Modern life runs on speed, scale, and convenience.
Groceries show up in minutes. Phones arrive in days. FaceTime can connect people across continents without so much as a blink. And it’s all because many things have become cheaper to produce and scale.
Yet with all this splendor, creating and owning buildings remains costly, according to modern engineering expert Brian Potter.
”I became frustrated that we were not making it any better and that buildings remain so expensive,” he shares in an exclusive sit-down with Mindvalley Book Club.
That frustration pushed him to investigate and write about how progress actually unfolds—or not—in the industry, culminating in his book, The Origins of Efficiency.
“I’m always trying to understand how these systems really work,” he adds. Because once you see a pattern, “you start noticing it everywhere.” And it’s here that solutions can emerge.
Watch his full interview on the Mindvalley Book Club:
Who is Brian Potter?
“I worked as what’s called a structural engineer… the person who designs buildings and makes sure they stand up,” Brian explains to Kristina Mänd-Lakhani, co-founder of Mindvalley and host of the Mindvalley Book Club. He’s also the founder of Construction Physics, a newsletter for fellow engineers, builders, and policymakers.
Leaf through his book, and his fascination with the matter is unmistakably clear. “Efficiency,” the senior infrastructure fellow at the Institute for Progress writes, “is the engine that powers human civilization.” This was likely the interest that led him to study civil engineering at Georgia Tech and later systems engineering at the University of Central Florida.
Humans, Brian elaborates, were always meant to thrive because they understood systems. You see it in the shift from hunting and gathering to farming and later to modern industry. Surplus, skills, and societal growth tend to follow whenever people figure out how to produce food, tools, and shelter with less time and effort than their predecessors.
“Almost everything that distinguishes modern life from the past,” he continues in the book, “flows from our ability to make things using less human effort.”
No wonder he spent years trying to apply it in practice (like when he led engineering teams at Katerra, the SoftBank-backed construction startup aiming to bring speed, scale, and repeatability to the industry).
But the same 15 years he spent in the domain? It also gave him a front-row seat to major industrial problems that keep happening, even as tools improved and ambitions grew.
Why inefficiency still exists in the modern world, according to Brian Potter
In practice, structural engineering is all about making sure designs on paper, from apartment complexes to your office buildings to big stadiums, can survive the real world. A structure has to literally hold its own weight, withstand unpredictable weather, and meet safety codes… all while remaining within budget.
Like walking a tightrope, it’s all a balancing act… except it isn’t, as Brian notes, so straightforward. An example he tells Kristina: “It’s still quite expensive to build houses and buildings.”
Sure, products on the likes of Amazon and Alibaba.com are super accessible now because they have become cheaper to produce and scale over the past few decades. But you can’t say the same about buildings.
After years of observing the industry from the inside, Brian sees the same pattern everywhere else, too. Whenever work stays custom, coordination-heavy, and overly dependent on human judgment in real time, efficiency can break down due to these factors:
1. Siloed information
Many apartment blocks, offices, and homes follow similar layouts and use similar materials. Still, each project is planned, approved, and built almost from scratch. Lessons from one project rarely carry over to the next.
“Without repeatability,” he reveals in The Origins of Efficiency, “it is very difficult for learning and improvement to accumulate.”
You see a similar dynamic play out in healthcare. A 2025 study published in Information found that fragmented information systems slow coordination and decision-making in such a complex sector.
The thing is, doctors often lack access to the same patient records. Because there’s no single shared approach to treating common illnesses, care often has to start from scratch instead of building on existing patient data.
2. Long chains of handoffs
In construction, work moves step by step. Design finishes before engineering begins. Engineering finishes before permitting. Permitting finishes before building starts. Each phase depends on the one before it.
Even with better planning tools, progress slows as responsibility passes from one group to the next. Every handoff introduces waiting and clarification before work can continue.
“A lot of the cost and delay,” Brian explains, “comes from coordination. And it’s not that people aren’t good at their jobs. It’s that the work has to move between so many different groups.”
