Ending Lost Wisdom: Our Generational Knowledge Project

The Challenge: A Cycle of Lost Wisdom

For nearly 30 years, our CEO Jeff has watched our industry grapple with a quiet but persistent challenge. It's not a problem of material, method, or market, but of memory. With each generational transfer, a massive repository of hard-won knowledge is lost. This loss forces the next generation to waste precious time and resources relearning the painful lessons of their predecessors.

It's a frustrating cycle. Take a classic estimating mistake. A team is bidding a large, multi-story building. For 15 straight floors, the plans show no masonry. The estimators get into a rhythm, clicking through floor after floor. Complacency sets in. They miss that the very top floor has a significant and complex masonry scope. The result is a catastrophic, expensive error.

For years, this knowledge has been scattered. It was proprietary, held within individual companies, if it was preserved at all. At best, it was relegated to conversations at the MCAA Midyear Meeting or World of Concrete. It was valuable, but it wasn't a system.

Now, at long last, we have one.

The MCAA's pioneering work in AI development made this moment possible. For the past four years, the association's been building GEORGE, a proprietary artificial intelligence platform designed specifically for the masonry industry. What began as a tool for answering technical questions has evolved into a pertinent and ambitious offshoot: a system capable of preserving and transmitting the experiential wisdom of our industry's greatest leaders.

The breakthrough came when we realized GEORGE could do more than retrieve information. It could capture the way our legends think, not just what they know. The technology finally exists to turn 30 years of hard-won experience into an on-demand resource for the next generation.

The MCAA's Generational Knowledge Project is our solution for what Jeff has often called the industry's "leadership continuity crisis." The concept is to harness the knowledge of this generation and forge it into a living legacy for the next. This project fundamentally changes the nature of mentorship from a passive, chance encounter into an active, on-demand resource.

This living legacy isn't an archive of what our leaders did; it's an active council of mentors that explains how they think and articulate those thoughts. We're not just building a library of our industry's greatest hits. We're building a platform that allows the next generation to have a conversation with the legends who wrote them. This ensures they're not just avoiding old mistakes. They're starting their careers from a foundation of wisdom that took our mentors decades to build.

Each will sit for an expected 10 to 12 hours of comprehensive interviews, walking through every phase of the masonry project lifecycle, from relationship building and estimating through closeout and lessons learned. Their first interviews took place in Mackinac Island, Michigan during the MCAA's 75th Anniversary Midyear Meeting.

Exhaustive personality and knowledge documents are then generated for each person. Within the new hub, a slew of proprietary GEORGE AI assistants will then make that knowledge accessible for the industry.

Interactive Mentor Profiles

Each mentor has their own dedicated profile page within the hub, featuring their biography, areas of expertise, and direct access to their AI assistant. These profiles serve as gateways to decades of accumulated wisdom, making mentorship available on-demand.

Here's what this looks like in practice. A young project manager's about to sign a contract with a general contractor she's never worked with before. The terms look standard, but something feels off. Instead of calling her boss at 10 PM or making an expensive mistake, she opens the Generational Knowledge Hub, uploads the file, and asks: "What contract terms should make me pause and investigate further?"

The system draws from hours of recorded wisdom. Donnie Williams' voice on why you never sign a contract without redlining something. Mackie Bounds explaining the subtle ways inexperienced GC project managers try to shift scope into your contract. Mike Sutter's story about the deal-breaker clause that saved his company hundreds of thousands.

Or consider an estimator facing a complex take-off on a project type he's never bid before. He can navigate to the estimating phase and ask: "What are the less obvious mistakes in take-offs that cause problems down the road?" The platform synthesizes responses from multiple mentors, each offering the hard-earned lessons from their own costly errors.

The system's organized around the complete masonry project lifecycle, from managing relationships and finding the right jobs to bid, through mobilization, execution, and closeout. Every phase includes:

• Direct mentor perspectives on decision-making and problem-solving
• War stories illustrating what happens when things go wrong
• Specific processes these leaders use in their own companies
• The subtle warning signs that only experience can teach you to recognize

Want to know how to build loyalty with your team during a long, challenging project? Ask. Wondering how these leaders balanced gut instinct versus hard data when deciding whether to bid? The system captures not just their answers, but their reasoning.

Having had the unique privilege of conducting these interviews, I observed a powerful and unifying quality these leaders all share: every single one of them has, at some point, been accused of being "too nice."

But this isn't a weakness. It's a sign of a deliberate and sophisticated leadership style. Their "niceness" is a byproduct of their process. They take the time to analyze and assess a situation with patience before acting with absolute certainty. It's a quiet confidence that allows them to lead with emotional intelligence, not ego. That same emotional intelligence makes them natural teachers, which is precisely why their knowledge translates so powerfully through this cutting-edge format.

The Generational Knowledge Hub, anticipated to launch in 2026, will allow users to navigate by project phase, search by topic, or interact directly with mentor assistants crafted in the personality and knowledge of each mentor. The platform will be collaborative and interactive, providing a 30,000-foot view of strategic decision-making in a way that simply can't be replicated through a manual or a single training session.

This is just the beginning. As the platform grows, we'll continue adding mentors, expanding the depth of coverage, and refining GEORGE's ability to synthesize and deliver this wisdom in the moment of need. This project will ideally spark into continued conversations, content development, and events with all the mentors involved for as much as they'd like to be.

For the next generation of leaders in this industry, our message is clear. The MCAA's doing everything in our power to empower you and connect you with the mentors who built this industry. We're giving you the tools to build upon their success.

The goal isn't just to prevent you from repeating old mistakes. It's to give you the foundation to tackle entirely new challenges, to innovate faster, and to advance our industry further than ever before. Eventually, you might even find yourself being one of the mentors as part of this project.