Communication to align ideal with reality : a contribution to virtual design and construction theory for infrastructure projects

Picture yourself on the construction site of a large public infrastructure project, like rail or air transport, that is critical to society. Imagine that you are a laborer on a construction crew. You completed a five-year apprenticeship administered by a trade union. You earned certifications, you are confident in your skills. Your primary goal is for everyone to go home uninjured. Given these skills and this goal, how do you explain what activities you completed each day? A plan to direct your activity has been made based on an ideal of the situation, the ideal being a cognitive perception of a perfect representation of the reality of your day. Typically, this plan has been made for you by a construction engineer, but any number of factors could intervene and make it impossible to complete the planned work. In this case, a replan will have to be executed. However, creating a successful replan is not that simple. As Akbas' groundbreaking 2003 planning research discovered, there are severe limitations with replanning due to limitations in feedback communications. Since you and your fellow crew are most aware of the circumstances leading to the replan, for it to be successful you must be the principal replanning actor. Without such crew discretion, the replan ideal cannot fit well to the reality of the worksite, leading to misaligned and potentially unsafe plans. Current Virtual Design and Construction theory does not indicate when and how a crew should become the principal replanning actor. This is the problem this thesis addresses through formalization of a theory that explains the problem. Through two years of ethnographic action-research I observed that communication often relies on a shared understanding. This shared understanding allows for abbreviated communication based on references to the identifying features of an activity. If that shared understanding breaks down communication fails. Language by itself can fail to effectively communicate, leading to unsafe conditions for workers. That is why working through the shared understanding of reality and ideal is so important. In current construction replanning theory (Virtual Design and Construction), correcting for a communication breakdown should be easy, yet some situations lead to breakdowns that cannot be resolved easily, which I call unmitigable breakdowns. A substantial body of philosophical theory—American Pragmatism—summarized by Bernstein (2010) addresses communication breakdown, which I follow as the underpinning philosophy of this research. The source of breakdown of shared understanding could originate with the replan or with the reality of the worksite. Current virtual design and construction theory fails to explain the reasons for and frequency of communication breakdown and potential for its recovery. Applying current replanning concepts preclude the crew from overcoming unmitigable breakdowns and from taking responsibility for replanning and using their discretion to determine the worksite activity. Therefore, the current practice is for the crew to send a representative to the supervisors' field office to assist with explaining the current activity status. With neither a replan that provides a safe situation nor the ability to replan for the current activity status, the worksite is not safe. To approach this problem, I began with a research question: how can a crew work through discrepancies between the ideal and the workplace reality? I answer the research question through the analysis of two years of ethnography data. I collected 60,000 features carried within 4,000 communications of activity states. Since these communications exhibit the communication challenges highlighted above, a panel composed of crew supervisors audited 260 of these communications to form a set of corrected communications. I also developed three case studies to highlight three specific types of unsafe situations. Two types of breakdowns became clear during my observations—a breakdown in communication and a breakdown of the self-explanation of what is communicated. I found that adding a feature to these communications that represents discrepancies prevents all breakdown in communication itself. However, there remained a breakdown in the explanation of 25.8% of communications. The introduction of a technology solution that leverages the discrepancy feature with a maximum discrepancy distance and crew discretion in an unmitigable breakdown improved the explanation rate to 97.6%. The resulting improvement in explanations reduced unexplained discrepancies to 2.3%—a 91% improvement in explanations from the initial 25.8% unexplained. I found that, with this theory, a crew could work through discrepancies between the replan and reality and that this appeared to result in a safer worksite. When generalized to a wider application, I saw evidence that the explanation performance drops by 10%. A limitation of adding a technology supported by my theory is that the new technology adds to a discretion imbalance that only exacerbates the management obsession with technology and authority which can impinge on labor standards and prevent crews from having the discretion to keep themselves safe. I recommend future research on this topic to focus on how to create balance between the workforce and the profit-driven authority figures. With authority for discretion imbalances in mind, my theory should be implemented by technology developers, by owners in contract provisions, by contractors in their crew organization, and by labor unions in their collective bargained provisions. My theory creates a need to adapt workforce education to include discretion of the workforce supported by technology tools

Advisor: Fischer Martin
Lepech Michael 
Akinci Burcu