A popular book on evolution from some years ago, Climbing Mount Improbable, by Richard Dawkins, explains that extremely complex organisms and assemblies evolve through extremely slow and tedious baby steps, climbing the “gentle slope” of evolution. No miracles or giant leaps are required – much less permitted. Each baby step of evolution from protoplasmic organism to modern humanity must be an improvement on the previous step – and must deliver an immediate benefit – or it simply will not occur. In the clear and brutal logic of evolutionary theory, this is because an organism that incorporates any change from its predecessor or its neighbor a) will have no motivation to make that step unless there is an immediate benefit and b) will die before creating offspring that will also incorporate that step if there is no immediate benefit.
As a result of this extremely short-sighted behavior by organisms to selfishly think only of their survival, they can never reverse their evolutionary progress, even temporarily, even if it is obvious to higher organisms such as ourselves or Richard Dawkins that they have headed down an evolutionary dead end. That is, they can never descend the evolutionary slope they are on so that they can begin climbing another more promising hill that may even take them higher. Put another way: in the gearbox of evolution there is no reverse. An organism cannot back down an evolutionary road that appears to be a dead end so that it can take another fork in the road. It can only find its way out of a mess by moving forward or it can stall and cease to evolve further.
This predicament – trapped in a dead end or as Dawkins says, stranded on a hillock in the foothills of Mt. Improbable – can be relieved in just a few ways. First, circumstances may change in a way that alters the “landscape” and opens new evolutionary paths. For example, global climate change such as an ice age might “suddenly” favor an animal with heavier fur and slower eating habits over a lighter animal with no fur that needs to forage constantly. Secondly, attributes from another stranded organism on a faraway hill might travel (by wind or bees or birds) to cross pollinate with other organisms and contribute new attributes that the first organism needs to advance on the evolutionary ladder. Lastly, and most rarely, a sudden change or gross mutation – effectively a miracle – can yield a sudden positive change and help the organism leap forward. This third option is extremely rare because the odds of any sudden change yielding a positive effect are remote. As Dawkins says, there are many ways for an organism to live, but there are many more ways for it to die.
You might now be wondering if this relates to the architectural profession and building industry (or the analogy of painstaking slow incremental change may already be all too obvious) Having already read this far, you can’t just “unread” what you have read. You can certainly abandon it and move to other activities, but you can’t really go backwards. Welcome to evolution.
Applying this Darwinian concept to some Internet-based businesses in the recent past, we can understand their successes and failures much better. So many of them just assumed that customers would see the long term benefit of using their platforms that they would make a collective short term sacrifice – essentially move backwards from what they were currently doing – to achieve it. They based their entire business on the belief that all of its customers would somehow reformat their business to a common new business format that would eventually benefit everyone. The key word is “eventually,” and the fundamental flaw was that their customers were also competitors to each other.
One large and unsuccessful start-up in the early 2000s had the ambition (and the investor list) to transform the entire residential construction industry in a single mighty transformational blow by buying up all of the small accounting software and related vendors and moving everyone to a great unified industry standard for the procurement and distribution of building materials. Only in hindsight, it is amazing that so many really smart people could be hypnotized so well for so long and came so close to a suicide leap into the precipice between their little hill of inefficiency and the shining mountain of industry wide supply chain efficiency that was promised. They were selling a vision of a promised land on a high distant mountain in the Mt. Improbable Range, but getting there was predicated on not just one company, but ALL companies in the building industry simultaneously taking a giant step down their own slope and somehow walking up together to this new promised land. Despite significant investment from most of the major US home builders and other institutions, this move simply defied the fundamental laws of evolution, and the entire effort ultimately failed spectacularly. Years later, the building industry has improved slowly and incrementally, but still sits today on its innumerable, inefficient, infighting, little hillocks while the higher mountains populated by so many more efficient industries such as financial services, aeronautics, automobiles, information technology, look down with bewilderment.
Successful companies moved in slower, and always positive, increments. Some started delivering movies on DVDs before evolving to online delivery and ultimately producing music of the content it distributes. Another pretty obvious example started selling just books, then selling everything, then warehousing and delivering everything, then adding services to the stuff it sells. For the customer, no single step is backwards. Benefit is layered upon benefit which is layered on benefit.
If not already clear, the message is that no matter how obvious might be the faults of any industry, and no matter how obvious might be the advantages of adopting better systems, better organization, better efficiency, etc. enjoyed by others, the industry (or the “market,” customer, and anyone who might be considered part of the industry) cannot walk backwards – cannot intentionally go downhill – to take a different course that may eventually lead to a higher ground. Forward is the only way to go and each incremental step must be self-sufficient. Each step must pay its own way. If any step even temporarily disadvantages any player in the industry, be it a professional sacrificing proprietary information, a government agency sacrificing control, a customer sacrificing purchasing power, a supplier sacrificing delivery times, or contractor sacrificing a competitive advantage, that player would essentially be agreeing to take a bullet for the others. This is very rarely how society works and certainly not the way that business is expected to work. In a public company, such an intentional short term disadvantage might even expose its management to lawsuits if they are suspected of operating even briefly against the shareholders’ interests.
Although it is widely accepted that it is still fractured and highly inefficient, the construction industry in general (there are exceptions) has resisted most fundamental change that might improve efficiency, reduce material waste and delivery times, and speed construction precisely because no company has come up with an incremental forward moving path towards achieving change. No one with any industry knowledge would dispute the handicaps suffered by the building industry as it is currently organized, which include highly fractured design profession, antiquated models of government oversight, cultural biases by both builders and clients, deplorable supply chain management, and rampant lack of technology standardization. Most proposed solutions, however, require sacrifice, re-tooling of processes, sharing of confidential information, or adherence to complex and simplistic CAD formats. Innovators mistakenly think that change must be quick to take hold; in fact, it can be slow (or quick) as long as it is positive. In other words, no one has yet found or invented the magic map that can lead the industry to higher ground without reversing its course or going downhill.
So, for lack of a path forward from their various hilltop fiefdoms, the major players in the building industry wait for change from cross-pollination: radical, game changing ideas with game changing acronyms like BIM, IFC, IPD, LEAN, TQM, and others, that will propel their own company to new levels, and pull the rest of the industry along in their wake. They will be waiting a long time… While, indeed the building industry is more efficient than ten years ago (largely due to improvements in online services during the pandemic), nothing has fundamentally changed the design/permitting/construction paradigm and the efficiency gains are mainly the side effects of general improvements in online publishing, web-based procurement, video conferencing, GIS services, and shipment tracking rather than any “homegrown” building-specific solutions.
The construction industry and the architectural profession are changing in small positive steps. The worldwide exigencies of climate change, a chronic housing shortage, wealth inequity, mass migration due to weather events and war, and other challenges force the question whether slow evolutionary steps can be enough. Richard Dawkins described three ways that evolutionary change occurs: incremental positive steps, cross pollination of ideas from other industries, and lastly, miracles. Cross pollination is happening, some government agencies are learning to streamline, newer lower carbon building materials and techniques like 3D printing are on the horizon.
Let’s hope we don’t rely on miracles.