Similarly, in healthcare, a patient moves from a primary doctor to a specialist, then to a lab, then to imaging, and back again. Each step requires transferring not only the patient but also their information, context, and responsibility for care.
Research published in Patient Safety and Quality explains that these attributes can often get lost during long information handoffs. When this happens, the risk of medical errors can increase due to information gaps, misunderstandings, or missing details.
3. Outdated work processes
According to Brian, you see new software, from project management platforms to advanced modeling tools, come up from time to time in construction. Yet, as he notes, the way people spend time and effort behind them all remains largely unchanged.
And this is the one problem technological advancements alone can’t solve.
It’s no wonder that in 2017, a McKinsey Global Institute report said that construction has been among the least industrialized sectors of the global economy, with productivity hovering near zero for decades.
And the “snail” pace has not changed much since. Another McKinsey report published in 2023 found that while construction firms have increased their use of digital tools, gains have been modest and uneven. Sure, productivity has risen by about 10% since 2000, but mostly through better oversight and coordination rather than workflow restructuring.
4. The (unavoidable) need for real-time collaboration
Some work simply doesn’t get cheaper with time. And Brian is clear about why.
Progress in construction, for instance, often depends on experts stepping in at the exact moment something goes wrong. That’s when the room for scale shrinks. The reliance on live human judgment, however important, creates a cost structure that technology can’t flatten.
“The things that remain expensive,” Brian explains, “are the things where you need a person there who can figure out what needs to be done.”
You see the same pattern outside construction, too, in:
- Education. Learning still depends on teachers adjusting lessons in real time, responding to confusion, and guiding students—who all come with different educational needs and backgrounds—moment by moment. Even with online classrooms and microlearning apps scaling education, it all still requires human attention.
- Healthcare. Diagnoses and treatments often require clinicians to interpret incomplete information on the spot. When records don’t transfer cleanly or cases vary widely, expertise has to be applied repeatedly. This drives up time, staffing needs, and ultimately, cost.
And herein lies the constraint Brian often sees. When so much of your industry’s progress depends on humans solving problems as they arise, efficiency improves only so much.
“The things that have gotten cheap,” Brian points out, “are the things that we can make in some sort of repetitive process, where you can make the same thing over and over again.”
5. Misplaced use of technology
Technology, Brian argues, accelerates whatever system it is placed into. So, when workflows remain fragmented, automation—brilliant as it is—only speeds up isolated tasks while reinforcing the same bottlenecks. “It’s much harder to do that sort of repetitive process,” he notes, “when you’re encountering lots of different and unique situations.”
Which leads to his bigger point: from here, it’s just all too easy for humans to risk getting better… at optimizing the wrong things, whether in construction or beyond.
Seeing that AI could replace up to 30% of hours worked across the U.S. economy by 2030, the real peril here isn’t the notion of speed itself. No, it’s what we choose to speed up, at the risk of slowly engineering our own blind spots and, eventually, societal detriment.
“Just because we have technology,” he adds, “doesn’t necessarily mean there will be improved productivity.”
Brian Potter’s proposal for revving up efficiency
Ultimately, it’s not about making everything move faster. What Brian ultimately argues for is that the right systems should upscale and do the heavy lifting, so humans don’t have to.
Pause for a second, and think of how commercial aviation came to be.
You see, planes don’t rely on pilots to manually fly every second of a long flight. The autopilot setting handles the repeatable, predictable phases, which gives pilots more wiggle room to monitor unpredictable conditions and make judgment calls in real time.
That’s how Brian approaches efficiency, too, both in construction and other areas of overall world-building. (You’ll see this right upon Googling “Brian Potter Construction Physics.”)
Across his newsletter and The Origins of Efficiency, the author often returns to a handful of principles that have peppered the history of human advancement, as shown below.
1. Prioritize repeatability before speed
According to Brian, efficiency only occurs when the things that do require automation are automated. Ergo, they are completed roughly the same way again and again.
In his book, he writes that if cost reduction is a priority and “you want things to get cheaper,” then you simply have to “find ways to make the same thing again and again.”
Here’s what it can look like…
- At the general workplace: Using the same onboarding flow for every new hire instead of reinventing it for each team.
