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 29, 2026 | News and insight, Tools
Part one of our five-part series: Deploying Behavioural Assessments in Infrastructure Procurement
AI is already changing the quality and speed of tender production. As written submissions become easier to enhance, how do we distinguish between a compelling bid and the capability of the team expected to deliver it?
Recent* research reports that 79% of proposal teams have used generative AI in Request for Proposal responses, compared with 34% in 2023. UK construction research points in the same direction.
That development brings genuine benefits – AI can improve consistency, help teams navigate complex tender information and enable organisations to articulate good ideas more effectively.
The issue is not whether AI should be used, it is what the increasing sophistication of written submissions means for the evidence clients need alongside them.
From what a team can describe to what it can demonstrate
This is not a new procurement challenge. Behavioural and collaborative assessments have been used on major infrastructure programmes for many years. Long before generative AI, clients were looking for ways to test whether the people behind a tender could actually operate in the way the submission described. At that point, it becomes less about what is written on paper and more about understanding how the people responsible for delivery might actually work together.
AI does not create that need. It reinforces the importance of distinguishing between what a team can describe and what it can demonstrate. For example:
- A written response can explain how a team will manage uncertainty; a live assessment can see what happens when the information changes or established assumptions are challenged.
- A tender can describe collaborative decision-making; an assessment can observe how the nominated team navigates competing commercial, programme and stakeholder priorities.
- A bid can set out how challenge will be encouraged; an assessment can show what happens when people genuinely disagree.
These are different forms of evidence answering different questions. Technical and commercial evaluation tell us important things about the proposition. Past performance tells us something about previous delivery. Interviews can explore individual experience and judgement. Behavioural assessment can provide evidence of how nominated people interact, exercise judgement, make decisions together and demonstrate the behaviours required for successful delivery, particularly when faced with uncertainty or pressure.
What are we actually trying to evidence?
The question is broader than whether to include a behavioural assessment. There may be evidence we need at three different levels:
- Individual – do critical people have the judgement, experience and leadership capability needed for the role?
- Team – can these people work together, manage tensions and make effective decisions?
- Organisation – will the wider business provide the capacity, governance, resources and support needed to deliver the commitments being made?
Those questions may require different forms of evidence. A team exercise can reveal how nominated people interact. Interviews can explore individual judgement and experience. References, site visits, organisational evidence or clarification can help test whether the capability extends beyond the people in the assessment room.
Cabinet Office guidance on AI in procurement makes a similar point: use of AI in preparing a tender is legitimate, but buyers may still want proportionate assurance about the capability and capacity behind the submission.
The implication for procurement
The implication is not that AI means more behavioural assessment. It is that, as the written proposition becomes easier to strengthen, clients need to be increasingly deliberate about what capability needs to be demonstrated, by whom and through which forms of evidence.
ResoLex helps clients look beyond the quality of the bid to build confidence in the people, teams and organisations expected to deliver it. For bidders, we help close the gap between the proposition on paper and the capability the nominated team can demonstrate in practice. Our experience spans supporting leading engineering consultancies, contractors and programme-management organisations with behavioural assessment preparation on successful bids, as well as working with major UK infrastructure clients and programmes to develop and deliver behavioural assessment approaches.
Next up, we’ll move into what the delivery model requires and what needs to be evidenced: ‘Start with the delivery model, not the procurement route’.
If you want to learn more, contact Liz Lawman and Jay van den Boogaard: info@resolex.com
Source: * Loopio's 2026 and Rider Levett Bucknall's 2026 Procurement Trends
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.
Aug 19, 2026 | News and insight
The role of the project manager continues to evolve. Technical delivery remains a core part of the job, but there is now a growing recognition that successful outcomes depend just as much on how teams function as on what they deliver. Awareness of this shift is increasing; translating it into practical action is less straightforward. Building an effective team is not an abstract idea – it requires intent, structure and practice.
This is the question that originally led me to write Performance Coaching for Complex Projects.
At the time, I had just completed a Master’s degree in coaching and behavioural change and had become increasingly interested in research on group dynamics and the emerging field of team coaching. The theory was compelling, but I wanted to understand whether it would hold up in the context I knew best: major projects, where pressure is high, timelines are tight, and teams are often temporary and fragmented.
To explore this, I spoke with experienced project leaders and asked a simple question: “Tell me about a project that went well.”
It sounds straightforward, but it often wasn’t. Many had to think hard before answering. Yet once they found their example, something shifted. Their posture changed, their energy lifted, and they began to describe the experience with real clarity.
Despite differences in sector and scale, the stories shared a consistent theme. Success was not primarily attributed to technical excellence or process efficiency. It came back, time and again, to the team – how it was formed, how it worked, and how it evolved over time.
When I probed further into how those teams developed, a familiar set of factors emerged. There was strong, people-focused leadership. Time had been invested in building relationships. Teams were aligned around a shared goal. There was a sense of mutual support, a collaborative culture, and an openness to learning.
In other words, the lived experience of project leaders reflected what the research had already been telling us.
Much of that research, however, is based on teams within stable organisational settings. Project environments are different. Teams form quickly, often across organisational boundaries, and must become effective under immediate pressure.
Leadership groups are assembled with little time to establish shared ways of working. People join and leave throughout the lifecycle, disrupting continuity and weakening behavioural norms. Under these conditions, teams can easily revert to transactional patterns – doing what is required, but not necessarily working well together.This raises an important question: if effective teamwork is so central to delivery, whose responsibility is it to make it happen?
In practice, it sits with the project leader.
Yet traditional project management training has focused far more on planning, governance and control than on the mechanics of building and sustaining team performance. As a result, many project managers are left to develop their own approaches through experience. Some do this exceptionally well, but often by trial and error – reinventing methods that already exist elsewhere.
