If Your Construction Tech Failed, This Might Be Why
Your implementation failed. Now you’re left wondering why.
And while it might be easy to point fingers at the tech, or at the executive sponsor or even at the construction industry in general for not understanding how to best move forward, there just might be a different reason things went sideways.
More often than not, the effort required to make technology work peaks before the ROI becomes visible. Somewhere in that gap, many simply give up.
The first time you experience it, you assume something has gone wrong. But the more reps you take, the more you begin to recognize what it actually is: a predictable phase.
But there’s a second side to this equation, and it wasn’t until recently that I put two and two together.
How Humor Disarms Construction’s Hardest Conversations
Construction doesn’t struggle because we lack expertise. It struggles because we lack safe ways to talk about the things we all know are broken. Everyone sees it. Few say it. And even fewer say it in a way that doesn’t instantly raise defenses.
That’s why some of the most meaningful progress in our industry doesn’t start with a white paper, a dashboard or a keynote deck. It starts with a laugh.
Not because the problems are funny, but because laughter lowers the guard just enough for honesty to sneak in.
At What Point Does “Best Practice” Become “We’ve Always Done It That Way”?
“It’s a best practice.” My, how we love that phrase in construction. In fact, I can still remember the first time I heard it. The answer came back fast and confident, conversation over. Not in a rude way, just fact.
But if we’re not careful, there’s a secret side to the idea of something being a best practice.
That is, at what point does “best practice” simply become an excuse for “we’ve always done it that way?”
Construction Doesn’t Hate Innovation. It Hates What Innovation Reveals.
We like to say construction resists innovation because it’s old-fashioned, risk-averse or slow to change. Personally, I don’t think that’s true. Construction doesn’t hate innovation. It hates what innovation reveals: the inefficiencies, the power structures, the status quo.
You see, innovation forces us to ask the truly difficult questions around why we’ve “always done it that way.”
And as a result? Well, bureaucracy doesn’t kill innovation accidentally. It kills it to protect itself.
Expanding the Conversation in Construction: Mission 2026
In 2025 I launched a ridiculous idea. A place to talk about the messy, human, hilarious, frustrating and brilliant reality of this industry we all love.
But the heartbeat behind TheEngiNerdLife was never about just a blog for lessons full of half-serious satire. It was about creating a place to have honest conversations about what it means to build things. A place to say the things I wished more people in construction were saying out loud.
So when looking toward 2026, I don’t want this to be just a turn of the calendar with simply “more blogs on the way.” Something feels different. In 2026 it’s time for TheEngiNerdLife to level up.
TheEngiNerdLife in Review
Every new endeavor we attempt to tackle comes with a lesson, but that lesson rarely reveals itself up front. No, instead it tends to sneak up on you and slap you across the face.
So, after a year of TheEngiNerdLife, I got smacked by a lesson in clarity. A lesson about how all this work educating others has actually been teaching me all along.
Teaching me what exactly? Well, in a true end-of-the-year reflective fashion, here are the seven things 2025 taught me.
Subtract First: Why More Tech Is Making Construction Worse, Not Better
Sometimes more is truly just…more.
When it comes to technology, construction isn’t under-tooled. In a world that labels construction as a “laggard” the irony is that we’re actually overloaded. Yet global construction productivity has grown less than 1% per year.
If technology along were the answer, we’d be delivery every project faster and cheaper by now. But sometimes the quickest way to innovate is not by adding something new, but rather by taking something useless away.
The Real Reason Your Team Hates New Software
In the physical world, the definition of project success is necessary. You don’t break ground (really, you don’t even mobilize) until the scope is clear. Yet in the digital world, we treat transformation like a simple software install instead of what it truly is: a behavior-changing effort that touches every corner of the organization.
Spoiler alert, that doesn’t work.
Digital transformations rarely fall apart because of the software. They fall apart because no one ever aligned on the purpose to begin with. And if the foundation isn’t right, nothing built on it will be either.
We Can’t Build Anything Worthwhile If We’re Busy Fighting Each Other
I’ve spent my entire career in and around construction and if there’s one thing every jobsite has taught me, it’s this: We are really, really good at fighting.
Unfortunately, I don’t mean a healthy debate. I mean real fighting. The kind where we draw battle lines and weaponize RFIs.
I get it, the stakes in construction aren’t theoretical and somewhere along the way we convinced ourselves that survival requires being on constant defense.
But you can’t build anything meaningful with clenched fists. And in this week where we focus on giving thanks, that truth is becoming harder to ignore.
Why We Still Suck at Managing the Two Most Important Things: Time & Money
There are only two scarcities in life: time and money. And if you mess up one, you’re probably going to lose the other.
Many of us in construction have built careers fighting fires that never should have started. From war rooms full of red dashboards to schedule meetings of wishful thinking, we’ve done everything in our power to hit the deadline in time for opening day.
