Dec 1, 2025 | 25 in 25, News and insight
As part of our 25in25 series, we’re highlighting the people who’ve helped shape our work this year. Today, we’re recognising Jim Abbatt, whose practical approach to interface mapping has supported several teams working in complex environments.
Jim has a real ability to make the important connections visible – helping people understand how their work fits together, where the pressure points sit, and what needs attention next. This work that often goes unseen but makes a noticeable difference to how teams operate day to day.
His spotlight reflects the thoughtful way he approaches collaboration and the impact he’s had across multiple programmes this year. Read on to find out more:
“Most of my work sits at the busy intersection of people, process and pressure. With ResoLex I help teams map the interfaces that matter, turn ambiguity into clarity, and create the conditions for better decisions. The aim is simple. Less noise around the work. More signal about what has to happen next.”
I first partnered with ResoLex because of the way the team thinks. The mix of disciplines is real, the curiosity is genuine, and the work is grounded in delivery rather than theory. On complex programmes, there are always frictions at the handovers: design into delivery, programme into project, engineering into commercial. Interface clarity makes those handovers visible. Once you can see the work, you can govern it, resource it and protect it.
“The value is not the map on the wall. It is the conversation the map unlocks. Roles get clearer. Risks surface sooner. Decisions happen at the right level, at the right time.”
This year, the focus has been on three things. First, agreeing on what “good” looks like for each critical interface, from information flow to decision rights. Second, building lightweight artefacts that teams actually use: simple RACI shifts, meeting cadences that respect time, and visual logs that track dependencies without creating admin. Third, strengthening the behaviours around the system so collaboration holds when the pressure rises.
“What I enjoy about ResoLex is the climate. It is psychologically safe to explore an idea, invite a challenge and refine it together. That is how you move from clever slides to practical outcomes.”
There have been several moments this year where seeing how parts of the organisation actually fit together, rather than how people assumed they fit, has prompted challenging conversations. The difference is that those conversations remained anchored to reality, rather than a desktop view, and that is where progress came from.
Results show up in the day-to-day. The time to decision shortens because owners are explicit. Reviews are more likely to go through the first time because expectations are aligned. Escalations are calmer because the path is agreed and visible. None of this is flashy. It is disciplined, humane, and quietly powerful.
“Complex programmes do not need more slogans. They need clearer interfaces, steadier rhythms and leaders who make it easy for others to do their best work. That is the craft I bring to ResoLex, and why I keep coming back.”
A thank you to Sam Platten and Richard DaGama, two excellent consultants, and to the broader team for their engagement. It has been a pleasure working together this year.
I am proud to work with a team that blends different backgrounds yet shares the same values. The ResoLex approach respects context, invites honesty and leaves clients with tools they can run without us. That suits me. Help people hear the signal, then help them own it.
We’re grateful to our Associates for bringing their expertise, living our values, and helping clients achieve their desired project outcomes.
To find out more about interface mapping, read our article ‘From Friction to Flow: The Power of Interface Mapping in Major Projects’ on our website.
Nov 19, 2025 | Events, Roundtables
As the demands on leaders in major projects and programmes continue to grow, so too does the pressure on their personal capacity. How can leaders sustain performance, maintain resilience, and create the conditions for their teams to succeed in increasingly complex environments?
At our recent November roundtable, Annastiina Hintsa, CEO of Hintsa Performance, joined us for a thought-provoking conversation about what high performance looks like, both on and off the track. Drawing on lessons from Formula 1, working with large organisations, and years of research into human wellbeing, she explored how the world’s best sustain excellence under intense pressure and what leaders can take from it.
Building on the themes from the MPA’s No More Heroes report, which highlights the leadership gap linked to burnout and low productivity, our roundtable explored practical ways to help leaders thrive. The evening was full of energy, discussion, and plenty of moments of “this really can apply to me”.
Sustaining High Performance
In Formula 1, milliseconds decide championships, yet performance is not only about engineering or pushing harder. As Annastiina explained, success at the pinnacle of motorsport is about managing paradoxes: profit and purpose, efficiency and innovation, stability and change, wellbeing and performance. The ability to hold these tensions is a hallmark of senior leaders too.
