A Tale of Teamwork Delusion: Understanding the Embedded Culture of “Taichi” within the Construction Industry

Courtesy of Ram-Tech Construction Inc

“Taichi” terminology was a norm word used by Malaysian as the act of shifting the blame / responsibilities to other individual or parties. Construction industry comprises of many teams from different fields. Some may have already known or works together while others are just total strangers.

I would like to emphasize the four (4) primary players, the Architects, Civil & Structural Engineers, Quantity Surveyors and the Contractors. Architect will lead the team players and acts as the front line towards the respective clients. For design and build contracts, the contractors will be the pay master and appoint their own teams while the conventional contracts process appoint the team players separately. Good coordination is a must for the client to achieve their target and cost.

Now, how would the “Taichi” fits into the picture? When one issue crop up and jeopardize the time frame and cost, all team players will scramble to issue their “show cause letter” by fax to client, explaining the cause, “taichi” the cause to other team players and usually minus the win-win solutions. During the meeting with the clients, then everyone will start to blame each other. If the culprits are identified in the meeting, they will in chorus bashing and undermining them in front of the respective clients.

I have been in the shoes of clients and the industry players. The situation above is typical in any technical or progress meeting. The situation simply display how fragile the so-called teamwork when it comes to handling the problems at hands. If the firm’s representative was an inexperienced staff, they will become the easy target for the “Taichi” process to take place. All players are all out to protect their business interests and selfish is no longer a dirty words. Understandably, it creates more headaches and difficulties for clients in order to achieve their KPI, and above all they will poorly evaluate the performance of the whole team, instead of one particular firms / company. The circumstances demonstrate poor coordination among the players. All will share the responsibilities.

This highlights the needs to fully embrace the concept of teamwork. Instead of waiting for others or worse the clients to issue the red flag, one needs to be more proactive by calling the team to meet up first before the official meeting with the clients. It will be easier to dish out all technical problems in that particular meeting (hopefully in a more civilized way) instead of presenting the problems to the clients. Sadly, such practice is rare or poorly conducted. Short notice, meeting attended by inexperienced staff, poor commitment from other players and lacks communication are the major hindrance. One of the main causes was due to many projects in hands and the effort to cut cost by lowering the overhead factors.

In essence, until the “Taichi” practice can be minimized, the fallacy of “teamwork” values will remain as the terminology delusion.