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
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.
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.
Mar 28, 2023 | Tools
Projects often start with positive intentions, especially if you hold a good kick-off workshop which generates lots of ideas and action plans, and the team leave the event feeling energised and hopeful. Pretty soon, however, the reality of delivery kicks in and all the plans that would have embedded collaborative ways of working drift to the periphery of the agenda. So how do you keep the momentum going after the initial workshop is over? The best mechanism we have found is to establish a collaboration workstream.
A workstream is essentially a cluster of tasks that need to be completed to achieve a particular outcome within the project. The point of the collaboration workstream is to follow up on the actions and initiatives that the leadership team know are important, but are often otherwise displaced by the urgent issues that typically dominate their agenda. To give an example, the following list of questions emerged from the output of a recent project kick-off workshop:
- How do we establish a culture of ‘collaborative delivery’ throughout the project so that everyone understands the positive behaviours?
- What are the teams’ non-financial objectives and what are activities that will support their achievement?
- What actions are needed to develop a well-considered Relationship Management Plan?
- How does the project leadership monitor and measure the relationships between the key parties involved?
- How do we establish a communication strategy that emphasises the underlying narratives that will support a collaborative culture?
- What is the collaborative maturity of the teams and what training is needed to improve their collaborative skills?
- Where are the potential areas of disagreement/dispute that potentially lie ahead and how do we prepare the teams to avoid or resolve them?
- How do we define collaborative ways of working and how do we communicate them to everyone working on the project?
Each of these questions is a component of the overall delivery strategy that will require different levels of attention throughout the project lifecycle. As you can see, there is a lot to do, and so the tasks that arise from the discussion need to be resourced, organised and managed. It, therefore, makes sense to form a ‘Collaboration Workstream Steering Group’ that meets at regular intervals to oversee the progress. We recommend that the membership of the group should be no more than 5 to 6 people. Within this group, there must be a senior project manager or leader and ideally a collaborative specialist. The remainder of the group should be selected from individuals senior enough to ensure decisions are acted upon.
The other critical success factor is to identify and set up metrics that are reported to the project leadership team regularly. Collaborative metrics might include:
- Culture of trust and openness
- Clarity of delivery strategy
- Alignment of teams to the common goal
- Effective communication
- Effective meetings
- Information sharing
- One team ethos
Throughout the programme, one would expect to see these metrics move positively and negatively depending upon periods of pressure. We have found that reporting the trends regularly keeps the people element of the programme higher up on the leadership team agenda, prompting actions that can then be managed by the ’Collaboration Steering Group.
Collaborative delivery is as much a philosophy as it is a series of activities, but to be effective it must sit at the heart of a project or programme. By establishing a collaboration workstream, the management team is creating the facility to ensure the behaviours needed to achieve success are embedded into the team’s culture.
Aug 15, 2022 | Tools
Purpose: Tap into your team’s potential to solve complex problems
Time required: Initial half-day workshop, then interim follow-up work over the next six months
The theory behind the resource: The traditional approach to problem-solving on large projects is to rely on the knowledge and experience of individual experts. However, we are coming to realise that when faced with the often complex and ambiguous issues that are a feature of 21st-century, projects require a different way of thinking. The solution is to tap into the power of human ingenuity by using the collective thinking power of a diverse group. Teams can therefore provide an invaluable mechanism for finding new and effective solutions to difficult problems.
Accessing the collective intelligence of a team is, however, easier said than done. Assembling a group of bright minds does not mean they will generate any new thinking. There are a number of barriers which inhibit the truly open discussions that are needed. Miscommunication, a lack of appreciation of each other’s mental filters, outsized egos, and internal rivalries all diminish thinking capacity. To build collective intelligence, teams often need to learn, through training and group coaching, to be able to understand their limiting factors and how to work around them.
The process: The first step is to set up a half-day workshop, or to include the following activities as part of a team development day. The workshop comprises of three sessions.
Part One – Seeing different perspectives
The first part of the journey is to help team members recognise they have different ways of thinking. One of the fastest ways to do this is to use a simple psychometric that will help identify different motivations or preferences that will shape each person’s perspectives. Our preference is SDI (Strength Deployment Inventory) because it is quick to administer, easy to absorb, and most importantly easy to memorise. Having sent out the online tests the week before the team should arrive at the workshop aware of their own psychometric profile. The facilitator can then focus the team on the differences that are likely to emerge from each of the main profiles. The purpose of this first session is to engage the team members in a discussion that begins to help them see the potential value in having different perspectives when compared with the limitations that come with a single point of view.
