The Capacity to Sustain

The Capacity to Sustain: How to Protect Your Project Team From Overburden and Keep the Job Stable

Most project teams don’t fail because they don’t care. They fail because they get overloaded. It starts subtly. One more change. One more RFI. One more “quick” submittal. One more meeting. One more interruption. One more late night. And then suddenly the team can’t prepare, can’t plan, can’t go home, and can’t even think clearly enough to see what’s happening. Jason Schroeder asks a question that should be asked on every project, every week: “The question isn’t, do we want to do it? The question is, do we have the capacity to sustain it?” This is not a motivational question. It’s an operational question. Capacity is real. And if you ignore it, the job will take it from you in the form of burnout, mistakes, rework, and instability.

The Pain: When the Team Has No Room Left to Breathe

You can feel overburden on a project before you can measure it. Meetings get missed. Preparation stops. The jobsite gets messier. People become short with each other. Quality becomes “later.” Safety becomes “be careful” instead of a real system. Leadership becomes reaction, not planning. The system failed them; they didn’t fail the system. Overburden is often created by the project environment: incomplete design, too many decisions late, too many simultaneous priorities, or staffing that doesn’t match the reality of the workload. And when a team is over capacity, everything becomes harder. Even simple tasks feel heavy. Even good people start dropping balls.

The Set Point on Every Project: Capacity Is Real, and It Can Be Lost

Jason talks about a set point—the reality that every project team has a limit. You can stretch capacity for a short burst, but you cannot live there. If you live in stretch mode, the team will start breaking. People will stop thinking. They will start surviving. And survival mode is where the worst mistakes happen. This is why the phrase “capacity to sustain” matters. It’s not about what you can do today. It’s about what you can keep doing for weeks without destroying people. If the plan requires burnout, the plan is broken.

Muri, Mura, Muda: Why Overburden and Unevenness Matter as Much as Waste

Jason brings in a Lean lens that project teams need to understand: it’s not just waste (muda) that hurts you. Overburden (muri) and unevenness (mura) crush teams even faster. Overburden happens when workload exceeds capacity. Unevenness happens when work arrives in bursts—quiet days followed by floods of urgency, constant reprioritization, constant surprises. Those two together create chaos. And chaos creates waste. So if you want to reduce waste, you don’t start by telling people to “work harder.” You start by stabilizing the system: reduce overburden, reduce unevenness, and then remove waste.

The Research Lab Story: When Design Changes Ate the Team’s Capacity

Jason shares a research laboratory story that shows how capacity gets destroyed. The design was changing in phases. Decisions were coming late. The project team was drowning in redesign, coordination, and constant new information. That kind of environment consumes capacity because every change triggers downstream work: updated drawings, updated coordination, updated logistics, updated communication. Eventually the team had to draw a hard line. Design had to be finished. Not “mostly done.” Finished. Otherwise construction could not flow. That is a leadership move. It’s not about being difficult. It’s about protecting the system. If design remains incomplete, construction becomes a guessing game, and guessing games are expensive.

Draw the Hard Line: Finish Design So Construction Can Flow

One of the most practical takeaways from the episode is this: you can’t ask a project team to absorb endless design change and still expect stable production. At some point, you must protect the workforce and the schedule by completing design. That doesn’t mean you never process changes. It means you stop allowing “phase design” to become an excuse for constant rework. If the project is always redesigning, then the team’s capacity will be consumed by administration and coordination instead of production. Finishing design is a capacity strategy.

Don’t Ignore General Conditions: Staffing Is a Capacity Strategy

Jason also makes the point that staffing and general conditions are not just cost decisions—they’re capacity decisions. If the team is overloaded, the answer is not “try harder.” The answer is often “add support.” In the research lab story, the team negotiated for an added project engineer. That wasn’t a luxury. That was a capacity correction. It gave the core leaders room to plan, to coordinate, to lead. When you refuse to staff to reality, you push the cost into burnout and mistakes, which always costs more.

The Scorecard Habit: How to See Red Flags Before the Team Breaks

Jason talks about having a scorecard—something that shows you whether the project is stable or not. This matters because leaders often normalize overload until it becomes a crisis. A scorecard helps you see early warning signs: missed planning, rising RFIs, rising submittal backlog, increasing change volume, declining jobsite organization, reduced meeting quality, increased weekend work. The point isn’t paperwork. The point is visibility. You can’t protect capacity if you can’t see when it’s being consumed.

