The Most Important Resource for an Innovation Program
ConTech best practices: A new expert series
This is the first in a series of guest posts written by industry insiders and construction technologists aimed at increasing the adoption of technology solutions in construction.
The goal of this series is to provide evergreen educational content to serve as the foundation for the emerging role of a 'Construction Technologist’ and to codify best practices for employing technology solutions and delivering change programs.
The target audience for this series is three-fold:
For Industry Professionals:
This series will provide an understanding of how to build and deliver process and change management programs, with a focus on using technology as an enabler where applicable.
For Startups:
This series will offer a peek behind the curtain to help founders and operators understand how the industry identifies and adopts new solutions within an organization.
For Investors:
This series will highlight the nuances of the construction industry and facilitate understanding of its unique dynamics and incentives, particularly regarding the technology paradigm and how solutions are reviewed, operationalized, and grown.
The first article is written by Nate Fuller, a passionate and accomplished construction technology leader with a diverse background in corporate innovation, construction technology, and entrepreneurship.
Nate started his career contributing to engineering design and project management for global construction projects before helping to create Bechtel’s Office of Innovation in 2016, one of the first of its kind.
He then ventured into entrepreneurship and is now the founder of Placer Solutions using his proven track record defining strategy and directing change management in construction to consult for North America’s largest construction contractors.
Contents
The Most Important Resource for an Innovation Program by Nate Fuller
Takeways:
For innovation leaders and digital executives
For startup founders & operators
Keeping change agents engaged through construction innovation and technology programs
Reading Time: 12 mins
The Most Important Resource for an Innovation Program
Do you know what jumpstarts an innovation program? It’s not an accelerator or business incubator or lavish new research hub. It’s not design thinking courses or business model brainstorms.
All of those can — and have — been used to great success.
There’s an activity that’s more fundamental than that that the best innovation leaders do early. And it involves searching for a latent resource that exists within every large organization and that will make or break your program.
I’m referring to identifying change agents. These are the employees who will provide impetus and sustain momentum for lasting change. It’s a resource that’s scattered across all of your project teams and entrenched in your daily operations.
These change agents are hungry for what your innovation group has to offer and will be among your most enthusiastic advocates. They will be your bench strength and provide the soft power that fends off corporate antibodies with business-as-usual tendencies.
It should be your top priority to identify these people early on. And if you haven’t systematically done so already, you’re behind the competition.
Change agents are the 10X’ers of the enterprise innovation game. They’re the ones carrying the ball over the line — so being programmatic about how you identify, activate, and retain them is the entire ballgame.
You think you know who these change agents are. But very likely, you don’t.
How do you identify these innovative employees among the hundreds or thousands of people in your company? And how do you understand their motivations? The answer is with a modern technique called network analysis.
Hidden change agents.
Change agents are the people in your enterprise who will be the fountain of new ideas, who will inform your strategy, and who will put in the hard yards to experiment with new ways of doing work.
They’re the influencers across your company who are viewed by peers as the best sources of information, who are approachable and consequently in the highest demand as a social resource.
In most cases, they’re synonymous with the champions that will make your startup pilots a success. They wield the soft power and have the vision that will help mold these oftentimes tenuous value propositions into something that can be sustaining.
The challenge is: change agents are often deep in your company with broad impact but little authority.
It’s the story of that project control specialist I knew on a job site in Queensland circa 2012 who was enamored with an iPad she’d recently bought and wondered aloud about all of the awesome software tools that could be at her disposal if only construction had more R&D budget.
This was before the company I worked for at the time created our Office of Innovation, but she’s exactly the kind of person that would have been open to a dialogue about digital transformation and a willing participant in testing out a brand new mobile device-focused solution from a female founder.
Unfortunately, many innovation groups would have missed this change agent. Her name might have come up through her area manager’s project manager or maybe through one of her functional managers who also managed dozens of other people in that region. More likely than not, she would have slipped through the cracks.
A change agent network would have had a much greater chance of finding her and many others like her. Not only that, the network analysis would have allowed you to quantify the extent of that change agent’s connections and then — with a full picture — be strategic about how you engage them.
You could determine, for example, that she’s a fourth year employee who recently made the move to a new business line but still has strong connections to the previous business and is still recognized by her peers as innovative.
Oh, and she’s really interested in field software and mobile devices.
This challenge isn’t unique to construction. Most industries have hidden change agents because day-to-day operations require long periods of time when employees are removed from corporate life or simply too heads down doing what they do.
Introducing change agent networks.
When done correctly, a change agent network allows you to identify your innovation audience quickly and is a powerful tool for distilling down the complexity of organizational structure into something that’s manageable at a programmatic level.
When forming an innovation group, the initial list of people is often made up of first-degree connections that senior stakeholders know or sometimes looser second-degree connections that senior stakeholders know to be affiliated with a particular part of the business and/or particular technology.
That list, while likely a good start for forming a leadership team, is only one layer deep — it only scratches the surface of operational depth.
A critical error is stopping your scouting there.
If that’s where you end your scouting, you’ll produce a very front office program.
That’s because much of the real work within enterprises happens behind the organizational charts and in informal networks that bypass formal reporting initiatives.
The thing to do is to go deep on the front end with a targeted message and probe down five or six layers into all of the many organizational channels. It’s there that you’ll find those employees that are most influential among their peers.
The important thing is to be systematic about administering the analysis and then spending resources to thoroughly interrogate the resulting information.
That information can then be sliced and diced in a way that builds a targeted list of employees who are open to championing new initiatives, piloting new products, taking part in an incubator, or engaging with new communication channels.
This is a must-have for any new innovation or technology group. But it’s also useful for established groups who are exploring their next act or ones that are looking to validate an existing approach.
A case study.
