Millennial Madness & The Fabrication Workforce: There Is A Cure!

PRESENTER: And so my undergraduate's in civil, master's in structure. I did those in the mid '90s and 3D parametric modeling. And probably about 10 years ago, I started some graduate work in psychology in the area of organizational development, while I was running my own firm. I started at a department at another firm, and then began my own consulting firm later.

And currently, I am working as a principal at IKERD Consulting and completing a PhD at the University of Denver and part of their program. And so the areas we work on are organizational development. That's some of what I'm going to be talking today. We train and implement owners, general contractors, architects, engineers, and the use of technology, and more importantly, the sociology of how to bring it all together.

And so along the way, I've worked with Autodesk as a consultant to them on many of their named accounts, and also some of the resellers. And through that process, a few at Autodesk asked me to present on this topic. And so this is something we use with the teams that we do consulting with.

And let's go to the next slide. So this helps me-- probably about a good chunk of millennials and Gen Xers-- these are the ones that use smartphones, by the way, so that may not be a totally statistically accurate sampling. Let me ask a few other things.

Obviously, coming from hard science engineering background, the first half of my career. I really looked down on psychology, and I knew a lot of it was cow cookies, in my mind. And so I want to get a feel for where the audience is. Do you think it's really a science? Do you strongly disagree or do you agree?

So is psychology a science-- or I'm sorry, is not a science. So if you're disagreeing, you think, OK, there's something there. We used to joke with engineering that we got our feelings surgically removed. It's just part of being an engineer. If you see something, you say something. And that doesn't always work with friends and family.

But do you feel like feelings are important in day-to-day tasks in your organization? What about feelings and staff retention? So that's the other one. And so as we talk about this topic, I might submit to you these two lower ones may be closer than we might think-- that you're going to be doing things day to day, and if generations are not communicating, stuff builds up, and wow, what do you know? You've got staff turnover.

Let's look at the next one. This one, be careful please. Don't just say anything. Keep it PG. But what do you think when you hear the word millennial in the workplace? Entitled-- so the more of you that say the same thing, the word gets larger. And so this is called a word cloud. It's kind of interesting.

Appreciate it. No F bombs here, so that's good. I always get nervous. There's a trust thing going on between me and you right now, as we do this. So y'all are good. Man, entitled keeps popping up-- lazy. And half the people in the room with smartphones are the ones voting, so we're half millennials. Misunderstood.

So we're going to share this at the end. Look at this. I do this with teams. It's interesting to see how they go. Let's look at the next one. We've got half the room. We're going to keep going. Yep, we're going to leave this one up. And let's switch over to my screen. And we're going to try this here and see that this goes.

As I mentioned, the Mentimeter still running. And this is a freeform. We want y'all to be submitting things you'll think about, as we talk through this. So let me just start a framework. I'm going to go through some of these slides quickly of the history of the generations, and it will have a very US-based focus.

A lot of this discussion is on basically US-based teams. With that said, you'll find there will be generational differences in all countries, and so that's just a caveat, as we go into this one. As we look at it, my company is probably most known for 3D parametric modeling, reality capture, a lot of technology-heavy things.

And our clients are very surprised when they look at it. I submit to you that any innovation with technology is 10% sociology-- I'm sorry, 90% sociology, 10% technology. It's the human element. Many industries have implemented technology already in manufacturing, aerospace, et cetera, and yet the US construction industry has not seen the efficiencies that other industries have. And I'd submit, too, it's the way we contract our projects and bring our teams together, and it has a lot to do with the sociology.

So the purpose of this content here is that we want to identify some of the characteristics. We now have five generations in the workforce, and we're going to talk about ways to improve communication. Mentioned that this is going to deal some with psychology. So I have my team-- I call it the Department of Questionable Truth.

So I want to encourage you in the Q&A to ask questions and push back on what we're going to go over here. We're going to be talking also about social science. And some maintain it's a little too fuzzy. And so we're going to make some broad-sweeping generalities here as we go, and hopefully challenge some teams to some thought.

So as we begin with social science, it's not like hard sciences where water freezes at 32-- unless you add salt, or the pressure changes. But in general, 32, it freezes. 33, it's not. 31, you know it's hard. That's a hard science, and I like that. The engineer in me, that's where I came from.

So as I start to look at social science, it gets a little fuzzy. People are on a bell curve, and there or outliers. So the first thing I want to say in everything we're covering here is these are generalities and there's outliers. And my first point in these outliers is I would submit to you that the building industry will self-select outliers.

