Nov 4, 2026 | Events, News and insight, Roundtables
We spend months negotiating contracts. But do we spend enough time understanding the people delivering them?
On the 20th of October, we brought together clients, contractors and consultants for a roundtable tackling a familiar disconnect: what works on paper doesn’t always work in practice.
The shared view on why? Contracts set the rules of the game, but people decide how it’s played. Success comes down to the relationships behind the contract.
Everyone agreed that process, governance and commercial terms are important. They need to be clear, and the foundations need to be solid. But they only hold up when the team trusts each other, and when people are empowered to use their judgement once things become challenging.
Six key themes stood out:
The human reality: what happens under pressure
Every project runs on two contracts. One is commercial. The other is social: the unwritten expectations about what’s fair and how we treat each other. Under pressure, people fall back on what feels safe. They revert:
- To type. Habits and instincts take over. Some push harder, others withdraw. Some focus on relationships, others on facts. If the team doesn’t understand these responses, tension escalates.
- To the organisation. People protect their own side. They can assume others are working against them, rather than recognising they have their own legitimate pressures.
- To the contract. The contract must be used, but too often it’s the first move instead of the follow-up to a conversation. People often try to be ‘right’, rather than try to move forward. You can ‘win’ on paper and still lose the project. Disputes bring higher costs, long delays, and deteriorated outcomes.
So why does this keep happening? Those in the room spoke about their experiences:
- People are scared of getting it wrong.
- Structures, recruitment processes and incentive schemes turn leaders into ‘heroes’, and lead heroes to burnout and often inevitable failure.
- We train people on how to execute a process or manage a contract, but not how to deal with conflict. The human side is learnt on the job.
- The project profession struggles to attract new people, especially in traditionally male environments like construction, and is often seen as adversarial. More diverse thinking, leader self-awareness, and courage at every level would help break the cycle.
- No practise. Teams that haven’t worked together fall apart under pressure. Learn to row together slowly before you race.
Preparing for Reality
Pressure is inevitable, but what if we were better prepared for it?
Start at contract setup by agreeing what collaboration means in practice. Build structures that let people decide and trust their judgement. Train people to understand one another, their pressures, and how to handle conflict and, above all, bring humility and learn to spot when you might be the problem.
After all, we are complex humans delivering complex infrastructure.
A checklist for your project
How many can you honestly tick for your project today?
- We are clear on the basics: what we are buying, why, and how much for.
- We agreed what we want to achieve together, at a level we ccan deliver to
- We have agreed what collaboration means to us, and how we will do it
- Our governance is good enough, and no more
- People have the confidence to use their professional judgement within limits.
- We gave trust from the start
- We notice early signs of conflict and deal with all sides of it
- We encourage humility and self-awareness
- We built the team on purpose; we practised under low pressure before the pace picked up
To explore this topic further, contact Joanna Jarvie, Associate Director at ResoLex.
Oct 2, 2026 | Events, News and insight
At this year’s Conflict Avoidance Coalition Conference, which ResoLex was pleased to support as a sponsor, our Chief Executive, Edward Moore, spoke about the journey from conflict to coexistence to collaboration. ResoLex has supported the work of the Coalition for many years, sharing its commitment to helping the industry address conflict earlier and create better conditions for projects and programmes to succeed.
Drawing on his experience through ResoLex, as Chairman of Concordis International and as a Fellow of the Institute for Collaborative Working, Ed brought together perspectives from complex project delivery and international peacebuilding.
Running throughout his session was one question: is a lack of conflict enough?
For major projects and programmes, avoiding disputes is clearly important. But does the absence of conflict mean that a project is working well? And is there enough drive across our industry to make the behavioural changes needed to move beyond simply avoiding problems and towards better performance?
These are questions we have been grappling with at ResoLex for a long time.
Starting with resolution
ResoLex started life firmly in the world of dispute resolution and contracted mediation. Even our name reflects those origins: ‘Reso’ from resolution and ‘Lex’, the Latin for law – resolution before the law.
During his talk, Ed shared two examples from those early days where ResoLex was brought in to help project teams work through some significant issues. Both projects overcame those challenges, finished on budget with no outstanding claims at completion.
You might expect those results to have made the case for taking the same approach elsewhere. In reality, it was difficult.
