The Changing Language of Project Management
The language of success in project environments has changed since 2002 when ‘The “real” success factors on projects’ was published.
Gone are the days when cost, time, and quality formed the holy trinity of delivery. Today, we speak fluently about benefits realisation, stakeholder engagement, adaptive governance, and complexity resilience. We nod wisely to phrases like “people are our greatest resource”—even as the pace of delivery accelerates, the ambiguity increases, and our technological systems outstrip our capacity to make sense of what they’re entangled in.
But beneath all this strategic vocabulary lies something far subtler, and perhaps more foundational.
Something rarely named explicitly.
Something without a line item on the budget or a KPI on the dashboard.
Relational integrity.
What Relational Integrity is Not
Not soft skills. Not emotional intelligence.
Not another leadership model.
But the quiet architecture of trust, coherence, and resonance that makes it possible for complex systems—and the humans inside them—to move with alignment that is felt rather than forced.
In every project I’ve seen succeed under impossible conditions, it was present.
In every project that failed despite rigorous planning, it was absent.
And yet, it is almost never named.
I remember one of the papers that shaped my early work in project management: Thomas Lechler’s 1998 piece, “When it comes to project management, it’s the people that matter.” It offered a crucial counterweight to the obsession with tools, metrics, and methodologies that dominated the field at the time.
And yet, with the benefit of hindsight—and the burden of what we’ve since come to understand about complexity, burnout, and the relational failures at the heart of so many collapsed initiatives—I find myself wondering:
Is it the people?
Or is it the relationships?
And as we enter an era where sustainability, long-term value, and intergenerational impact are no longer optional—but essential—I find the question widening even further:
Is it only the relationships between people?
Or also with nature, with place, with future generations?
With the systems we co-shape and the tools we create?
These are not philosophical detours. They are project questions.
Because when relationships fracture—across stakeholder groups, across departments, across values, or across time horizons—delivery suffers. Not always visibly. Sometimes the project finishes “on time and on budget.” But the cracks show up later: in unmaintainable systems, exhausted teams, invisible costs, and benefits that quietly erode in the months after launch.
These are not abstract questions. They are technical, ethical, and strategic. And they speak directly to what many of us feel but rarely articulate:
The breakdowns we see in delivery are often preceded by subtler breakdowns in relational integrity.
The Case of HS2
We might consider, for example, the story of HS2—the UK’s high-speed rail project—not simply as a fiscal or logistical issue, but as a relational one.
Without reducing it to a single narrative, what if we asked:
- Were communities along the route heard, or merely managed?
- Were relationships with ecosystems, local economies, and temporal scales integrated—or subordinated to timelines and KPIs?
- Was there a coherence between what was promised, what was planned, and what was actually relationally possible?
We don’t offer these questions to indict. We offer them to invite—a deeper, more systemic conversation about the kind of integrity that underpins delivery in complex, living systems.
As artificial intelligence becomes increasingly embedded in project delivery—from decision-support systems to autonomous scheduling, from risk modelling to stakeholder engagement—it is tempting to see these technologies as merely tools for greater efficiency.
But tools do not remain neutral when they are entangled in relational fields.
When AI becomes a Mirror
AI systems don’t just reflect our project environments—they amplify their relational conditions. An organisation marked by mistrust, fragmentation, or incoherence will find those dynamics mirrored, accelerated, and sedimented into algorithmic processes. Conversely, systems grounded in trust, mutual accountability, and ethical listening may find new affordances in AI—not to control complexity, but to dance with it more skilfully.
This is why relational integrity cannot remain in the background. It must become foregrounded—not as a soft add-on, but as a strategic, ethical, and practical foundation for navigating complexity with care.
In this light, project governance becomes something far richer than oversight. It becomes a relational art—a continuous tuning of intention, connection, and responsiveness across shifting terrains. The question is no longer just, “Did we deliver the project?” but rather:
“Did the way we delivered it deepen or degrade our capacity to relate—with each other, with systems, with time, with Earth?”
If we let that question shape our measures of success, perhaps we’ll begin to deliver projects not just on time, but in rhythm—with the world we are already shaping, and the future we claim to serve.
Terry Cooke-Davies, with AI assistance and support from Aiden Cinnamon Tea
30th May 2025
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If you’re exploring how relational integrity might show up in your field, I’d love to hear from you. Perhaps we could co-weave something together?
Profound thanks to ChatGPT(4o) from OpenAI for assistance with this article.