Regardless of your generation, a 4:00 concrete pour happens at 4:00 AM. And you're not showing up at 4:15 for the concrete pour. This is an industry that doesn't have a lot of forgiveness, if you are not professional, punctual, and do a great job. The litigation environment basically creates a high-stress area where it weeds out those that might fall under some of the typical millennial trends that we may talk about here.

So that's my first big caveat is I think the design and construction industry is a hard profession. It's a noble profession and I love it. I couldn't think of doing anything else. But it's going to draw outliers. Those are the ones that are going to last. So that's my big comment on everything we go here.

A lot of the content today is from a great book called Sticking Points. It was written about eight years ago and covered four generations in the workplace. We have Generation Z coming online. In that book, they used the term traditionalist, and I'm going to talk some about that. There could be builders or Greatest Generation, baby boomers, Gen X-- which I would be a member of-- millennials, Gen Z, and what they're going to call cuspers-- and I'll define this.

This is someone that's in between two, and they kind of adopt the philosophies and thinkings of two generations. And so why is that important? This is in your slide. I'm not going to read it in gory detail. We can argue about what these numbers are. Many books you read on this will.

Why is it not important, and the extent, whether it's one year this way or that way? Because it's a bell curve, and we got outliers. And so at any rate, also I like in this book-- it defines this cusper, which are these regions where we're coming through and we're in the in-between years. And that's important, as you start to look at lessons learned from this.

So what I've tried to do in these slides is really look at the kind of phone device we've used over these generations. And so I'm going to try to highlight those as we go. Has anyone ever used a rotary dial? OK, yeah. It's out there. It's out there. Then we're going into touch tones.

And this was cool. I remember in grade school the first mobile phone in the house, and that was-- it was incredibly amazing that you could talk on it for like 30 minutes before the battery died. And then here, Y and Z. There's numerous labels for these generations. And what I'm going with here is Y and Z, because it fits on my PowerPoints more succinctly.

And so Z's coming online. So these parts I'm going to go through. Here, what I want to remind everyone is don't get fixated if it's one year or another. For me, I'm going to highlight somehow-- I'm a little contrarian to some of this, but what we're looking at is the majority of the bell curve with each of these groups.

And so what I've included in these slides are some updates of census data. And you can start to see how the populations change. This is '13, '14. This is '16. By '16, you start to see what we might call the Greatest Generation basically pulling back from the demographics. And from stats in '17, you start to see we're losing a lot of what we would call the Greatest Generation, if I looked here in this part of the graphic.

But as we look at baby boomers, Gen X, millennials, and Generation Z coming up, it's basically a diverse workforce if we started to look at the demographics here. Probably about 10 minutes in, and I'm going to share with you this concept of why it's important to consider this generational diversity, and what creates one of these bell curves of defining that's a generation.

It's going to be shared life experiences and common values. Those are the two things we might look for. If I looked at traditionalists, you're going to look at technology such as the telephone coming online-- well-defined for the Great Depression, New Deal, World War II. Later, if I get time in the Q&A, I can talk about this.

This gentleman here's Leroy Williamson. Lives in the town or our office is. He's emeritus member of our team. He was born in 1920, and he's basically-- joined the Army when he was 16, and-- Air Force, went into Army Air Corps. But he ended up getting shot down over Germany. He spent 14 months at a POW camp-- in a Nazi prisoner of war camp.

And he knows what a real problem is. At that time, the Army didn't teach you how to use parachutes. He's only used a parachute once in his life. He's at everyone of our company team meetings, when he can get out. He's 97, but sharp as a tack. I always like to invite our new interns to sit with him.

And I tell them, ask Leroy about the first time he used a parachute. And then they stop-- halfway over I'll look, and they're not even eating. Their eyes are about to pop out of their heads. But his generation knows what a real problem is. I don't. I've get inconveniences. When I look at what I thought were real problems, they're pretty much an inconvenience.

But that's important for the traditionalist generation. When I look at boomers, television's coming on, how we get information and news is evolving. And I'm going to go through some of these rather rapidly. For me, I definitely remember the Berlin Wall crystal clear. I was probably-- I want to say fifth grade when the Challenger exploded.

We were watching it in class, and I just remember immediately, we shut TV off. There was this feeling it's happening all in real time, because we were watching it live and we're seeing all these astronauts blow up in front of us-- unusual, different from previous generations.

