As outlined last month, the land development industry is undergoing tremendous change. In order to keep pace with and take advantage of this change, the individual participants, project teams and organizations must be willing and able to change in response. None of the issues outlined in last month’s article are easily addressed by traditional approaches undertaken by most professionals and organizations today. Therein lies the problem. To continue to do business as before will not only degrade our individual organizations’ competitive positions, but collectively, it will not allow us to maximize our land, land resources, and economic and social outlook for future generations.

The land development industry needs to develop mechanisms that will help clarify a cohesive direction for industry participants. Out of that direction then, will come the goals and priorities of the industry, which represent the needs it must meet in today’s environment.

The clear formulation of a direction, goals, and priorities is the key to ultimate success. When utilized correctly, a strong vision will guide hundreds and thousands of decisions that are made by the diverse industry participants and will motivate people to take action in a coordinated direction.

Positively impacting the necessary change to keep pace with our dynamic industry requires that we first answer the question: “What is the land development industry?”

The diversity of participants in the industry would no doubt conjure many different concepts and approaches to this question. What is necessary to begin the process is to envision the land development industry as a unified whole. Doing so brings forth the following answer and definition:

The land development industry is a team-oriented, multidisciplinary science concerned with the planning, design, regulation, and management of converting land to other uses, aimed at delivering a higher quality of life today and for future generations.

That’s a pretty wordy response to the question, but examining its components helps us to begin to chart a course for the industry.

…a team-oriented, multidisciplinary science…

The changes taking place in our industry reflect its increasingly complex and nebulous nature. Multiple disciplines and multiple stakeholders are more involved in projects than ever before. This requires that we take a new approach to our work.

One of the most important changes we must make is to reconceive our concept of who our business partners are, and fully explore the relationships between participants in the industry. We must continuously seek to learn more about how, what, and why the other participants in our industry want to do what they do. This knowledge and insight will make each participant better at doing what they do. Developing this knowledge requires a more holistic mindset and team-oriented approach to our work.

Of course, collaboration has a timeless tradition in our industry. However, the current state of our industry dictates that collaboration occur about different issues, with different people and groups, and at a deeper and broader level than ever before. Today, our collaboration efforts tend to flow from a current paradigm of our individual organizations seeking short-term gains versus the longer-term good of what we do, and in the end, this hurts each of us. Our new environment requires a more strategic approach to our work than ever before.

Strategic Visioning and Planning
Strategic visioning and strategic planning are all too rare in all industries, and ours is no exception. Most organizations are momentum-driven and don’t pay enough attention to strategic planning. Upper-level management does not push innovation or quality improvements because they don’t impact the short term enough. Too often, we do business by looking at individual results, and pay too little attention to the quality of our processes and systems. Focusing on individual results causes the following problems:

1.       Tunnel Vision: Individual entities work to meet their own goals and ignore how they may impact the peripheral organizations and groups on projects. Sometimes distortions and errors on the work performed by one organization cause numerous other participants to struggle to survive them. Then the cycle becomes self-reinforcing as they must integrate the sub-quality work they received into their own processes, forcing them to struggle to meet their goals.

2.       Conflict: The goals that direct one unit’s short-term gain typically contradicts the goals of another unit. There are countless examples of politics being emphasized over sound policy, civil designers not delivering what construction crews need, and construction companies shortcutting the construction process to save time and money, thereby decreasing the long-term quality and sustainability of the project.

3.       Insincerity: Individual goals that conflict with other participants’ goals force people to act in potentially insincere ways to work around issues and people that “stand in their way” rather than working to improve understanding. This fosters guarded communication and minor – sometimes major – dishonesty.

Each of these problems compounds the others, disguising the true shape of our industry. People think they are doing a great job – and they are – by their own standards. This approach typically reflects well on the individual entities within a project and reinforces the legitimacy of their single-minded goals. When goals are met, organizations can boast of good performance. They are doing little to aid the overall success of the project however, and they add long-term cost, manifested in many different forms, to the projects and to the industry. This type of attitude degrades project quality throughout the process. Too often, individuals and organizations lose sight of the larger purpose of the work they do.

As an industry, we must begin to shift our evaluation from individual results to quality systems. The quality of what comes out of a process is determined by the quality of what goes in and what happens at every step along the way. Achieving quality means that problems get solved, not covered up. In order for each organization to build quality into every system, we must work in partnership with internal and external clients to determine their needs. All of this requires more effective strategic visioning, planning and communication by the leaders of land development projects within each industry organization, and between organizations.

What About the Bottom Line?
Many private-sector organizations have trouble justifying why they should focus on improving processes and methods. Most organizations get caught up in a short-term, project-by-project mentality, which makes it difficult to justify spending unbillable hours on process improvements. Companies that focus on the short-term end result are analogous to trying to keep a dog happy by forcibly wagging its tail.

