What is a cognitive bias? These are shortcuts to help us act and think efficiently, and (in the past) to survive. They also help us understand each other better. Sometimes these are referred to as the curse of knowledge. Not all of these shortcuts are based on logic! There are
I’m not sure this judge (HHJ Stephen Davies) has a very high opinion of main contractors as he said: There is plainly evidence that the claimant was struggling with cashflow on this project. The correspondence clearly demonstrates that, like many main contractors, it would use almost every trick in the
The UK Construction Productivity Taskforce’s Private Sector Construction Playbook (November 2022) has 10 key drivers for reforming and modernising aspects of private sector project, including: effective partnerships aka collaboration; it recommends a project charter with shared objectives, values and measures for success longer-term contracting to drive innovation as well as
Although advertisers have spent 100 years saying a picture is worth 1000 words, I prefer a more logical approach. In 1861 Turgenev a scientist said a “drawing shows me at a glance what might be spread over ten pages” of text. Visuals are a great way to get attention, convey
Following on from last year’s report, the HKA Crux Insight Report 2022 Battling the Headwinds has again reviewed claims and disputes on global construction projects. Changes in scope (the #1 cause of disputes) might be an unavoidable side-effect of major construction projects, but the #3 cause of disputes is contract
A 2022 report into Construction Adjudication in the UK (Tracing trends and guiding reform by Kings College London) has strongly suggested that the project team are the biggest cause of construction disputes that end in adjudication. The four most common causes cited by the 249 respondents were: inadequate contract administration
Your contracts should be useful, useable, understandable, upright, up-to-date, urbane, unique… but most of all they should be user-friendly. Could your contract be as user-friendly as a Haynes manual? Read the full edition here Who should your contracts appeal to? Sorry about my dreadful pun: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yh71DTzfV50
The RIBA Construction Contracts and Law Survey 2022 has again shown that roughly 1/3 projects start without a contract being in place: 65% signed before construction starts (yay) 32% between the start and end of construction (ahem) 2% after completion (oiks) 2% never signed (arggh). Back in 2011, David Mosey
The 2022 RIBA Construction Contracts and Law Survey reviewed whether the Net Zero goals of the UK government, the climate crisis and wider sustainability goals were being reflected in contracts for projects. The Chancery Lane Project, Zero Construct and the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals are all encouraging us to
The Dalton Company, based in Toronto, Canada, have trust as a core value in their business. I was introduced to them by Stephen MR Covey, author of the Speed of Trust. This what they said about how they do business (when I interviewed them for CICES back in 2017). Trust-based