Personal computers-- definitely my graduate work was a 15-story building and zone 4 seismic. I was doing the 3D parametric model. I had a 46 DX. I had 64 megabytes of RAM. My phone has 1,000 times the RAM that my graduate computer had that I was doing the work on.

Both my parents worked. My grandmother lived with us. And so my role models were really-- both my parents were very end the traditionals. And my grandmother was born 1917. So as I was growing up, I heard her Depression era story. I spent all my waking hours with my grandmother during the day.

And both my parents worked. And that affected my philosophy of things. Growing up, we had a victory garden, because that's what you did in World War II. And so as a little kid, my grandmother still did victoria gardens. So I grew up-- I thought everyone had a victory garden, until I got to kindergarten and realized no, not everyone does.

So as I look at millennials, these are things from the book that are there. And I'd submit to you add things in the Mentimeter if other things come up to this. We've got about half the audience here is millennials. But for me, I have to imagine the internet has to be one of the strongest drivers.

And when I looked at VDC implementation, either at design firms or at construction firms, I look at this demographic, and I look at the leaders at the firm and if they got out of college before '93. '93 is when Marc Andreessen created Mosaic web browser. We had some AOL stuff. It was clunky.

But the first real browser internet experience was '93. And by '94, called it Netscape, and it really took off from there. If you graduated after '94 and get out of college after '94, you assumed a digital relational database workflow to your problem solving. You assume that to how you're going to research.

If you got out before '93, you went to the library with a card catalog. I still did that. I started my college in '92, and by mid-'90s, I was doing my graduate work in BIM. But it was an amazing time because I started completely analog, and then we had email coming online by the time I got to grad school. The connectivity was changing.

If I was going to explain to business owners why they needed to change to a certain technology, it was a completely different discussion that I would have with someone who got out before '93 and after. Before '93, they're going to care about benefits to the bottom line. It's a business decision. After '93, some of them would care about the features and the inner workings of how it would work-- but two philosophically different world views.

Gen Z, there's a lot coming out right now. They're just turning 18, entering the workforce. So I think there'll be more to that. That might be next year's presentation, depending on your feedback from this year's. Traditionalists, I want to look at some items that are coming out from them-- hard work ethic.

Baby boomers basically live to work, not the same work ethic of traditionalists. Gen X, which would be mine, the book would stereotype work to live, and expect their careers to keep moving forward or they'll leave. That was important for me. If I look back, I started a new department at another firm and it was partly because the firm I was that, I didn't see that we were going to keep up with technology. And I felt like I needed to move on or I was going to get left behind. And so that was a philosophy that you might see in a Gen X.

Millennials live then work. Some of us may push back on that, and I encourage you to, as we look at the commenting on the Mentimeter. Words that do come out-- informal. I'm not wearing a tie today. I evolved. First 10 years of my career, whatever-- any professional interaction, you wore a tie.

The engineering firm I started at, everyone wore ties. It was just understood. That's not the firm we have. We've created quite a different firm. I do see this a lot, and I would welcome in the Q&A for the millennials to come back to this, but prefer instant or text messaging, and want to build parallel careers-- multitasking. But the informal piece sticks out. That's probably a critique other generations might have.

So the previous demographics were the US population overall. Now, we're going to dive into the workforce. This is 2002. It has evolved. We've lost more traditionalists. Millennials have grown. And we're about to see just slivers of Gen Z coming online. Traditionalists-- these are additionally more generalities on that bell curve, but we would look at conformers and not rocking the boat.

Boomers, in some of the readings, are saying uncomfortable with conflict. That wasn't the firm I was in. And I'm saying this because the person who owned the firm that I worked for was Harry Lee-- great guy. And I started working for him I guess '98. It was pretty much an old school engineering firm.

You get in there. We had our Monday morning meeting at 7:45, and it was the conference room that was in front. And 7:45 meant you were at the table working, not pulling into the parking lot. And he didn't have to tell anyone many times. He just told you once. You're late. You need to be on time next time, or go work somewhere else. And it was a short conversation, and everyone shut up 7:45 thereafter.

That's not how it's typically done today. And so interestingly enough, about three years ago I hired Harry Lee. He's now an engineer at my company. And it's a small world, but Michael works with him a lot. So even within the small world that we have, we'll share some of how we work through these different generational perspectives.