But only 8.5% of construction projects actually come in on time and on budget. Yup, less than one in ten.
This isn’t just a rough patch; it’s a full-blown industry crisis. Is there any hope for improvement?
Leading Through Chaos: What Construction Can Learn from the Military
It was one of those Mondays. The kind where your phone starts buzzing before your alarm does. By the time I woke up, the daily concrete numbers were off, by a lot, and by lunch we realized there was an entire floor in a multi-story building missing.
In construction, VUCA doesn’t just describe the environment. It describes Monday.
While originally defined by the U.S. Army War College to describe the chaotic conditions of modern warfare, you no longer need a battlefield to feel it. You just need a project under construction.
So how do we lead through it?
The 80/20 Lie: How Construction Tech Fooled Us All (Even Me)
For years, I’ve repeated one of construction tech’s most accepted truths: “Out-of-the-box platforms get you 80% of what you need.”
Turns out…that 80% rule was a lie regardless of how many vendors continue to sell it or executives continue to quote it.
Truth be told, I even continue to write it. Or at least I did. That is, until a week or so ago, when I got called out on it.
So, naturally, I went digging into the data to see what’s what. What I found will likely surprise you (or maybe not).
What It Really Means to Enable Innovation
Everyone will tell you they want innovation. Yet all too often, we treat it like a product to buy instead of a culture to build. We’ll sit around and talk about it all day, but few will actually live it.
The truth is, innovation isn’t something you install; it’s something you enable.
And truly enabling innovation is about more than money, software or slogans. It takes people willing to think differently, processes designed for adaptability and leadership courageous enough to trust both.
AI Needs a Foundation: Why Consolidation Still Matters in ConTech
It wasn’t all that long ago that we would carry one device for our phone calls, another for our music and a third for our email. Raise your hand if you remember that? What we didn’t realize at the time was that this monumental moment wasn’t just consolidating devices, it was consolidating data too.
As the saying goes, history repeats itself and we’re here once again. Only this time, the revolution knocking at construction’s door isn’t mobility.
It’s artificial intelligence.
And like before, the organizations that thrive will be the ones that consolidate first.
Specialization Makes Champions (Until It Doesn’t)
There’s a reason specialists exist. These folks don’t become elite by accident, but instead by living inside their craft long enough to see nuances that outsiders never will.
But there’s a dark side to specialization too. Because when all you know is one thing, all your solutions start to look the same.
Specialization without adaptability breeds fragility. However, the goal shouldn’t be to abandon specializing altogether, but rather to balance it.
AI Isn’t a Miracle, But It Will Change Construction
A few weeks ago, I threw a rock at all the AI talk in construction. Saying what a lot of folks were thinking, it seemed to hit a nerve.
The fact is, it hit a nerve because it’s true. We’re throwing around the phrase “artificial intelligence” like it’s capable of doing magic while we still can’t get drawings that don’t contradict themselves.
So, let’s slow down, breathe and figure out what AI actually is, and what it isn’t so that we choose our future wisely. At least, before we just throw a chat-bot at a laborer because it sounds smart.
Enough is Enough: Construction Needs Leaders Who Are Real
I’ll never forget that sunny vacation morning, sipping my coffee out on the deck and enjoying the view. Then my phone rang.
“We need you to do this meeting today.”
Day in and day out, we preach “core values”, but when the rubber hit the road, feeling valued is an afterthought. And that’s the nature of construction, isn’t it? This constant gap between what we say and how we actually behave.
The truth is, construction has a culture problem, one we created ourselves. So, how do we fix it?
Take Back Your Crayons: How Construction Can Unlock Their Creativity
For the first several years of my career, I was that guy that was tucked away in a corner crunching numbers. Design calcs, takeoffs, unit pricing and production rates, you name it. I was an engineer, “perfectly suited” for that role. But inside, I was bored out of my mind.
Somewhere along the way we started being rewarded for precision and punished for risk, so we stopped coloring outside the lines.
It’s a lie that has been spreading for a long time now.
The Data Wars: How We Screwed Up Construction’s Future (and How to Fix It)
I’ll be super honest with you, for a long time I helped build this siloed data monster. While the idea was noble (one platform, one place, one set of data), what I didn’t realize is that we were really just building a single source of control.
And now, almost 15 years later, we’ve institutionalized a massive data imbalance.
It’s become a detriment to every phase of construction, negatively impacting owners and contractors alike. So, how do we fix it?
28 Rules for Building Smarter in Construction
I’ll never forget the day one of the area managers looked me dead in the eye and said, “This software is stupid.”
Because in some ways he was right. We had digitized chaos, which is a no-no.
It was a rule I learned the hard way. And after years in construction tech amassing thousands of similar conversations with people in the field I’ve collected 28 rules for building smarter in construction.
They’re part scars, part lessons learned and part rallying cry for the industry I love. Feel free to copy and paste.
