Strategic Planning: Top Disruptions You Can’t Ignore

“If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll end up someplace else.” – Yogi Berra

This famous quote from Yogi Berra is highly applicable to strategic planning, as the process defines both where you are going and the roadmap to get there.

Yet, too often strategic planning is based upon looking through the rearview mirror instead of the front windshield. While past performance, strategies, and processes are important for developing strategic plans, they can’t be the only guide. Drive that way, and it’s only a matter of time before you hit an obstacle you didn’t see coming.

To truly prepare for the future, firms must anticipate what’s next. That means understanding the trends and disruptions already taking shape. At Stambaugh Ness, we build this forward focus into our strategic planning framework through a dedicated trends workshop and anticipatory thinking training.

Recently, we surveyed architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) firms nationwide to understand how they approach strategic planning, including how often it’s done, who is involved, what the strategic priorities are, and more. We also asked about the disruptions they expect in the coming years. From a lengthy list of possibilities, five emerged as the most urgent, based upon weighted average:

Skills Gap – Declining Knowledge of the Workforce

Three of the top five disruptions on the radars of firm leads right now deal with talent. This specific disruption relates to concerns we regularly hear from clients about the internal knowledge base at their firm. From recent college hires being less prepared for the job than their predecessors to the lack of mentoring across the organization to the inability to transfer knowledge from senior staff before they retire, this disruption is here and now. And it is getting worse with the acceleration of Baby Boomer retirements in recent years.

When considering the next generation entering the workforce, the refrain “they don’t know as much as we did at that age” has been shared across AEC offices for decades. But now it is not just a comment about recent college graduates, but rather about all levels of an organization.

Talent Shortage – Senior Level

“Peak 65” refers to a demographic trend that sees approximately 4.1 million Americans reaching age 65 between 2024 and 2027 – the largest wave of Americans becoming “retirement age.” This subset equates to more than 11,000 per day, and while it doesn’t mean that everyone is retiring as soon as their sixty-fifth birthday rolls around, it does herald a mass exodus of knowledge from the workforce.

Our survey asked specific questions about Baby Boomer retirements, and while retirements on the client side ranked as the seventh disruption, retirements internal to the firm ranked tenth. So there is more to this trend than retirements.

It has been well documented that Generation X, or those between 1965 and 1980, is a smaller generation than the Baby Boomers, so the pipeline of senior leaders is smaller, in a time when many firms have been enjoying years of sustained growth. Furthermore, the number of women in senior positions in AEC firms is woeful – just 11% of management positions in architecture and engineering, for instance, are held by women.

Furthermore, as much as 70% of women who earn a degree in engineering are no longer in the industry within two decades of graduation. Who will lead our firms tomorrow, particularly when you consider the missing middle trend below?

Economic Downturn

The strategic planning survey was conducted over July and August 2025, a time with much uncertainty over tarrifs (18th-ranked disruption), inflationary pressure (6th-ranked disruption), and continued high interest rates (9th-ranked disruption). So it is no wonder that firm leaders are very concerned about a potential economic downturn. The economy has shown remarkable resilience in the face of such uncertainty, although many of the primary economic indicators have been experiencing a downward trend. The Deltek/AIA Architectural Billings Index has tracked declining billings for the past two years.

While the yo-yo news of tariffs – on, off, high, low – hasn’t inspired confidence in the future economy, most economic forecasters still peg the odds of a near-term recession below 50%. And yet, that still leaves an uncomfortably high probability, and firms serving the vertical construction markets have certainly been more challenged in recent years than those serving the horizontal construction markets, which have significantly benefited from government programs like the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA). Thus, an increasing number of AEC firms are considering “What if…?” in their strategic plans to make sure they are prepared for an economic downturn.

Talent Shortage – Mid-Career Level

The lack of mid-career professionals – aka, The Missing Middle – has been near the top of AEC firm concerns in the annual Stambaugh Ness AEC Industry Outlook since we began publishing it three years ago. So it is no surprise to see it ranked as the number two anticipated disruption in our strategic planning survey. Many of the same factors that are driving the senior-level talent shortage are at play with the mid-career shortage; however, this is where the lack of mentoring and development of younger staff has come back to haunt firms.

Furthermore, generational differences are exacerbating the talent gap. Job hopping is common among the Millennial generation, with 21% of Millennials switching jobs over the past year, according to a 2025 Gallup Survey. On top of all this, both Millennials and Generation Z members are most likely to switch industries, with a recent Express Employment Professionals/Harris Poll survey finding that 56% of those cohorts are eager to switch industries. Factor in 70% of female engineering graduates leaving the industry within 20 years of graduation, and the AEC industry is experiencing a perfect storm in this area.

Artificial Intelligence

The top anticipated disruption is Artificial Intelligence (AI), which should not be a surprise. I’ve heard the creation of artificial intelligence equated to the discovery of fire. AI will be hugely disruptive to the AEC industry, particularly the office jobs from engineering to architecture to construction estimating. Although AEC is lagging behind other industries in AI development and adoption, this is changing. For instance, Bentley Systems’ OpenSite+ is promising to increase the speed of planning and design by up to ten times using its AI engine.

As new automation and AI technologies come online, it will undoubtedly take considerable time to test and eventually trust artificial intelligence, so job displacement is not imminent. However, we’re already seeing clients look out over the next 3-5 years in their strategic plan, and consider supplementing or even replacing staff with AI in production. So AI has the very real potential to help make up for the talent shortage facing AEC firms in the short term. But firms are also considering a very important question – a potential existential threat: what happens when the professionals who know how to design and construct a building have left the industry, and those left don’t truly understand “the math behind the calculator”?

Next Steps

Don’t wait for these disruptions to impact your business. To hear what else we learned from the AEC strategic planning survey, be sure to attend our upcoming webinar, The State of AEC Strategic Planning: Industry Trends & Insights. And if you are looking for seasoned AEC professionals to lead our next strategic planning process, let’s connect: contact us today!