Hintsa Performance works from a simple belief: when people live better, they perform better. It is a philosophy that has shaped the routines of more than 3,000 executives and over 90 percent of Formula 1 race winners in the past decade. Lewis Hamilton reflected, “We’ll always be in each other’s lives”, a reminder that true performance coaching goes far beyond results.
The methodology behind Hintsa’s work focuses on your Core (inner motivation) and creating a Sustainable Performance Cycle that is personal to each individual, whether an F1 driver, Olympic athlete or business leader.
Their session opened with three fundamental questions:
- Do you know who you are?
- Do you know what you want?
- Are you in control of your life?
It echoed a question often put to young drivers by Dr Aki Hintsa: Do you want to be in the drivers seat of your life or the passenger seat?
Annastiina shared several practical frameworks that leaders and teams can use to maintain performance over the long term:
- Periodisation: Understanding your daily, weekly, and annual performance rhythm. Knowing when to push, when to make time to recover, and when to renew.
- Optimal Pressure: Identifying your stretch zone and recognising when healthy challenge begins to tip into strain.
- Recovery: Planning small recovery moments across your day, week, and year to protect wellbeing and fuel growth.
- Preparation: Creating capacity before peak periods so you can perform when it matters most.
- Team: Remembering that even the best driver cannot win without a world-class pit crew and support team.
One of the key messages was that resilience is a skill that can be learned. Balancing the comfort zone with the stretch zone underpins the optimal area for performance.
There was also a helpful distinction between healthy and unhealthy stress. Stress itself is not the enemy – we need it to perform, but problems arise when stress becomes chronic. Knowing your early warning signs and planning moments of recovery is vital.
Annastiina explored the four elements of mental recovery: Control, Relaxation, Mastery, and Detachment. Building these into everyday routines can make a significant difference. While embedding recovery within projects and programmes may need a cultural shift, it often begins with the small things – what you do, and what you enable others to do.
One Change That Cascades
Each of us was encouraged to consider one meaningful change that could have the biggest ripple effect. Sustainable change starts with awareness and grows through small, consistent actions. The WOOP framework (Wish, Objective, Obstacle, Plan) offers a simple and practical way to turn good intentions into tangible progress.
Resilience is not a fixed trait. It is a rhythm, a balance between pressure and recovery, competition and cooperation, performance and wellbeing. The conversation left us with a shared realisation: resilience is not about enduring difficult environments, but about designing conditions where people and teams can thrive.
For further insight into how the world’s best balance wellbeing and performance, explore the latest Hintsa F1 Insights Report.
Nov 7, 2025 | 25 in 25, Events, News and insight
ResoLex worked with the Crossrail East leadership team to embed a structured approach to behavioural risk management, collaboration, and leadership alignment. Using our RADAR methodology, we helped leaders recognise the direct connection between behaviours and project outcomes, creating a new reporting process that surfaced risks early and informed decision-making.
Crossrail East involved complex works along the eastern section of the route, including track upgrades, station improvements, and new facilities to increase train capacity and reliability. While technical challenges were well managed, the leadership team faced a less visible risk: how behaviours, culture, and team dynamics could influence delivery. Recognising this, the Project Director asked us to help strengthen alignment, build collaboration, and develop a reporting framework that could highlight issues before they escalated.
We began by gathering data across the project to establish a baseline of behavioural and project risks. Through confidential interviews, leaders were able to share perceptions openly, surfacing the issues that mattered most to them. These insights shaped a facilitated workshop where the leadership team collectively analysed root causes and prioritised 20 key risk areas. Importantly, they also identified positive and negative behavioural indicators, giving them tangible signs to track and address.
The outputs were built into a monthly monitoring cycle, with RADAR reports providing leading indicators of risk. These reports highlighted where perceptions varied significantly across the team, enabling the Programme Director to focus attention on alignment and shared understanding. Over time, RADAR became central to monthly strategy meetings, shaping agendas and guiding discussions, and giving the leadership team consistent visibility of behaviours and their impact on risk.
The approach quickly expanded beyond the leadership team to include the wider programme, supporting collaboration across Network Rail, Costain, and Signalling Solutions. The result was a stronger culture of accountability and transparency across the programme and supply chain.