Gen X, I think-- these are the ones I highlighted. Loyal to staff leader-- in my career, I was mentored by many, both professionals and people I reached out to. You do not move around firms. Maybe after you've been there four years and you've passed your professional licensure exam-- you have to do four years experience-- maybe you could think about moving then, but do not hop around. You'll get a bad mark on your resume and you'll be known as just one of these drifters.

And this is how everyone started. And I think some of that's probably-- that loyal to staff leader's probably why I hired-- one of my first bosses that I had 20 years ago is now an employee for me. And so there's lessons to be learned through that, but that is something I see in my generation that's quite different from millennials.

On average, want options and choices. We can talk about some how our firm dealt with that, and lessons learned there. Expect attention, expect feedback, think digitally-- again, that's after the internet boom. I think, if you come out of college after '93, that easily falls into the millennial trend to continue. Working towards a weekend, I think that's fair, as we look at it.

Gen Z, this is all very new information. Technology-driven-- some of the early research is showing a sense of wanting security-- both digital security with their credentials, but also-- their worldview has been constant war and basically economic insecurity. Many of their families may have seen impacts from the great recession of '08 on. And so security themes are popping up with Gen Z quite differently than millennials.

I tagged here just some comparison charts, and this is really reference material in here that I wanted y'all all to have. And I'm not going to read this in detail. I think the leadership one is a important one I do want to point out though. We're going to a little bit about this.

Traditionals have a very vertical leadership style, and as you go into some of these others, they're a little more integrating, as you look at them. I can relate a lot to the feedback level. The firm I started my career at, no news was good news. I thought it's pretty good if you didn't get chewed out that week.

And then once a year, you would get a performance review. And that was the owners that owned the firm I started out with. And so I do probably a little mix. And then once we get to the Q&A, I want to invite more the millennials to chime in. But I do see wanting feedback more, and maybe instantaneous feedback more so, among millennials. And so I'd encourage all to chime in if y'all agree with that-- or don't.

Work/life balance-- need flexibility to balance activities. I don't know if that's true of all millennials. I know we do a lot of work at our firm to create flexibility that, again, is not normal from the career I started with. And so I see a firms that are succeeding with staff retention are a good bit more flexible that we work with.

So a big arching point I want to make here with you is I could probably guarantee you what the first construction delay claim most of you have heard of. I want you to think about this. And it's why this topic is important. It's the Tower of Babel.

Now, whether you think that's a true story or a fable, I'll submit to you there's truth in the story. Who knows why the Tower of Babel stopped construction?

AUDIENCE: God stopped it.

PRESENTER: How do he do it?

AUDIENCE: Lack of communication.

PRESENTER: Lack of communication. He confused their languages. That's how construction stopped. That's how, in this story, the construction delay claim began. Their languages were confused. And so what I'd submit to you the truth in that is-- that's happening today. It's happening in our coordination meetings, it's happening in our design, and it's also definitely happening in the job site trailers where we're running clash detection and trying to resolve RFIs.

There are conflicts, and things are not getting addressed and answers are not getting resolved. So the backdrop of all of these generations is that what if you looked at all of these generations just as different countries? What if you had a project and you knew you had to work from some-- with someone from another country, and your livelihood depended on it?

Would you get really hung up that they dress differently in the other country? Would you really get hung up that they communicated slightly different? Your livelihood depends on it. You've got to do business with this other country. Common sense would say you wouldn't get hung up on the things that don't matter.

Now, if you've got to all be there at a certain time for a 4:0 AM concrete pour, that matters. If you need a little flexibility to accommodate people's schedules, and it's not a concrete pour, maybe it's not as important. But one of the things I like, that Haydn Shaw did in Sticking Points, is he created this analogy that, even if everyone is from the same locale, in the same town, the same US, as you look at these generations, it's as if they were from completely different countries.

And yet they have to do business together. And so my example with Harry, my original first boss, who's now a senior engineer at my firm-- he's a boomer, I'm a Gen X, Michael's millennial, and we are from different countries, if you will. So keep that analogy in mind, as we think about this.

A part of the technology work we do is-- it's not a large part. There just haven't been many of them. But we've been on four BIM litigation cases. One of them was around a $135 million hospital. But the BIM claim was $18 million. But I would submit to you what I've seen as an expert consultant on BIM litigation cases is that, at the end of the day, they're communication cases.

The technology works. It's the sociology of the teams not sharing the right information. You're doing something with the model, but you downloaded the wrong model. You've got the model and you're using it to move forward a process, but not everything in the model is complete and you didn't get that message. It's a communication item.

