Industry Challenges Episodes

Affordable Housing Starts With Better Questions | Purpose, Community & Construction Affordable housing is often framed as a construction challenge, with conversations focused on cost, speed, and supply. Yet behind every housing project is a deeper question about community, purpose, and the people those spaces are intended to serve. In this episode of Activating Curiosity™, Ryan Ware sits down with Rory Rubin, Founder and CEO of SI Container Builds, to explore her unique journey from socia...

For over 20 years, the construction industry has discussed prefabrication, modular construction, and industrialized construction as solutions to labor shortages, productivity challenges, and project inefficiencies. Yet, adoption has been slower than many expected. Why? In this episode of Activating Curiosity™, Ryan Ware sits down with Josh Mensinger, President of Integrity Built Texas and Prefab, to reveal a hard truth often overlooked: The biggest barriers to prefabrication aren't technical—...

Construction delays are often blamed on labor, cost, or materials—but what if the real problem starts much earlier, during design? In this episode of Activating Curiosity™, Ryan Ware sits down with Robb Andrade of Overcast Innovations to explore how siloed design decisions create downstream friction, rework, and unnecessary change. Instead of focusing on what happens in the field, this conversation shifts upstream—where critical decisions are often made without full visibility into how they im...

In this bonus episode of Activating Curiosity™, Ryan Ware sits down with Tom Raftery—speaker, sustainability strategist, and host of the Resilient Supply Chain and Climate Confident podcasts—to explore how global energy disruptions are reshaping construction, supply chains, and the future of resilience. Using lessons from the 1970s energy crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic, supply chain disruptions, and today's geopolitical uncertainty, Ryan and Tom examine what happens when critical systems become ...

In this episode of Activating Curiosity™, we explore a hard truth about construction: we’re not just facing a labor shortage—we’re facing a productivity problem. If the construction industry is “busy” every day, why are projects getting slower, more expensive, and harder to deliver? This conversation challenges the idea that we’re solving problems and reveals how often we’re just firefighting symptoms like rework, delays, and inefficiency. Ryan Ware sits down with Wayne Larsen, CEO of PT Blink...

What happens when architects and construction leaders stop accepting the limits of traditional building materials—and start asking better questions? In this episode of Activating Curiosity™, Ryan Ware sits down with Allison Dring, CEO and Co-Founder of Made of Air, to explore how discomfort drives curiosity, innovation, and change in the built environment. Explore how biochar is becoming a key tool for sustainable building practices and climate action in the construction industry. With the con...

What if the AEC industry’s biggest challenge isn’t a staffing shortage—but a work model problem? In this episode of Activating Curiosity™, Ryan Ware sits down with Erin Fantozz, Founder of EFDesigns, to explore how architecture and construction firms are navigating a deeper shift in leadership, change management, and the future of work. As workforce pressure continues across the AEC industry, many firms focus on hiring more people without rethinking how work is structured. This conversation c...

Affordable housing isn’t just about building more homes—it’s about whether people can actually sustain a place to live. In this bonus episode of Activating Curiosity™, Ryan Ware sits down with Nneoma Albert-Benson, founder of BEFA Women and Child Care Foundation, to explore how construction leadership and change in the AEC industry must go beyond supply and into the systems that determine long-term stability. This conversation challenges a common assumption: that homelessness is the problem. I...

The housing crisis isn’t just a policy problem—it’s a production problem hiding in plain sight. In this episode of Activating Curiosity™, Ryan Ware sits down with Ryan Smith, Co-Founder of ModX, to explore how construction leadership and change management in the AEC industry must evolve to address housing affordability at scale. This conversation challenges a common assumption: that better policy alone will solve the housing crisis. Instead, Ryan Smith breaks down why housing affordability is...

Climate policy shifts happen fast—but construction leadership in change management is what separates winning AEC firms from reactive ones. In this bonus episode of Activating Curiosity™, Ryan and Laura Steinbrink (CEO, Emerald Built Environments) dive into the mindset shifts and industry transformation needed when policy changes overnight. Discover the strategic framework for navigating regulatory uncertainty and building organizational resilience. This conversation challenges a common assumpti...