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There’s this word I keep coming back to: entropy.
It’s not just a physics concept—it’s a force I feel like I’ve been battling my entire life, personally, physically, and at work. While I haven’t spent my career on construction sites, I spent years in film production, where every shoot felt like a daily struggle against disorder. Film and construction might seem like distant cousins, but they share something critical: if you’re not careful, entropy will eat you alive.
Let me explain.
What Is Entropy, Really?
Technically, entropy is a thermodynamic quantity—something about the unavailability of energy in a system. But I like the second definition better: a lack of order or predictability; a gradual decline into disorder. A gradual decline into disorder. That hits home. Entropy is why your yard gets overgrown if you don’t care for it, why your body breaks down if you stop working out and eating right, and why relationships falter if you don’t nurture them.
It’s not that we did something wrong. It’s that disorder is the natural direction of things. The universe, by default, tends toward chaos. And for most of us, it’s our job to keep things orderly.
Entropy on Set
In film production, this played out daily. One missed email, one unsent call sheet, one crew member confused about parking or what the next shot is—boom, disorder. We’d spend months planning a shoot, only to feel like every force in the universe was conspiring to tear it down once the cameras rolled.
And still, it got made. Because we fought like hell to keep it together.
Now, I’ve never managed a construction project myself. But I’ve grown up around construction risk management, worked with enough safety teams, and studied this industry long enough to know that the fight against entropy is even harder in construction. You’re juggling more people, more variables, more things that can (and will) go wrong.
Construction’s Daily Battle With Disorder
A construction site is a living, breathing, dynamic system. On a big job, hundreds—sometimes thousands—of people might be involved, each making dozens of micro-decisions a day. Every one of those decisions can nudge the project slightly closer to order… or chaos.
And chaos has real consequences. According to a McKinsey study, large construction projects are typically 80% over budget and 20% over schedule on average. Another report found that 9 out of 10 megaprojects exceed their planned costs. That’s not because people are lazy or incompetent—it’s because entropy is relentless. Entropy never sleeps.
Ricardo Viana Vargas, a well-known voice in project management, puts it this way: “Entropy is not on your side.” Projects don’t fail because someone sabotaged them. They fail because disorder creeps in—quietly, incrementally, but inevitably. A late delivery here, a miscommunication there, a forgotten safety step, and suddenly you’re off the rails.
Entropy’s Toll: Time, Money, and Safety
Let’s break it down.
- Schedule delays happen when just a few things go sideways. One missed delivery can cause a chain reaction. One confused crew can stall an entire day of work.
- Cost overruns follow closely behind. Mistakes mean rework, confusion means inefficiency, delays mean overtime, and disorder is expensive.
- Safety incidents are where it gets scary. When a crew doesn’t get the right information about a hazard, a schedule change, or a site condition, the consequences aren’t just budgetary—they’re human. Poor communication is cited as one of the top causes of construction injuries.
Think about that for a second. A breakdown in communication, a moment of disorder, can mean someone doesn’t go home to their family that night.
Communication: The First Line of Defense
If there’s one thing I know from film production, it’s that communication is everything. We had walkie-talkies for the entire crew, and we used them constantly—not just to talk, but to broadcast. Everyone tuned to the same channel. Everyone was in the loop, all the time. That was the expectation we set and held crews accountable to.
On many large construction sites, safety and important logistics information still travels by chain of command—superintendent to foreman to crew. Have you seen the movie 1917? The whole movie is about two soldiers going through hell to deliver a simple message to the front line: “Don’t attack.” Spoiler alert: It doesn’t get there in time, and people die. Today, the message would most likely be delivered with a quick radio call, and lives would be saved. An important aspect of communication is how long it takes information to get to workers in the field. If it takes too long to get information to the people that need it the most, the information is useless.
And here’s the thing: even a perfectly engineered AI-powered robot worker couldn’t make good decisions on a construction site if it didn’t have all the information. Humans are no different. If your people don’t know what’s going on, they’ll fill in the blanks—and that’s how entropy sneaks in.
Influencing Decisions Through Culture
On big jobs, you can’t stand over every person and make sure they do the right thing. You just can’t. What you can do is set the culture. You can influence how people make decisions when you’re not there.
Colonel John Boyd’s OODA loop—Observe, Orient, Decide, Act—is a powerful mental model for this. It’s about how people perceive the situation around them and respond. If we can improve how they orient (through shared culture, values, and information), we can help them make better decisions. That’s how you reduce entropy at scale—not by controlling every move, but by influencing every mindset.
Fighting Project Entropy Without Burning Out
All of this raises a big question: how do you stave off entropy without killing yourself in the process?
I’ve seen what burnout looks like. On long shoots, I physically declined. Sleep-deprived. Overwhelmed. Trying to hold it all together. I’ve seen the same look in the eyes of superintendents, foremen, and PMs on job sites. They’re carrying the weight of the world. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
It starts by being intentional. Ask yourself:
- What can I control? What can’t I control?
- Are we communicating clearly—and fast enough?
- Am I doing everything I can to convey our culture and expectations?
- Are we asking crews to guess, or are we giving them the inputs they need?
Technology can be part of the answer, but only if it doesn’t feed entropy. It’s important to look at software through the lens of “Does it help me control chaos?” If it doesn’t, it may not be worth the investment in time and effort. But, a tool that helps plan, reduces steps, removes friction, and gets information into people’s hands instantly? That’s worth something.
And remember: software is just a tool. It’s not going to fight entropy for you, just like a hammer doesn’t build a building. It takes discipline. Focus. Culture. It takes humans who care about doing great work and working smart.
Final Thoughts
Entropy isn’t going anywhere. It’s part of life, part of work, part of every project. But we don’t have to let it win.
When you walk through a finished building—a school, a hospital, a stadium—take a second to feel the invisible battle that was fought to make it happen. Every beam in place, every wire run, every concrete pour—that’s a victory over entropy.
So let’s keep fighting. Let’s communicate better, lead smarter, and build teams that thrive—not just survive—under pressure.
Because construction doesn’t just build structures. It builds stories. It builds futures. And the more we push back against disorder, the better those futures will be.