After spending the last two days at the ACA Future of Construction Summit (#FCON23) I was struck by some uncanny parallels between two of my passions - #ConstructionTech and #Crossfit.
Both have aspects that fall into three classes - those that are exciting but difficult to master, then there are more foundational elements that play to our strengths and yet others that expose our weaknesses.
In Crossfit parlance, exercises like ring muscle-ups or handstand walks fall into this first category - something that takes great skill, impresses everyone, and one might even use it as a party trick. But in getting through day-to-day workouts they rarely come up. The construction tech equivalent has changed over the years, featuring a plethora of drone solutions a few years back, to blockchain-everything and now the evident trend is AI. Fantastic technology when you have the data to feed the engine, but without that, it is somewhat of a toddler without lived experience.
The second category are the exercises that you are just good at - it might be rowing, or squats or bench, but when it's programmed, you give a little fist pump because you know you'll smash it. In the ConstructionTech world - these are the solutions that we have already adopted. Mobile forms, QR codes, workflow solutions even the ERPs at the core of our businesses have established a place where we cannot work without them.
The final category is those exercises that you know you should be better at, but you don't particularly like, and you cherry pick the days where those movements are programmed and thus never get the opportunity to improve. For me - that's wall balls. An exercise that involves throwing a 9kg medicine ball, 10 feet in the air and catching it, squatting and repeating. My height and the unwavering force of gravity are my enemies in this movement, and I have been known to miss workouts when they are programmed. But it's fundamental to Crossfit, and if I work on my weaknesses, I'll get a lot better overall.
I see docket management falling into this same category in the constructiontech world. Everyone hates them, it's a difficult problem to solve and it doesn't carry the panache of the tech du jour categories of the day. Yet it is fundamental to how every construction company runs and if we do it well we can lift the performance of our projects, our businesses and the construction industry as a whole. Further, dockets, along with the linked Orders and Invoices provide a rich source of transactional data that is available instantly to projects. It provides the foundations on which the show ponies of the AI world can shine.
So, the message from all this - work on the fundamentals, even if they are not sexy. Get them right and lay the foundations for accelerated tech solutions that build on this data.
You do that, and I will work on my wallballs.