Building For The Other Side Of The Chasm

Matt Bishop is not especially interested in preserving the old shape of his industry. Brevity, Bishop’s Auckland-based business still does the practical work of construction engineering, particularly across interiors, racking, events and compliance, but it is also building software, training tools and automation systems for where that work is heading next.

Bishop thinks that matters because construction is reaching the point where small improvements are not enough. “The engineering services are becoming more and more commoditised, more and more platform based,” he says. “You can see the door shutting on the traditional professional services work. And we’re yet to see what doors are opening on the other side, but we know that there’s something there.”

Old systems rarely glide into new ones. They usually resist, stall and defend themselves until the gap between how things are done and how they need to be done becomes too big to ignore. You can see versions of that in media, finance, retail and logistics. Construction just makes it easier to see because the inefficiencies are physical, expensive and slow. “You can’t cross a chasm in two short leaps,” says Bishop.

Brevity sits right in the middle of that tension. On one side, it is solving very concrete problems. The business works on non-structural and interiors engineering, seismic design, racking systems, event structures and inspections. It also offers CPD and training. On the other side, it is building digital products and workflow tools, with public material focused on AI in construction workflows, design validation, document processing and custom web apps for the architecture, engineering and construction sector.

Bishop’s criticism of construction is not that it has ignored technology. In fact, his point is almost the opposite. “It’s not an industry that isn’t digitised,” he says. “There’s a lot of consultants and architects that are using digital tools. But if anything, that is making things less productive, not more productive.”

That sounds counter-intuitive until he explains it. A digital tool can make one part of a process faster while making the overall system messier. He points to Revit and BIM as examples. They make revisions easier, but easy revisions can also create more downstream rework if the wider project chain is still fragmented. “The ability to change fast increases the level of rework,” he says. “It decreases the efficiency rather than speeding it up.”

In plenty of industries, digital tools have made local tasks easier while leaving the overall process just as frustrating. A retailer can have excellent dashboards and still have poor stock visibility between warehouse and store. A bank can have layers of customer software on top of old internal systems that still do not talk to one another properly. A publisher can have modern analytics and still lose time moving information across editorial, sales and production. More tech does not automatically mean a better workflow.

Bishop has a very clear example of the problem in construction. At design stage, a wall might carry layers of information about fire ratings, acoustics, seismic performance and wind. But by the time the job gets to site, “all of that information dropped off and gets to the site as a chalk line and a sharpie note.” The problem is not that there is no information. The problem is that the information gets degraded as it moves through the chain. That is exactly the sort of gap Brevity is trying to close.

A lot of that thinking led Bishop toward automation well before the current AI rush. Looking at engineering consultancy work in 2019, he decided it was especially exposed because so much of it was linear. “You put the numbers in, you put the equations in, you got the answer out, you built the report,” he says. “It was all very linear.”

That pushed him to a conclusion that many professional services founders would rather avoid. “So it’s then that I start going, well, I need to be building the automation platform that puts myself out of business.”

That platform is PRENGUIN and it has become part of Brevity’s digital capability around construction workflows. Bishop describes it as a “pre-engineered user interface.” The idea is simple enough. A lot of construction elements are not completely one-off. A wall is still a wall. A ceiling is still a ceiling. The geometry may change, but the product systems and the rules are often repeatable. If you have the right data and equations sitting behind it, more of that work can be automated rather than rebuilt manually from scratch every time.

Bishop gives a practical example of how big that shift can be. A process that used to take roughly two weeks, from drawings to quote to deliverables and invoice, could be collapsed into 15 minutes. But the harder part was not the software. It was the industry. If the new system gave a faster answer but placed a new task on somebody already overloaded, they resisted it. “And it turns out they don’t want to do that,” he says.

That is why the “chasm” idea matters so much. Disruption is not just about what is technically possible. It is about whether incentives, responsibilities and habits actually line up to let a new model take hold. In most industries, they usually do not until there is enough pressure from the outside.

Bishop thinks construction is feeling that pressure now. He argues that it is no longer just construction’s own problem if the sector is inefficient. Data centres still need to be built. Infrastructure still needs to be built. Growth still needs physical systems. “Construction has got to change now because it’s becoming the bottleneck for the whole thing, not just for itself.”

That helps explain why Brevity has not stayed in a neat single lane. The company’s work spans interiors, racking, events and digital with recent projects including Brevity engineering suspended ceilings at Central Park Tower, where predictable seismic performance and coordination mattered in a large commercial build. Another was a cantilever storage system, where engineering validation supported scalable development of warehouse storage. The digital side of the business is also nicely showcased in Brevity’s work for ACE New Zealand on The Pillars Competency Framework. The original framework was already useful. It defined the non-technical capabilities important for consulting and engineering professionals across four pillars: relationship management, talent management, operational excellence, and professionalism and culture. But as Brevity’s case study notes, it was still a static resource. The problem was not the content. The problem was translating it into daily use, progress tracking and measurable planning. Brevity turned it into a digital tool to close that gap between intent and application.

That might sound far removed from construction engineering, but it is really the same business idea. Many organisations have good frameworks, processes and knowledge stuck inside documents that are hard to use in practice. Turning those into working tools is its own kind of productivity gain.

Another example is Watercooler Chats, an internal web app Brevity built for its own distributed workforce. The app is simple: anonymous entry, short sessions, under 10 minutes, no work talk. But the thinking behind it is serious. The goal was to recreate some of the low-friction connection that disappears in remote and distributed teams. Brevity describes it as a system-level response to a real delivery problem in work-from-anywhere organisations.

This is probably some insight here also in terms of how Bishop thinks. He is not treating technology as a flashy front-end layer. He is looking for the places where friction quietly slows a business down and then building a system around that. In one case it is a seismic engineering issue. In another it is a competency framework. In another it is the social glue that helps a dispersed company keep working well.

He is also unusually blunt about the mindset required to do that. “I think that I am just too curious and too easy to get bored,” he says. “The idea of creating a profession, getting good at a profession and then doing the same task for the next 30 or 40 years, I can’t imagine anything worse than that.”

That restlessness has clearly shaped Brevity. It is one reason the company looks less like a traditional consultancy and more like a firm trying to rewrite parts of its own category as it goes. Bishop talks excitedly about the software side now because new coding tools have radically changed what a small, specialised company can build. “I can have an idea today and then by lunchtime I’ve got a prototype and by the next day it’s just bloody built,” he says.

That is a major shift. It means firms with strong domain knowledge no longer have to wait for giant software vendors to solve their specific problem. They can increasingly build their own tools around their own workflow. That has implications far beyond construction. It applies in law, healthcare, logistics, education and media too. The firms that understand their bottlenecks best can now move faster to fix them.

Bishop is realistic, though, about who is ready to move. “Our ideal customer is that small percentage of people that understand that fundamentally, things are shifting and want to be one of the first,” he says. Brevity’s work across engineering, digital tools and workflow systems all comes back to that same idea. The firms that do well will not be the ones adding a few new tools to an old process and hoping for the best. They will be the ones prepared to rethink how the whole thing works. That is the harder call, but it is also the point. “You can’t cross a chasm in two short leaps.”