Scottish Construction Now, in partnership with sponsor HF Group, recently brought together senior leaders from across Scotland’s construction sector for a candid discussion about one of the industry’s most pressing challenges: strategic leadership.

The roundtable, held at Glaschu in Glasgow city centre on August 11, brought together leaders from construction, engineering, architecture, property and professional services, including:

• Hugh Fulton, managing director, HF Group
• Paul McDevitt, managing director, McDevitt & Co
• Kieran Findlay, editor, Scottish Construction Now
• Martin Elsby, partner, DM Hall
• Derek Hutchings, partner, Troup Bywaters + Anders
• Laurence Casserly, director, Bellrock
• Robert Butler, director, Butler Consulting Engineering
• Neil Pearson, director, Butler Consulting Engineering
• Jeanette MacIntyre, managing director, Indeglås
• John Brown, group managing director, Veitchi Group
• Stephen Logan, managing director, Veitchi Flooring
• Janice Russell, managing director, McTaggart Construction
• Marcus McLaughlin, electrical estimator, HF Mechanical & Electrical
• Gordon Lundie, director, Lundie Media
• Michael Kilpatrick, associate director, Waterman Structure
• Jon Jewitt, managing director, Jewitt & Wilkie Architects
• Martin McHugh, managing director, Martec Engineering

Is strategy planned – or simply happening?

Guiding the discussion was Professor Bill Minnis, recently Dean of the Business School at Stockton University in New Jersey. He used the findings of a pre-event strategy survey as a springboard for a wider conversation about how organisations plan, adapt and make decisions.

Professor Minnis began by turning the lens on his own career. Despite moving between academia and business, including a five-year stint as a bank president – a position he took on in 2012 despite having no previous banking experience – he described much of his success as accidental rather than carefully planned.

Opportunities, he suggested, often arise through relationships and reputation as much as through deliberate strategy.

That set up one of the central questions for the room: is an organisation’s progress really the result of strategic intent, or are businesses sometimes simply good at making the most of opportunities when they appear?

For Professor Minnis, networking and connection are themselves part of strategy. The people leaders know, the relationships they build and the rooms they find themselves in all influence the opportunities available to them. In that sense, the roundtable itself was an exercise in strategic thinking.

Think beyond the next year

A recurring theme was the importance of extending the strategic horizon without attempting to predict every detail.

Professor Minnis encouraged attendees to consider several timeframes simultaneously – six months, one year, three years, five years and even 20 years – while recognising that only the immediate future can be planned with any real precision.

The further out the vision extends, the more directional it should become.

Long-term priorities such as succession, workforce development and organisational resilience do not require a fully developed roadmap from day one. What matters is having a clear sense of direction and the discipline to revisit and adapt the plan as circumstances change.

That led into an important distinction between change and transition.

Change can suggest stopping one approach and replacing it with another. Transition, by contrast, is a more continuous movement from where an organisation is now towards where it needs to be.

For businesses operating in an increasingly uncertain environment, that more fluid approach may offer a more sustainable way of thinking about organisational evolution.

Lessons from higher education

Professor Minnis also used the higher education sector as a warning about the risks of failing to adapt.

Universities, he argued, can be structurally slow to respond to disruption, constrained by tradition, bureaucracy and established ways of working. Many institutions have been able to see challenges such as falling enrolments, reduced international student numbers and growing deficits developing, yet have struggled to respond quickly enough.

His own experience as an interim dean tasked with driving cultural change reinforced the point.

Organisations that become too reliant on “the way things have always been done” can find themselves overtaken by circumstances they had already identified but failed to act upon.

For construction businesses, the lesson is straightforward: flexibility and adaptability cannot simply be assumed. They need to be built into the way an organisation operates.

The 80/20 split

Drawing on research into decision-making, Professor Minnis introduced the idea that around 80% of organisational decisions are driven by fast thinking – drawing on familiar patterns and past experience – while only around 20% involve genuine analysis of situations that fall outside that experience.

That bias towards the familiar is natural. Experience provides valuable judgement and allows leaders to make decisions quickly.

But Professor Minnis argued that every leadership team needs someone occupying that crucial 20%: looking beyond the familiar, identifying emerging changes and challenging the organisation to consider possibilities that its history alone might not reveal.

He linked this to the different perspectives often found between generations of leaders. Younger entrepreneurs may be less constrained by established assumptions and therefore more willing to pursue new approaches, while experienced leaders bring valuable judgement but can also become anchored by what has worked previously.

The challenge, therefore, is not to choose between experience and innovation, but to make sure both perspectives have a place in strategic decision-making.

What does strategy actually look like?

The discussion that followed highlighted several recurring themes.

Communicating strategy

One of the strongest concerns was how effectively strategy is communicated throughout an organisation.

Several attendees suggested that their businesses may have a clear strategy at senior level, but that its meaning and priorities can become less clear as they travel through the organisation.

That was reflected in the pre-event survey, where a significant proportion of respondents felt that senior leaders’ understanding of strategy differed from how it was understood elsewhere in their businesses.

A strategy that exists only in the boardroom is unlikely to have much impact on day-to-day decision-making.

Are we doing more strategy than we realise?

There was also a recognition that strategic thinking is happening constantly, even when it is not labelled as such.

Leaders are regularly asking themselves questions such as “What comes next?”, “Where should we invest?” or “What do we need to change?”

Much of that thinking happens informally and through conversation rather than through a formal strategic planning process.

As a result, some organisations may underestimate how much strategy they are already doing simply because it has never been written down or given a formal name.

Making strategy part of the business

Attendees also questioned whether strategic planning needs to involve producing a large, formal document.

There was greater appetite for a lighter-touch approach in which strategy becomes part of the organisation’s regular rhythm rather than an occasional exercise.

That is particularly important in construction, where immediate operational pressures can easily dominate attention.

The challenge is to create enough structure to maintain a long-term focus without creating a process so cumbersome that strategy becomes detached from the reality of running the business.

Key takeaways

Across Professor Minnis’ presentation and the experiences shared around the table, a consistent picture emerged.

Most organisations are probably doing more strategic thinking than they give themselves credit for. The greater challenges are formalising that thinking, communicating it consistently and protecting time for it alongside the demands of day-to-day operations.

The organisations best placed to navigate continued uncertainty are likely to be those that:

• Think beyond the immediate business cycle.
• Set a clear long-term direction without trying to predict every detail.
• Build adaptability into their organisational culture.
• Challenge established assumptions and avoid becoming trapped by past success.
• Communicate strategy clearly at every level of the organisation.
• Create regular opportunities for strategic thinking rather than treating it as a one-off exercise.
• Ensure someone within the leadership team is always looking towards the “20%” -considering what lies beyond familiar experience.

As Professor Minnis’ discussion made clear, strategic leadership is not necessarily about having all the answers. It is about creating an organisation that can recognise what is changing, decide where it wants to go and remain capable of adjusting course along the way.

As featured on Scottish Construction Now

Back to News