May 30, 2025 | 25 in 25, News and insight
As we celebrate 25 incredible years of ResoLex, we’re shining a spotlight on some of people who make it all possible — our Associates.
We asked a few of them to share why they choose to be part of the ResoLex team, and their reflections have been nothing short of inspiring. Here’s what Russell Poynter-Brown had to say:
“I was delighted when Ed and Tony asked if I’d come and work with them on a high-profile, complex and multi-stakeholder programme, especially as a key workstream centres on collaborative working.
In all honesty, I’d almost given up on the construction and infrastructure sectors, as it is so rare to find clients, consultants and other advisers who fundamentally understand what it takes to work in a truly collaborative environment.
ResoLex is refreshingly different. It uses its 25 years of expertise and insights to constructively challenge clients and then work with them to think laterally, suspend judgement, and then co-create programme-specific practicable, long-term value-added solutions, with measurable programmatic benefits.
The ResoLex team is a constant source of creative ideas and solutions. I‘ve never felt freer to work in a psychologically safe environment, where I can test my thoughts or ask for comments and opinions without feeling that I’m being judged or fearing that the Team already has a ‘stock’ answer that I’d be forced to adopt.
Highly complex programmes invariably have their challenges which can often adversely affect working relationships. However, ResoLex has a fundamental understanding of how people work in teams, in particular the interaction between people, processes and the environment within which team personnel work. I’ve been fortunate to be able to tap into this knowledge bank and adapt several ‘in-house ‘ models for our programme client’s benefit, enhancing its ability to work in a more collaborative way.”
Stay tuned on LinkedIn throughout our birthday celebrations as we continue to showcase some of the voices behind ResoLex — the people driving impact and making a real difference every day.
Mar 18, 2025 | News and insight
Projects, by their nature, are technical and commercial enterprises. However, what often makes or breaks a project is not a technical issue or even a commercial or cost one – but whether the relationships built can support and drive delivery.
It is easy to overlook the importance of these relationships as projects are driven to deliver quick wins or short-term gains such as “getting a shovel in the ground”. But focusing on these immediate wants risks undermining the long-term needs for our success, including the trust and collaboration that keeps things moving forward, particularly in modern mega- or even giga-projects where delivery is no longer a simple client/contractor relationship but a web of interconnected delivery partners and organisations.
Relationships between these organisations are what drive your delivery – but they are often not considered or worked upon in any meaningful way. At best, we might begin to think about interpersonal relationships, but what about interorganisational? After all, each component partner likely has their own ways of working, their own values, and their own ideas of what success looks like
We see the evidence of this lack of consideration everywhere. How many times have you encountered an organisation – client or otherwise – that is always in a ‘state of emergency’? Where every ask has to be answered right now? Perhaps a few times their partners will go along with it (if they have a good relationship), but sooner or later someone will say “no” – and then where does that leave the asker?
Even within a traditional client/contractor relationship, the client may be constantly demanding that their contractor push costs down, or deliver faster, or deliver more, focusing on the client’s immediate ‘wants’ – but if this results in the contractor failing, both sides lose – the client has a failed project, and the contractor may be facing dire consequences, including insolvency.
Further, in complex modern project environments organisations will often be interacting outside of this transactional “I tell, you do” relationship, and so cannot even fall back on the (as mentioned, potentially unsustainable) “well the contract says you have to”.
So, if relationships are that important to project success, what can we do about them?
For interpersonal relationships, Schein & Schein set out a model with four ‘levels’:
Can we also apply these to the relationships between organisations? And what would that look like?
- Level -1 would consist of an exploitative relationship where one organisation is totally dominant of another, free to use and abuse them without accountability
- At Level 1, we would have the traditional transactional relationship – client/contractor, where one party holds all the power, and will only ever be thinking about their own needs – or more likely, their own wants, at any given time.
- Level 2 places parties in a position of openness – which enables a deeper understanding of other parties’ needs, as well as your own. Because only through understanding the needs of those you are relying upon to deliver, can you fully understand what yours are, and begin to evaluate your wants in terms of those needs.
- Level 3 would represent a level of intimacy between organisations which is likely unnecessary to most delivery environments. It may have a place in certain places where an acutely high level of trust and dependence is required, but otherwise, it applies far more to our personal relationships than our professional ones. It may even be detrimental, where clients favour one organisation to the exclusion of others, or two partners are co-dependent for any decision-making!
As with interpersonal relationships, Level 2 is the ‘sweet spot’ for delivery. Both parties recognize that achieving long-term goals means building mutual trust and aligning on shared objectives. Instead of viewing interactions merely as exchanges of services for payments, Level 2 encourages us to see our partners as collaborators whose success is intertwined with our own. This shift from a wants-based approach – built upon a system of ‘knowing your rights’, where contracts and legal obligations dominate – to a needs-based mindset opens the door for genuine problem-solving.