And what I'm also seeing is that there is a technological divide among the firms, where certain generations are more heavily involved in the modeling, and then others are involved in the design decision making, and you can get these communication gaps going on. And this really does matter. It really is slowing down construction by having our languages confused.

So the other analogy I want to share with you-- if I can try this-- maybe some of y'all did track. Look at this, finishing one strong run. Something's not going well. That one's got to hurt. It's an analogy. It's a relay race. Each runner runs their leg strong.

I see this happen a lot in VDC coordination, both design handoff to construction, general contractor handoff to trades, and then also among the trades communicating between fabricators and other trade members and their details. Everyone does pretty good with their technology within their leg of the run. It's when they have to hand off their technology and interact with someone else, and that's where the baton can be slipped and fall. Good point.

So what we'll go over here is poor communication; decreased productivity, quality, and innovation; misunderstood attitudes, relationships, working environment; less engaged volunteers and co-workers; lack of motivation, initiative, and teamwork. These can be all challenges that can come from a lack of generational awareness, as you're putting teams together.

Let's just look at a few of these. Speaking up-- traditionalists and boomers generally do not question or challenge authority. That's their paradigm. And so X, Y, and Z, they've been taught to speak up. That can create some friction. And once you start looking at methods of communication, traditionalists and boomers they prefer face-to-face communication. Boomer bosses like to have at least one meeting each week with employees, interaction face to face.

And X, Y, and Z prefer electronic communication, do not like meetings, may have not developed listening skills. I'm going to push back a little on Hayden Shaw on that one to some extent, but let me unpack where he's going with that. How many of you had a speech class in high school? How many of you had a listening class in high school?

You get where he's going. We have two ears and one mouth, and yet we have speech classes. We don't train people to listen. So some of the coaching we do with teams is doing-- training them to listen. And I'm going to unpack this a little and talk about examples, as we go through doing that kind of training

The general consensus, if you looked at these differences, is that we might have nothing in common. There are going to be many things that bug you and downright drive you crazy. Probably over the next 10 slides, I include a lot more examples that show some of this in the slide information.

But what I want to do, in the interest of time, is skip to some tools we use with teams, once we've accepted or at least opened up to the theory that there's these distinct generations and it's almost as if they're from completely different countries, and we've had to do business together. And so if you buy into that theory-- I want to skip over some of these examples-- they will be in all of your slides you can download. But I'm going to go over that.

This is data from the Structural Engineering Institute. And this has been an ongoing survey over the last 10 years looking at building information modeling by structural engineers. And one of the things that's been in there from the very beginning was just looking at the demographics of the typical structural engineering office.

They are typically 20 people or less. And this is the breakdown, but you see that similarity of generational differences. And once you drill into this over the years, you could also see a lot of contraction of engineers when we hit the recession. So ways to get teams to work together and address generational differences-- this is a philosophy we have that we advocate to the firms we work with.

If you can read but you choose not to, then you're no better than the ignorant, illiterate person who can't. I have this idea of the fact that the depth of ignorance is proportional to the ease of access of information. When I started, and I had to go to a meeting in another town, I pulled out my Mapsco. And I had to flip over and find out what part of the city that segment of the Mapsco went.

And I had to study the streets, and then I had to figure out what street names were-- what streets were closed, if the map was outdated. If it was a 45-minute drive, I factored in an hour and a half because I needed time to get lost. I needed time to stop at a gas station, ask someone for directions. I needed time to look them in the face and figure out are they just lying to me to get me to go away and send me down the wrong direction, or do I really think they know what the answer is?

There was this whole social interaction of figuring out where you're going, when I went to a new area. And I had to look at all the streets. Now, today with GPS, if I'm not careful, I could just plug it in, start going, and I don't even pay attention to what streets I'm flying by. I definitely needed to know north, south, east, and west.

And I will sometimes-- not in our company-- but sometimes I will call a young project engineer at an office and ask for directions of where their job site trailer is, because they don't have an address set up yet. And they say, well, you just come down here and you turn left. Is that north, south, east, and west? And they have to pause and think.

So it's this interaction of looking at this. So what amazes me is we have so much information at our fingertips. It's so easy to get a book now. How many of you use audible? Listen to it. How many of you use Kindle or something like it? I'm not plugging Amazon's stuff here.

