Alliance Culture Lessons: Ten Things We Still Get Wrong (And Have No Excuse For)

Introduction

After more than two decades of alliance contracting, we have an enormous body of experience to draw from.

We've delivered remarkable projects. We've generated innovation that conventional contracts couldn't. We've built relationships that have lasted decades.

Yet despite all of that experience, many alliance teams continue to repeat the same cultural mistakes.

Perhaps more alarmingly, an alliance can be highly collaborative and still be ineffective.

These aren't emerging challenges.

They're not lessons we're still discovering.

They're lessons we've already learned.

The real question is why we're still not applying them consistently.

Here are some of the things alliance projects should know better by now.

Setting the Scene for Collaboration

For years, alliance contracting and the broader relationship contracting field of practice has treated collaboration as both the means and the end.

It isn't.

Collaboration is the purposeful creation of value through interdependence.

At its heart, collaboration is a collective capability.

Like any capability, it should be developed intentionally, applied selectively and measured by the value it creates.

The goal of collaboration is not more interaction, more meetings, more consultation or more consensus.

The goal is better outcomes.

When collaboration improves decision quality, accelerates delivery, strengthens innovation, improves stakeholder outcomes or enhances risk management, it is creating value.

When it creates delay, dependency, confusion or unnecessary complexity, it is not collaboration.

It is inefficiency.

The most mature alliance teams do not collaborate everywhere.

They collaborate where collaboration creates value.

And they empower expertise, accountability and individual ownership where it doesn't.

1. Culture Is Not What You Write. It's What You Reward.

Most alliances invest significant effort creating charters, values and behavioural frameworks.

Then spend the next three years rewarding completely different behaviours.

People don't pay attention to what leaders say.

They pay attention to:

• who gets promoted
• who gets recognised
• whose behaviour gets tolerated
• where resources get allocated
• how decisions get made

If your project charter says "collaboration" but your heroes are individual problem-solvers who save the day at the last minute, then your real culture is not collaboration.

It's heroics.

2. Alignment Events Don't Create Alignment

We've convinced ourselves that a launch workshop can create culture.

It can't.

Culture is created through thousands of interactions after the workshop finishes.

The evidence is obvious.

Most alliance teams leave alignment events energised.

Six months later many are experiencing exactly the same tensions they were trying to solve.

The issue isn't the workshop.

The issue is believing culture is an event rather than an ongoing leadership responsibility.

3. Psychological Safety Is Not Being Nice

This is perhaps one of the most misunderstood concepts in alliance contracting.

Many teams have interpreted psychological safety as:

• being agreeable
• avoiding conflict
• protecting relationships
• keeping everyone comfortable

In reality psychological safety exists when people can:

• disagree openly
• challenge decisions
• admit mistakes
• raise concerns early
• have difficult conversations

without fear of punishment or exclusion.

Teams that avoid healthy conflict rarely become high-performing.

They simply become polite.

4. We Still Mistake Harmony For Collaboration

Great collaboration is not the absence of tension.

It's the productive use of tension.

The best alliance teams disagree often.

They challenge assumptions.

They test ideas vigorously.

They surface issues early.

What makes them effective is not that conflict doesn't exist.

It's that the conflict is directed toward the work rather than the people.

Too many alliances still reward agreement more than contribution.

5. We Underestimate The Damage Of Tolerating One Person

Every experienced alliance leader has seen it.

A technically brilliant person.

A significant relationship holder.

A high performer.

Someone considered too valuable to challenge.

The alliance spends months accommodating behaviour they know is inconsistent with agreed values.

Eventually everyone receives the same message:

The standards apply to everyone except certain people.

Culture begins to deteriorate immediately.

The lesson is simple.

Nothing destroys credibility faster than selective accountability.

6. Trust Is Built Faster Through Vulnerability Than Competence

Most alliance teams focus on proving capability.

Yet the moments that usually strengthen trust are different.

Trust often accelerates when people:

• admit mistakes
• ask for help
• acknowledge uncertainty
• disclose risks early
• share lessons learned

Many alliance cultures still reward certainty over honesty.

We should know by now that the reverse is more valuable.

7. We Wait Too Long To Have The Conversation

Issues rarely appear suddenly.

Most teams see them coming.

