Why Construction Still Operates Without a Shared Source of Truth — and What Veterans Notice First

Transitioning from military service into the construction industry felt surprisingly familiar. Both environments are high-stakes, deadline-driven, and dependent on coordination across diverse teams. Planning, execution, logistics, and leadership must operate in sync. Failure in either environment carries real consequences.

But one difference stood out immediately.

In the military, shared situational awareness is non-negotiable. Everyone — from leadership to operators — works from the same operational picture. Information is current, accessible, and aligned. In construction, that shared source of truth is often missing.

Importantly, situational awareness in the military is not about having a single, permanent picture of reality. It is about having a shared picture—however imperfect—at a given moment in time. Situation reports are snapshots, but they are understood as snapshots that will evolve, shift, and potentially change dramatically. What matters is mission focus and alignment, not the illusion of certainty.

Veterans don’t expect stability. They expect volatility. What they do expect is that when conditions change, the shift is visible to everyone who needs to drive revised action. When that visibility breaks down, coordination suffers—not because the environment is dynamic, but because the response is no longer aligned.

For many veterans, the transition includes being told—directly or indirectly—that they don’t fit the mold at first, even when they’re ready to contribute.

Owners invest significant capital in projects yet frequently lack real-time visibility into cost, schedule, and risk. Financial data, schedules, and field updates live in separate systems, updated on different cadences, and reconciled manually. By the time issues surface, options are limited, and trust is already strained.

This fragmentation isn’t a personnel issue. It’s structural.

Veterans entering construction often recognize the environment immediately — but struggle with the systems. Inconsistent data, delayed reporting, and siloed tools undermine accountability. Teams work hard, but without a shared operational picture, alignment breaks down.

“I think the hardest thing for people coming out of the military is the transparency aspect.”  
Jed, Veterans Who Build Show guest (Ep. 31)

Jed’s point isn’t about a lack of information. It’s about the lack of shared understanding. Transparency, in this sense, means knowing not just what the data says, but who is seeing it, when they are seeing it, and how decisions will be made based on it. The shared mission.

Monthly reports are treated as visibility, even though they reflect the past. Real decisions, however, are made in real time. When owners, lenders, project managers, and field teams don’t see the same information simultaneously, accountability becomes subjective. Everyone operates with partial context.

In military operations, no one mistakes a situation report for the final truth. It is understood as a time-bound reference point—a way to align action until the next update. Construction often misses this distinction,—  given it'sit’s siloed environments. Reports become artifacts to defend, rather than inputs to coordinate across multi-company stakeholders.

In high-performing environments, visibility drives ownership. When outcomes are clear, and data is shared, responsibility follows naturally. When information is fragmented, accountability becomes diluted across contracts, consultants, and assumptions.

This dilution isn’t caused by bad actors. It’s caused by latency. When accountability depends on who saw which snapshot, at which moment, responsibility becomes debatable instead of actionable. Moats are dug, and teams take defensive stances to guardguardian their work. 

Veterans are trained to operate in complexity — but only when systems support clarity. Construction already demands discipline, coordination, and execution under pressure. What it often lacks is the infrastructure to consistently support those demands.

Complexity itself is not the enemy. Construction, like military operations, is inherently dynamic. The failure occurs when dynamic conditions are met with static coordination mechanisms.

For owners, the implication is simple: if the project’s reality isn’t clear, it can’t be governed effectively. Until construction establishes a shared source of truth across stakeholders, accountability will remain reactive, — and preventable issues will continue to surface too late.

A shared source of truth does not mean perfect foresight. It means shared context. It means that when conditions shift—as they always do—everyone is adjusting from the same reference point, rather than reconciling different versions of the past. That’s mission alignment.