Part Two – Formative experiences
How we behave in a working environment is also influenced by our previous experiences, both positive and negative. The second part of the workshop requires the team to split into groups of two or three people. Each person is then allowed five minutes to talk about what they remember as an important experience that has shaped how they think or make decisions. This could be personal or it could be professional. Once each person has had the chance to share, their counterpart must then provide a shortened (two minutes) summary of what they have heard, to the rest of the room. The value of this exercise is that it begins to deepen the types of conversation that can take place between team members helping them to understand what matters to each person and why.
Part Three – Understanding the need for psychological safety
A team is unlikely to harness its collective intelligence if some of the members do not feel psychologically safe. In other words, every person around the table feels sufficiently comfortable to be able to express their thoughts without fear of ridicule or retribution. This is easy to understand in theory, but how does it work in practice?
This is a short exercise where the concept of psychological safety is explained. Having allowed some time for questions, each team member is asked to spend five minutes thinking about the concept and to make a note of their thoughts around the following questions:
- When do I feel most safe in a meeting?
- When might I be uncomfortable?
- What could we do as a team to improve our sense of safety?
- How do we get better at challenging each other’s thinking without creating an intimidating atmosphere?
The facilitator then goes around the table, taking each of the questions, in turn, explains their thoughts without interruption, summarising their points on a flip chart. Once each person has spoken the team can then have a short discussion before moving on to the next point.
Part Four – Next actions
To close off the session, the team should spend 10 minutes identifying a series of actions they will take forward in future meetings.
Notes:
These exercises will not in themselves automatically improve the team’s Collective Intelligence. They will however your team the foundation upon which to build a more effective way of thinking as a genuine team. The key point to emphasise is that in a complex environment, there are few simple answers. Indeed one of the dangers teams face is to try and oversimplify an issue by simply ignoring the other elements that create complexity.
Part of the underlying learning from the above exercises should be that no single member of the team has the full answer, but each member of a team potentially has a part of it. Teams who can learn the humility to accept this have a much better chance of finding novel and practical responses to the challenges of 21st-century problems.
Apr 21, 2022 | Tools
Major projects are typically fraught with issues and problems. Teams are generally set up with the resources to solve day to day difficulties. It is why most of us like working on projects. What happens, however, when you have to rely on another team to find the answer? This is why every project needs to pay attention to the development of collaborative interfaces.
More often than not when we talk about collaboration we think of it as some form of generic process or activity that should be taking place across the whole of a project at all times. The reality is that collaboration is only needed when a problem occurs at the interface between two or more teams engaged in the delivery process. One of the key leadership activities sitting under the collaboration workstream should focus on the potential points of inter-team friction.
Here are some suggestions to consider that will improve collaboration by reducing friction:
1) Create an Interface Management Plan
Each team within a project should invest time in developing an ‘interface management plan’. This is a simple document that captures the thinking around the following questions
a. Who are we going to be dependent on to deliver our portion of the works
b. Who is going to be dependent on us
c. What are the potential friction points where problems could arise
d. Who are the individuals we need to get to know in those teams where we have a degree on interdependency
e. How should we connect and communicate with them to establish the right relationships? The development of the plan should be treated as a short and simple exercise, the output from which is contained in a single sheet of paper. It can be created in a couple of hours, but should be a team exercise so that everyone is aware of the need to manage the interfaces.
2) Build collaborative relationships
If you know you are going to need help from someone in another team, it is a good idea to have some form of positive relationship with them. We advocate the process of building what is known as Level 2 relationships, where we seek to have the kind of social exchanges which enable us to learn enough about the other party to be able to see them as human beings rather than simply names attached to a role. Of course, people must be allowed to make their own choices about building personal relationships, but we can put in place mechanisms to stimulate our team’s knowledge of each other through meetings, workshops and social events.
3) Manage blame instinct
It is also helpful to train your teams to understand the counter-productive nature of blame when things go wrong. Blame is an emotional reaction to frustration and anger, but it tends to be highly destructive and usually closes down our ability to find solutions as we limit communication and establish adversarial positions. As human beings, we cannot control our emotions, but we can learn to manage them. So train your teams to understand the need to move quickly from a reactive response that the other team is at fault, to a reflective position where you try to understand what has gone wrong and how to remedy the situation.
Paying attention to collaborative interfaces can be thought of as another form of risk management. It requires identifying key interdependencies in advance and putting in place a plan of activities to mitigate the consequences of inter-team conflict. At ResoLex, we come across too many projects where the leadership takes a view that a proactive approach to collaborative relationships is unnecessary. This attitude is somewhat complacent as human beings have a tendency to react negatively when under pressure or stress. So paying some attention to establishing positive interfaces between the right people at the right time, will significantly improve the chances of a successful outcome.
