Why Is Flow Not Flowing in the Construction Industry?

The concept of flow, a core notion of lean, has been proposed and discussed throughout the construction literature for over three decades but is not yet widely applied and disseminated across industry. This paper sets out to perform an exploration of potential underlying root causes of this problem by examining a number of concepts across varied disciplines: (i) metaphysics and ontological assumptions (already discussed in the construction context), (ii) particle/wave duality (from quantum physics), (iii) co-emergence (or non-duality) (from Buddhist philosophy), and (iv) cognitive biases and fallacies (based on the work by Tversky and Kahneman). A set of six preliminary and non-exhaustive hypotheses are formulated seeking to provide insights to the problem at hand, namely, “Why is flow not widely understood and applied in construction practice?”. Two experiment designs are proposed to test the last three hypotheses, which are related to the pragmatic aspect of this question, and thus these findings can potentially assist in a more widespread adoption of flow in practice.