Collaborate to integrate: How trust can help rail rebuild communities

Social impact, community engagement, sustainability: major projects in rail are being evaluated more thoroughly than ever. Both the volume of measurables and their thoroughness is growing, in the effort to unlock greater value from our transport infrastructure. Yet as a result, rail projects are growing more complex, with a greater range of outcomes, metrics, and reporting criteria expected of them. As public funds come under greater pressure, scrutiny intensifies, and the risks of failing to deliver against each of these bottom-line benefits is high.

The best way to address this complexity is collaboration at all levels - but change presents its own challenge. By bringing together cross-functional, multidisciplinary teams to address project challenges, collaboration allows us to confront complexity. At its best, early-stage collaboration helps to ensure that solutions are informed by a range of perspectives and offer the best possible outcome for everyone involved. However, these benefits cannot be taken for granted. In order for rail to realise them, we must reconsider how our major projects are conceived, planned, and delivered.

Contract models can make all the difference when they create a requirement to work together. Their definition can synchronise different organisations, both horizontally across project partnerships and vertically through the supply chain. Aligning on a shared vision allows us to incentivise behaviours that foster collaboration. In turn, these incentives can safeguard the outcomes defined at the project’s inception, so that rather than being lost in the programme’s complexities, they’re translated into effective actions across different stakeholders. That’s how we can turn linear silos into collaborative processes - and deliver against the many evaluation measures that are now expected of rail.

Values, process, outcome

Collaboration usually appears within organisational values. That’s as it should be: no corporation can compete for long if its staff do not work well together, let alone with the outside world. However, despite the rhetoric, organisations struggle to turn high-minded intentions into workable processes on a project. For all the corporate talk of collaboration, it’s often just too difficult to realise amidst the challenges of a long-term major rail project.

Yet values are the right place to start. They define how we see the world, what we prioritise, and why we undertake these projects in the first place. Aligning on values, and explicitly agreeing upon a wider vision, is an important first step to collaboration. Organisations that explicitly define their purpose and how they’ll deliver it through values-based behaviours can go beyond the narrow outputs demanded of them. Together, they can establish a shared understanding enabling deeper partnership. 

However, values alone are not enough. For train and track to meet, values need frameworks capable of transmitting them into ways of working. For example, major projects that enshrine such values through a project partnership or industry alliance have a shared platform through which to agree upon and enforce collaborative, outcome-driven behaviour that might otherwise slip. Unless such values shape governance models and decision-making at every level of a project, they risk being left behind in concepting and failing to translate into meaningful action.

It’s not easy, but we must proactively translate our values into processes capable of driving outcomes. Collaborative values can be encouraged through contract models, incentivising partners to work towards a shared outcome - and rewarding them for doing so. However, you need to recruit and train the right type of people who are willing and able to work together to succeed, regardless of the contract model. Methodologies such as Sprint and Lean can help break down silos and foster cross-disciplinary spirit. Common data environments can ensure that data is visible across stakeholders and domains, enabling partners to share the same view of the world and form decisions together. Collaborative processes such as these can ensure consistent progress towards desired outcomes, so that benefits are realised. 

Our work on the East Harbour Transit Hub Alliance in Toronto, Ontario is an opportunity to do things differently with a contract model that is still somewhat new in Canada. …But it’s early days, and it takes time. You have to invest in people, empower them and support the adoption of new ways of thinking and working. You have to adapt standards and processes. And all partners must be committed for the long haul, because tough times will tempt some to revert to the traditional ways of working.

From project first to community first

Just as trust is vital between project partners, it’s even more important between the infrastructure and the community it will serve. Collaboration with local communities is as important as collaboration across the supply chain or throughout the lifecycle. For community engagement to be more than simply a tick-box exercise, it needs to happen early and often. When projects are simply rammed through, and public dissent is seen as an obstacle to be overcome, rather than feedback to be considered, the result is often a wake of destruction in the community. On the other hand, when projects respect their environments and the communities in them, the opposite is true. People actively work to mitigate impacts collaboratively, relationships with the local community grow, and contractors are able to deliver much greater value - boosting the project’s reputation and its social impact. 

Communities are at the heart of what we do, but too often they’re left out. That is short-sighted.
Large projects have the potential to provide employment, generate economic investment, and boost investment, not just for the project’s duration but for decades to come. With the right intention, rail projects can be training grounds for new tradespeople, used to bolster local and small businesses and reduce emissions. Anticipating how communities assimilate the structures and assets we create helps ensure that the asset actually becomes a part of that community, starting as early as the development phase. 

For locals who must live alongside the assets, the project isn’t over - and the best transport teams recognise that. What happens to the people who worked on the job, the local businesses, the community as a whole? How do you ensure lasting impact? Taking responsibility for these outcomes strengthens relationships and turns locals into allies. True collaboration is capable of extending the relationship between a project and its stakeholders beyond the traditional linear lifecycle. The trust that’s fostered in this way continues to energise the community and ensure lasting success. 

Resilience, the legacy that lasts

Transport depends on trust: between owners, engineers, local levels of government, contractors, trade partners, communities, and institutions alike. We can’t unlock rail’s potential unless we do more to win it and nurture it. Building trust means creating relationships that you can fall back on. A ‘best for project, best for team, best for community’ mindset encourages win-win mutual benefit, inviting stakeholders to contribute rather than merely managing them. 

Whether net zero, social impact, or place-making and community-building, the universal human objectives of our project outcomes won’t happen by themselves. Only when we are willing to collaborate can we create the deep, broad, and intersectional relationships that are fundamental to overcoming complexity, achieving our social goals and creating a better world for all. Rail must help deliver critical social and economic goals, but we can only do it by joining together.