What amazes me is that, when books were very hard to get, they were cherished and read. Now, the information is so easy, and if we're not careful, we just go humming on along and we never even read. And so one of the things we work with our project managers is I like to see a book a month. There are five books people have to read in the first 90 days or we're not a good fit for them.

I've never gotten rid of anyone. I call it transitioning them to the competition. But we're going to have to be stuck with this gray matter up in our skull, and it just gets funnier the more you feed it. And so life just gets fun. You get more options. When you get to work with people, the more you learn.

So these are some of the books we include, and this helps the different generations we're interacting with have common touchpoints where we talk about how it relates. And so I'll go through some of those. Thos are provided there. One of the things we work with, as we are bringing on new team members-- they're often millennials. By and large, the majority growth of our company has been working with millennials.

And then starting in '06, I taught one of the first Revit structure classes at an engineering school in the US. And then the next year, Autodesk had me write their curriculum for Revit Structure. And that was in the town or our office is. And since that time, I've trained a little over 600 students over those years since 2006. And I get to appreciate each semester. Taught one night a week, but it was like a 16-week interview with 40 students.

And so I got to get a lot of interaction with millennials going through the great recession, those classes that were coming out, other classes later. And so I started to really listen and that inspired a lot of-- they taught me. A lot of the success we've had in technology implementation, consulting with firms, including clients like Autodesk, has been working with lessons learned on this sociology piece.

One of the things. We work with as we're interviewing is-- this is one of the core values of our company is integrity, and we define it using a model from Dr. Tom Payton but it is what I believe, what I feel, what I think, what I say, and what I do. My world view is I'm not going to quite get there this side of heaven, but the closer I get those five things together then I will be an integrity. And so that's the concept of integrity.

So what's interesting in this from-- this is a theoretical model, so again, Department of Questionable Truth. Push back on this. It's funny, places I go, they have integrity in their core values, but I never really get clear definition on what it is. And so when we added integrity to our core values, we wanted a definition.

And these first three are internal, and I would submit to you. they're going to be heavily influenced by the generation you come from. And so it's important to know that. If my generation feels like it's a violation of loyalty to hop around firms, and another generation doesn't, then we have that conversation and I can respect that other view.

This doesn't mean that the other generation has to inherit my generation's perspectives, but to have integrity means that we've at least got to address these five things. So those first three are internal, and then the last two or external observable. So one of the things I ask on my interviews, as I'm bringing in particularly millennials and-- we just this summer had two high school students that were in a STEM program for engineering.

They amaze me. They were 16 and had already learned moment diagrams and how to size a simple steel beam. They were our first Gen Z interns, and they worked really well. They picked up laser scanning registration. They couldn't go on job sites. They weren't 18 yet.

But I asked them, what do you want to do in five years? What is your ideal dream job after you work here? I'm already assuming this next generation has the view they're going to move around firms. I want to just explicitly go and put it on the table. Now, if they go like 15-minute exposé of their dream job of where they want to go after they're done using me, then I might not hire them.

But I've gotten to the point where I've got to respect this new generation's perspective that you are going to change careers. My grandfather passed away, but he had the same telephone number from when he got back from World War II. That's his generation. And same mailing address, and never moved.

And then I have other people coming in and they change cell phone plans like every 18 months. And some new number, and then they're getting fake Google numbers, and masking numbers. And they got like five phone numbers sometimes, and I think that's cool. It's just different. And so this is something I put out on the table. And so belief and feelings are two things that sometimes are uncomfortable to talk about. And so if we just ignore them, do you think they go away? No, I'd submit to you they don't.

So along with the books, we have videos. How many have seen Simon Sinek's 18-minute video of "Start With Why"? 18 minutes-- he's got a book. The book is good. I got a lot just out of the video, and it's free, and so maybe just stick with the video. There's other books I'm going to show you along the way, if you're choked for time.

This basically-- people will follow why you do what you do. We get in trouble with the generations trying to explain what and how. And this is a good video that gives you a snapshot-- 18 minutes-- of stick with why you're doing what you're doing. How many of you have had little kids? What's one of their favorite words?

Why? My daughter's nine, my son's six, and then a lot of my incoming staff is 18 to 20. Why? I want you to set the files up this way. We're going to put all the models over here and-- why, why? And so this is good for baby boomers, this is good for traditional, and Gen Xs to keep this in mind. Because there's a lot of value millennials are bringing to the firm when they ask this question why, because we need to be an answer. There should be a good reason, and if there's not, maybe we need to change it. It might make the business better.

