David Rockhill, Global Head of Advisory at Arcadis, has spent 25 years going from structural engineer to McKinsey partner to leading a 36,000-person built environment business. His view on what AEC actually needs right now is uncomfortable for an industry that prizes deep specialism: more generalists, more outsider thinking, and bolder targets backed by clearer plans. The lessons are practical, the stakes are enormous, and most of it comes down to one habit, picking a number and making the organisation believe it.
Construction is one of the biggest industries in the world, with one of the widest gaps between ambition and delivery. McKinsey estimates around $69.4 trillion in global infrastructure investment will be needed between now and 2035, yet productivity has barely moved in two decades. The labour problem is just as stark. Deloitte projects the US E&C industry needs 499,000 new workers in 2026, up from 439,000 in 2025.
That is the backdrop for David Rockhill’s work. He runs the consulting arm of Arcadis, helping clients make harder front-end decisions on major projects, from investment cases to supply chain capacity to delivery models. His background is unusual for someone in that seat, structural engineer first, then a decade-plus in management consulting at McKinsey, now back inside an engineering business. The lessons he has pulled out of 25 years across both worlds are about how AEC leaders, and ConTech founders selling to them, can get transformation to land.
Have a mission, stray out of your lane, set bold targets with credible plans, and lead teams in a way that builds real resilience. Simple to say, much harder to actually do.
The mission beats the plan
Why anchoring on a long-term goal frees you up to change everything else
Rockhill’s career has gone sideways more than once. From structural design into management consulting at McKinsey, then back into engineering as an advisory leader at Arcadis. The thread connecting all of it is what he calls a mission, getting cool infrastructure built and improving quality of life through the built environment. The mission stayed the same. The role kept changing. Most career advice is built around 10-year goals and rigid plans, but Rockhill argues the opposite. Set short-term goals you can actually attack with energy, two or three years out, but anchor them in a long-term mission. As long as each move points roughly in the right direction, the path will look chaotic but the destination won’t change. For founders the same logic holds. Products evolve, strategy evolves, but the mission is the check that you are still going where you said you would.
Stray out of your lane
Outsider thinking is not optional in an industry this stuck
One of Rockhill’s most useful habits is doing work outside his own discipline. Two examples stick out. As a young engineer he hired an illustrator into the firm and started using sketches instead of standard 2D drawings in client reports. People didn’t get it. The clients responded immediately. Later, working with a builders’ merchant, he brought experience designers into a project on how craftspeople actually buy materials. The finding surprised the client. Tradespeople didn’t love coming into the store. They came because home delivery was unreliable and because they could price-arbitrage between branches of the same chain. The “in-person preference” the client was betting strategy on was a workaround for two operational failures.
I love that moment where you bring someone who takes a different perspective, and you can create something really new for a client. We need more of that.David Rockhill, Global Head of Advisory, Arcadis
For Digital Pragmatists running construction businesses, this is the case for hiring outside the industry, not instead of deep expertise, alongside it. It’s a pattern we’ve seen across the Foundamental University masterclasses, the operators making real progress combine domain credibility with people who didn’t come up through construction.
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Watch the MasterclassAmbitious, not reckless
Why picking a number matters more than forecasting one
The single sharpest idea in Rockhill’s masterclass is the difference between an ambition and a forecast. A forecast is meant to be accurate. An ambition is meant to move an organisation. Confuse the two and you either get timid targets nobody cares about, or bold numbers nobody believes.
He tells the story of a CEO who set a 15% productivity improvement target for maintenance operations over three years. When Rockhill asked how he arrived at the number, the answer was, “we picked one.” The 15% came first. The plan, initiatives, and accountability were built underneath it. That is the right order. Target high enough to force creative thinking, then back it with a baseline people can see themselves moving from. The opposite trap, ambition with no plan, is just as common, and it’s why new CEOs setting bold targets so often get politely ignored.
| Approach | What it looks like | What it produces |
|---|---|---|
| Forecast disguised as ambition | “We think we can grow 3% next year” | Timid targets, no creative pressure, incremental thinking |
| Ambition with no plan | “We’re going to double the business” (no baseline, no initiatives) | Organisation tunes out, leader loses credibility |
| Ambition with a plan | “15% productivity gain in three years, here are the initiatives” | Stretch targets people can rally around, real transformation |
Lead teams like the work is the work
Resilience comes from how you behave when things break, not when they don’t
Rockhill is clear that high-performing teams are the engine of any advisory or engineering business. The most formative moments for him as a leader weren’t the wins, they were the disasters. Errors in a design. Analysis that didn’t land with a client. He has worked under leaders who responded to those moments by applying more pressure, “just fix it, just make it happen.” He has also worked with leaders who sat down next to the team, rolled up their sleeves, and got into the work. That second behaviour is what he tries to model now. Combined with regular pulse checks on team health and visible role modelling on things like client time, feedback, and safety, you get an organisation that can absorb shocks. For ConTech founders building in a market with long sales cycles and skeptical buyers, the same logic applies. The culture you build in good months is the culture that has to carry you through bad ones.
The opportunity sitting in plain sight
Why Rockhill is bullish on engineering design as the next big unlock
Asked where he sees the biggest opportunity in AEC right now, Rockhill points to engineering design workflows. Engineers are scarce and expensive, and a meaningful share of their time goes to document management and admin that doesn’t add much to the finished asset. Strip that out with AI and you free up technical talent to work on the harder, higher-value problems, smarter assets, better use of existing infrastructure, and the kind of transformation an industry running on 2 to 3% margins desperately needs.
David Rockhill is Global Head of Advisory at Arcadis, a global engineering and built environment consultancy with around 36,000 employees. He trained as a structural and geotechnical engineer, spent over a decade in management consulting including ten years at McKinsey, and now leads the advisory business focused on helping clients make better front-end decisions on major projects. (Source)
A forecast is meant to predict what will actually happen, so accuracy matters. An ambition is meant to motivate an organisation to stretch towards a target, so it’s deliberately set higher than what the current trajectory predicts. Rockhill argues that confusing the two is one of the most common leadership failures, leaders either set forecasts as if they were ambitions (too cautious) or set ambitions with no plan underneath (so nobody believes them). (Source)
The industry has plenty of deep specialists. What it lacks, in Rockhill’s view, is people who can move across disciplines and bring outside perspectives into traditional engineering and construction problems. Bringing in experience designers, illustrators, or operators from other industries surfaces blind spots that insiders can’t see. With the scale of transformation AEC needs to deliver on infrastructure, energy transition, and housing, that cross-pollination is no longer a nice-to-have. (Source)
McKinsey has estimated that around $69.4 trillion in global infrastructure investment will be needed between now and 2035. The World Bank-linked Global Infrastructure Hub puts the shortfall against current spending trends at roughly $18 trillion, with the biggest gaps in roads and electricity. The construction industry as a whole accounts for roughly 13% of global GDP. (Source)
Arcadis is a global consultancy of around 36,000 architects, engineers, project managers, and scientists working across the built and natural environment. Projects range from the Hudson Gateway Tunnel in New York to environmental remediation, water systems, and major real estate work. The advisory business that Rockhill leads helps clients make front-end decisions on major projects, including investment cases, organisation design for capital programmes, supply chain capacity, and procurement transformation. (Source)
Rockhill points to engineering design workflows. Engineers are a scarce resource, and a significant share of their time goes to document management and admin that doesn’t add value to the finished asset. AI and automation that strip out that work would free engineering capacity for the higher-value design and delivery problems the industry actually needs to solve. (Source)
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