The warning signs are normally present months in advance:

• increasing frustration
• reduced engagement
• siloed behaviour
• stakeholder complaints
• participant tensions

But many alliances continue to postpone difficult conversations until positions harden.

The cost of delayed feedback remains one of the most avoidable cultural failures in our industry.

8. Accountability Is Not Something Leaders Do To People

One of the biggest cultural shifts still required in alliance environments is our understanding of accountability.

Traditional environments often rely on hierarchical accountability.

Alliance environments require collective accountability.

The most successful projects create conditions where people:

• hold themselves accountable
• hold each other accountable
• challenge respectfully
• own commitments publicly

When accountability only flows from leaders downward, alliance maturity remains limited.

9. Learning Reviews Are Still Too Close To Compliance Exercises

Most projects conduct lessons learned reviews.

Far fewer create genuine learning cultures.

A learning culture asks:

• What surprised us?
• What assumptions proved wrong?
• What nearly happened?
• What should we stop doing?

Too often lessons learned sessions become exercises in documenting successes rather than examining reality.

And as a result many lessons are identified without behaviour ever changing.

10. Culture Requires Continuous Re-Design

Perhaps the biggest lesson of all.

Many alliances behave as though culture is established during formation and maintained thereafter.

In reality culture is dynamic.

The project changes.

The stakeholders change.

The pressures change.

The people change.

An alliance that does not consciously evolve its culture will eventually find itself operating with norms that no longer serve the work.

Culture is not something you build once.

It's something you continuously redesign.

Some Additional "Industry Sacred Cows" that we can’t stay silent on…

Here are some myths that we see and hear regularly repeated in the alliance world, but ones we don’t want to leave unspoken (we will no doubt deal with these at a later point):

"Collaboration means consensus."

No. Consensus is a decision making approach that collaborative teams may choose to use.

Collaboration is much more complex and focuses on value creation, it recognises interdependence, treats diversity of thought and participation as essential, and implies that it is essential to a performance outcome.

"Trust takes years to build."

Not necessarily. Earned trust can.

Many teams build significant trust in weeks. This is Swift Trust (just call us if you want to know more!)…

The bigger challenge is maintaining it – Trust requires intention by all parties.

"The alliance model guarantees collaboration."

It doesn't.

The contract creates conditions.

Messing with the original contract design also creates unintended consequences.

People create collaboration, often spite the contract.

"The best leaders are visible all the time."

Often the opposite.

The best Alliance Directors build systems that don't depend on them.

To learn more about this – read this article about Alliance Director Excellence.

"High-performing teams avoid conflict."

Research and experience say the opposite.

New teams evolve by working through Forming… Norming… Storming… but it doesn’t stop there.

High-performing teams rely upon constructive conflict to surface and address issues before they become obstacles.

"Culture follows structure."

Only partially.

Culture is shaped far more through leadership behaviour, reinforcement and shared experiences than organisation charts. Too much emphasis on organisation charts has resulted in an overemphasis on individual reporting lines over the vertical alignment of goals throughout the structure.

"No silos" is utopia.

The goal is not removing boundaries.

The goal is creating the right degree of integration at the right time for the right purpose.

Too little integration creates fragmentation.

Too much integration creates drag.

Closing Thought: we’ve forgotten what Collaboration is for….

One of the most damaging myths in alliance contracting is that more collaboration is always better.

It isn't.

Collaboration is not the objective.

Performance is.

Collaboration should only occur where bringing people together creates more value than letting them operate independently.

The best alliance teams understand this intuitively.

They know when to:

• integrate
• involve
• challenge
• co-create

And they know when to:

• empower
• delegate
• trust expertise
• get out of the way

Collaboration that improves outcomes is valuable.

Collaboration that creates delay, dependency and unnecessary complexity is simply inefficiency with a better marketing label.

The question should never be: "How can we collaborate more?"

The question should be: "Where will collaboration create the greatest value?"

Collaboration is not people working together.

Collaboration is people creating value together that they could not create alone.

The future of collaboration is not learning how to work together more. It's learning when working together creates value and when it doesn't.

The ODAPTIC Definition of Collaboration:

Collaboration is the purposeful creation of value through interdependence.

It is not an outcome. It is a collective capability.