What the UK’s Infrastructure challenges reveal about strategic leadership

What the UK’s infrastructure challenges reveal about strategic leadership

A note from Al Simmonite, Managing Director, Advance Consultancy:
I’ve been thinking a lot about the big stories that shape our headlines, and the bigger questions underneath them. Here’s where my head’s been this month…

HS2. Crossrail. So many major UK infrastructure projects that begin with huge ambition, and then stumble in ways that feel all too familiar.

Having spent decades working alongside teams tasked with delivering complex, high-stakes programmes, I find myself asking:

What do these recurring patterns say about our collective capability to turn national goals into reality?

The questions that keep me up at night.

We all know the usual headlines: missed deadlines, blown budgets, delayed delivery. But what about the bigger question underneath?

What does it mean when a nation consistently struggles to deliver the infrastructure it knows it needs?

The National Infrastructure Commission’s 2024 report called out “a lack of a long-term strategic vision and plan.” But in my experience, the gap isn’t just about vision, it’s about our capacity to execute, to learn, and to sustain complex delivery over decades.

In the best leadership teams I work with, there’s always a hard moment early on: the moment they ask if they truly have the capability to match their ambition. They test assumptions about skills, resources, readiness, before making bold promises.

How often do we do that at a national level?

The complexity of national capability.

The UK’s Major Projects Portfolio now includes 244 projects worth £805 billion, yet we still talk about a “project management skills shortage.”

The truth is, this isn’t just a training gap. It’s about how we build and protect deep, institutional knowledge, the kind of expertise that stays alive between projects, not just within them.

The highest-performing teams I know treat every project as a chance to build “institutional memory.” They capture lessons. They develop people systematically. They create pathways for know-how to be shared and retained, so the same hard lessons aren’t learned twice.

It makes me wonder:

Do we have the frameworks and culture to support that kind of long-term learning at a national scale? Or are we still hoping each new project will succeed in spite of the same old structural gaps?

The leadership question we’re not asking.

One thing that’s stuck with me lately is the link between accountability and learning.

In organisations, the best teams create what I call intelligent accountability, the conditions to surface problems early, fix them fast, and keep moving.

At a national level, are we creating those same conditions? Or are we still stuck in cycles where admitting a problem feels too risky, so issues get buried until they become headlines?

Bridging vision and execution

Whether you’re delivering national infrastructure or leading a complex transformation inside an organisation, the fundamentals don’t really change:

• Be honest about capability.
• Invest systematically in people and knowledge.
• Build a culture where it’s safe to raise problems before they become crises.

Because at the heart of it, the UK’s infrastructure challenge isn’t just about engineering, funding or politics, it’s about the kind of strategic leadership that can bridge the gap between vision and practical execution. It’s about our collective will to learn from each project and grow real, embedded capability over time.

Where Do We Go From Here?

So here’s what I’m left wondering:

What would it take to create the kind of leadership culture that can consistently deliver on our national ambitions?

How do we rethink capability, accountability and learning so that we don’t keep repeating the same patterns?

I’d love to hear your perspective, whether you work in infrastructure or not.

What have you seen play out in big, complex programmes? Where have you seen capability and culture make the real difference? And what could we do differently, right now, to make sure the next generation of projects succeed where so many have stumbled?

Get in touch if you’d like to talk about what it means to build this kind of strategic capability in your own organisation.

Because if there’s one thing I know for certain: vision alone won’t deliver it. But smart, honest, learning-focused leadership might.