Over the last 13 years, I’ve been fortunate to work across a diverse range of industries: telecom, e-commerce, advertising, iGambling, finance, energy, and more recently, construction and infrastructure. Each of these domains comes with its own unique contexts, cultures, and constraints. But they all face a common challenge: how to become more adaptive, resilient, and outcome-oriented in a world of accelerating change.
In this new series, I’ll be sharing lessons I've learned about what exercising true business agility looks like in different domains. My goal is simple: help organizations build systems and structures that are not only robust but fit for flow, responsive to change, value-focused, and grounded in continuous learning.
Let’s start with the Construction & Infrastructure (C&I) industry. It’s often seen as one of the most “traditional” domains, project-heavy, deeply specialized, and historically distant from the product paradigm or a relentless focus on end-users. But make no mistake, competition still exists. And in an industry where delays and cost overruns are the norm, the ability to leverage business agility can be the difference between leading the market and becoming obsolete.
Here are five key insights I’ve gathered from working within the Construction & Infrastructure sector:
1. Safety Is the North Star
During one of my early experiences in this space, I encountered a striking OKR, “Zero fatalities and major injuries.” That wasn’t a marketing slogan. It was a deeply embedded operational goal, guiding decisions and behaviors from top floor to the job site. An incredible amount of time and energy goes into proactive checks, incident prevention, and, when things do go wrong, - rigorous root cause analysis and learning.
This focus on safety is often foreign to those of us coming from digital-first environments. But it serves as a powerful reminder, our work, whether on-screen or on-site, has real-world consequences. Every decision, delay, or oversight can ripple downstream, affecting people’s lives. Business agility in C&I must be grounded in this reality, human impact always comes first.
2. Lack of Transparency Breeds Fragility
Large-scale infrastructure projects typically involve a complex web of subcontractors, external vendors, and regulatory bodies. This layered delivery model introduces massive coordination challenges and exposes the system to risks like poor quality, delays, misaligned incentives, and more often than you might think - corruption.
Transparency isn’t just a governance checkbox, it’s the bedrock of trust, flow, and effective decision-making. Without shared context, common tooling, and aligned incentives, teams operate in silos and lose the system-wide view.
Creating visibility across the entire value stream, from idea to operation, is key. This doesn’t mean tracking everything. It means surfacing the right signals at the right time to enable coherent, timely decisions across the delivery chain.
3. End-to-End Accountability Wins
Construction projects typically unfold in three broad phases:
Decide – Understand the demand and make a commitment.
Design – Plan the what, how, and when.
Develop – Execute and build until the asset is operational.
In theory, it’s a clean progression. In practice, it’s fragmented. Designs are often created by engineers who’ve never been on-site, without consultation from those who’ll execute the work. By the time feedback comes in, it’s too late or too expensive to act on it.
Here’s where cross-functional, end-to-end (E2E) accountability comes in. High-performing teams in C&I are those that break down silos and bring together planners, designers, builders, and operators into a shared mission, not sequentially, but concurrently. They operate like true value stream teams, taking collective ownership from concept to concrete.
When delivery is disconnected from discovery, waste skyrockets. When teams own the full arc of value, flow improves, and so does the outcome.
4. Manage the Portfolio first, then manage the Projects
Construction organizations rarely have the luxury of one project at a time. They juggle portfolios of initiatives, bridges, roads, plants, railways, each with varying complexity, risk, and strategic value. This is where Lean Portfolio Management becomes a game-changer.
Understanding interdependencies, shared resource constraints, and strategic priorities across the portfolio helps avoid bottlenecks and misaligned tradeoffs. But more importantly, it helps limit WIP and align efforts with actual capacity, not theoretical capacity.
Another hard truth, value in C&I is often binary. There is either a bridge to cross the river or there isn’t. Until completion, partial value is minimal. This increases pressure to finish what’s started, and it elevates the cost of delay. Agility in this context isn’t about pivoting on a whim, it’s about making better bets earlier, and finishing what matters most.
5. Milestones Should Enable Flow, Not Block It
Because these projects span years (even decades), they’re broken into milestones for tracking progress. But most milestone planning is done in a way that favors compliance over learning. Rarely are milestones tied to:
The release or reallocation of critical resources
Integration points that validate assumptions
Feedback loops that inform downstream decisions
Flow-based thinking encourages designing milestones as evolutionary checkpoints, places where we learn something new, unlock capacity, or make better-informed choices. Milestones should serve agility, not delay it. And they should always be tied to value realization, not just activity completion.
Learning from the Past, Don’t Repeat These Mistakes
Across the world, we’ve seen high-profile C&I projects fail due to poor planning, scope creep, broken feedback loops, and lack of systemic thinking. A few infamous examples:
Berlin Brandenburg Airport (BER), Germany – Plagued by technical failures, poor coordination, and over a decade of delay.
California High-Speed Rail, USA – A cautionary tale in underestimating complexity, cost, and political entropy.
Hinkley Point C Nuclear Plant, UK – Billions over budget with repeated schedule slips, despite deep technical expertise.
These aren’t just anomalies, they're signals. We can, and must, learn from them. The antidote is not more control. It’s more clarity, cohesion, and collaboration. It's agility, done right.
Final Thoughts, Business Agility in C&I is Possible, and Urgent
Business agility is not a buzzword. It’s an operating model for a world that doesn’t sit still. And in Construction & Infrastructure, where stakes are high, systems are complex, and delays are costly, it might just be the edge that separates thriving from surviving.
If you’re in this space, start small, think big, and involve the whole system. Build cross-functional teams, manage flow across the portfolio, and tie milestones to learning, not just deadlines.
Most importantly, stay humble. The best way to build the future is to learn from those who tried, and failed, before you.