National Highways opened bidding on Monday for a road maintenance framework worth up to £7.96bn, covering the 4,500-mile strategic network, collapsing ten area contracts into seven regional lots with one contractor each, and running from January 2028 to July 2037 (Construction Enquirer, 24 August 2026). SCAPE opened an £8bn framework the following morning: five lots, up to fifteen places, three delivery partners each (Construction Enquirer, 25 August 2026). The incumbent names on the two lists overlap heavily. Applications for the roads work close on 26 October.
Sixteen billion pounds of public work, two bidding processes running at once against the same deadline, and the same handful of contractors on both. Most of what those bid teams submit will be track record.
Asking for a track record is the reasonable thing to do. It is also the part of a submission I would want to read hardest, because a track record is a claim about the past that gets treated as a forecast.
The same organisation, different results, in the same week
BDUK’s August update puts Project Gigabit at 296,770 premises built against 846,770 contracted, 35% complete and up 9,260 on July. Cheshire, an Openreach lot, sits at 0%. Four further Openreach lots sit at 4% (ISPreview, 24 August 2026).
Openreach has built more fibre in this country than anyone. Whatever those lots are short of, organisational experience is not it.
I would not read a single percentage as a verdict. Lots start at different times, and a contract signed later reports a lower number for reasons that have nothing to do with how it is being run. What the spread does show is that experience held at group level does not arrive in a lot on its own. It arrives with particular people, particular working relationships with particular local authorities, and a particular way of sequencing wayleaves, permits and crews that somebody worked out on a previous job and then wrote down.
Where that transfer happens, a lot moves. Where it does not, the company’s history sits on the letterhead and nowhere else.
What management experience actually evidences
Experience is a record of exposure. It turns into competence in the places where something told the person they were wrong, early enough for them to change what they did next. Take that correction away and the years still accumulate. The practice stays where it was.
Kahneman and Klein spent years arguing about expert intuition and then wrote a joint paper setting out where they agreed. Skill develops in environments regular enough to contain a real pattern, and only where feedback returns quickly enough to be attached to the decision that caused it. Their line is blunter than anything I would write: “Subjective experience is not a reliable indicator of judgment accuracy” (American Psychologist, 2009).
Management struggles on both counts. The feedback arrives months later. It arrives mixed with a market movement, a contract variation and three other people’s decisions. Almost any outcome can be explained by conditions, and where it can be, it generally is.
Medicine has measured what that does over a career, in a field with far better feedback than management has. A systematic review of 62 evaluations found 32 of them, 52%, reporting performance declining as years in practice increased. One, 2%, reported it improving (Annals of Internal Medicine, 2005). Those are doctors, with test results, clinical audit and colleagues who see the same case.
In a fibre build, fifteen years can mean five regional programmes or one programme repeated in five places. The two CVs read almost identically. The question that separates them is what the person did differently on the second build and what told them to do it. I built and ran operations for a fibre broadband provider through its growth phase, and in that world the answer to that question is usually specific, technical and short.
Nothing in the job forces the correction
A third of current UK managers and leaders have never had any formal management or leadership training. 52% hold no management or leadership qualification, and 27% of workers rate their manager as highly effective. Among people newly entering management, the untrained share rises to 82% (CMI, October 2023).
That reading is now nearly three years old and CMI has not refreshed it, so treat it as a measurement taken at a date rather than a live number. More recent government data points the same way. In the Scottish volume of the Employer Skills Survey 2024, managers were among the least-trained occupations at 44%, and management training was one of the two least common kinds of training employers provided, at 34% against 32% two years earlier (Employer Skills Survey 2024, Scottish Government, October 2025).
The direction of travel is upward and slow. The ONS management practice score for firms in Great Britain rose from 0.49 in 2020 to 0.55 in 2023, and firms scoring higher on management practice show higher labour productivity and profitability (ONS, May 2024).
Put the three together. Most managers carry no formal training. The job returns feedback too slowly and too contaminated to correct anyone by itself. And the thing filling the gap is the person’s own accumulated sense of how this usually goes.
The half of this that is awkward to write
That accumulated sense is worth a great deal. A manager who has run the work for fifteen years reads a site, a programme and a contractor faster than anyone who has only studied them. Judgement and instinct built in the field are real assets, and I would take that person over a fresh methodologist most weeks of the year.
The trouble starts where those qualities are asked to carry the whole job. They work well alongside a method and badly in place of one. A business that has never written down how it plans, delegates, checks and corrects is asking every manager to invent all four privately, then reading the variation between them as a difference in calibre.
It is usually a difference in what each person happened to be exposed to.
What a buyer is reading
In diligence, a management team gets assessed on CVs and a few hours of conversation. Years in post is the cheapest proxy for capability available inside that timetable, so it gets used.
Where the proxy is wrong, the cost lands in the hold period rather than in the price. A value-creation plan is built on the assumption that the incumbent team can execute it, the plan slips, and the correction typically arrives as a change of management eighteen months in, at the point where the time left to compound anything has already shortened. That is one of the more expensive ways to discover that a long CV and a working method are separate purchases. Assessing what a manager can actually do, rather than what they have been present for, is cheaper before the deal than after it.
Four questions worth more than the CV
The useful move here is to test what the experience contains. Four questions do most of the work, and they take about twenty minutes.
What have you changed your mind about in this role, and what changed it? A person who cannot answer has either been right about everything for fifteen years or has never had a loop that told them otherwise. The second is far more common, and it is a property of the job rather than a character defect.
Show me one thing this operation does differently because you were here. The answer worth having names something they installed that outlasts them, rather than something that happened while they held the post.
Where is the feedback loop on your own decisions, and how long does it take to close? If the honest answer is the annual accounts, the correction is arriving too late and too blended to teach anybody anything.
When did someone last watch you do the job? Observation in role is rare in British management above supervisor level, which is a large part of why the training figures move so slowly from survey to survey. A manager nobody has watched for fifteen years has fifteen years of unreviewed practice.
Run those four across a team and the answers separate quickly. Building the missing method into the people already in post is almost always cheaper than replacing them, and it produces something the next fifteen years can compound on.
Before the next bid, or the next hire
The frameworks closing in October will be won substantially on what the bidders have done before. Fair enough. The harder question sits inside the winner, on the morning the mobilisation starts: of everything this organisation learned on the last one, how much is written down, and how much is standing in a corridor waiting to be asked.
References
- Construction Enquirer. “National Highways fires gun on £8bn roads upkeep deal.” 24 August 2026. Read Article
- Construction Enquirer. “SCAPE opens bidding for £8bn construction framework.” 25 August 2026. Read Article
- ISPreview. “August 2026 Contract Progress of UK Project Gigabit Broadband Rollout.” 24 August 2026. Read Article
- Kahneman, D. and Klein, G. “Conditions for Intuitive Expertise: A Failure to Disagree.” American Psychologist, 64(6), 2009.
- Choudhry, N., Fletcher, R. and Soumerai, S. “Systematic Review: The Relationship between Clinical Experience and Quality of Health Care.” Annals of Internal Medicine, 142(4), 15 February 2005. Read Article
- Chartered Management Institute. “Better Management Report: Take Responsibility, Take Action.” October 2023. Read Article
- Scottish Government. “Employer Skills Survey 2024, Scotland: training and workforce development.” 8 October 2025. Read Article
- Office for National Statistics. “Management practices in the UK: 2016 to 2023.” 13 May 2024. Read Article
