Matter. Julie Williamson

basis. “Craft” is the specific building trade engaged to help build projects. To ensure that DPR employees and subcontractors are constantly improving, the company facilitates regular structured conversations to share best practices. In one session, for instance, a tradesman shared how he had discovered a new and faster way to estimate and install drywall, shaving 10 percent off the scheduled time while reducing waste. Another clued the group in to a newly discovered green product that had performed even better than less environmentally friendly products. At DPR, managers facilitate these calls in a structured way that verges on scientific, expecting participants to contribute and learn. Because of the formal nature of this collaborative learning, we might best think of these calls not just as standard meetings but as true “learning labs.”

      DPR also gathers knowledge internally through its Global Learning Group, charged with formal learning and development. As Cari Williams, DPR’s head of people practices, told us, “Who we build is as important as what we build.”⁵ Rather than simply buying content and hiring trainers from outside the company, DPR challenges its people to develop their own content by taking stock of what they already know.

      DPR didn’t overlook the job site as a place for capturing knowledge. It launched Opportunity-For-Improvement (OFI) programs and charged every job site with seeking out either best practices or new ideas for improving everything from record keeping to tool use; employees recorded their insights on the OFI cards. Although the cards themselves hardly broke new ground, the intensity with which DPR deployed them did. The company eagerly took action in response to OFI suggestions, showing near-religious discipline in sharing the best of them across the company. Then in 2009, recognizing the difficulties that an organization of DPR’s size has in scaling ideas, DPR created an Innovation Support Team whose sole responsibility was to take OFI-style cards and spread the insights they contained. The Management Committee appointed Jim Washburn, DPR employee number nine, to head up the Innovation Support Team, and allocated it significant financial and human resources, including implementing software to capture and track ideas from the OFI suggestions and other sources.