Arcadis on Resilience and Uncertainty in Construction

Resilience in construction is a hot topic as businesses in the sector look ahead and try to prepare for an uncertain world. We spoke to Heather Polinsky, CEO nominee of global engineering, design, and consultancy firm Arcadis, to get her perspective on the complexity of the sector today, the uncertainty facing construction firms, and the trade-offs and decisions industry leaders have to make.

Heather is a 27-year veteran of Arcadis and has previously held executive roles, including most recently as Global President of Resilience & Mobility, leading a team of over 18,000 Arcadians focused on successfully driving growth and positive impact. Her experience leading complex portfolios through market shifts gives her a unique vantage point to reflect on resilience and uncertainty in construction.

Why is resilience such a priority in construction now?

The world of construction is changing faster than ever.  Sector risks are now combining with broader economic, political and global developments, creating a series of connected challenges that every business in the industry must navigate.

Heather says: “There’s geopolitical uncertainty, there’s supply chain fragmentation and supply chain risk, there’s grid constraints, there’s digital transformation. You have climate impacts that you overlay on top of that, and then regulatory evolution.”

In that context, resilience is never limited to a single function or discipline. When financial pressures, technological changes or people challenges emerge, they rarely do so in isolation. For many construction organisations, resilience is shaped in thousands of daily decisions – on site and in the office- where planning, cost control and resource choices determine whether uncertainty is absorbed or amplified.

“If one part of the organisation is weak – financial, technological or people – it affects everything else,” says Heather. Resilience, therefore, demands operational rigour and cultural alignment, not isolated interventions. It isn’t a quick fix. She continues: “This is something you build over time. It’s a muscle.”

Uncertainty has always existed. What has changed is its speed, interdependence, and persistence. One risk quickly becomes a chain reaction across delivery, cost, talent and reputation.

How should the construction sector think about resilience?

“Many leaders equate resiliency with control. But to be in a world where there’s persistent uncertainty, control is an illusion. It’s not a question of whether volatility will occur; it’s when and how prepared and agile your organisation is. ”

This suggests construction leaders may need to change their mindset, recognising that resilience is a long-term problem and that short-term reactive solutions to uncertainty are not suitable. She continues: “The biggest challenge is complacency – not responding to change or treating each risk as isolated rather than anticipating how multiple risks are converging at the same time.”

That matters because a lot of industry responses still treat resilience as defensive – as protection. Heather views it differently. “Resilience is strategic because it allows organisations to maintain decision quality under pressure and protect performance when uncertainty increases.”

The need to balance long-term thinking with short-term risk

How to effectively plan for the future while ensuring short-term profitability and success is an age-old question in construction. With today’s challenges, it is arguably harder than ever to balance commercial realities with long-term planning – so how can construction businesses manage those pressures effectively to build resilience?

Heather says: “As simple as it might sound, the biggest struggle is that we misdiagnose what that risk is. It’s easy to jump to conclusions. It’s easy to take the convenient truth rather than truly understanding that connection between the short-term and the long term. At project level, this often shows up as late visibility into cost, capacity or planning impacts, when options are already limited and risks have become harder to manage.”

For Heather and Arcadis, the key to dealing with risk effectively while also building resilience for the future lies in creating the right commercial models, staying open to innovative them, and choosing the right construction technologies to work more productively and collaboratively. Doing so, she says, “[will] help us better manage that short-term and long-term consistently.”

“This is where portfolio diversification and agility matter. If market demand shifts, resilience means redeploying leadership attention, talent and investment quickly without losing delivery discipline. Technology plays a crucial role in accelerating decision‑making. But only when it provides teams with reliable, consistent insight into planning, cost and performance, and supports disciplined execution across projects.” Heather adds.

What other risks do companies face when trying to build resilience?

Beyond financial risk, construction companies face three critical challenges: workforce capacity, trustworthy data, and the power requirements of an increasingly digital industry. Heather believes all three problems come down to leadership questions more than engineering or resourcing problems, saying: “Commercial forces are already pushing the industry towards operating differently, where we have to think less about the perfect process and more about how we progress with discipline and informed insight. Progress over perfection is essential.”

“Companies that make early decisions and defensible choices are the ones that will thrive under uncertainty. Resilience won’t come from hiring harder. It will come from redesigning how we work and how we use, strengthening and scaling knowledge effectively before it walks out the door.”

Digital tools add value when they move decisions upstream, improve certainty and reduce rework, particularly in complex projects where late changes and interface risk erode margin.

The objective isn’t more tools. It’s better decisions, made earlier, with clearer accountability to strengthen both performance and resilience.

Building resilience ultimately requires more than intent. It requires a structured digital foundation that brings data, planning and financial control together — enabling earlier decisions, clearer accountability and more predictable outcomes.

Want to know more about how construction companies can respond to uncertainty and build long-term resilience?

The uncertainty in the sector makes building resilience harder than ever. Where this discussion focuses on the leadership reality of uncertainty, our e‑book “From uncertainty to resilience: The digital future of Construction” provides more structure and practical guidance for organisations looking to make resilience more manageable and actionable.

Click here to download the e-book today.