Why Strategy Fails Before It Starts
Construction businesses face unique strategic challenges. Market volatility, economic cycles, and unpredictable external forces make traditional strategic planning difficult. Helen explains that organizations often attempt to be strategic but struggle against forces they cannot control: economic pressures, political decisions, and contractual constraints.
Yet we know uncertainty is the norm. The real question isn't whether to plan, but how to build resilience into our businesses so we can weather these storms and emerge ready for transformation.
What Strategy Actually Is
Strategy gets weaponized as a buzzword. It gets branded with logos, it sits in annual reports, but people don't know what it means for their day-to-day work. Helen distinguishes between strategy and its implementation: a solid strategy must cascade throughout the organization, changing how people behave and make decisions.
True strategy is about the neurological system of a business. It's the infrastructure that ensures every limb and touchpoint of the organization understands direction and can send critical information back up to leadership. Without implementation and embedding, you don't have a strategy. You have marketing theater.
The Danger of Ignoring Market Reality
Helen has reviewed strategies where business leaders ignored obvious market realities. They'd won good projects and felt optimistic, but ignored rampant price inflation, labor challenges, and upcoming regulation like the Building Safety Act. A good strategy starts with a very honest, very critical assessment of your actual market.
You must understand your competitive position within that market and where you add unique value. Ignoring reality doesn't make it go away. It just means your strategy won't align with what your people actually experience in their work.
Why Culture Must Come First
Traditional strategic models developed in the 1950s through 1970s don't account for what we now know about occupational psychology and modern workforces. Helen's approach is different: she starts with culture. She doesn't use off-the-shelf frameworks. She learns your business first, feels your culture, then chooses which strategic framework makes sense for you.
Culture must be integrated into strategy from the beginning, not added as a checkbox later. If you implement digital transformation without addressing your culture, without understanding the people who make it happen, none of it lands the way you intended.
Regulation, Risk, and the Data Gap
The UK construction industry faces unprecedented change. Regulation, legislation, and competency requirements force businesses to transform how they operate. Organizations get excited about digital platforms, but forget the critical piece: data governance.
Without good data strategy and governance, the data you collect today won't feed predictive models effectively tomorrow. There's a skills gap and a procedural gap. Data shouldn't live in a silo. It should be democratized, embedded in everyone's job, with clear understanding of why that data matters and how quality and context make all the difference.
How Blame Culture Blocks Progress
Construction has a pervasive blame culture. When Helen worked in scaffolding, every operative asked the same question: if I speak up about what's not right, will I get in trouble? Will I get my friend in trouble? That single question reveals everything about how an organization communicates.
Psychological safety is the foundation of high-performing teams. Google's Project Aristotle found this. High-performing teams report more mistakes not because they make more mistakes, but because they report them and fix them faster. Helen has spent years advocating for this in construction, particularly after health and safety transformed their culture around reporting and collaboration.
Neurodiversity and Rethinking Learning
Construction attracts neurodivergent talent. People with ADHD, dyslexia, autism spectrum traits choose hands-on work because they're kinesthetic learners. Yet our training systems are built for classroom learning and reading. When Helen ran a supervisor training academy, 85% of scaffolders tested as kinesthetic learners as part of their learning profile.
Many left school thinking they weren't good at learning. School taught to visual and read-write learners, then told everyone else they weren't learning properly. The problem wasn't the learners. The problem was how they were being taught. This carries into our organizations, creating self-esteem issues and untapped potential.
Rebuilding Confidence Through Training
Helen completely redesigned the supervisor training academy to accommodate kinesthetic learners and neurodiversity. She changed the physical environment: adjusted acoustics, changed wall colors, removed fluorescent reds that affect neurodivergent perception, used dyslexic-friendly fonts. She introduced fidget tools and movement throughout.
Content became kinesthetic too. Labour planning became a game with Top Trumps featuring celebrities. Managing conflict was taught through the Chimp Paradox, giving learners a neurological framework for understanding their own behavior. Within a week, a supervisor naturally said "My chimp's playing up" when stressed. Helen had given them language to understand themselves and autonomy to express what they needed.
Psychological Safety as a Performance Strategy
Psychological safety isn't just about speaking up on safety issues. It drives efficiency, productivity, quality, and innovation. When people feel safe reporting what's not working, you improve at exponential rates. Yet many organizations have a "no bad news" culture where leaders don't want to hear problems.
You can't fix what you don't know about. Organizations must create environments where people speak up, share ideas, and contribute information that changes strategy. This requires leadership visible commitment to psychological safety and systematic removal of blame language from culture and contracts.
Giving Language to Leadership and Emotion
Giving people language reduces stigma and creates agency. When Helen introduced neuroscience concepts in an accessible, fun way, people gained frameworks for understanding their own behavior and their teams. The Chimp Paradox became a shared vocabulary. When someone said "my chimp's playing up," everyone understood they needed a moment to regulate before making decisions.
This transforms how teams communicate. Instead of blame ("You're being emotional"), people say "I'm in a moment right now." Instead of judgment, there's understanding. Instead of avoidance, there's direct communication grounded in common language.
The Link Between Learning, Mental Health, and Productivity
Construction faces a mental health crisis. Much of it connects to how people have learned they "aren't good" at work, how shame attaches to asking for help, how blame cultures make people hide struggles. When you design learning experiences that work with how people actually learn, you restore confidence and capability.
Productivity isn't just about processes and metrics. It's about psychological health, confidence, and belonging. When someone realizes they can learn and enjoy learning, when they're in an environment where mistakes are fixed rather than punished, everything changes. Performance follows naturally.
Strategy as a Living, Breathing System
Strategy isn't something you write once and execute for five years. It's a living organism that must evolve as your market changes. Include your entire organization in keeping strategy alive. Be comfortable changing objectives when they stop working. Create feedback loops where frontline workers can signal when strategy needs adjustment.
This requires the kind of culture Helen describes. Without psychological safety and trust, your strategy becomes disconnected from reality. With it, strategy becomes the neurological system that keeps your business healthy and responsive.
Rapid-Fire Q&A with Helen Gawor
Book Recommendation: The Fearless Organization by Amy Edmondson. Helen recommends this so frequently she says Amy owes her commission. She's even bought copies for distribution.
Go-To Source for Different Perspectives: Her tribe. Helen emphasizes the difference between a network and a tribe. A network is connections. A tribe is people who share your beliefs and vision for the future, people you can trust and lean on.
Advice to Younger Self: Trust yourself. Even now, Helen finds herself second-guessing. But months pass and she realizes she was right. That instinct, that conviction when you truly trust yourself, is invaluable.
Trend Shaping Construction's Future: Automation and predictive analytics (specifically, not just AI in general). But this only works if you get your data right. Bad data amplified by AI is still bad data.
Industry Tagline: "Creating the societies and communities of tomorrow." Construction builds the places where people heal, learn, work, and raise families. That's the real story construction should tell.
