I often answered my kids with words to the effect, “Everything in life is an experiment – let’s work it out,” when they asked questions like, “What should I do?” or “What’s going to happen now?”

While it sounds simplistic, there’s a lot of truth in the answer I gave. There is no manual or guide that tells us exactly what to do in life. We’re guided by our values, laws, regulations, tradition, experience, advice, fears, vision and a whole lot of other influences. Each person will find their own, unique answers to the problems they face in life.

But in the world of construction, we don’t want each person working on their own solutions, trying a bit of this, or maybe testing that, or that, or … We want to create the dream home our clients have engaged us to build, and that means we need systems and processes. And where do these systems and processes come from? Um … ah … from regulations, experience, The process we follow and expect our team to follow is based on what we (or others) have done before. We follow the process, we identify improvements, modify the process, and, over time, we become experts in the process. We plan what we’re going to do, we do it, we assess how we went, and we act on our learning to make it better next time.

In this lesson we look at the PLAN, DO, ASSESS, ACT cycle as it applies to us as builders, advisors, etc.