Everyone's talking about behaviour

Jon Masters
18 November 2016

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Collaboration

A new initiative is spreading out across the roads sector in England, identifying and embedding the good behaviours that make collaboration work: the Improving Behaviours Improving Performance (IBIP) programme.

Anyone expecting to work on a road improvement project for Highways England (HE) in the near future can look forward to having some frank conversations about behaviour. Fear not, the HE is gathering views on what makes collaboration work, or fail, with the promise of anonymity. Project teams are getting opportunity to talk openly about the subject without fear of reprisal. But in return, everyone is being asked to take responsibility for their own behaviour.

The concern for the HE and its supply chain is tacitly understood: England’s roads sector needs to up its game if it’s to successfully deliver all £15.2bn of investment planned for 2015 to 2021.

“We have evidence of a direct correlation between collaboration and project performance, which is why we’re focusing on collaborative behaviours.” Tracey Collingwood, Highways England

As the HE came into existence in April last year, it set up an Engagement Council with over 70 of its suppliers. The first meeting came up with six priorities for success with delivery of the government’s Roads Investment Programme (RIS). Embedding collaborative behaviours throughout the supply chain was one of them (along with safety, defining good value and performance; best practice in planning; incentivising and supporting innovation; and building capability and capacity).

Since then, on behaviour, a new initiative has emerged: the Improving Behaviours Improving Performance (IBIP) programme. “It’s clear to us that better outcomes result where projects are truly collaborative,” says the HE’s lead on IBIP, Tracey Collingwood.

“We’ve invested in lean and used different types of contracts and processes, but productivity has not materially improved across our industry for a generation. However, we also have evidence of a direct correlation between collaboration and project performance, which is why we’re focusing on collaborative behaviours.”

“It’s not a soft and fluffy subject. It’s about having the open and sometimes difficult conversations – getting people talking about behaviours.” Matt Stacey, BAM Nuttall Morgan Sindall Joint Venture

The HE is driving IBIP; the intention is to introduce it to every one of the 113 projects of the RIS; but in partnership with its supply chain. Individuals from companies on the HE’s Collaborative Delivery Framework (CDF) have volunteered to drive improvement in each of the five priorities. Facilitators are being trained up to deliver IBIP workshops to project teams that their own companies are not involved in. So far, over 1000 people at around 30 different sites have seen what it’s all about.

Andrew Jones is a technical director and IBIP leader for WSP Parsons Brinckerhoff: “Having seen what needs to be delivered over the next four to five years, it’s clear that as an industry, we cannot carry on as before,” he says.

“Collaboration is commonly described simply as companies or organisations working together with a common objective, but it needs more than that if it’s going to work. We all know it can get tough when projects don’t go well or problems occur. What’s needed, to prevent delays or disputes, is the ability to have honest and productive conversations when things get difficult.”

This is the nub of it. Everyone involved in IBIP seems to have their own take on it. But what keeps coming up, is the importance of people being given opportunity to talk, in a safe environment, about what the good and the bad of collaboration look like; and then having the personal skills, or ‘maturity’, to recognise what they can do to improve their own behaviour.

“It’s not a soft and fluffy subject. It’s about having the ability or skills to have the open and sometimes difficult conversations – getting people talking about behaviours,” says Matt Stacey, a board member of BAM Nuttall Morgan Sindall Joint Venture, which holds a place on the Major Projects Lot of the CDF.

There is also some systematic process to all this. Individuals and companies pushing the IBIP message are being assisted by a team from JCP Consulting led by behavioural specialist Amanda Crouch. “The industry has picked out eight key collaborative behaviours that are needed to make projects successful. We’ve helped them put these into behavioural language,” Crouch says.

Under each of the eight headings or categories – including engagement, accountability, trust and respect – multiple different descriptions have been determined, of what that behaviour looks like when it is ‘damaging’, ‘contributing’ or ‘leading’ towards success.

The resulting matrix has been called the Behavioural Maturity Framework (BMF). At project level, anonymous surveys are gathering views of all team members’ ‘experience’ of the different key behaviours.