- In manufacturing: Relying on standardized components instead of custom parts for every product run.
- In healthcare: Applying clear treatment protocols for common conditions instead of deciding from scratch each time.
- For a construction project: Reusing proven layouts, parts, and methods that teams already know how to execute.
When you can automate the right workflows and tasks, there’s no need to relearn the basics. All of your human focus can go into improving creative details. That’s when your higher-level efforts compound for future reference.
2. Make all systems scalable by default
The biggest gains happen when improvement no longer depends on individual brilliance. Brian describes this shift as moving judgment upstream. Decisions get baked into processes, standards, and designs, so fewer problems need to be solved in real time.
Think standardized parts instead of custom components, proven methods reused across projects, or designs refined once and then copied many times.
In The Origins of Efficiency, he referred to some industries that made progress and encoded hard-won lessons into templates, rules, and routines:
- Textile manufacturing. Once spinning and weaving were mechanized, knowledge moved out of workers’ hands and into machines, looms, and factory layouts.
- Agriculture. So many farming tools, crop rotations, and methods were standardized and improved by leaps and bounds across generations.
- Pharmaceutical production. Experts turned lab discoveries into repeatable manufacturing protocols that could scale safely and reliably.
That’s when progress stopped relying on “who’s in the room” alone.
3. Reduce overreliance on human intervention
…Where possible, of course. As Brian is careful to remind us all, not every domain should run on pure mechanistic efficiency. Fixing your car, for example, can’t get cheaper over time.
“You need somebody there,” he says, “who can figure out exactly what’s wrong with it.”
But say you’re in an industry that doesn’t. Scale hits a ceiling when progress depends solely on experts stepping in every time something goes wrong. As he tells the Mindvalley Book Club, systems “can only work at the speed that a person can work.”
In practice? This means identifying which decisions are often repeated and don’t require senior judgment each time. Those choices can be pre-decided, documented, or built into processes.
When fewer moments require a pause for expert input, a project can keep moving. Problems still get solved optimally, and not only in the heat of the moment.
4. Review how you work before embracing new tools
Brian’s rule here is simple: tools only magnify existing structure. If your systems are outdated, technology only speeds up their “tangle.”
“We’ve been very successful at making some tools better,” he says. “But the way the work actually flows hasn’t really changed.”
In the professional world, this can show up when:
- Teams adopt new tools without changing how work is organized.
- Software adoption is improving, but stakeholders still make important decisions a little too late in the pipeline.
- Operational standards stay loose, and responsibilities remain fuzzy.
Sure, at first glance, the process looks modern on the surface with a shiny new tool, yet it behaves the same underneath.
So, before adopting new tech at work in any capacity, Brian suggests always looking upstream first. No matter your role in the project, don’t hesitate to ask:
“Where does my work tend to stall?”
“Why do some decisions arrive too late?”
“Where do teams wait unnecessarily on each other for information?”
Only after you’ve addressed those bottlenecks do tools start adding to your projects in very meaningful and expansive ways.
Fuel your mind
As Brian Potter has shown us, the pace of modern life asks for sharper thinking about how progress actually happens.
What truly moves the needle right now?
Which ancient paradigms still serve humans well?
What are the present and coming drivers of our evolution?
Questions like these sit at the heart of the Mindvalley Book Club. It’s a special “room” that exists to give space to ideas that deepen your understanding of the world around you, one book release at a time.
Follow Kristina Mänd-Lakhiani each week as she brings forward books specially handpicked for their depth and relevance. You’ll hear directly from both new and critically acclaimed minds who are shaping the future of how we think, live, work, and evolve.
By joining the book club, you’ll get:
- News of thought-provoking books that update your worldview,
- One-on-one conversations that go beyond surface insights,
- Ideas that influence how you think, work, and make decisions,
- A global community drawn to curiosity and meaning, and
- A steady rhythm of learning that fits into your unique schedule.
This is where ideas stretch beyond the page and land as “eureka” moments in your mind. Consider this an invitation to challenge your thinking and step into your inherent greatness.
Welcome in.
