35 years ago, Richard Barrett was a young civil engineer in Queensland. Today, he leads more than 3,000 people across AECOM Canada as the Regional Chief Executive.

The journey between those two moments has taken him across two countries, thousands of kilometres of infrastructure, and some of the industry’s most complex projects.  

Along the way, Richard has moved from designing and delivering projects to leading the people and teams behind them. Three years ago, after more than three decades in Australia, Richard moved halfway around the world to begin a new chapter in Canada. 

Starting again in a new country gave him something few leaders get: the opportunity to see a familiar industry with fresh eyes. 

Today, his perspective is shaped by both sides of the Pacific. His Australian career shaped his belief in collaboration, relationships and outcome-driven delivery. His Canadian chapter has challenged him to look at familiar questions from a different lens. 

We sat down with Richard to talk about the journey, the lessons along the way, and what he believes matters most when you are building infrastructure—and the relationships behind it.

Finding purpose in infrastructure 

For Richard, the attraction to engineering was never simply about designing things. 

It was about what those things could make possible. 

His father worked in the industry, and his older brother spent his career as an engineer within one of Australia’s state highway agencies. Richard began his own career there before moving into consulting engineering. 

What continued to draw him in was the opportunity to work from the earliest stages of a project—to understand the problem, define what needed to be solved and work with others to develop a solution. 

Over more than three decades, he watched the industry evolve from a more traditional approach to one increasingly focused on collaboration between owners, designers, contractors and communities. 

For Richard, that evolution has reinforced something he has believed throughout his career: the best infrastructure outcomes come from people solving difficult problems together. 

Two countries, a shared purpose 

Moving from Australia to Canada might seem like a significant cultural shift, but Richard says the transition was surprisingly seamless. He says that Australians, Kiwis and Canadians have a lot in common. 

Upon his move here, the scale and pace of Canada’s infrastructure program stood out immediately, as did the quality and diversity of the people he encountered. 

He jokes about Canada’s two seasons—winter and construction—but says the country’s changing seasons have become one of the things he and his family enjoy most about living here.  

More importantly, he has come to appreciate Canada’s depth of talent. 

What each country can learn from the other 

Perhaps one of the most valuable perspectives Richard brings to Canada is his experience watching the infrastructure industry evolve in Australia. 

One area where he sees a particularly interesting parallel is collaborative project delivery. 

Australia began embracing alliancing and other collaborative delivery models more extensively in the early to mid-2000s. Richard has been involved in more than a dozen major alliances throughout his career, including as a business chief executive or operational leader. 

Canada, he observes, is now on a similar journey. 

At the same time, Richard points to Canada’s deep experience in public-private partnerships as offering useful lessons in how to create frameworks that attract private investment and improve delivery. 

For Richard, the value isn’t in deciding which country has the better approach. It is in learning from both.

Collaboration doesn’t just happen

After decades of experience with relation-based delivery, Richard has developed a clear view of what makes collaboration work to provide exceptional outcomes; and it is not simply the contract.

“Collaboration doesn’t just happen. It comes from having the right people and the right leadership at the table to build a collaborative culture, and supporting it with the right commercial model.”

He has seen well-designed alliance contracts fail when individuals or organizations remain focused on protecting their own interests rather than aligning around the owner’s objectives and the outcomes sought for the community. 

The leadership challenge is therefore to foster a different mindset around a common definition of success: one where everyone involved understands what success looks like for the owner and the community and recognises that their own success flows from achieving those outcomes. 

For Richard, that mindset is just as important outside formal alliance models. 

Traditional contracting can cause people to hold back ideas out of concern that it may later be used against them. That can slow decision making, reduce transparency and lead to missed opportunities for innovation. 

The contract model can help create the conditions for collaboration—but ultimately, Richard says, leaders must model the behaviour they want to see.  

The Tully Alliance: when listening changed the outcome

One memorable example from Richard’s career is the Tully Alliance in Queensland. 

The project involved upgrading approximately 16 kilometres of a national highway across a major flood plain in one of Australia’s wettest regions with an average annual rainfall exceeding 4m. The road was regularly cut by flood waters during the wet season, while the surrounding area included environmentally sensitive and rich agricultural land. 

The team faced several possible road alignment options, each with different technical, environmental and community impacts. 

Instead of presenting the community with a predetermined solution, the alliance team took the options into the community and openly discussed the trade-offs and engineering constraints and invited local stakeholders to help shape the outcome. 

They explained the engineering constraints, listened to local perspectives and worked through the alternatives together. 

The result was more than a technically sound solution.  It was a solution the community understood and supported because people felt their perspectives had genuinely been heard. 

The experience shaped the team’s approach for the remainder of the project. Community engagement wasn’t treated as a separate activity undertaken at key milestones.  It became an integral part of how the team approached decisions. 

For Richard, that’s the real power of collaborative delivery: bringing diverse perspectives into the room early and often can produce better outcomes than any single stakeholder could develop alone. 

Looking ahead 

Richard’s journey from Australia to Canada is a reminder that growth rarely happens by staying in familiar territory. 

That same mindset is important for the future of Canada’s infrastructure. 

The challenges ahead are significant; but so is the opportunity—to think differently, collaborate more deeply and create infrastructure that delivers lasting value for the communities it serves. 

“Canada has an enormous opportunity ahead: to invest in the infrastructure its growing communities and its economy needs, to learn from experiences around the world, and to find new ways of bringing clients, partners, industry and communities together to achieve better outcomes and deliver a better world.”