Focusing on strategic quality is the best way to improve the bottom line in a way that leverages itself and optimizes an organization’s long-term position. By focusing on quality, completing projects becomes replaced by completing projects that consistently and exactly suit the needs of all participants of the project, and are completed through a process that produces no errors, revisions, dissatisfaction, or lost time. Simply providing a “piece of the puzzle” becomes replaced by providing service that surpasses the expectations of the public, regulatory agencies and other clients by how well it meets their needs – even needs they hadn’t thought of.

With each improvement, processes become better executed. Productivity goes up and inefficiencies go down. Clients receive service of increasingly higher value at increasingly higher profit to each organization. Clients receiving high quality service spread the word and tell their colleagues, and demand for services increases.

Teamwork
Industry participants must work in new ways to replace barriers, rivalries, and distrust with true teamwork and partnerships. The partnerships formed must entail a mutual effort to please your common clients, not separate struggles for power and individual goals. This notion includes suppliers, regulatory bodies, and the public. Time and again, input is not gleaned from the public or regulatory agencies early enough in the process. As a result, conflicts arise later in the project that could have easily been avoided.

A group of people does not make a team. A team is a group of people with a high degree of interdependence geared towards the achievement of a goal or completion of a task for which they hold themselves mutually accountable. A team outperforms a group, and outperforms all reasonable expectations given to its individual members. A team has a synergistic effect – one plus one equals a lot more than two. An optimal team has:

·         a common goal - although a team may have a number of goals, one of them must stand out. This forms the basis for the identity of the team.

·         communication – open, honest and effective exchange of information between members. The more members of the team, the more time must be dedicated to communication.

·         trust – openness in critiquing and trusting others. Teams have a spirit that shows a sense of bonding and camaraderie.

·         resource optimization – optimal use of resources necessary to achieve the goal.

·         change compatibility – being flexible and assimilating change necessary for process improvement.

·         shared understanding – team members understand how to perform their individual roles, but also understand how others fulfill their roles, and how they can best help the overall process succeed.

It is rare in today’s environment that land development project teams perform optimally. Improvements cannot happen without a different view of our relationships between all partners throughout the project development, regulation, and management processes.

…concerned with the planning, design, regulation, and management of converting land to other uses…

This component further defines what the industry does. The Land Development Handbook, authored by Dewberry and Davis, defines land development as any endeavor in which the purpose is to convert land from one use to another. It is in land development project planning, design, regulation, and management where specialization rightfully occurs in the industry. Research and development of this knowledge is typically conducted by and available through the respective specialized professional associations and educational institutions addressing the various disciplines that comprise the industry.

The land development process is a planning, design, regulation, and management system that serves an important role in our society. We must remember that the “conversion of land to other uses” also contains a significant amount of redevelopment. The conversion of land uses often includes the move to a better and more efficient and environmentally sound usage.

…aimed at delivering a higher quality of life today and for future generations.

This component effectively delivers a purpose, or the “why” and “how.” There can be no more noble cause than to provide our civilization economic and social growth opportunities, which is what we in the land development industry provide. We must take on a mindset that we are in the quality-of-life business, not the development, planning, surveying, design, or construction business. This mindset places a high value on responding to problems realistically, but through learning and innovation rather than critique and complaint. It involves seeking leverage points where small shifts can set in motion processes that have beneficial, system-wide effects that increase the quality of life of all people impacted by our work.

Achieving this purpose requires that we broaden our definition of who our clients are. By expanding our definition to include not just an individual client or the general public, but future generations as well, we can best enhance our collective sense of place, reduce crime, mitigate natural hazards, conserve energy and resources, preserve culture and heritage, improve traffic circulation, reduce waste, help propel strong economic development, and much more. Perhaps most important, we can help relate and integrate the many components of a community to achieve a synergistic whole. If done properly, these benefits can last for many generations to come.

Over the years, many in the industry have indicated dissatisfaction with a perceived lack of respect given to various industry professionals by others within the industry and by the public. Part of the solution to this problem lies with our ability to more effectively promote what we do in land development as the noble profession it is, which delivers substantial benefits to our society.

Another part of this image problem, however, lies squarely on our shoulders. True professionals willingly seek larger long-term gain and the greater good of a noble purpose over short-term gain. This requires that all of us throughout our industry become obsessed with the quality of our individual service to entire projects and our industry as a whole. Our clients will become more and more delighted, and we will continue to achieve more efficient and effective methods of project execution. Quality delivers project-wide results, and those results – effectively communicated – deliver a greater appreciation of our service to society.

The land development industry bring us all together, creating common goals and objectives, delivering both specialized and generalized expertise to help balance and harmonize seemingly irreconcilable issues – and helping us all come out ahead – way ahead – as a result. The better each of us can become at fulfilling the promise of our industry, the richer all of our lives become. SLDT