industry can approach improvement efforts through cooperation and competition, just like the best cyclists.

If you have ever watched the Tour de France, you likely saw a large group of cyclists, huddled close to each other, riding fast through the French countryside. This is known as the peloton. The pro peloton is made up of several teams, each with about 10-12 riders. These teams come to an event with a strategy in mind and each individual rider on a team has a role to play to make the team successful. The teams can also play off the strategies of other teams, and individuals, to achieve the goal of winning points or the race stage.

Whether you are riding in a local group ride on a Saturday morning or in the pro peloton, you quickly realize the aerodynamics created by the group can dramatically improve your individual ride. The tighter and more in-tune each rider is to the group, the faster the group can finish the route.

The same concept can be applied to leading change efforts around construction technology. The industry already separates itself into levels of professional competition based on schedule, budget and quality, but it does so in a largely opaque way. As the industry moves towards greater adoption of digital solutions, a fourth characteristic — transparency — is emerging as a key driver of competition and a differentiator for who will rise to the top. Transparency, supported and driven by the sharing of standardized digital data across organizations, seems to be more in demand, especially when it comes to pricing and material availability. Increased transparency enhances communication and allows construction companies to create more effective ‘aerodynamics’, much like a pro peloton team, leading to better performance both individually and as a group. Companies who can deliver this transparency quickly and with little effort will be best positioned to ride with those in their quality, price and schedule peer group and will push into more sophisticated and higher caliber peer groups as this momentum continues.

Our individual companies can only get so fit and efficient on our own, before we will need the assistance of the group to move us along to higher places. Not to mention the fact that riding, like work and life, is more fun with a group.

So, the question is: how do we get there?

One of the first steps in this process is to get everyone fit enough to ride with the rest of the group by generating accurate digital data. A parallel step is making sure the data is generated and presented in a way that makes sense to the rest of the companies in your peer group.

There are a few industry groups who are starting to make inroads on this topic, such as the Construction Progress Coalition, but there is work to be done at the local level too. If you would like to learn more about the work we’re doing on this topic here at Bergan, and how it might apply to your company, reach out and I would be happy to help you get started.

I welcome all comments and look forward to continuing this conversation.