How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.
It’s an old joke. Not a great one. But, if you think about it, it’s not really a joke at all. It’s a survival guide disguised as humour. Because when you’re standing in front of something so big, so complex, so completely unmanageable that you can’t even get your head around it, you’ve only got two choices: you can throw up your hands and walk away; or you can take that first bite.
Our industry — demolition, construction, all of it — is an elephant. A big one. And, truth be told, not a particularly friendly one. We’ve got accidents that shouldn’t happen but still do. We’ve got men and women who never make it home because something went wrong. We’ve got a skills gap you could drive a dump truck through. We’ve got sites where women and minorities are still treated like they’ve wandered into the wrong party. We’ve got conditions that would make an office worker faint before lunch. We’ve got workloads that swing from famine to feast in the space of a week. We’ve got margins so thin you can see through them. And we’ve got a mental health crisis that is costing lives on an almost daily basis.
That’s a lot of elephant.
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