And, if those technical or commercial issues do raise their heads – you can proactively resolve or mediate them rather than resorting to costly disputes, where ultimately nobody’s needs will be met!
Tom Chick is a senior consultant 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.
Mar 11, 2025 | News and insight
From the moment a major project is announced, there is a societal, political and organisational pressure to deliver the intended benefits as quickly as possible. This pressure creates a culture that champions technical delivery above all else, pushing teams towards the ‘build’ stage of the project life cycle before they are ready. As a result, many of the key elements critical to the project’s success are neglected or poorly planned, and come back to bite us later.
Back in September 2023, we teamed up with the Major Projects Association to host a workshop called ‘Challenging the Mobilisation Myth: Driving performance through effective Contract Mobilisation’.
We brought together experienced project professionals from government and industry, including representatives from Costain, HS2, DEFRA, Jacobs, HKA, GBR, and East West Rail, to discuss the common issues affecting mobilisation. Since then, we’ve been busy in the background working with the MPA and some attendees of the workshop to develop our latest perspectives paper, ‘Mind the Mobilisation Gap: Why we’re still getting mobilisation wrong on major projects, and how we can do better’.
Co-authored by Lisa Martello and Tony Llewellyn of ResoLex, the Perspectives Paper brings together practical thoughts, observations and recommendations on how to plan and deliver project mobilisation successfully. Its objective is to:
- support project organisations to consider and embed mobilisation as a critical stage in the programme
- provide guidance on the time, attention and resources it needs and deserves in order to be successful.
Read the full report here.
About the authors:
A project manager by trade, Lisa Martello has more than 15 years’ experience building and leading diverse, collaborative, and inclusive teams on major infrastructure projects in the UK and Australia. As a Director at ResoLex, Lisa specialises in strengthening the social, behavioural, and cultural components crucial to achieving desired outcomes within major project environments.
Originally training as a surveyor, Tony Llewellyn has spent over 30 years working on major projects, and is now an Author, Coach, Lecturer, and Thought Leader on the topics of performance improvement, interpersonal dynamics and the effectiveness of project teams. As a Director at ResoLex, Tony helps teams and leaders improve their outcomes by helping them to build trust, communication and collaboration.
Feb 26, 2025 | 25 in 25, News and insight
To celebrate our 25th birthday, we went fishing about in the ResoLex archives, and look at what we found! This is the very first article written about ResoLex back in the year 2000. It talks about the messy and costly disputes and conflicts that plague the engineering and construction industries, and introduces ResoLex as a positive and proactive partner that can help prevent differences from becoming disputes.
25 years on, and that remains our mission, and the facts and figures tell us it is more important than ever. Have a read through the article and our modern day insights, and tell us about the change you’ve seen over the years.
Click here to open the original article from 2000.
Nov 28, 2024 | News and insight
Exploring the importance of values
Collaboration has become a buzzword in the world of major projects and programmes – on trend, and frequently used, but usually without tangible explanation. So, what does it really mean in practice?
At ResoLex, we think of collaboration simply as helping teams work more effectively together to deliver desired outcomes. We work with leadership and project teams on developing collaborative and integrated ways of working, designing and implementing effective strategies to manage interfaces, and monitoring and measuring cultural maturity and behavioural risk.
We’re starting this series, ‘Collaboration is key, but how do you do it?’ to explore the ways in which teams can actually embed their collaborative intent project-wide. Our first area of focus is: Creating a values-based culture.
The importance of values for building and nurturing a positive project culture
Major projects are rarely afforded sufficient time for mobilisation and setup, with political, leadership and stakeholder pressures more often than not, driving a focus on ‘getting spades in the ground’ to show some semblance (or illusion) of site progress. Time and budget constraints only add to such pressures, and collectively, these factors can mean leaders miss important opportunities to build strong foundations and set their teams up for success, especially when it comes to culture, values and behaviours.
According to the Cambridge Dictionary, values are “the beliefs people have, especially about what is right and wrong and what is most important in life, that control their behaviour” . Our values help guide our decision-making, help to provide us with a sense of comfort and belonging, and help us connect with others, and to our organisations. In the project environment, meaningful values that resonate with people can encourage teams to connect, demonstrate desired behaviours, and make decisions that best support the desired outcomes and ways of working of the project or programme.
But why bother with project values when the individual organisations that make up a project almost always have their own?
Project values can help:
- Create alignment:
- Drive focus on strategic objectives: In project environments, sometimes it can be a challenge to shift mindsets away from individual organisational goals, towards a project-centric focus. Co-created project values support that effort, and aligning project values with the project’s strategic objectives encourages every action, decision, and behaviour to contribute to achieving the project’s vision. This shared focus helps to unify efforts, build team cohesion and maintain clarity.
