By Bradley Hastings
Looking forward, Australia has a $242 billion pipeline of major projects. Looking back, 88% of our major transport projects were delayed, over budget, or both.
A common reflex is to read this problem as a technical deficit and suggest more project expertise is required – better estimating, tighter assurance, stronger risk allocation, more advanced controls. I call this the expert answer: the assumption that better knowledge and stronger organising will get projects out of the muck.
Instead, the evidence on project excellence points elsewhere, somewhere less comfortable. The people we ask to lead these projects are, by and large, excellent at the technical work. Their expertise is real, and it is helpful. But what runs short at the top of a major project is something else entirely – it is capacity.
Expertise is what leaders know – knowledge and experience, accumulated through repetition. Capacity is how much complexity they can hold and still act well. The first fills a container. The second grows the size of the container.
Where does expertise run out?
When things get uncertain and complex.
Expertise is built by meeting the same class of problem often enough that the response becomes effective and largely automatic. This is among the most valuable things an organisation can employ, yet it works on one condition – that the situations ahead resemble those in the rear-view mirror.
But here is the catch. Modern major projects present contexts that have never been encountered before – first-of-a-kind scopes, more interfaces, new technologies, uncertain political decision-making and unique community conditions. These complex and uncertain environments mean, by definition, that solving them from expertise becomes a weak guide – the value of expertise dissolves where the stakes are highest, and it falls away most rapidly for the people who have the most to let go of.
What project executives see
Our interviews and survey of senior industry leaders returned a consistent pattern. Project leaders with strong expertise do not stall because they have forgotten how to plan, schedule or control work. They stall because the senior roles run on opposite settings – less personal control, more moving parts, competing interests, and decisions that need to be made before complete information arrives.
What these leadership roles ask for is what we call capacity: systems judgement, the ability to make meaning quickly from partial information, and the standing to hold a coalition of differing interests together.
The fallback mode is subtle but sure. Under pressure, a leader short on capacity supplies more expertise. They go back into the detail, take the problem onto their own desk, and work harder at the thing that has always worked. This might work in traditional business leadership, where business as usual continues and time can be invested to compound outcomes, but project leaders align people and resources to time – they don’t get more than one chance to build the railway/hospital/data centre.
Delegation – or lack of it – is a clear illustration. Nobody who struggles to delegate is confused about how to delegate – a quick online search returns hundreds of frameworks for it. The barrier is identity – we continue to frame leadership as expertise, and as such, leaders build their self-worth on the quality of their own answer. Delegation asks them to be valuable in a different way, and no amount of expertise will shift that. As one senior executive put it to us, the hardest leadership lessons at this level “are usually not intellectual – they are behavioural and identity-based”.
What does the executive education market currently sell?
Expertise.
We reviewed 14 major project leadership programs worldwide, and the dominant pedagogical basis is a self-awareness assessment followed by framework-based learning. A framework teaches leaders what to do, and what to do is the part these people already have. The wider picture tells the same story – an audit of 1,688 course descriptors across the Financial Times top 100 MBA programs found around 5% addressed the capacities required to lead in complex and uncertain environments.
Several of these programs attend carefully to the inner life of the leader, through 360 instruments and personality inventories, and they do it well. The distinction is what happens next. A psychometric describes where a leader currently stands, and delegation problem shows why description is not enough – those leaders can usually account for their own pattern with some precision, but accounting is not enough to grow capacity.
What grows capacity?
Vertical development.
If horizontal development adds skills and contents – another model, another tool, another framework – then vertical development grows the container: the way a leader makes sense of complexity, rather than what they know about it. Studies align later stage mindsets, the product of vertical development, with far superior outcomes.
Consider a familiar moment in projects. The programme slips by six weeks, and the sponsor wants a recovery plan by Friday. In expert mode, the response is fast and competent – dive into the schedule, isolate the drivers, and rebuild the plan. The leader’s worth is tied to the quality of this response. So, the answer had better be theirs.
For leaders with greater capacity, the same slip reads differently. It is a signal about the system rather than a problem to be solved. What changes is that the leader invests time at a higher level, before diving in. They talk to the sponsor and the supply chain– finding that two parties’ interests have quietly diverged, and an assumption made eighteen months ago has expired. The plan still gets built, but the new plan addresses the system factors that underpin the slippage. Same information, however the answer addressed both the problem and the root cause.
Vertical development helps leaders step out of expert mode and lean into the capacity, mindset and resilience required to make sense of uncertainty and complexity. It works through exposure and support in combination. A leader is held in situations that genuinely exceed their current capacity – real situations, with consequences – and given the support to construct a larger way of making sense, while resisting the natural urge to retreat to familiar territory. It is the second half that makes the difference – something we support through coaching, peer learning, an AI ’coach in your pocket’ and 1:1 mentoring. Exposure on its own produces the retreat described above, which is what a difficult project does to people already.
Vertical development is the backbone of our programs at the John Grill Institute. This is not a flash-in-the-pan solution. Our programs run across eleven months inside participants’ live projects, because changing identity takes time, and the shift needs to show up in real world project application, not just case studies.
Where to now
The $242 billion will be spent. What is undecided is how much of it becomes working infrastructure. This, in turn, depends on whether the people at the top of these projects possess the capacity the job demands of them.
Expertise we have, and we should keep building it. Capacity is developable too, and investing in it is how project organisations turn expertise into sustained improvements in outcomes.