Building an Infrastructure Alliance Partnership? Start with Culture.

Article by Stephen Manley

Bring together a group of smart, capable people from different organisations to deliver a project, and you’d think it would all just click. But more often than not it doesn’t, at least not right away.

What’s usually missing isn’t talent or intent. It’s a shared culture.

Without it, decisions take longer, misunderstandings build, and friction quietly spreads. But when you take the time to shape a common way of working, grounded in clear behaviours and shared values, everything shifts.

In this article, I explore why culture is the key to high-performing alliance partnerships, how reframing persistent problems can lead to better outcomes, and what it looks like when teams align not just on what they’re delivering, but how they work together to deliver it.

Refocusing on outcomes instead of problems

Building a collaborative culture starts with a shift in how you see the purpose of the partnership. Partnerships aren’t about fixing problems as they come up. The purpose of a partnership is working together toward bigger, shared goals. By setting your sights beyond reactive problem-solving, you create the conditions for creating shared values and successfully delivering projects.

To give you an example, when I bought my first house, I treated every maintenance issue like a crisis. A leaking tap? Call a plumber immediately. Flickering light? Replace the entire fitting. Each problem felt urgent and isolated, something to fix and forget.

But the issues kept coming. Eventually, I realised the better approach was to step back and think like a steward, not a firefighter. I started looking at the house as a system. I created a maintenance plan, upgraded infrastructure proactively, and worked with trusted professionals rather than reacting to emergencies. The turning point came when I stopped “fixing problems” and started investing in outcomes, like a safe, efficient, and liveable home.

So what does this teach us about alliance partnerships on large infrastructure projects? It is possible to reframe persistent problems into positive outcomes. Take these examples:

• Problem: We don’t have time to work on our culture, let’s focus on fixing what’s gone wrong when we need to

  Reframed outcome: By spending time developing an effective culture we’ll stop issues at source and speed up project delivery and save money from costly overruns.

• Problem: Culture clashes are inevitable, we just have to manage them.

  Reframed outcome: We can proactively find common ground and identify different strengths that will help us work seamlessly together.

• Problem: It’s too hard to define a culture across different organisations.

  Reframed outcome: Let’s create shared values and highlight practical day-to-day behaviours that will bring them to life.

• Problem: Working on culture is nice, but it won’t impact delivery.

  Reframed outcome: How we work together always impacts the bottom line. Building a coherent alliance partnership enables everybody to do their jobs better.

When organisations are brought together on infrastructure projects, they’re often expected to meet tight deadlines and tackle issues as they arise. But that’s a recipe for escalation, blame-shifting, and short-term fixes that do little more than patch the cracks. The leak is stopped, but the damp is still spreading.

When a shared cultural foundation is established, the conversation shifts from “what’s broken?” to “what’s possible?”. This supports collaboration, shared ownership and a clear-eyed focus on a common vision.

The transformative power of a unified culture 

At Spitfire, we’ve supported alliance partnerships to deliver significant infrastructure projects by embedding a positive shared culture that coalesces around the kind of reframed outcomes above.

We recently worked with a global engineering firm on two separate programmes in North America.

In the first programme, we came on board several months after it had started. Although the partnered teams had similar technical expertise, their cultures and behaviours weren’t aligned and problems were multiplying. These included communication breakdowns, withheld information and duplicated work, leading to missed delivery milestones and early signs of budget overrun.

We led workshop sessions which enabled the teams to co-create a shared set of values and behaviours. Initially the client had wanted to walk through a list of problems, but by focusing on what they wanted to achieve together, the teams shifted from defensiveness to openness, recognising each other’s strengths and casting light on troubling misalignments. Ultimately, it helped get the project back on track.

A notable piece of feedback from that work was a wish that they’d created a shared culture from the start. On their next project they did.

We supported them before design or delivery had begun with a series of culture-setting sessions that cemented the pillars of an effective alliance partnership. This included:

• Working with teams to define observable behaviours

  Behaviours that would bring values to life in practice, such as regular feedback sessions and clear decision making processes.

• Mapping individual and team strengths

  To create a mutual awareness of what everyone’s capabilities were and how best to tap into them.

• Creating shared values

  Using insights from the strengths and behaviour setting, we helped the client create a set of shared alliance values.

This proactive investment in culture put the project in a strong position to avoid dysfunction and work seamlessly towards an agreed vision. On a human level it also gave each team an opportunity to meet and engage with the other, to understand their perspective and view them as colleagues, rather than competition.

The key insight is this: while embedding a shared culture early on sets the foundation for smoother project delivery, as the first example above shows it’s also possible to address misalignment later and still build the behaviours that drive collective success.

Building a high-performance culture in your organisation

Culture is often seen as a soft skill and is therefore deprioritised. Yet, every high-performing organisation understands that mindset shapes behaviour, and behaviour drives results. That’s why they intentionally cultivate a culture designed to elevate performance.

During a complex project featuring multiple moving parts and organisations, culture underpins smooth delivery.

By stepping back to understand, document, and communicate how divergent organisational cultures can align around common outcomes and values, you’ll develop an effective alliance partnership.

Day-to-day that means less time fighting fires and more time completing tasks that move your project forward. Or, if you’re me, less time stressing over leaky taps, more time supporting businesses to unlock higher performance.

If you’re embarking on a project with a partner organisation or are working on one that isn’t going to plan, get in touch to discuss how we could support you.