What Happens When Design & Construction Competitors Start Sharing?
How open collaboration, Lean thinking, and shared lessons are helping the AEC industry deliver better projects for everyone.
Competition is built into the architecture, engineering, and construction industry. Firms compete for projects, clients, talent, and opportunities to demonstrate their expertise.
Yet no company delivers a complex project alone.
Owners, designers, contractors, and trade partners rely on one another to coordinate decisions, manage handoffs, resolve constraints, and respond when conditions change. The quality of those relationships often determines whether a project becomes collaborative or adversarial.
Through Lean Construction Institute Communities of Practice (CoPs), professionals who may compete for work have a place to meet outside the pressures of an active project. They can build relationships, discuss shared industry challenges, and find common ground around a goal that benefits everyone: improving how projects are delivered.
Communities of Practice Create Neutral Ground
A Community of Practice is a locally organized group where AEC professionals gather around a shared interest in Lean thinking and better project delivery.
These groups are not project teams. No contract ties the participants together, and no single organization controls the conversation. That makes a Community of Practice a rare form of neutral ground.
Tom Weathers, senior project manager at RNGD and a former leader of the New Orleans Community of Practice, compares the model to a research institute:
“We have day jobs, we might be competing, but we’re also going to come together on something that’s really important.”
That distinction matters. Participants do not stop being competitors. Instead, they recognize that the industry faces persistent challenges that cannot be solved within company boundaries.
Unreliable workflows affect everyone. Poor coordination creates problems for every discipline. Adversarial behaviors make projects harder for owners, designers, builders, and trades alike.
A neutral setting allows people to address those conditions without the commercial pressure that often shapes conversations on a live project.
Competition Does Not Have to Mean Isolation
AEC firms understandably protect confidential information, client relationships, and the expertise that distinguishes them in the marketplace. Open collaboration does not require organizations to abandon those boundaries.
It requires a clearer understanding of what actually constitutes a competitive advantage.
Recurring rework, poor communication, and distrust are not advantages worth protecting. Neither are industry norms that make it harder for every team to succeed.
Dennis Hoffman, senior project manager at Broadmoor and a New Orleans Community of Practice leader, explains the difference:
“There’s no trade secret that’s out there that we’re giving away. We’re genuinely trying to help. We’re trying to make our community better.”
The value of a Community of Practice is not that everyone begins operating the same way. It is that participants become more comfortable engaging with people outside their own organizations.
A competitor becomes a familiar face. A trade partner becomes someone whose perspective is understood. A future project partner may already have a foundation of trust before the team is assembled.
Better Collaboration Starts With a Wider View
Many project challenges look different depending on where someone sits.
An owner may be focused on operational priorities and business outcomes. Designers must balance user needs, technical requirements, and evolving decisions. Contractors plan how the work will be coordinated and built. Trade partners understand the field conditions, sequencing, and practical constraints that can determine whether a plan succeeds.
A conversation dominated by one discipline will inevitably miss part of the picture.
Denis Stroup, Client Service Leader for Healthcare at Barge Design Solutions and a Nashville Community of Practice leader, says the group was intentional about including owners, designers, and trade partners in its core team.
“That gives us that 360 perspective of the whole industry.”
That wider perspective does more than generate better conversation. It helps participants understand why other organizations make certain decisions, where communication commonly breaks down, and how one team’s work affects everyone around it.
Henry Nutt III of Southland Industries experienced this early in his Lean journey. He attended local CoP conversations involving architects, engineers, and project managers but saw that trade expertise was often missing. Participating gave him an opportunity to bring that perspective into the room rather than allowing others to make assumptions about the work.
That is how cross-company collaboration becomes more practical: not by erasing differences, but by making those differences visible and useful.
Trust Changes the Conversation
Traditional project environments can encourage people to protect their scope, defend their decisions, and avoid exposing uncertainty. Those behaviors may reduce short-term vulnerability, but they also make collective problem-solving more difficult.
Communities of Practice offer a different setting. Participants can interact as peers rather than as parties negotiating responsibility.
Over time, those interactions build relationships. People become more willing to ask questions, consider another discipline’s perspective, and challenge assumptions without treating every disagreement as a threat.
This does not guarantee that future projects will be conflict-free. Design and construction remain difficult, high-pressure work. But familiarity and trust can change how people respond when challenges arise.
The question becomes less about who is at fault and more about what the team needs to do next.
How Can Collaboration Between Competitors Improve Projects?
Collaboration outside the project environment can influence work inside it in several ways:
- Professionals gain a clearer understanding of other disciplines.
- Future partners begin projects with stronger relationships.
- Teams become more comfortable discussing problems openly.
- Participants see collaboration as a professional strength rather than a loss of leverage.
- Shared industry challenges are treated as collective problems instead of someone else’s responsibility.
These are cultural shifts, but they have practical consequences. Better conversations can support earlier coordination, stronger commitments, fewer adversarial interactions, and more reliable project delivery.
Frequently Asked Questions About Communities of Practice
Why would competitors participate in the same Community of Practice?
They share an interest in improving project delivery and addressing challenges that affect the entire AEC industry. Participation does not require firms to disclose confidential or commercially sensitive information.
Who participates in Communities of Practice?
LCI Communities of Practice may include owners, architects, engineers, general contractors, trade partners, consultants, educators, students, and other professionals involved in the built environment.
Does collaboration eliminate healthy competition?
No. Firms can still compete based on their people, capabilities, execution, and client service. Collaboration simply recognizes that a healthier industry and better project environment benefit everyone.
Building a Better Industry Across Company Lines
When design and construction competitors start sharing, competition does not disappear. Something more useful happens: professionals begin to recognize where competition belongs and where collaboration can create better outcomes.
LCI Communities of Practice give the industry a place to build those relationships before the pressure of a project puts them to the test. They bring different disciplines into the same conversation, create room for trust, and help professionals see shared problems from a broader perspective.
AEC firms will continue to compete. But when the industry’s toughest challenges cross company lines, the solutions should be able to cross them, too.
Connect with your local LCI Community of Practice to meet AEC professionals in your region and take part in the conversation.