As Project Director Ben Wheeldon reflected:
“To successfully deliver [one of] Europe’s largest infrastructure projects required us to clearly and succinctly identify, rationalise and manage a very unique and complex set of challenges, risks and opportunities. ResoLex not only helped us identify those which potentially had the biggest impacts but also prioritise them and develop, implement and monitor our mitigation plans.”
By embedding behavioural insights into governance and reporting, the Crossrail East leadership team gained a clear, structured way of surfacing risks and turning them into actionable insights. This gave leaders the tools to manage complexity with greater confidence, reduce misalignment, and strengthen collaborative decision-making.
Ultimately, the work helped the team move beyond individual perspectives to build a shared understanding of risks, creating the cultural conditions for resilient delivery on one of Europe’s most complex infrastructure programmes.
Oct 22, 2025 | Events, Roundtables
On the 9th of October, we were joined by Michele Dix (MPA, NISTA and former TfL), Julia Pyke (Sizewell C) and Richard Holm (ICW) for our latest ResoLex Roundtable, ‘Are We Selecting and Developing the Right Type of Leaders?’ Almost two years on from the MPA’s No More Heroes report, senior voices from across the major projects community came together to reflect on progress. The verdict was mixed: while the sector is showing signs of change, particularly around collaboration and diversity, there is still a long way to go to see more examples of good leadership cultures that are inclusive, adaptive and emotionally intelligent.
Despite the broad acceptance that the “hero” leader model is outdated, our speakers brought perspectives through different lenses – combining client leadership, industry body viewpoints and consulting experience. Michele reaffirmed the relevance of the “incomplete leader” concept, reminding the group that no one person embodies every quality. She pointed to “green shoots” of change, such as improving gender and ethnicity diversity, but more is needed to reflect the wider diversity of thought. She also emphasised that leaders should be assessed not only on what they deliver, but how they lead. Building on this, Richard introduced the idea of “character skills”, a concept originally explored by Alex Grant, arguing that so-called “soft skills” should be reframed and revalued as essential competencies for leadership. From a client perspective, Julia stressed the importance of leaders communicating vision clearly, hiring wisely, and empowering their teams to perform at their best – connecting the work of major projects with wider social value.
‘It was great to represent the Institute for Collaborative Working and see the alignment between the ‘MPA No More Heroes’ publication and the ICW Collaborative Leadership Insights paper. Whilst independently undertaken, the conclusions were aligned, placing an equivalent emphasis on management experience, as there is to emotional intelligence, and collaborative leadership skills.’
Richard Holm
‘It was very encouraging to hear consensus on the need to move away from hero leaders and the recognition of leaders needing to be “learn it all’s” as opposed to the “know it all’s” going forward – especially in an increasingly complex system-based environment.’
Michele Dix
Designed as an open, interactive discussion, participants shared their own experiences of where progress is being made and where barriers remain. The conversation unfolded across three key themes, each exploring how the industry can evolve from individual heroism to collective, sustainable leadership.
- Leadership in Major Programmes – Beyond the “Hero” Leader
Leadership in major programmes demands more than technical excellence. It requires ‘learn it all’s’, not just ‘know it all’s’ – emotional intelligence, systems thinking and the ability to orchestrate collaboration across complex environments. Participants called for leadership to be treated as a specialised discipline, supported by deliberate development and structured learning.
There was a strong call to grow talent from within through mentoring, coaching and safe spaces for stretch roles. Human qualities such as courage, empathy and vision were highlighted as essential, with agreement that great leaders not only deliver outcomes but also connect people to purpose. The takeaway: leadership should be seen as a craft, shifting the focus from short-term delivery to long-term capability building and ensuring there are good leaders across the project or programme, not just at the top.
- Capacity and Succession – Expanding and Diversifying the Leadership Pool
The discussion turned to why the leadership pool for major programmes remains so narrow. Consensus pointed to both quantity and readiness, but also to confidence in the industry of there being a committed pipeline of major projects to be involved in. Too few people are being developed, and those who are, often lack the support or experience to succeed. Over-reliance on familiar names, rigid professional silos and limited cross-sector mobility continue to stifle diversity and renewal.
Participants also recognised a disconnect between training and practice. Leadership programmes exist, but the learning rarely embeds once people return to delivery-driven roles. Burnout, lack of progression and a “too busy to develop” mindset were identified as major risks to capability and retention.
