Innovation that stays only happens when there is a hard clock on it

Time pressure is the determining factor in innovation, argues Pim van Meer. When time pressure is high, innovation is suddenly no longer a luxury but becomes a tool. If, on the other hand, lead time is not a hard requirement, then innovation remains optional.

In my career, I have often been seduced by the romantic image of innovation. The innovation dream. Pretty sessions, post-its, design thinking, labs, pilots. A little pain also helps: an accident, a crisis, a shortage of people or materials. Then there is movement. But William van Niekerk, director of TKI Bouw en Techniek, gently tapped me awake once. What you see in projects, he said, is no accident. If you really want innovations to succeed, make sure that time pressure can be applied. That remark resonated so well with what I felt in projects that I wondered why I hadn't already concluded it myself.
Time pressure sounds unhealthy. We think of night work, mistakes, rushing, stress. Yet in practice, it is often the fairest form of pressure. In a market where there are multiple clients and multiple contractors, something healthy arises: buyers can make demands. Not just about price and quality, but also about lead time and predictability. If you can't make it, there is someone else who can.
And then something magical happens with innovations that we have known about for a long time, but half-heartedly apply.

Take lean. Take concurrent engineering. We've been talking about it in construction for fifteen to twenty years. We write manuals about it, teach courses, hang diagrams in meeting rooms. Every once in a while we apply it consistently to a project. But often we don't. Then there is "no time" to set up the process properly, and so we go back to working in series the old-fashioned way: first architect, then consultants, then contractor, then suppliers, then repair work.
When I look back at the projects where lean and concurrent engineering did come to life, they have one thing in common. The combination of high time pressure and high risk. Projects where delay was literally prohibitive. Where a completion date was tied to a trade show, a move, an election promise, a hard legal agreement.

In those projects, innovation was suddenly not a luxury, but a tool. We don't have time for three design cycles and ten meetings? Then first get around the table with the most important suppliers, create one integral model, make decisions in sprints. No time for endless discussion? Transparent digital dashboards, so you can see at a glance what a choice does to planning, costs and risks.
Time pressure forces you to normalize all those techniques you "know but don't always use."

It is no coincidence that the lazy version of innovation thrives so well in projects without hard deadlines. There, an extra study is always possible, an additional session, a new sketch. Without pressure, innovation becomes a toy: interesting, inspiring, but optional. You can fiddle with it for an afternoon and then confidently put it back in the drawer, because no one will judge you for it.

With real time pressure, the question changes. Not, "Would it be nice to do something with lean or digitalization here?" But, "How on earth are we going to get this done on time and responsibly - and what proven but exciting methods do we need now?"

That only works in a market that has competition on two sides. Multiple clients, multiple contractors. If one party completely dominates, the incentive to really speed things up disappears. Then procrastination has fewer consequences, and time becomes elastic.
It would be healthier for the Netherlands, and certainly for the construction and real estate development sector, if we were to structurally force each other to make faster and digitally based decisions. Faster does not mean sloppier, but more conscious. Less meeting time, more decision impact. Less anecdote, more data. Less "another round about the design" and more "choose now, with all the information on the table, and record the result neatly in the model".
Digitalization is not a gimmick in that story, but the language in which we make time visible. A well-designed BIM model, a clear planning line, a dashboard where you can see what each slide in program, quality or technology does to delivery date and risk: these are the tools with which time pressure is fairly distributed instead of being tacitly dumped at the last link.
I don't believe that pain, crisis or visionary talk alone are enough to solve the housing shortage. They help to wake up. But the innovation that remains only occurs when there is a hard clock on it. Only when it is simply no longer possible to push decisions forward endlessly.

Filing moment

We like to say in the industry that we "don't have time" to innovate properly. But if I am honest, it is the other way around: precisely because we have made time so elastic, we get away with half-implemented lean, half-baked digitalization and blanks concurrent engineering.
As long as lead time is not a hard condition, innovation remains optional. And in an optional innovation system, it is not technology that fails. Then it is we ourselves who choose not to do what we have long been able to do.

About Pim's digital maze

In this column, Pim takes you into the sometimes wonderful, tangled but rapidly changing world of digitization. He draws on his experiences as director of digitalization at VORM. Pim is outspoken, critical, but above all wants to help you. Are you stuck in the digital maze? Pim helps you find the way out.... Do you have a question for Pim or are you looking to get in touch with him? Follow Pim on LinkedIN.