Everybody wants to learn. Every company strategist wants his or her organization, large or small, to be a "learning organization." It's clear, the ability to learn and the odds of thriving today and tomorrow are hardwired together.

Good news is, we're motivated to learn. Bad news, though, is that to do it, we've got to do something few of us are motivated to do. Unlearn.

Harvard Business Review contributor Mark Boncheck of Shift Thinking, writes this about that conflict between wanting to learn but not wanting to unlearn.

In every aspect of business, we are operating with mental models that have grown outdated or obsolete, from strategy to marketing to organization to leadership. To embrace the new logic of value creation, we have to unlearn the old one.

Unlearning is not about forgetting. It’s about the ability to choose an alternative mental model or paradigm. When we learn, we add new skills or knowledge to what we already know. When we unlearn, we step outside the mental model in order to choose a different one.

Boncheck's insight fairly describes residential construction and home building's relationship with Building Information Modeling--a marriage of data, visualization, and project management that links all a home builder's "mental models," from customer interaction, to completion and settlement, into a workflow platform.

In offices and in the field, home building managers and supervisors' brains tell them the way to cause the complex, concurrent series of tasks and resolutions is the way they're long familiar with. The more wrote, the less likelihood of a costly error, variance, delay, etc.

The mental challenge with BIM for many builders has been, we've heard, achieving, and scaling its benefits. It's not a dip-your-toe-in construct. It's hard to pilot any piece or part of it, validate it and cut-over to a new process gradually.

That said, both awareness and adoption of BIM in some form or fashion is moving glacially forward and upward among single-family home builders, according to new data released by National Association of Home Builders research associate Carmel Ford. Almost one in three residential pros--architects, single-family and multifamily builders--now reports being familiar with BIM, up measurably from two years ago. However, Ford, notes, the devil is always in the details:

While nearly 80 percent of architects in the survey say they are familiar with it, the share is only 30 percent among multifamily builders and 21 percent among single-family builders. Actual use, on the other hand, is more consistent: around half of single-family builders and architects who are familiar with BIM are currently using it. According to the survey, the two most-commonly used aspects of BIM are computer-aided design/drafting and reviewing three dimensional plans.

So, if one in five single-family home builders is familiar with BIM, and half that number goes so far as to use it in the business, BIM penetration into the single-family home building community clocks in at about 10%.

So, nine out of 10 builders (or firm management) may be knocking up against the wall of difficulty around "unlearning." In that case, there are two paths of recourse.

One is to begin, as Boncheck suggests here, practicing the process of unlearning, one part of which will make a great deal of sense to many home builders:

You need to ingrain the new mental habits. This process is no different from creating a new behavioral habit, like your diet or golf swing. The tendency will be to fall back into the old way of thinking and therefore the old way of doing. It’s useful to create triggers that alert you to which model you are working from. For example, when you are talking about your customers, catch yourself when you call them “consumers”—this corresponds to a transactional mindset. Find a word that reflects a more collaborative relationship. The shift in language helps to reinforce the shift in mindset.

Another, perhaps even more practical for many a home builder, is to "prepare" mental and behavioral habits that will make exploration and adoption of BIM feel less disruptive, counterintuitive, and costly.

Continuum Advisory Group principal Clark Ellis offers a step-by-step road map that could help many organizations rearrange some mental furniture in a way that could smooth discovery of BIM advantages. Here's a few of Ellis's basic exercises to prep for "BIM-formation."

  • Identifying what new products you will need in the next 24 months and how they will likely impact your business.
  • Calculating how much revenue your best-selling product will likely generate over the next 24 months. This includes an analysis of how revenue and profit are driven by various elevations and options–not just those in your most popular base plans.
  • Analyzing how you are using and managing materials on your jobs. You're not doing this already? Then I hope that you're OK with 2-6% per year in potential profit just kinda oozing and sliding its way out the door.

Unlearning is not so easy as it may look.