- Foster cooperation and collective success: Meaningful values can help foster a sense of mutual responsibility, with team members feeling a sense of belonging and purpose as they contribute to the project’s success.
- Consistent communication: Genuine, meaningful values can become a framework of sorts – a routemap that sets out how we do things around here, the attributes we value, and the way we talk to one another. Actively using the project’s values can support consistent and respectful communication internally within the team, and externally with stakeholders and customers, promoting trust, reliability and clarity.
- Promote a positive environment:
- Encourage positive behaviours: When values reflect the project and are co-created, there’s a stronger sense of ownership and accountability amongst the team. People feel more committed to upholding the values and behaving in alignment with them. Shared values foster respect, openness, and psychological safety. This leads to a more supportive atmosphere where team members feel valued, stress is reduced, and performance and productivity enhanced. This doesn’t mean that the project environment is free of conflict – it means that diversity of thought and healthy conflict are encouraged, and the best decisions are made.
- Drive motivation and engagement: A values-driven culture creates a sense of shared purpose and belonging, which in turn boosts motivation. A strong sense of belonging has been proven to drive greater engagement and productivity.
- Enhance resilience and adaptability: In a project environment, challenges and setbacks are inevitable and can be dramatic in scale, cost and/or impact. Shared values demonstrated by all – especially those in leadership – and especially when in crisis, help to provide a clear sense of purpose, and a guiding light during difficult times. This can help the team remain focused and balanced as they work through the problems.
- Enable and empower quick decision-making:
- Consistent decision-making: Values can help provide guidance for decision-making that aligns with the project’s long-term vision and principles. They act as anchors and behavioural guides that help keep decisions grounded in the project’s core objectives.
- Minimise conflict: When the team shares the same values, it becomes easier to work through differences and keep focused on collective success.
- Facilitate empowered decision-making: Values help to empower team members to be confident that their choices align with the projects core values.
At ResoLex, we work with many of our clients to co-create, embed and nurture values in major project teams, so we were already believers. But recently, the importance of values was really brought to life when we took our team to visit Align JV at their South Portal site.
Site visit: Align Joint Venture
The Align joint venture consists of three international and privately-owned infrastructure companies; Bouygues Travaux Publics, Sir Robert McAlpine, and VolkerFitzpatrick, who together, are constructing the Central 1 package of the UK High Speed 2 line (HS2). Their scope includes delivering the record-breaking Colne Valley Viaduct – which is the longest railway bridge in the UK, as well as constructing HS2’s longest twin-bore tunnel at 10 miles long.
We recently had the pleasure of visiting Align at the South Portal site, hosted by Head of Engagement & Compliance, Darielle Proctor and Stakeholder Engagement Specialist and Community Engagement Lead, Duncan Fallon.
Although we haven’t worked on this specific part of the HS2 project, we have supported the project in many other areas, and we were thrilled to be invited to the site to see the record-breaking works in action, and learn more about the JV renowned for their culture, collaboration, and ways of working.
Align have overcome some substantial geographical, environmental and technical challenges throughout the project, and have worked through the challenges thanks in part to their strong team culture.
Initially identifying a difference in culture and ways of working between their respective parent organisations, Align JV understood the need to create a one-team culture and an integrated project tea
m. They created values that supported the overall vision of the client, HS2, and brought together the partner organisations, including supply chain and they worked tirelessly to embed and nurture them until they became norms.
From the beginning of our visit, our team were surrounded by a feeling of community, identity and belonging. The values adorned on the side of the building as you drive in and across their sites were role-modelled by everyone we came across, from driver to receptionist to site supervisor. Our conversations with the team underscored the importance of good leadership and project champions, of cultural training and awareness, and of the value of a supportive, trusting client team. The commitment to collaboration and a values-based culture shone through in all aspects of delivery, from recruitment and training, to internal and external communications, and of course the physical working environment – on-site and in the office.
The values of safety, respect, integrity, excellence, and collaboration held by Align encourage a culture of inclusion and collaboration, and all accounts seem to be working!
Thanks for having us!
Darielle Proctor, head of engagement and compliance, said:
“It was a pleasure to show the Resolex team how we do things at Align and the lessons we’ve learnt along the way. We have made real effort to make sure that our culture at Align is engaging and empowering and that our values and associated behaviours drive our day to day interactions and project delivery. They are now part of who we are, what we do and how we do it!
“I believe that our success and ongoing commitment of the Align team is down to the emphasis we have continuously placed on the project culture and creating an integrated project team.”
Keep an eye on our LinkedIn page for the next instalment in the series.
