Alignment
When pressure rises on projects, experienced technical teams slip into jargon, defensiveness, or silence. That is when communities and stakeholders trust begins to unravel, and the social licence to proceed frays at the edges.Â
Improve your delivery outcomes, read below and learn how to:
- Spot when a room is losing trust before anyone says so
- Tell people what cannot change without losing credibility
- Report back to communities in a way that builds trust, not just ticks a box
- Hold a difficult meeting steady when it goes somewhere you did not plan for
- Close the loop on engagement commitments, even through disruption
“You only come to us when you need something. This isn’t a relationship, it’s insulting.”
I’ll never forget those words.
I had just started at NZTA and was meeting an important stakeholder about a b...
I've spent four years teaching teenage students to de-escalate what I call an ego attack. Not a criminal attack, where someone wants your bag, your compliance, your body. An ego attack, where someone ...
The project team warned me about him before I arrived at the venue
Dave, not his real name, had been arrested and was in the local paper months earlier, over a different matter entirely, nothing to d...
My daughter is home from Dunedin for the mid-semester break, and the weeks before she arrives always do the same thing. Time compresses. I make plans, try to cram in more work than the calendar allows...
Seven years ago I was given a seat at a PMO table for the first time. It was a stretch beyond anything I'd done before, surrounded by people who had run programmes for decades while I was still workin...
I had good ideas. I couldn't make myself say them out loud in the moment. I was in my late thirties, working at the Giblin Group, and I was the person in the meeting who said nothing.
Not because I h...
This weekend my daughter went to her friend's school ball. The group she went with are the children of friends I went to school with, and many of those friends are still in my life now. Several of the...
It was one of the moments you want to slow down.
I was in Wellington with my parents over the long weekend watching my daughter perform at the national Shakespeare festival. Two generations sitting i...
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