Ahead of International Women’s Day this weekend, Board Member Al Simmonite, Managing Director of Advance Consultancy, offers a candid reflection on inclusion in the major projects sector. Drawing on more than thirty years of leadership experience, he challenges the industry to move beyond comfortable conversations and take real responsibility for creating genuinely inclusive project environments.
This weekend its International Women’s Day. The Major Projects Association are, rightly, marking it. And I want to use this opportunity to say something that might create a little discomfort – because I think the comfortable version of this conversation is part of the problem.
Inclusion events, inclusion programmes, inclusion networks. All of these have genuine value, and I do not diminish them. But there is a structural dynamic that we have not, as a sector, fully confronted: when the conversation about gender equality, about racial equality, about neurodiversity and every other form of exclusion that operates in our professional world is held primarily within the communities experiencing that exclusion, we have a problem. Not because those conversations are wrong – they are necessary – but because they are insufficient, and because they carry an implicit logic that is deeply counterproductive: that inclusion is something the excluded work on, rather than something the included are responsible for enabling.
I have been an advocate for inclusion across many dimensions of my professional career – genuinely, I believe, and not performatively. I believe this because in my thirty-plus years of experience in operational leadership, in project sponsorship and delivery and in collaborative practice in complex major projects, the most capable project environments I have encountered have been ones where genuinely different voices were heard, valued, and able to influence critical decisions. Not because diversity is a box to be ticked, but because complex problems require the full range of available human intelligence to be solved well – and our sector has consistently left significant portions of that intelligence on the table.
The Major Projects Association’s Inclusion Hub, which I have the privilege of representing at Board level, is working to change the conversation. But the change that matters most is not happening in dedicated inclusion forums. It is happening – or more precisely, it needs to happen – in the rooms where programme strategies are set, where senior leadership teams are designed, where the informal assumptions about who belongs and who leads are either challenged or reinforced.
The ask, this International Women’s Day, is straightforward: if you are someone with seniority and credibility in the major projects sector – and especially if you are someone who has not personally experienced exclusion – please consider this your conversation too. Not because you should feel guilty for how the sector was built. But because you have both the capability and the responsibility to be part of how it changes.
A challenge to our members
So, here is the challenge to our members: what are you doing? What tangible actions are you taking in your projects, your leadership teams, and your organisations to move inclusion from conversation to practice? Where are you challenging assumptions, opening doors, and sharing power? We invite you to reflect – and to share with us the practical steps you are taking to create an environment where everyone can contribute fully. Because inclusion is not a side agenda. It is central to delivering better major projects.