Ed described some of what we encountered at the time as a combination of naivety, optimism bias and threat. Naivety around the behavioural risks that can develop within projects; optimism bias that, while problems might happen elsewhere, they won’t happen to us; and a sense of threat that acknowledging the need for support could somehow suggest that a team wasn’t performing well enough.
Despite the success of those early projects, preventative services were difficult to sell.
A lot has changed since then. There is now far greater recognition of the role that behaviours, relationships and culture play in project performance. But the underlying question remains relevant.
If we successfully avoid conflict, what comes next?
Ed explored this as a spectrum: conflict → coexistence → collaboration.
To bring that distinction to life, he shared an example from the work of Concordis International in Abyei, the Special Administrative Area between Sudan and South Sudan.
Seasonal cattle movements in the region had become a source of serious conflict. As cattle moved in search of grazing, tensions with farming communities could escalate, contributing to the loss of hundreds of lives and requiring armed protection.
Moving from conflict to coexistence could mean finding another route. Keep the cattle and farming communities apart and remove the immediate source of tension.
But collaboration asks a different question: could that interaction actually benefit both sides?
With the support of peace committees and trained mediators, the communities were able to reach a benefits-based arrangement. Rather than avoiding the farmland, cattle moved across it, eating the remaining grass and trampling and fertilising the ground in the process.
The arrangement continued for more than two years, turning something that had been a source of conflict into something from which both communities could benefit.
It is a very different environment from a major project or programme, but there is an important principle we can take from it.
Stopping conflict and creating collaboration are not the same thing.
We should collaborate. But how?
Collaboration is now part of the language of major projects. We hear regularly that teams need to collaborate more, work in partnership and break down silos.
But simply deciding to collaborate doesn’t make it happen.
Collaboration can sometimes be treated as a benefit or an outcome in its own right. What matters more is what collaborative delivery allows us to achieve. When it works, it should help create better outcomes for the programme and tangible benefits for the different organisations involved.
To get there, we need to understand the drivers, objectives and value points of the different parties around the table.
Finding mutual objectives is important, but it doesn’t give us the whole picture. Every organisation involved in a major programme also has individual objectives, pressures and priorities. Those don’t disappear simply because everyone has agreed a set of shared goals.
The opportunity is to make those individual objectives better understood.
When parties understand what others need to achieve, they can begin to see where their own actions can help others succeed, as well as where their objectives overlap. That creates the potential to move beyond simply having mutual objectives towards identifying outcomes where collaboration creates genuine benefit across the programme.
Communication has to be purposeful
This brings us back to some of the practical work required to make collaboration happen: interface management, communication and developing trust.
Better communication isn’t simply about reducing the likelihood of misunderstanding or conflict. Done properly, it can improve performance.
But it needs to be designed.
Who needs to speak to whom? What information needs to move between different teams and organisations? When does that communication need to happen? How often? Through which forum? And, importantly, what does each party need from the interaction?
These sound like straightforward questions, but on a major programme involving multiple organisations, interfaces and competing priorities, leaving them to chance creates risk.
Taking a purposeful approach means understanding the drivers and objectives of those involved, identifying where benefits can be created across organisational boundaries, and then putting the collaborative delivery methods and communication routes in place to support them.
Conflict avoidance matters. But perhaps the bigger opportunity for our industry is not simply to ask how do we stop conflict?
It is to ask what sits beyond it?
Moving from conflict to coexistence and ultimately to collaboration gives us the opportunity not only to avoid disputes, but to use our relationships, behaviours and communication to drive better performance across major projects and programmes.
Jul 24, 2026 | Events, News and insight
What if leadership development has been shaped by people who no longer remember what it is like to be led?
In 2025, ResoLex brought together senior leaders from major projects and high-performance environments to explore leadership, resilience and personal performance. These conversations highlighted the need to move beyond the traditional “hero leader” model and create more collaborative, emotionally intelligent and sustainable approaches to leadership.
However, one important voice was still missing: the next generation of leaders who are experiencing today’s leadership models first-hand and will ultimately inherit responsibility for delivering tomorrow’s major programmes.
ResoLex, supported by the Major Projects Association, recently hosted an interactive workshop for early-career professionals and emerging leaders. The session was designed to test previous findings, understand where current leadership thinking reflects their experience and identify where it falls short.