Dec 1, 2023 | News and insight, Tools
In a fast changing world, large organisations are increasingly engaged in projects and initiatives that are strategically critical. Such projects are likely to involve hundreds of people from different parts of the organisation working as cross-functional groups. The success or failure of such important initiatives is likely to be heavily influenced by the extent to which leaders and managers can motivated and organise these numerous groups to come together work as a single effective ‘Big team’.
A team of teams
There is an important distinction to be made between ‘big’ and ‘small’ teams. These simple words explain a much deeper concept. Terms like small and big are part of our basic language. They can therefore be seen to be generic, having a wide range of applications. In the context of teams, however, these two words have a precise technical role which helps establish some key differences.
The small team is the unit of production within any large enterprise. Emperors and generals have historically organised their armies and administrators into manageable groups. This is not however a top-down management strategy to create neatly arranged grouping on an ‘org chart’. It is actually a reflection of how humans prefer to work with each other. Groups of people naturally fall into sub-groups as the numbers involved start to increase. This is partly because we can typically maintain close engagement on a regular basis with up to ten people, but beyond that number, communication starts to become more sporadic and building close working relationships is more difficult. The point is that large teams do not exist as a single homogenous whole, shaped by a unitary corporate culture. Instead, a ‘Big Team’ is an organic collection of small groups whose roles and activities shift and change as the project they are engaged on progresses. Organisational success therefore depends upon the extent to which the leadership can enable this assembly of small teams to work effectively together as sub units which make up a single Big Team.
When working with leaders, we frequently hear the desire to create a high-performing team, but without having a clear idea as to what high performance actually entails. What constitutes performance is often subjective, depending upon the expectations of a particular team. When working with a collection of teams that make up a ‘Big’ team, however, performance must be articulated much more clearly so that there is a common understanding by everyone involved as to what is expected.
It is possible to map out a progression of activities that will enable the development of a high-performance environment which has the following features:
- Clear objectives fixed around sponsor and customer needs, giving the team a firm understanding of the desired outcome.
- Low hierarchy allowing direct connections between leadership and other specialist teams.
- Confidence in a low blame culture balanced with an expectation of high accountability.
- Fluid peer-to-peer networks where teams are encouraged to engage directly with one another to explore solutions.
- Strong behavioural norms which support a collaborative culture
Given the right environment, we have identified six primary elements that numerous practitioners have found to have a significant impact on the success or failure of a team engaged on a major project. They work in the following progression:
1. Shared Leadership
Big teams don’t necessarily need big leaders. All teams need some form of leadership but in Big teams, the ability of a number of individuals to take on the various aspects of leadership at various stages is critical to success.
2. Establishing the right project culture
One of the critical elements of success is to build a culture of alignment, but this cannot be mandated. Instead, the leadership team must create the right conditions to allow the desired project culture to emerge and mature.
3. Build alignment
Big teams must be able to focus on the right direction of travel even if they are not yet clear on the exact route. There are a series of practical activities that should be mandated as part of the set-up phase for each team and sub-team the is to be part of a major project. These include setting a clear vision, articulating core values, building interpersonal relationships with other teams, and agreeing a set of common rules for communication
4. Accelerated learning
Fast learning habits allow the teams to explore and experiment moving forward in short bursts of activity and adjusting plans as they go. The team is, in effect, learning how to learn. In a fast-changing environment, however, they may not adjust quickly enough to the new conditions and performance or output is likely to decline.
5. Maintain engagement
Leaders cannot force their followers to be engaged. All they can do is to create the right environment and anticipate the team will find their own drive and motivation. The core engagement activity is around communication and the use of an aligning narrative that informs and influences the messages and stories the teams use to understand what is happening in the wider organisation.
6. Build team resilience
In any complex and volatile environment, individuals and teams will find themselves in prolonged periods of pressure and stress. Team resilience differs from individual resilience in that given the right preparation, team members can learn to support each other so that they work together through periods of difficulty.
Summary
Teamwork is a fascinating and multifaceted subject. The contents of this article have hopefully given you a glimpse of the concepts, processes and structures for setting up a Big Team to give it the best opportunity to succeed. The component parts of leadership, culture, team set-up and team engagement are familiar to anyone who has frequent involvement in major projects. The framework is nevertheless novel in so far as it places the human components at the centre of business planning where as common management practice allows them to drift to the periphery.
There are, however, few shortcuts in the process. Building an effective team requires an investment in time and energy, both in the planning and implementation. The reward for this investment can be significant, improving the chances of bringing the project to a successful conclusion, on time and on budget. We would encourage any leader likely to have an involvement in a complex project to make the effort to move beyond standard practice and take the necessary steps required to build an effective Big Team.
