Darr Opens General Session with Remarks on Leading Through Uncertainty
Engineers are trained to think in straight lines. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Every road has a path. But on Monday, ACEC President & CEO Linda Bauer Darr told a room full of engineers that in the business of engineering, the straight line has started to bend, and the firms that thrive will be the ones willing to bend with it.
Darr set the scene with a nod to local history. Monday marked the 145th anniversary of the Gunfight at the OK Corral, which unfolded in Tombstone, about three hours from the Conference’s Phoenix setting. “The fight itself lasted only about 30 seconds, but we’ve spent 145 years talking about it,” she said.
Hollywood, she noted, turned that story into a tidy tale of white hats and black coats. Real life is murkier. She pointed to the moment in the movie Tombstone when Morgan Earp, dying, admits to his brother Wyatt that the heavenly light he’d once described simply isn’t there. “It ain’t true,” Morgan says. “I can’t see a damned thing.”
Darr said the scene captures the mood heading into next week’s midterms, with more than 450 House and Senate seats at stake and little clarity from either side about what comes next. For an industry built on order and risk mitigation, that’s an uncomfortable state of affairs.
A Rough Year for the Typical Firm
Darr asked attendees to picture a typical ACEC member firm: 40 employees, mostly transportation work, the kind of firm that handles road projects, small bridge repairs, and traffic studies. That fictional firm has had a rough year. The Department of Transportation ended the DBE program’s presumption of disadvantage, in place since 1983. The SBA proposed raising the engineering size threshold from $25 million to $252 million, pitting the firm against companies ten times its size. Then came the tariff wars, which brought delays, smaller scopes and, in some cases, outright cancellations.
Workforce pressures add to the strain. Darr described a senior engineer who won’t learn AI and younger engineers who won’t touch it on principle. Add private equity circling the firm and eyeing it “like a shark looks at a shrimp cocktail,” and it’s no wonder firms feel squeezed. “If it feels like the world is on fire,” she said, “you aren’t imagining the heat.”
The AI Equation
So, what about AI? The easy math says it boosts productivity, so hours and costs fall while profits rise. “It’s all tidy and logical,” Darr said. “But is it?”
Clients may demand lower fees for fewer hours, unless firms start pricing on the value of their judgment. “We have spent a century proving the value of engineering,” Darr said. “Now we must learn to capture more of the value we create.” She also questioned how young engineers will build professional judgment if AI absorbs their routine work and urged firms to secure the rights to their own data. “We can’t just supply the ingredients while someone else owns the restaurant.”
Why the Stamp Still Matters
Darr insisted engineering’s core value isn’t going anywhere. “A stamp is a promise that a human being with training, experience, and a conscience has looked at this work and will stand behind it,” she said. “In times like these, our judgment matters more. Not less.”
The industry’s future, she said, depends on strong engineering fundamentals and real fluency in technology. Getting there, she argued, requires a “bigger table,” a role ACEC has played for more than 120 years.
Eyes on the Horizon
Darr closed by returning to a joke she heard when she joined ACEC nearly a decade ago: the introverted engineer looks at his own shoes, while the extroverted engineer looks at yours.
In uncertain times, she said, the instinct is to look down and watch every step. “The instinct is understandable, but it’s never built anything worth building.”
Her final charge to attendees: “Look out to the horizon, see the road that isn’t there yet, and build it.”
