Boosting: Improving People’s Decision-Making Competences in Construction

Boosting is an intervention that empowers people to improve their decision-making competences, make informed choices, and enhance their situational awareness. As a result, people can learn to make the best decisions by taking advantage of external structures, cues, and information available in their environment. However, ill-informed decision-making and (in)actions during construction routinely contribute to errors resulting in nonconformances requiring rework. By fostering competences or developing new ones, boosts can be designed to enable specific behaviors that can be used to reduce nonconformances and improve quality in construction. This paper examines the choices confronted by individuals during the construction of a transport megaproject that inadvertently impacted quality. It uses knowledge from quality-related events to demonstrate that the potential of uncertainty management boosts the fostering of procedural rules for making good decisions. With boosting being a high-impact and low-cost investment, construction organizations have access to a strategy that can be used to build their workforce’s long-term competences and learning capacity, enabling improvements in quality to be realized. The contributions of this paper are twofold: (1) it demonstrates how construction organizations can potentially use insights from behavioral science to empower their workforce to take responsibility for improving quality; and (2) it identifies avenues for research to design boosts that can be applied to enhance quality-related choices and in other areas, such as workplace health and safety.