The Realest Superpower on Any Site
With Hayes Heimbaugh at the College World Series on June 20, 2017.
Superpowers are awesome. Every one of us at some point has dreamed of flying. Or of having super strength. Or of the “Spidey sense” that warns us of something being wrong before we can see it.
Unfortunately while they may be helpful, none of those can be used to build buildings.
So this week, we had a little fun. I sat down with a long-time friend, Hayes Heimbaugh of Procore, debating superheroes and their powers. Who's the coolest? Who'd run your project if you staffed it like the Avengers? Who would hold the project together when the sh-tuff hit the fan?
And most importantly, is it the power or the person that makes the hero?
It was a fun conversation, and an all-around good debate. And it’s the kind of thing that though it starts out as a bit, it totally lands on something of incredible value.
Because in the end, the real moment of this episode wasn't about the comics at all.
If You See Something, Say Something
It’s been said so many times it’s almost cliche, but there is truth to it. In fact, Hayes vividly remembers walking a job site at 5:30pm. End of day. Only person still out there with the civil contractor.
Civil was not his scope. He was holding the MEP contracts with a different company, different crew, different set of problems to own. By every reasonable definition of the contract, what happened next wasn't his to touch. But a 938 loader slid into trouble while doing some selective digging around the foundation. The bucket caught the corner and the machine started spinning out, trying to get free, tearing at the edge of the wall.
Hayes had two options. Keep walking (not my monkeys, not my circus) and head home to the family, or stop, insert himself into a problem and risk being the guy who overreacted over nothing. Thankfully he stopped. They shut down just before tearing into the foundation, called the superintendent and two hours later a second machine pulled the first one out clean.
Skip that stop, and it's not two hours. It's a torn-out foundation wall and six figures in concrete, on a schedule that doesn't have six figures of slack sitting around waiting to be spent.
He wasn't the superintendent. He didn't hold that contract. He just saw something wrong and said something. And that's the whole story. There's no twist, no dramatic reveal, no moment where the movie score swells. Just a guy who noticed and didn't talk himself out of saying something, at the exact moment it would have been easier to keep walking to his truck.
The Essence of Captain America
For anyone who follows the podcast, it’s no secret that Captain America is my favorite superhero. But what many people don’t know is that this has nothing to do with his “powers.” In fact, his powers aren’t all that impressive and he's arguably one of the least flashy heroes in the entire lineup. A simple guy standing next to gods and aliens with nothing but a shield.
What makes Cap so special is his unwavering desire to do the right thing.
It’s his decision, made over and over, that no matter what’s in front of him he will rise to the moment and avoid the easy, comfortable path. Nobody handed him that instinct fully formed. He built it one hard choice at a time, usually while getting told no, usually while smaller and weaker than the room he was standing in.
But what makes this superpower equally important is the fact that anyone can have it. This power actually translates to a job site. No vibranium required. No special lab, fortune or radioactive bite. You just need the willingness to make the harder call in the moment it actually costs you something.
While we love to talk lessons learned in construction, hindsight turns out to be cheap. Everybody's a hero in hindsight. The only version of this instinct that truly matters is the one we use before we know how the story ends.
Why This is So Hard in Construction
The construction industry runs on trust. Trust between people who don't share incentives, don't share information and don't always share a definition of whose problem this actually is. Different companies, stapled together on one site, each protecting their own scope, their own schedule, their own liability.
That's exactly why we're one of the most litigious industries out there. And it's exactly why "not my scope" costs more than any change order ever will.
Hayes put his finger on the real barrier, and it isn't ignorance. Most people on a job site know the right call when they see it. What gets in the way is friction, the discomfort of speaking up, of being the one who stops the work, of potentially being wrong in front of a crew that isn't even yours. And underneath the friction, there's a social cost that's older than any of us: nobody wants to be the guy who "snitched,” even when the snitching saves time and money (or even lives) in the long run.
Rip out a wall once because nobody wanted to be that guy, and you'll do the job three times over instead of once. That's not a hypothetical. That's just how rework compounds, by doing things the hard way, after the fact, instead of the cheap way, five minutes before it happens.
No Title Necessary
Here's the thing I keep coming back to, Hayes didn't have any positional authority that day on the project. He wasn't the guy whose job it was to police that excavator. All he had was five minutes and the willingness to be wrong out loud in front of a crew that wasn't his.
That authority is available to literally everyone on the site. The apprentice three weeks in. The sub who's only there for one trade package. The PM who's technically not even supposed to be in that part of the building today. Every one of us can pause long enough to ask the question instead of swallowing it.
See something, say something isn't a slogan or cliche. It's the practical, unglamorous version of the same instinct that makes Captain America worth writing about seventy years after he first showed up in comics. Choose the good over the convenient, even when nobody's going to throw you a parade for it.
And even when there's a real chance you might be wrong.
Choose Good Tomorrow
At the end of the day, we don't get to pick our superpowers. Nobody's getting bitten by a radioactive spider on the way to the job trailer tomorrow morning.
But we all have access to the one power that actually makes a difference. The pause. The nerve to say something when staying quiet would be so much easier. The refusal to let "not my problem" be the last word, even when it would technically be the correct word.
So here's the question worth carrying into work tomorrow:
What have you already noticed on your site that you decided isn't yours to say?
Construction is cool, tell your friends!