Journey toward Lean Construction: Pursuing a Paradigm Shift in the AEC Industry

This paper presents a personal historic view on lean construction, referring to the application of lean thinking to the delivery of capital projects in the architecture-engineering-construction (AEC) industry. Lean construction has caused a paradigm shift: it offers a new way of thinking to those involved in designing and managing AEC projects. The systems thinking that lean promotes began to develop in the AEC industry 20-some years ago and was spurred by the recognition that the then-current thinking about the delivery of projects was incongruent in many ways. The writer first offers conceptual underpinnings to frame this new way of thinking, and then describes her journey of discovery of incongruences in construction project management theory and practice. Along the way, the writer offers several partial yet complementary definitions of lean construction while giving examples and illustrations of the underlying lean thinking. The writer’s thesis is that lean thinking helps eliminate much self-inflicted, unwanted complexity from systems, so that people can accomplish more using simpler systems. Readers may not necessarily agree with this thesis, but are challenged to at least consider that lean thinking offers a new paradigm for the AEC industry, and that it is worth pursuing.