To break the cycle, the group urged a move away from “hero” models towards shared leadership teams, recognising and rewarding leadership behaviours at all levels, not just at the top. Building a connected system that values leadership as a collective, long-term capability was seen as essential for resilience.
- Future Skills and Behaviours – Leading with EQ in an AI World
Looking ahead, participants explored what the next generation of leadership should look like. The message was clear: leadership development must start early, not at university but in schools and early career experiences. Education still teaches outdated command-and-control models, leaving future leaders technically skilled but emotionally underprepared. Closer collaboration between industry and education was seen as vital to redefining what effective leadership looks like, combining real-world experience with academic learning.
Bridging the gap between academia and industry was seen as critical. Participants called for more collaboration, with practitioners teaching in universities and academics engaging with live projects. Diversity of thought, empathy and adaptability were identified as future core competencies, especially as AI automates technical work.
The conversation also touched on the future of work. Younger professionals want autonomy, flexibility and meaning rather than hierarchy. Organisations that fail to offer purpose-led environments risk losing talent to more progressive sectors. As one delegate put it, “we can’t keep measuring people by outdated frameworks and expect modern leadership to thrive.”
Shifting from Heroic to Systemic Leadership
Across all three themes, the message was consistent: sustainable leadership in major programmes requires cultural and systemic reform. This will mean creating safe spaces for growth, structures for mentoring and mobility, and metrics that reward empathy, collaboration and trust.
Without these shifts, the Hero leader challenge will persist, with a small group of exhausted leaders carrying the weight of complex programmes while a generation of potential successors look elsewhere.
This roundtable marked just the beginning. In an upcoming playbook, we will explore the data gathered during the session alongside wider industry research and insights from related events. Together, these will examine how major projects can move beyond the hero leader model and build a more sustainable leadership ecosystem.
Stay tuned as we share more on what it takes to select, grow and sustain the right type of leaders for the future of major programmes.
Oct 10, 2025 | 25 in 25, Events, News and insight
ResoLex partnered with the University of East Anglia (UEA) on the delivery of the Enterprise Centre, one of the UK’s most sustainable buildings. The project set out to achieve exceptional environmental performance, using innovative materials and construction methods to push the boundaries of what was possible.
From the outset, the ambition to deliver a Passivhaus-certified, BREEAM Outstanding building presented unique challenges. Success required close collaboration across a wide network of stakeholders, including UEA, its architects, contractors, local suppliers, and funding partners. Traditional risk registers were insufficient here: they capture technical and commercial risks but overlook those arising from human behaviour, organisational practices, and cultural dynamics. These “invisible risks” around alignment, trust, and collaboration had the potential to derail progress if not actively managed.
That’s where ResoLex came in. We supported the project team with regular workshops and facilitated engagement sessions that created a safe environment for open discussion and problem-solving. Central to this was our RADAR tool, which provided a confidential way for individuals to share perceptions of risk, collaboration, and communication. This data was analysed by an independent panel and fed back to the team through monthly reports, highlighting both emerging risks and positive behaviours.
During our involvement, RADAR provided leading indicators of risk, often giving the team 6-9 months’ early warning of potential issues. This allowed leaders to adjust quickly, prevent conflicts from escalating, and maintain alignment around shared objectives. Crucially, the anonymity of the process gave stakeholders confidence to be candid, surfacing issues that might otherwise have been buried.
The findings showed that risks linked to expectations, commercial negotiations, and the use of pioneering materials were identified and managed early. For example, RADAR flagged concerns around affordability, supply chain capability, and programme clarity months in advance, giving the leadership team time to resolve them collaboratively. As Professor John French, UEA Project Sponsor, later reflected:
“ResoLex’s RADAR platform provided us with real insight into our scheme, allowing us to capture the views of all involved on the project. This ensured we were able to tackle issues early, reduce conflicts, and ultimately save time and money.”
The impact went beyond traditional project measures of cost, time, and quality. By embedding continuous feedback and collaboration into governance, the team developed stronger relationships and created a culture of trust and accountability. This cultural alignment was a critical factor in the successful delivery of a world-class facility that continues to be celebrated for its sustainability.
The project demonstrated that sustainable construction is built on sustainable relationships, and that behavioural risk management can be as important as technical expertise in achieving ambitious outcomes.