What has changed since I wrote that first book is the accessibility of knowledge. The field of team coaching has developed significantly, and there is now a substantial body of research and practical guidance available. The challenge is that much of it still sits outside mainstream project management literature.
This creates an opportunity.
Team coaching is not about turning project managers into coaches in the traditional sense. It is about equipping them with a set of perspectives and tools that help them work more deliberately with the team as a system. It provides practical ways to shape how teams align, interact, learn and adapt – particularly in complex, fast-moving environments.
This is increasingly relevant in today’s delivery landscape. As highlighted in our wider work at ResoLex, the challenges that undermine major projects are rarely technical in nature. They are social, relational and behavioural. Teams struggle to operate effectively at scale, across interfaces, and under sustained pressure. Addressing these challenges requires more than good intentions – it requires capability.
Encouragingly, developing that capability is now more accessible than it was a decade ago. The growth of digital tools, including AI-enabled search and synthesis, has made it easier to engage with established thinking and adapt it to specific project contexts. Alongside this, there is an increasing range of practical resources – frameworks, diagnostics and techniques – that can be applied directly within live delivery environments.
For project managers who recognise the importance of team performance, the next step is to experiment. Start small. Introduce structured conversations about how the team is working, not just what it is delivering. Create space for reflection and learning. Pay attention to alignment, relationships and behaviours – not as secondary concerns, but as integral to delivery.
Looking ahead, this shift is likely to accelerate. As aspects of technical project management become more automated, the differentiating value of the role will increasingly lie in areas that cannot be automated: judgement, adaptability, and the ability to foster effective human collaboration.
Developing team coaching skills is not a departure from project management – it is an evolution of it.
Tony is a Director at ResoLex specialising in developing team coaching processes and techniques to apply to large, complex project team performance. He regularly advises teams on applying alliance-based principles and how to adapt both mindset and behaviours. Tony has developed a range of practical tools designed to support team development and ongoing performance. The tools are designed to transfer skills and develop social intelligence throughout the project team. Contact Tony here or connect with him on LinkedIn.
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.
Mar 6, 2026 | News and insight, Tools
In the previous article, we explored why successful projects depend not just on technical expertise or commercial strategy, but on the strength of relationships between individuals and, importantly, between organisations. The focus was on how we can apply relationship theory to improve project delivery. Schein & Schein’s “Level 2” relationships, where partners are open, aligned on needs, and view each other’s success as intertwined, represent the theoretical “sweet spot” for effective delivery.
These relationships can be foundational to the delivery of a project or programme, and so it is vital that they are developed in the right way. This is not just about building an environment where everyone is nice and friendly, but where they have an aligned vision, are able and willing to constructively challenge, are comfortable raising issues and know what is expected of them. These relationships will not materialise just because we’d like them to. We cannot assume that because everyone in an environment is experienced and professional, that they will also seek to understand the need for and value the relationships needed for successful delivery.
The desired relationships, therefore, need to be intentionally built into the way a project or programme is set up from day one. As Professor Bent Flyvbjerg references a project leader observing: Projects don’t go wrong. They start wrong. So moving beyond the theory to the practical, how can we set up to ensure we start in the right way?
Here are some principles to project setup that we’ve developed over time at ResoLex to begin building the relationships, teams and environments needed to deliver successfully:
- Don’t assume good will ‘just happen’
As touched upon above, good relationships require space and structure to grow, and if you do not take the time to proactively drive this aspect of your delivery approach, it will languish. In the early stages, you may get away with this, but when complexity grows and challenges hit, the lack of adaptable or resilient relationships will undermine every aspect of delivery.
- Understand and align values and goals
This is especially relevant for complex programmes that comprise multiple interconnected projects, but is applicable to any environment comprised of multiple teams or organisations. Each group comes in with its own culture, language, and definition of success. Bringing these into alignment – and creating a shared vision – is essential if you want a “best for project” mindset. As we discussed last time, fundamental to this is taking the time to properly understand and appreciate one another’s needs and wants, and where those differ.
- Value difference
While it’s important to ensure you understand and align values, it is equally important to ensure you don’t stifle innovation. Alignment should provide a ‘north star’ to work to, not set a single way of working or thinking. It is the differences between people that drive change and improvement, and the key in project setup is creating a proactive management framework that identifies and uses these differences to drive positive behaviours rather than conflict.
- Make it a leadership priority
If leaders are measured on elements of team development and relationship quality, they will make time for it. If they’re not, it will always slip down the agenda. The social aspect of delivery is, unsurprisingly, a cultural item. If it is not driven from the top and given priority, it will be forgotten. This leadership then also grants permission for others to invest the time and effort needed to build effective working relationships across the project and programme.
- Build psychological safety into how your project operates
Psychological safety is a cornerstone of effective working relationships. If the people in your project feel unable to openly constructively challenge, they cannot build the trust needed to achieve true Level 2 relationships. Embedding a culture that values this supports an environment where issues can be openly raised and addressed as early as possible, driving effective project delivery.
The look ahead…
Setting up relationships is only half of the job, because too often, great starts are undermined by complacency and erosion over time. These relationships need managing, maintaining, and developing as the project evolves. We’ve explored some of the initial steps you can take and questions to ask yourself here, however, we will look at the longer-term approach, including how we can ensure that what we’ve built is embedded, enduring and adaptable, in a follow-up article.
Relationships are foundational to delivery. And like any foundation, they have to be deliberately laid.
Tom Chick is an Associate Director at ResoLex specialising in building effective working environments in major projects. If you want to learn more about how to get the most out of your professional relationships, contact Tom here or connect with him on LinkedIn.
