Answer extracted from the Beyond The Plan podcast — listen to the full episode below.
What happens when teams take a claims-focused approach instead of collaborative problem-solving?
Australia spends more of its project budget on claims than any other Western nation, a direct result of teams prioritizing contractual leverage over collaborative problem-solving. When parties adopt a claims-focused mindset, they hold back discovered problems for future negotiation, eroding trust and making everyone defensive about contractual certainty rather than focused on achieving the shared project objective.
The Cost of Holding Back Information
In a claims-focused culture, teams treat problems as negotiating ammunition rather than shared challenges to solve together. When someone discovers an issue, instead of raising it immediately for the team's benefit, they file it away as a potential claim. This defensive posture transforms relationships from collaborative to adversarial, where each party views the other as a future opponent rather than a partner in delivery.
As Brett Ackroyd explains in the episode, this mindset makes people reluctant to expose vulnerabilities or admit they need help. Problems that could be solved quickly and cheaply spiral into expensive disputes because they were never raised in real time. The financial impact compounds across years of project execution.
The Trust Erosion Cycle
Trust is fragile in a claims-focused environment. Once teams sense that others are withholding information or waiting for an opportunity to lodge a claim, defensive behaviour spreads across the entire organisation. People become focused on protecting their contractual position rather than solving problems, which directly undermines project performance and delivery timelines.
The irony is that this defensive approach creates the very conditions it claims to protect against. By withholding information, teams actually increase risk and cost exposure for everyone. What should have been a minor fix becomes a full-blown dispute because it was never addressed when it was small and manageable.
"You will know a collaborative culture exists when one party will take it on themselves to actually act to their detriment for the other party, because that allows for the achievement of the overall outcome."
Brett Ackroyd — Commercial Lawyer with 25 years of experience in mega projects. Ackroyd has spent his career working within the Department of Defence and Government Security sector, helping major organisations move beyond contractual frameworks to achieve complex project outcomes through intentional relationship management and shared values.
The contrast is stark: true collaborative cultures operate on a fundamentally different principle. Teams are willing to absorb short-term costs or take on extra work if it serves the overall project objective. This willingness to act against immediate self-interest for collective benefit is the hallmark of high-performing delivery environments, and it's completely incompatible with a claims-focused approach. You can explore how Scottish Water and Sydney Water used collaborative frameworks to reduce delays and improve outcomes in the full episode.
Key takeaways
- Claims-focused cultures reward information hoarding and defensive behaviour, turning teammates into adversaries.
- Problems discovered but withheld for future claims escalate in cost and complexity rather than being solved in real time.
- Collaborative cultures operate when parties are willing to absorb short-term costs for the collective project objective.
- Australia's disproportionate spending on claims compared to other Western nations reflects widespread reliance on contractual leverage instead of partnership.
See also
How can predictable relationship management improve project productivity?
Scottish Water's research comparing projects utilising collaborative working versus those that did not showed that projects with collaborative working delivered significantly reduced delay times compared to non-collaborative projects.
Why do most project failures occur after a contract is signed?
Project failures often stem from the inability of teams to act on problems they know how to fix because of contractual boundaries and organisational silos that prevent collaboration beyond the contract's scope.
What role does ISO 44001 play in managing collaborative working?
ISO 44001 is the business relationship management standard that provides a starting point for organisations to be intentional around managing business relationships and aligning values and behaviours across teams.