Bringing Lean Construction to Life: Developing Leaders, Consultants, Coaches, Facilitators, Trainers & Instructors

Alan Mossman¹

Abstract

There is a global shortage of competent and experienced individuals able to lead, coach, facilitate, train and provide consultancy support both internally and externally to clients, owners, constructors and designers who want to make a successful lean transformation of their enterprise or their projects. Demand exists within public and private sector clients and owners, as well as among design and construction enterprises and their professional advisers. If the shortage is not addressed there is the potential for the advance of lean thinking in construction to stall and lean construction to get a bad name as constructors and others seek to cut corners and pay lip service to lean as happened in UK (United Kingdom) 15 years ago. The aim of this paper is to begin a discussion of the skills and knowledge required by those who want to succeed in one or more of these roles. This essay reviews past lean construction leadership development actions and suggests a curriculum for those who want to develop the skills and knowledge required to excel in these roles. A delivery framework for a development program is proposed. The paper concludes with calls for further research and for action sooner rather than later to address the issues, preferably on a regional or global level rather than on a national one. The value of the paper for practitioners is that it suggests the range of skills and knowledge required to be effective which can help their own development and help assess and recruit internal and external consultants, etc; the benefit for scholars is the discussion of what might be included in undergraduate and higher degree curricula as well as ideas for post-experience, post-graduate course offerings aimed at this need.

Keywords

Lean Construction, leadership, consultancy, coaching, facilitation, training, instructing

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Reference

Mossman, A. 2015. Bringing Lean Construction to Life: Developing Leaders, Consultants, Coaches, Facilitators, Trainers & Instructors, 23rd Annual Conference of the International Group for Lean Construction , 413-423. doi.org/

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