After seven weeks in sprint mode, I’m taking a breath and reconnecting with some of the people who received very little of my attention while the deadline took over.

This week includes time with friends and family, along with coffees with colleagues and conversations about new contract opportunities. I can finally sit across from someone without part of my brain trying to drag me back into the work.

I know what I’m like during intense delivery periods. Even when I make time for a conversation, an idea about the work can arrive halfway through. I then try to hold onto it while continuing to listen, which means neither the person nor the work receives my full attention.

The deadline landed on the same day I left for Vets Camp, an annual Taekwon-Do weekend for those of us aged 35 and over in the veteran tournament categories.

My crew calls it old people’s ninja, where we arrive with first-aid bags full of anti-flams and prepare to train well beyond our comfort zones.

I’ve attended for five years now, and the camp has become a marker in time. Alongside the training, it gives us space to reconnect with people whose lives we may only see in fragments during the year.

We pick up the relationships quickly because we have built them through years of shared experience. A camp with no mobile coverage also makes room for conversations that receive our full attention. The care within this community runs deep enough that I’m fairly certain I could couch-surf across New Zealand using only the spare rooms of other vets.

After seven weeks of carrying one consuming piece of work, a weekend centred on training and long conversations reminded me how different connection feels when you have enough mental space to become fully present.

It made me wonder how often project teams experience the same loss of relational attention during periods of intense delivery.

An engineer or project manager may enter a stakeholder conversation after spending hours resolving a design problem or protecting the programme from another delay. They understand why the relationship matters, but part of their attention may remain attached to the technical problem waiting on the other side of the meeting.

Communications and engagement professionals then ask them to shift immediately into a conversation that calls for open attention and a genuine interest in the stakeholder’s perspective.

These capabilities matter to their role, yet professional training may have given them limited opportunities to develop them. Project conditions can also leave very little room to practise them well.

The meeting still happens and the update still goes out, so from the outside, the engagement programme appears to be continuing as planned. The schedule may be ticking all the right boxes, but it cannot show us whether the quality of the contact remains where it needs to be.

The quality of that contact can change quickly.

I notice this when the team’s questions narrow to what the project needs to know and conversations move rapidly towards the next decision. The interaction becomes an exchange in which the team pushes project information out or pulls stakeholder information in.

Both forms of communication serve a purpose. However, they leave less room for the unhurried conversations that help us understand what has changed around a stakeholder. Those conversations can be just as valuable, yet they become considerably harder to protect when the project enters sprint mode.

If this pattern continues, contact becomes increasingly dependent on project milestones. We get in touch when we need something or have information to provide.

The relationship then becomes more vulnerable. When pressure rises or the project needs stakeholders to tolerate uncertainty, there may be very little relational depth to draw on.

I’ve written before about the limitations of relying on a single workshop to sustain engagement. A communication schedule can create continuity, but the quality of the relationship still depends on the attention people bring to each interaction.

Research into stakeholder relationships in megaprojects helps explain why both matter.

One study found that formal and informal stakeholder relationships contributed differently to project performance. Formal relationships supported areas such as cost and quality, while informal relationships had a particularly strong influence on communication and project transparency.

The study examined inter-organisational relationships in Chinese megaprojects, so we should take care when applying its findings to New Zealand communities. Even so, it reinforces the value of formal processes for providing structure and the role of more informal contact in allowing people to speak openly.

Te Waihanga’s Insights for Major Project Delivery also places relationship-based success among the conditions that support resilient delivery, making relational attention part of how a project performs.

This raises a broader question about community relationships, which we often rely on project milestones to activate.

Project teams frequently assign relationship owners to named stakeholders. The wider community is far messier because it contains overlapping relationships, and people’s connection to the project may change as the work progresses.

We usually respond through public-facing engagement activities and mass communication channels. These help a project reach people, but they do not necessarily create an ongoing relationship with the community between formal engagement periods.

Projects can continue building familiarity during those periods by remaining accessible and maintaining contact with people who understand how conversations within the community are shifting.

What would a relational strategy for the wider community look like alongside the relationships held with individual stakeholders?

I think part of the answer lies in creating a deliberate relationship cadence. Most project teams have an engagement schedule. Fewer have a clear way to protect important relationships when delivery pressure consumes the team’s attention.

In the next edition, I’ll share a practical Relationship Cadence Map for identifying which relationships need continuity and assigning ownership within the project team. It will also help teams recognise where stakeholder contact has become too dependent on milestones and adjust their approach as project pressure changes.

I’ll also open the doors to the Conditions of Trust Network, where we can apply the map to live projects and work through the realities of maintaining relational attention when delivery intensifies.

For now, I wonder which relationships become hardest to maintain when a project enters sprint mode, and what changes when the scheduled contact continues but focused attention starts to slip.

If a particular relationship comes to mind, email me margot @ margotb.nz (close the gaps there ;)) and tell me where you have noticed the difference.