We were delighted to be joined by Professor Christine Unterhitzenberger from the University of Leeds and Nathan Rendel from Hintsa Performance, who brought complementary perspectives on sustainable careers, leadership under pressure and the realities facing those progressing through the major projects industry.
The reality of a sustainable career
Professor Christine Unterhitzenberger shared interim findings from her recent research into sustainable careers in major projects.
Major projects can offer an unusually strong sense of purpose, variety and opportunity. However, they can also involve long delivery cycles, uncertain pipelines and career structures that do not always reflect how people want, or need, to develop.
The research encouraged participants to think about career sustainability through more than progression or productivity alone. Happiness, health, purpose and the surrounding organisational context all influence whether people can build careers that remain fulfilling over time.
This provided an important starting point for the discussion. Developing future leaders is not simply about preparing individuals for their next role. It is also about creating an environment in which talented people want to remain, can continue learning and are able to sustain their contribution across a career.
Leadership is becoming more relentless
Hintsa Performance explored how the demands placed on leaders have changed.
Leaders are now expected to provide clarity, maintain performance, lead change and make decisions while operating in environments defined by uncertainty, information overload, hybrid working and continuous pressure. Leadership frameworks may describe the right behaviours, but those behaviours can become much harder to access when under pressure.
The discussion drew attention to an often-overlooked component of leadership development, capacity. Knowledge and technical competence remain important, but future leaders will also need the physical, cognitive and emotional capacity to apply their skills consistently when leadership is at its most difficult.
This shifted the conversation away from resilience as simply enduring difficult conditions. Sustainable performance requires organisations and individuals to manage pressure, recovery and personal capacity deliberately.
What future leaders told us
Participants were then invited to respond to five themes drawn from ResoLex’s previous leadership events:
- Collaborative leadership
- Emotional intelligence
- Development and training
- Clear career progression
- Resilience and wellbeing
The discussion broadly supported the five themes presented, while also adding important nuance.
Participants agreed that collaborative leadership, emotional intelligence, development, career progression and wellbeing all matter. However, they also stressed that none of these can be considered in isolation or applied as a fixed formula.
Collaboration should not remove accountability or slow decision-making. Emotional intelligence must sit alongside sufficient technical and organisational understanding. Development needs protected time, visible sponsorship and opportunities to learn through experience. Career progression should offer clarity without assuming that everyone follows the same route.
A recurring message was that leadership is shaped as much by what people observe as by what they are taught. Future leaders look to senior colleagues for examples of how to make decisions, manage pressure, invest in others and respond when things do not go to plan.
Creating the conditions for future leaders to succeed
The second part of the workshop moved from reflection to action. Participants considered the factors that help and hinder their development before identifying practical steps current leaders and organisations could take.
The conversation highlighted several consistent principles: Future leaders need access to mentors, sponsors and senior leaders who are visible and available. They need permission to stretch themselves, make decisions and learn from failure. They need clearer communication about opportunities, meaningful feedback and dedicated time for development. Just as importantly, they need leaders who demonstrate the behaviours they expect others to adopt.
The workshop also reinforced that there is no single model of “good leadership” that works in every situation. Leadership needs to respond to context, balancing collaboration with direction, autonomy with support, and performance with recovery.
The challenge for the industry is therefore not simply to identify the characteristics of an ideal future leader. It is to create the structures, cultures and experiences through which a diverse range of people can develop and succeed.
The full findings from the session will contribute to a ResoLex whitepaper, supported by the Major Projects Association, exploring how the industry can better select, develop and support the leaders needed for the future of major programmes.
Jul 8, 2026 | Events, Roundtables
Conflict is inevitable on complex projects, but escalation is not. As major infrastructure programmes become increasingly complex, the industry’s ability to manage relationships is becoming just as important as its technical capability. Hosted by ResoLex in partnership with the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE) and the Conflict Avoidance Coalition (CAC), Turning Tension into Trust brought together industry leaders Edward Moore, ResoLex, Sue Barrett, Houses of Parliament Restoration and Renewal Programme and Veronica Flint-Williams, Environment Agency to explore how projects can create the conditions for healthy challenge, identify behavioural risks early and create the conditions for productive challenge before issues become disputes.
