Adaptive capacity is not a matter of age

- June 9, 2023

Yesterday I took a trip back in time and revisited my roots. We organised a BIM workshop for colleagues from my first job at BuildEXT. What I experienced made me think.

First of all, it was a deeply nostalgic experience to recall how this once small construction company with only a few members has grown into a general contracting and steel structure manufacturing company with more than 200 employees.

The man in the picture is one of the pioneers, one of my first “mentors”. I learned the first tricks from him as a newbie foreman on a construction site 23 years ago. At that time István was already an experienced construction manager.

Today, I tried to teach him something new.

Today in our office I showed him in 20 minutes,

how the QR code of a paper design on the Dalux interface can be used to display a model of the designed engineering system in half a minute via the phone’s camera, and then
I gave him a pair of VR goggles to interactively walk him through the photo-realistically rendered interior design of their new office building while teaching him to teleport, and finally
I put our Hololens MR glasses on him so he could see the machinery running above our office ceiling.

Then I felt,
that it turned the world upside down a bit with him.

And then – after a short processing time – this man said: This is good. This is very good This must be used.

This man, who often didn’t even receive plans and spent his life standing with both feet on the ground, guiding manual workers, declared that this technology must be utilized.

This man, who lived a life of improvisation – or “firefighting”, as they call it – and watched a company grow a hundredfold in 20 years, was not flustered by the prospect of using a futuristic ready-made solution.

And it always strikes me that the ability to adapt is not a matter of age.

I’m reminded of the 30-year-old design guy who told me at a job interview the other day that he had learned everything and didn’t want to learn anymore. He claimed that BIM would not become widespread because contractors are not ready for it.

We often worry that contractors are not prepared for digitization. But often, they are the most open-minded, regardless of their age.

These folks? They’re more than thinkers, they do! Give them a target, and they charge. That was the magic of yesterday – pure, unfiltered dynamism!

I would never tell them personally, but I am very proud of them.