Collaborative Contagion
There is a word that gets used a lot in major infrastructure procurement nowadays. Collaboration. It appears in NEC4 contracts, in alliance agreements, and in the behavioural commitments that bid teams make during tenders and Collaborative Behavioural Assessments. It is, on paper, everywhere.
And yet the gap between collaboration as a stated intention and collaboration as a daily operational reality has a measurable commercial cost. Research by McKinsey & Company found that large construction projects typically take 20% longer to complete than planned and can run up to 80% over budget — and the researchers identified fragmented supply chains and poor coordination as among the primary reasons. Those are not technical failures. They are collaboration failures, expressing themselves in real-life programme and cost.
Teams travel more in hope than expectation. Teams that perform in the assessment room fracture under delivery pressure. Charters set out shared values, but those values are never translated into shared ways of working. Organisations that committed to open-book transparency find themselves defaulting to the contractual protections and transactional behaviours they know best.
I've watched this pattern repeat itself over 30 years on both sides of major public sector programmes — first as a lawyer advising government on public spending, and over the last 15 years as an adviser helping Tier 1 contractors win. And it has led me to a conviction that shapes everything Milestone does.
Collaboration isn't soft. It isn't a cultural aspiration or a set of values on a wall. It isn’t a nice-to-have.
Collaboration is a capability — one that can be developed, practised and, crucially, spread. When it takes hold in a team, it changes how decisions get made, what people prioritise, how quickly disagreements are surfaced, and how knowledge moves across organisational boundaries. It becomes self-reinforcing as those working collaboratively see, hear and feel the impact of the collaboration. That is what I mean by collaborative contagion.
But it has to be built on something real.
Why hoping for the best isn't enough
The mistake most organisations make when they invest in collaborative development is to treat it as a people problem with a people solution. Run some workshops. Do some profiling. Help individuals understand themselves and each other. All of that has value — but it is not sufficient, because collaboration on a major infrastructure programme is not primarily about how people feel about each other. It is about how they work together under pressure, across organisational boundaries, when the programme is behind schedule, relationships are fracturing and the commercial stakes are high.
You cannot develop that capability in the abstract. You need real material to work with.
This is why Milestone uses actual programme data and real project tools in our leadership development work. Not because it makes for more engaging sessions — though it does — but because the only way to build genuine collaborative capability is to practise it on something that matters. When a bid team works through sequencing decisions and constraint logic together, they are not doing a team-building exercise. They are developing the shared understanding of the programme that will sustain them through the CBA, through mobilisation, and into delivery. The collaboration and the planning are not parallel workstreams. They are the same work.
What collaborative contagion looks like in practice
The most telling moment I have witnessed came during a dress rehearsal for a major North American infrastructure CBA — a programme worth $ 60 billion CAD, with a rigorous assessment process designed to determine whether the collaboration was real.
One senior team member joined the preparation process late. He was sceptical — visibly so — and made little effort to conceal it. By the second day, though, something had shifted. I have seen this happen before, but not quite like this. During the dress rehearsal interview, he stopped. Looked around the room. "I've never been through anything like this before," he said. "This is different."
He wasn't performing. He wasn't following a script. He was describing something that had actually happened to him — a genuine change in how he understood his own role in the team and what the team was capable of together.
They went on to achieve the highest marks in the assessment. Not because they had rehearsed good answers, but because they had genuinely learned to collaborate — and the assessors, who had designed the process specifically to find that out, could tell the difference.
That is collaborative contagion in practice. It starts in one room. It spreads — through the assessment, into mobilisation, across the programme. And it is self-reinforcing, because once a team has experienced what genuine collaboration feels like under pressure, they want to do it again.
A planner who has genuinely integrated subcontractor intelligence into the programme baseline has not just produced a better schedule. They have created a point of shared ownership that changes how the supply chain engages with the contractor. A bid team that has worked through real scenarios together in CBA preparation has not just rehearsed their performance. They have established a way of making decisions and surfacing disagreements that the delivery team inherits.
This is why the teams Milestone works with don't just perform well in assessments. We work on the assumption that the teams we prepare will win. That means the preparation is never just about the assessment — it builds the team as if mobilisation is already in view. They arrive already operating as a team, with shared working principles they have thrashed out together. The investment is made once. It pays back twice.
Why this matters more than ever
We are living through a period in which the ability to collaborate across organisational boundaries is no longer a competitive advantage, it’s necessary. The major projects of the next decade will be delivered through alliances, joint ventures, integrated project teams and complex supply chains where no single organisation controls the outcome. They are projects that will be delivered through NEC4 explicit mechanisms for collaborative delivery.
The organisations and leaders who will thrive in that environment are those who can collaborate well when it is easy and who have also developed the capability to collaborate when it is hard — when there is genuine disagreement, when the programme is under pressure, when the temptation to revert to contractual self-protection and transactional behaviours is at its strongest.
Megaproject delivery in particular demands this. The scale and historic complexity of these programmes — the number of organisations involved, the length of the pre-construction lifecycle, the weight of commercial exposure means that collaborative capability is a delivery-critical requirement - and, let’s face it, built into commercial assumptions. As we know, collaborative capability does not develop by accident and it doesn’t develop quickly or easily during mobilisation. All the studies show that a project leadership team that genuinely is intent upon developing collaborative capability will focus early and invest deliberately, in the knowledge that this focus and investment will pay a return many times over.
What this means for how Milestone works
Milestone combines rigorous, experienced planning with deep behavioural and coaching expertise - because they are genuinely inseparable in the work we care about most.
Our planners have worked in construction and pre-construction. They know what a programme needs to survive contact with reality. When they run collaborative planning workshops, they are not facilitating a process — they are building the shared programme intelligence that holds a team together under pressure, and that sustains a credible bid team alignment through assessment and into delivery.
My own work in CBA preparation and leadership development is grounded in the same principle. I have designed a Collaborative Behavioural Assessment for a North American public transport infrastructure project. I understand what these assessments are built to find — and it is not a polished performance. It is evidence that the collaboration is real, practised, and will hold under the conditions that actually apply in major infrastructure procurement.
Every team that has fully engaged with our preparation process has achieved the top score in their Collaborative Behavioural Assessment. More importantly, they arrived at mobilisation already functioning — with a collaborative capability they had earned, not borrowed.
We work with one client per bid. We are selective about every engagement as we have a reputation to protect. When we go in, we go deep, and we do whatever it takes to help your team build that collaborative capability until it is a collaborative contagion.
The question worth asking
If you are leading a major bid, preparing a team for a collaborative assessment, or gearing up for mobilisation on a complex programme, the question worth asking is not whether your team “can” collaborate in a Collaborative Behavioural Assessment. It is whether they will when it’s time to mobilise.
If the answer is uncertain, I would be glad to talk.
Thirty minutes is usually enough to know whether we can help.
Sally Calverley personally leads all behavioural and coaching work at Milestone. She has spent 30 years on both sides of major public-sector procurement and has designed Collaborative Behavioural Assessments and prepared teams to pass them.