Game in the Brain

Having participated in projects and being able to analyze it as part of the Quality Management Team has given me a few insights that I can model.

Take away (TLDR) – We’re competent and our prices are reasonable (we use a Standard Pricing formula. We don’t price based on the “Difficulty of the Mark.” It’s just that Buyers/Clients who want a building are not engineers themselves. So we have to be very efficient in Communicating Technical information to them in a way that makes them Feel Good about themselves.  My solution would be a Materials Gallery.

Projects are Facilitated by Buyers Representatives.
The buyer is busy making money. He has to delegate the buying of Construction and Furniture to his agent. The agent does not have the same motives as the buyer, and the buyer’s purposes are for many varied reasons as well. So you have two parties in the Client-side, and sometimes even more, that have different motives and intentions and a scarcity of time and attention.

So the end result is not a Clear set of Objectives but a Tangled set of Constraints.

The lowest Bidder Wins.
So know you know its a tangled set of constraints instead of goals and motives. So MONEY is the most straightforward clearest signal that cuts through the noise, friction, and uncertainty.

Manufacturing and Construction has a lot of Technical Debt. The best way to approach it is to study it and be clear about the Quality and Objectives. Ideally, in manufacturing and construction, you have a Material Board, a board that has all the Finishes so that people can Touch and Scratch and Test what the end product will be. A material board will determine if the Floor will be a Scratched up Mess after a few months or will look brand new 5 or 10 years from now.

Technical Debt is not money. Its money in the future, people have been known to be terrible in assessing Money in the Future called Hyperbolic Discounting.

It is Money that is the Clearest Signal in the Fog.

The serving company is also a soup of motivations, incentives, and people who sometimes happen to align in brief lucid moments. Most of our problems are losing the BID to COST, ours is too high. But the reason ours is too high is that we use Low Technical Debt solutions. We cannot communicate that effectively to the Client. We have to deal with the Tangled Mess of Agents who have their own Motives and Incentives.

While the Clearest Signal is to DEFAULT TO CHEAP costs, we run the risk of looking like a CHEAP company. Also, Technical Debt is its own Advertising, having your name attached to BAD workmanship is a delicate balancing act.

The Materials Gallery.
It’s not a New Concept. If your Catering to Business Owners then you have to be in the Hospitality Business. You have to bring them into a Beautifully Designed Materials Library where they can see the High Technical Debt against the Low Technical debt. In that Gallary, you wine and dine them. You show them – Best Practice, Anti-Patterns, and Cater the Message to every Client. You change the experience for the Client who wants to treated like Royalty, for the Erudite Client, for the Engineer Client, for the Bombastic Client, etc. The Material Gallery is where your sales take the clients through the journey to play on their Biases and Educate them to be SPECIFIC about what Technical DEBT they want to incur.

The Material Gallery also serves the Purpose of Getting as MANY SUPPLIERS possible to be Showcased in the Gallery. From the Low Tech-debt to the High. The market place where we present the options and play to what the client wants to hear.