Why Jason Pushes 5S / 3S: Cleanliness and Organization Help You See Problems

Jason brings in 5S / 3S because organization isn’t just about aesthetics. It’s about signal. A clean, organized site makes problems visible early. A messy site hides problems until they explode. When the team is over capacity, the first thing that slips is organization. Tools get scattered. Material piles up. Debris accumulates. And those conditions create more variation and more waste. It becomes a feedback loop. Cleaning and organizing is not “extra.” It’s a stability strategy.

Signals Your Team Is Over Capacity

• RFIs, submittals, and change requests are piling up faster than the team can process them.
• People are staying late or working weekends just to keep up with basic administration.
• Meetings get cancelled, rushed, or turn into reactive status updates with no planning.
• Quality becomes “later,” and the jobsite gets messier because nobody has time to finish as they go.
• The team is constantly interrupted, and prime work time is consumed by emergencies.

The Dials You Can Turn (and the One You Cannot)

Jason’s point is that leaders have dials they can adjust: scope sequencing, staffing, design completion, meeting cadence, prioritization, and interruption control. But there is one dial you should never turn: the overburden dial. Too many teams solve every problem by asking the same people to do more. That is not leadership. That is borrowing from the future with interest. If you keep turning the overburden dial, the team will eventually stop producing. Not because they’re weak, but because they’re human.

One-Piece Flow and First Things First: The Tire Store Story and the Jobsite Mirror

Jason tells a story about a tire store. A customer calls asking for an installation. The team puts the request on hold because they’re “busy,” but they’re not actually finishing what matters first. They’re multitasking. They’re bouncing between tasks. And the phone call becomes another piece of work-in-process that sits.This mirrors what happens on projects. Leaders interrupt prime work with non-urgent items. They start too many things and finish too few. They create their own unevenness. One-piece flow and first things first is a capacity protection strategy. Finish what’s in front of you before you start the next thing. Reduce work-in-process. Reduce context switching. Protect the team’s thinking time.

Capacity Protection Moves You Can Make This Week

• Draw a hard line on design completion so construction can flow without constant re-coordination.
• Staff to reality: add support before the team breaks, not after.
• Use a simple scorecard to track workload signals (RFIs, submittals, change volume, meeting health).
• Protect prime work time by controlling interruptions and prioritizing first things first.
• Use 5S / 3S to make instability visible early, not hidden under mess and clutter.

Connect to Mission

At Elevate Construction, the goal is stability—field teams that can plan, schedule, and flow without burnout. Jason Schroeder’s teaching here is system-first: don’t blame people for overload. Fix the system that created it. LeanTakt supports this by reducing variation, stabilizing handoffs, and building flow. Takt cannot run on a team that is overloaded and constantly interrupted. Protecting capacity is protecting flow. If your project needs superintendent coaching, project support, or leadership development, Elevate Construction can help your field teams stabilize, schedule, and flow.

Conclusion

Here’s the challenge: stop measuring leadership by how much pain your team can absorb. That’s not strength. That’s neglect. Ask the question Jason gives you and act on it: “The question isn’t, do we want to do it? The question is, do we have the capacity to sustain it?” Protect the set point. Reduce overburden. Finish design. Staff correctly. Prioritize first things first. Keep the job stable so people can live a remarkable life.

On we go.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does “capacity to sustain” mean on a construction project?
It means the team can maintain the workload week after week without burnout, mistakes, and instability. It’s not about short bursts—it’s about what’s sustainable.

What is muri and why does it matter?
Muri is overburden—when workload exceeds capacity. It matters because it creates errors, rework, safety exposure, and eventually collapses planning and performance.

How do I know my team is over capacity?
Look for backlog growth (RFIs/submittals), late nights, missed planning, jobsite disorganization, reactive meetings, and constant interruptions stealing prime work time.

Is adding staff always the answer?
Not always, but staffing is a capacity strategy. Sometimes the right move is finishing design, reducing work-in-process, or stopping interruptions. But if workload truly exceeds capacity, added support can stabilize the system.

How does this connect to Takt and LeanTakt?
Takt requires stability and predictable handoffs. Overburden and unevenness create variation that breaks flow. Protecting capacity is essential for Takt to work.