This is another book. Has anyone read this book? Who Moved My Cheese. Older one-- this is an oldie, a goodie. All our books we try to keep 45 minutes or less, because they're in the first 90 days, and I'm just trying to figure out if we're a good fit for each other and learn about the culture. So basically this book is a fictional goofy story about change, and that has inspired kind of the diversity we have in our firm.

We do construction grade modeling for electrical plumbing, HVAC, steel, cold-formed metal framing, timber framing, precast, curtain wall, metal panel, trestle panels. If there's a system in the building, we do shop and fab modeling for it. And so everyone on our team knows Navisworks and basics of BIM execution planning, and probably about half our team knows field laser scanning.

So there's a core in our group that does the reality capture, but everyone's cross-trained on registration, because we just use laser scanning as part of how we do our as-builting when we're doing shop drawings. And so someone comes in to do one thing, I have to explain to them in the interview and first 90 days why they read this book is the market changes.

And a project where we started doing just coordination for the GC, we may have then been hired by several of the trades to do shop and fab for MAP. And so that job went from having one contract to maybe four. And you need to understand everyone else's segments, and you've got to communicate with them. And so this book explains change, and I think that's kind of the workforce ahead.

Again, Iceberg is Smelting, another one on change. Has anyone read this book? A few here. This one's focused on business. This is probably one you could find a cliff notes summary to on the internet. Just find an article. There's a lot of good articles on it. It's kind of a lengthy read for what we use it for.

I started applying it to the individual. It was written to apply to a whole company and research-based on publicly traded companies, but one of the things I look for in this is that it has this Venn diagram with three circles. And this is what we start the interview with the person coming in. And I tell them that we're on a journey here to find out what you truly enjoy doing, what you can be the very best in the world at, and what you're profitable at.

And when I find the overlap of those three, you found your sweet spot. And it takes probably about a year for someone to start to get in that groove. And what you find is each of these circles grows. And so they find out more things they like. The more technology they work with, the more teams they work with.

In the interest of time, be looking at what questions we have here in the Q&A, and we'll go to tee up some of those. Talked about communication a lot and listening. Has anyone seen this show from a few years back? It was actually based on scientific research by Paul Ekman starting as way back as the '70s through the '90s.

But it's looking at the facial muscles. And there are seven primary emotions. You can go to Paul Ekman International. They have a three-day crash course in this where you just do three days looking at reading faces. The one I went to, the lady trained CIA and FBI right after 9/11.

Where does this come into use? Well, you'll find books written on it for how to play poker. It's used in a lot of places. Where we use it is in coordination and kickoff meetings. But the main emotions we're looking for are anger, and you'll see a furrowed brow in the book. This is something there's a lot of literature out there. You can read the book on this, if you're at all interested. It's called Emotions Revealed.

Most of you, without a lot of training, could get a 70% score if you've studied this a little. And the two you'll find in the building industry the most are occasionally happiness, anger, and fear. And those are the two that you'd want to-- the fear and anger the ones you want to watch for, when you're putting a team together.

Happiness is not always good. Sometimes I'll slide my proposal over and the client's looking at the number-- I like to do these negotiations in person for this reason. If I immediately see them flash happiness when they look at the bottom line, I know I offered too little. There was still money I could have had. And so this is really practical stuff and it is well vetted in scientific peer-reviewed journals.

So with that, this is Joe Navarro, former FBI. This is on body reading, so getting away from the face-- whole body. This is a little more non-scientific, but there are rules of thumb. Transactional Analysis is well vetted in peer-reviewed journals. This is-- started from late '50s from Eric Berne, and looks at the word patterns people are using.

So we talked about face, body, word patterns, and Ernst Young took Eric Bern's work and came up with this, what we're going to call the OK Corral. Has anyone heard of the OK Corral? OK Corral. What you're going to see is you've got an axis, and this has to do with one individual's existential state. Do I feel like Michael is a human worthy of dignity and respect?

AUDIENCE: No.

PRESENTER: I do. I do. And then do I feel like I'm a human worthy of dignity and respect? So OK doesn't mean my behavior's OK, it just means is my view right now that I see him OK and me OK? So this corral is set up so you basically-- I can have the view that I'm OK and he's OK. I could have the view that I'm not OK-- I'm just messing things up-- and that he's not OK. And I can have the view that I'm OK and he's not. And then I could have the view that we're both OK.