The discussion reinforced a clear message: collaboration is not a soft option. It requires structure, openness, commercial discipline and the courage to have difficult conversations early. When done well, conflict avoidance can protect relationships, reduce cost and delay, and help teams remain focused on delivery rather than dispute.
Collaboration is not a soft option. It requires the most rigorous conversations.
Creating conditions for healthy challenge
One of the strongest themes throughout the discussion was the importance of creating a project environment that allows space for challenge and healthy tension from the outset. Tension is inevitable in project environments with so much complexity and uncertainty, but by establishing clear communication channels, defined escalation routes and psychologically safe environments from day one, organisations can harness it to drive challenge, innovation and better decisions. When those conditions are absent, issues are more likely to go unspoken, relationships come under strain and tension can quickly develop into destructive conflict.
To get healthy tension and challenge, it needs explicit permission.
Edward Moore illustrated this through the analogy of a farming community preparing for harvest. Crops are ready, cattle need moving, and success depends entirely on timing and communication. If everyone understands the plan, both objectives can be achieved. If communication breaks down, the crop is destroyed and everyone ends up firefighting. The comparison reflected the importance of establishing communication channels before pressure builds, rather than relying on them once problems have already emerged.
The client sets the tone
A strong theme throughout the event was that clients should be shaping the relationship from day one. Transparency about constraints, active listening when suppliers raise concerns, and the willingness to face problems early-on creates the conditions for trust.
The role of leaders was also highlighted, encouraging leaders to do more than simply permit challenge – they should actively model it by asking difficult questions, thanking people for raising concerns and demonstrating that constructive challenge is valued rather than merely tolerated.
Behavioural risks appear long before conflict
One of the panel’s key observations was that behavioural risks often emerge long before contractual disputes. Differences in perception, misunderstandings and unspoken concerns are often the first indicators that relationships are beginning to deteriorate.
The conversation reinforced that trusted relationships are built on rigorous honesty. Creating regular opportunities for open, honest feedback helps teams identify the early signs of conflict before issues become entrenched around commercial pressures, roles or ego. Practical mechanisms such as Conflict Avoidance Panels, project resets and tiered escalation processes provide structured opportunities to surface concerns, test assumptions and resolve differences before they become formal disputes.
What we end up seeing is the seed of conflict.
Prevention is an investment
The panel challenged the perception that conflict avoidance represents an unnecessary overhead or, worse, an admission that a project is expected to fail. Organisations can be reluctant to invest in prevention because they believe success is measured by never needing formal intervention in the first place. This creates a stigma around conflict avoidance, where investing in mechanisms to resolve issues early can be wrongly perceived as planning for failure, rather than planning for successful delivery.
Early intervention is almost always less costly than adjudication or litigation. More importantly, it keeps teams focused on delivery rather than becoming absorbed in dispute resolution.
Spending a little on a predictable outcome is a much better investment.
Key takeaways
- Plan communication and escalation routes before pressure builds.
- Invest early in prevention to protect delivery focus, reduce cost and avoid the distraction of formal disputes.
- Give challenge explicit permission and model it through leadership behaviour.
- Clients set the tone by being transparent about constraints and listening when suppliers raise difficult issues.
- Behavioural risk often first appears as a divergence in perceptions, making safe feedback loops essential.
- Treat conflict avoidance mechanisms as good project governance, not evidence of failure.
- Use resets, panels and tiered processes before issues become formal disputes.
The audience discussion reinforced the practical challenges of applying these principles in live projects. Topics ranged from managing uncertainty transparently and responding to change, to creating collaborative cultures where clients are still on their own maturity journey, and giving people the confidence to have difficult conversations early.
While every project is different, the panel agreed that trust is built through openness, clear expectations and the confidence to address difficult conversations early.
The evening concluded with a challenge from Richard Bayfield, Chair of the Conflict Avoidance Coalition: “What’s the one thing you’d encourage people to do differently tomorrow morning to turn tension into trust?”
While the answers varied, one message stood out: contracts provide the framework, but people determine the outcome. Trust is built through early conversations, disciplined collaboration and leaders who create the confidence for others to challenge constructively.
Tension will always exist on complex projects. The opportunity lies in creating environments where it leads to better decisions rather than destructive conflict. By addressing issues early and fostering collaboration, organisations can strengthen relationships, improve delivery and build greater confidence in the infrastructure sector.
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.
