Six years on from the collapse of Carillion, the failure of ISG has reignited the debate about the construction industry and its broken model. In Modernise or Die, published two years before the Carillion liquidation, I warned of an “inexorable decline” in the industry’s fortunes unless things changed. Here and now, in 2024, it feels like the industry is continuing on its insidious course towards even choppier waters.

The brutal reality is that the industry at large is unable to reform unilaterally at scale in response to this or likely further major corporate failures. It is just too fragmented to perform a collective about-turn on how it does business, and there are still no significant external initiators to break out of a vicious circle of doing the same thing day after day.

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