Building Trust and Stakeholder Buy-In Through Realization of Collective Benefits in Lean Construction

A lot has been said and done to improve the Lean adoption at construction sites, but still the Lean Champions across projects feel a dearth of motivation from the stakeholder’s part. ‘If it isn’t broken, then don’t fix it’ attitude correctly represents the inertia, this industry must overcome to achieve the productivity spurt those other industries have achieved decades ago. From a yearlong effort in implementing Lean across 20 project sites, it was well understood that unless we highlight tangible benefit to our stakeholders (own staff, subcontractors, client, material supplier, others) it would be difficult to on-board all of them in our Lean journey. Otherwise, it would be another top down initiative. In order to defeat this notion, we sought ways in which the benefits can be realized at each stakeholder level and once this is achieved a sense of trust in the process can be built.