Why homebuilders struggle to scale new initiatives

Despite the reputation production homebuilders get for resisting change – and failing at innovation – the best path to a homebuilding team member’s career advancement is by evangelizing a passion project. Homebuilders have dozens such initiatives in progress at any given time across their various departments, divisions and workflows. So how does inertia survive in our industry despite these big incentives to innovate? How an innovative idea normally spreads An operations leader trials something new in their division, then shares the idea with a few friendly peers in other divisions. If those divisions carry out an experiment that produces an equally impressive outcome, they have formed a coalition of sponsors who can present the idea at the next meeting of whatever inter-divisional committee handles that topic. If the approach is widely understood and flexible enough to implement in a way that each division feels best suits their unique operation, it tends to catch its own momentum. Holdout divisions are more likely to be slowly nurtured through the barriers to adoption than bullied into conformity. Most initiatives fail because of a handful of common dynamics in builder organizati...