Transitioning from military service to a civilian career is rarely straightforward. For me, it led to the built environment — an industry that, to my surprise, felt immediately familiar.
Construction sites, development teams, and project organizations operate under pressures familiar to military units: tight timelines, limited resources, high stakes, and the need to coordinate across disciplines. Success relies on trust, clear roles, discipline, and shared awareness, while failure often stems from misalignment and poor communication.
It quickly became clear that, while construction mirrors the military’s structure and complexity, it sometimes lacks the systems and norms that enable those environments to function effectively at scale.
Transferable skills — and missing infrastructure
Military service instills habits that translate well into construction: accountability, respect for process, chain of command, and a bias toward execution. In both worlds, no single team operates in isolation. Outcomes depend on coordination among planners, operators, logistics, and leadership.
But in construction, the systems meant to support this coordination often fall short.
In the industry, I saw firsthand how ‘finger-pointing’, fragmented tools, legacy software, and disconnected data create blind spots between stakeholders. Financial data lives in one system, schedules in another, and field updates elsewhere — often reconciled manually, late, or sometimes not at all. The result is a lack of shared truth across owners, lenders, project managers, and site teams.
In the military, incomplete or delayed information can jeopardize a mission. In construction, it jeopardizes budgets, schedules, safety, and trust.
The transparency gap across the project lifecycle
One of the most persistent challenges in construction is the uneven distribution of information and accountability across the project lifecycle.
Owners and lenders often lack real-time visibility into how field decisions impact financial outcomes. Site teams execute without full context around costs or risks. Project managers spend too much time bridging system and communication gaps rather than managing outcomes.
This lack of transparency isn’t usually malicious. It’s structural. The industry has normalized working with partial information, delayed reporting, and reactive decision-making. Over time, this erodes accountability. When no one has the full picture, determining ownership of tasks and outcomes is difficult.
In contrast, high-performing organizations — military or otherwise — align incentives around shared visibility. Everyone understands how their actions affect the broader mission.
Ownership needs more skin in the game
Another lesson from the built world: true accountability requires engaged ownership throughout the project lifecycle.
Too often, information flows upward in a delayed, filtered way: field teams report progress after the fact, financial updates come monthly, and risks are only noticed once problems arise. By then, options are limited, and trust is compromised.
When owners, lenders, and development partners have continuous access to accurate, consistent data, the dynamic changes. Conversations shift to problem-solving, and decisions become proactive. Teams can course-correct earlier, when change is less costly.
This doesn’t mean micromanagement. It means shared accountability — a principle deeply ingrained in military operations and still underutilized in construction.
Data congruence is not optional anymore
Construction grows more complex, costly, and scrutinized. Yet many projects still rely on decades-old systems built for a different scale.
When data is inconsistent across stakeholders—when schedules, budgets, and field realities don’t align—trust erodes, decisions stall, and risk increases.
Congruent data across the project lifecycle isn’t a “nice to have.” It’s foundational. Without it, collaboration breaks down, and accountability becomes subjective.
Accessibility also matters. When systems are too expensive, complex, or rigid, silos harden. Some stakeholders are privileged while others are excluded, leading to disjointed use.
Collaboration is not a buzzword — it’s a requirement
One of the worst ways to run a construction project is to operate in sequence, handing off or compartmentalizing responsibility between phases. Overlap is inevitable: design affects construction, financing affects sequencing, and field conditions impact budgets. Everyone’s work intersects.
Successful projects acknowledge this reality and build systems — and cultures — that support collaboration across phases and roles. That requires shared visibility, aligned incentives, and tools that reflect how work actually happens.
The military succeeds not just through hierarchy, but through coordination, trust, and clarity under pressure — with clearly defined autonomy. Construction deserves similar discipline.
A moment for change
The built environment faces an inflection point. Rising costs, tighter capital, increased compliance requirements, workforce constraints, and growing complexity force the industry to rethink its assumptions.
My transition from military service into construction made one thing clear: the industry already has the talent, experience, and work ethic to perform at a higher level. What it often lacks is the infrastructure — technical and cultural — to support true transparency, accountability, and collaboration.
If construction can close that gap, the results won’t just be better projects. It will mean building stronger teams, more resilient organizations, and delivering outcomes that match the scale of what’s being built—or even what could be built. Now is the time for leaders, owners, and teams in the industry to prioritize building the technical and cultural infrastructure that enables real accountability, visibility, and collaboration. Take the first step: invest in systems, processes, and behaviors that support shared truth and proactive partnership across every phase of the project.
Adam Stark is a Special Forces veteran and construction technology executive with experience spanning development, project delivery, construction management, and operational systems in the built world.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of HousingWire’s editorial department and its owners. To contact the editor responsible for this piece: [email protected].
