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The construction industry has contributed substantially to not only the growth of the economy but also the development of the environment and society. In the past decades, an increasing public awareness on the environmental and social growth has promoted the application of sustainable development in construction. Triple bottom line-economy, society and environment has been widely recognized as significant dimension for measuring the performance of sustainability. Although a number of performance indicator systems are available in the current market, few of them have considered soft systemsculture and human aspects, in measuring the performance of sustainable construction. This paper therefore aims to develop a conceptual maturity model for sustainable construction to gain a deeper and richer understanding on the actual practices on sustainable construction. Five key domains are outlined in the proposed model as the metrics with the description and sub-factors of each metric. Apart from contributing to increasing competitive advantage, the proposed model can steer the construction community to improve performance in attaining the goals of sustainable construction. Nonetheless, this conceptual maturity model is still at an early development stage and it is subject to more empirical testing and research for its practicability and further refinement. 1.0 Introduction The construction industry always plays a significant role in pushing the growth of a nation, especially in its contribution to economic growth. A positive correlation is found between gross domestic product per capita and various measures of construction output (Yiu et al. 2004). The gross value of construction output often contributes approximately 4-12% of gross domestic product (GDP) to many national economies (Spence and Mulligan 1995; Presley and Meade 2010). Notwithstanding the contribution to economic growth, the construction industry has also created substantial negative impacts on the growth of society and environment with its extensive exploitation of natural resources and the production of huge amount of waste (

This paper addresses a research question on why construction companies fail in their business. Starting with the concept of growth and capacity underinvestment archetype, a new and operational systems thinking model is developed. The conceptual systems thinking model includes a set of causal structure that can explain various modes (including the growth and failure modes) of business performance of small and medium construction companies. Mainly the three componentsprojects, finance and capacityand the understanding of their nexus (or causal interrelationships) are found to be sufficient to reveal different performance modes in construction business. Further, the three operational aspects, namely, the business growth or decline process; the situation of financial and other capacity resource consumption; and the management of projects, finance and other capacity resources have been identified as the interrelated core and integral aspects of construction business. The three interrelated core aspects could actually include and explain different possible range of business situations, policies and practices in a construction company.

Higher failure rates of construction business have been observed as a recurring phenomenon in the construction industry. This research focuses on the causes behind a range of performance modes of construction business. The growth and capacity under-investment archetype has been used as the main systems archetype to develop a causal structure for understanding the business performance. A system dynamics model was developed to create a simulation platform for the causal structure. A context of a typical small and medium construction company has been used in the simulation model. This research considered and experimented with a set of selected managerial policies and practices that can lead the construction business to failure, sustenance, or growth. In order to achieve the expected growth or sustenance, it is found that a certain level of balance needs to be secured on how much emphasis is to be given to win new projects, how much profit margins to work with, and how much capacities to be arranged and deployed for project operations, management, and execution.