In the long run, there’s intention to use the data to map out how the damaging or leading behaviours occur commonly at certain positions or points within project teams. For the time being, however, the survey results are being used to inform how IBIP workshops are set up: in the process, giving project teams an understanding of where they’re at with ‘behavioural maturity’.

"Workshop discussions often focus on how to talk about it. Trust and permission are important. People need to feel safe talking about it.” Darren Griffin, Osborne

“There is real value in having a straightforward explanation to help people understand why behaviours, such as the positive or negative tone they adopt, are important,” Matt Stacey says. “In the past we have often hoped too much that people would figure all this out for themselves.”

Amanda Crouch says: “The IBIP workshops are designed to show which different behaviours are having a positive or negative impact, and to allow people to then have important honest conversations about these actions, or inaction, based on anonymously gathered views.”

For example, she says, quicker decision making comes from people relying more on face to face discussions and less on emails. The resulting more rapid resolution of issues stops people making assumptions.

“Face to face meetings and direct communication prevent time being wasted by stopping people from going off in their own direction with critical tasks. All of these things are important for helping things to be done more effectively, with a big impact on cost and delivery,” Crouch says.

Darren Griffin is a lead bid manager for Osborne – a contractor of CDF Lot 2 for schemes up to £25m. He’s also now a trained IBIP facilitator. “The behaviours of the BMF for discussion are not tightly prescribed. It’s about individual teams deciding what’s important rather than us dictating any answers,” he says.

“The surveys test what the focus of each workshop needs to be. From that point, with a nominated leader on site, we work out the necessary theme.”

Quizzed on levels of scepticism he’s encountered: “not a lot”, Griffin replies. “The behaviours have generally been well thought out. And project managers, they get it.

“There is a tendency for people to revert back to talking about process, because behaviour is more difficult to talk about. Workshop discussions often focus on how to talk about it. Trust and permission are important. People need to feel safe talking about it.”

"This is the hot topic for quite a few major clients within the infrastructure sector, which are all facing the same challenges around delivery, efficiency and resources." Tracey Collingwood

Crouch gives a good example that she’s encountered when talking to one of the HE’s project teams. “They recognised that they needed to better understand the time pressures each was experiencing and how these were affecting them personally,” she says.

“A team member has subsequently told me they have been having wider and more frequent conversations about people’s availability and key dates on other schemes, so getting a better appreciation of when the work peaks will arise. The result is better resourcing and the project team hitting its weekly completion targets.” 

It’s also not just the HE and its CDF suppliers that are getting to grips with collaborative behaviours. According to Tracey Collingwood, how to enable the right ones that lead to improved performance, is now being talked about by a number of major infrastructure  providers.

“We’re all now talking about this agenda together, about behaviours and their importance for delivery of programmes of projects. This is the hot topic for quite a few major clients within the infrastructure sector, which are all facing the same challenges around delivery, efficiency and resources. And so there’s a lot of appetite for IBIP, for a concerted approach focused on collaborative behaviour,” Collingwood says.

The individual members of the IBIP group have also stated their intentions to spread the message by running their own in-house workshops.

“Connect Plus which is running the M25 DBFO contract, it too has its own similar variation of IBIP,” says Darren Griffin. “We’re a Tier One supplier to Connect Plus and now we have got to bring our subcontractors into the same work on collaborative behaviours. The facilitating ideas are different but they’re aiming at the same principles.”

Mouchel’s managing director for highways and transport, Jeremy Wray, is also part of the IBIP group, as well as a member of the HE’s Collaboration Board.

He says: “This subject of how to improve performance through genuine collaboration is taking on a lot of importance. We now have the BMF as a bespoke model for raising awareness, which we’re intending to run internally and across other sectors.

“It develops a language in relation to collaborative behaviour – this is the real value of it. Once people get that vocabulary, they can have the open and honest conversations with constructive comments about behaviour. But it’s just the start of a process that has to be repeated. It’s not just a tick-box exercise,” Wray adds.

“We’re working project by project with teams already put together, which makes sense, but those teams will tend to get broken up. It’s going to take some time, possibly a generation, to imbed completely across industry and deeply through the supply chain.”