Change agent networks are especially powerful for companies that have recently gone through mergers or acquisitions.
I recently consulted for one of North America’s largest contractors who had acquired several companies over the past decade and was now in the process of building a new technology program.
The company is divided into distinct business lines with P&Ls that make for a healthy bit of competition within the organization. It was apparent that their initial challenge would be integrating all of these businesses into a wider innovation dialogue and then building cross-functional teams that would be able to drive new technology selection and adoption.
I went to work looking for change agents and did an analysis that peeled away surface level organizational interactions. This network analysis reached nearly a thousand employees and provided granular data into the change agents and nature of technology conversations happening.
The end product provided a useful view of siloing among the businesses. Not unexpectedly, the silos were especially sharp along business units that were part of recent acquisitions.
But there was room for hope in the newfound insights. One of these insights allowed leaders to target change agents within each of the businesses and to put particular emphasis on the ones that could best connect otherwise siloed parts of the company.
As they rolled out the technology program, they were able to build a dialogue across all business lines and put the pieces in place to address implementation challenges for the entire enterprise.
From square one, they were having the right conversations.
The purpose of an innovation program is to get people thinking about problem solving and then collaborating towards transformational change.
The complexity of modern enterprises presents unique structural and cultural challenges that can often dampen those intentions — and the best way to inoculate your organization against rejection is to identify change agents early and then focus energy and resources to continue fostering them along the way.
Note: This article was originally written in 2020. Since this article was written, Nate has worked with additional construction companies on the field side of tech implementation and provides these services through Placer Solutions. These are available on Linkedin or I highly recommend reaching out directly to Nate (nate.fuller@placersolutions.io).
Nate Fuller is a passionate and accomplished construction technology leader with a diverse background in corporate innovation, construction technology, and entrepreneurship.
He contributed to engineering design and project management for global construction projects before helping to create Bechtel's Office of Innovation in 2016.
He then ventured into entrepreneurship and later founded Placer Solutions, a management consultancy firm in 2021. Nate’s proven track record defining strategy and directing change management in construction has led to successful consulting engagements with North America’s largest construction contractors.
Takeaways
For innovation leaders and digital executives
Network analysis is a tool to measure, graph and visualize how communications, information, and decisions flow through an organization.
It is necessary for innovation teams as they often only engage with 1st or 2nd degree connections. This limits the reach of the program.
Nate’s service leverages advanced network analysis to identify and categorize four key roles in construction organizations:
Ringleaders (Tech Champions) - individuals who are already advocates for technology within an organization.
Frontline Innovators (Amplifiers) - field or project employees who are highly connected, respected, and have trust of their peers.
Cross-Functional Connectors (Bridgers) - influential individuals who span different groups, departments, or business units.
Adoption-Ready (Susceptible Employees) - employees who might not yet be fully convinced but are open to change due to their connections.
Change agents (the 10X’ers of enterprise innovation) are often hidden (and not identified) as day to day operations require engineers onsite and removed from corporate life.
These individuals have broad impact, are viewed by their peers as trusted and approachable sources of information but often have little defined authority.
Once you have identified these people, work to have them engaged with your innovation program.
This increases the reach and leverage of your innovation programs by identifying employees who are open to championing new initiatives, piloting new products, taking part in an incubator, or engaging with new communication channels.
By engaging with change agents your program will have higher ROI in terms of adoption and will ensure you are having the conversations with the right people from the start.
A core challenge in construction is that project and field teams are moved around each time the project delivery machine is broken down and reassembled. Nate advises that nearly all technology initiatives in construction ultimately benefit from a detailed understanding of these shifting field and project networks.
For startup founders & operators
When undertaking a pilot with a company, work on identifying who the change agents on the project are.
Work with the company’s innovation office to have a service like this provided (it benefits them across the board!) or have your customer support team identify who the project engineers trust and turn to.
Nate advises that this information is crucial to getting out of the “death by pilot” trap that contech startups often fall into and allows them to organically scale at an enterprise level when ready to do so.
Once identified, have your account management and customer support team build relationships with them and work closely to address their pain points.
These people are willing to work with you to operationalize your solution into their workflow.
They will provide valuable feedback and share their frustrations which can help guide product development.
Keeping change agents engaged through construction innovation and technology programs
Once the change agent network has been identified it is important to continue to engage with this community.
They need to trust your team and having strong relationships with these people will improve the reception of your initiatives.
2 ways to engage with them at scale are:
Write an internal newsletter
Keep them updated on your activities, the pilots you are running and share your wins and feedback.
At BHP Billiton, a large mining company, their corporate venture team blogs on all their deals and meetings (their comp package is tied the quality of their blog). The openness with sharing knowledge allows for osmosis and facilitates the building of relationships at scale.
Related:Stripe, a successful startup ~$65b valuation, has an open email culture.
Build an internal community
Teams and Yammer are easy options. Build a community site for your change agent network and continue to provide them with information on your activities and what you are learning. Building engaged communities are hard, but here are some tricks which I have seen work:Start internal Centers of Excellence
Nate advises his clients to bring the identified Ringleaders, Frontline Innovators, Cross-Functional Connectors, and Adoption-Ready Employees into CoEs based on self-identified interests.
These groups become the nucleus for project-level tech adoption and business alignment.At the start, your team needs to start the conversation
Every community needs an engagement strategy to scale. Every week, share 3x posts on what you have building/working and end with a question.
Make sure other members of your core team respond with thoughtful comments to foster the appearance of high engagement. Over time, conversations will naturally prosper.Re-engage the community
Continue to highlight conversations inside of the community by summarizing relevant popular posts/questions in a weekly email and linking back to discussions.
Community platforms such as Circle automate this helping to grow dialogue on your initiatives and re-engage your internal change agent network.