Building resilience and capability: Shaping the future of Morgan Sindall Construction

Case study

Steven Ridout Head of Design Management Cardiff/Bristol Time with business: 8 years, 2 months

I got involved with the Shaping our Future programme after I was contacted by my director, who recommended one of my direct reports. I thought the programme sounded great, and I asked to be involved in it too. I felt I had something to bring to the table and I think taking part has been very beneficial, both for me personally and for the business. It was very different to what we do normally. Spending time breaking down a problem in different ways before coming to a solution was a bit alien to us, but it worked. I think, as an industry, construction has got to change massively from this mindset that we do things how we have always done them. Two years ago, no one was asking us about embodied carbon or operational energy and now, suddenly, it is everything. As a business, we want to be the most sustainable option – the low carbon contractor of choice – but how do we go about doing that? How do we encourage collective responsibility, how do we recruit the right people to help us on our journey, and how do we spread the word across our supply chain? In all that, we have to come up with strategies that work for a decentralised business, which is always a challenge when you can’t implement something centrally and push that out. It can be frustrating and slow to implement change. But decentralisation is a core philosophy of our business, and it allows us in Cardiff to thrive because we’re not governed by central decisions, so I can see that it works.

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