Over time, large construction projects have become more documented, more disputed, and more contract-driven in the way decisions get made. That shift is not just a feeling from the field. Arcadis has reported persistently high dispute values, longer dispute-resolution periods in recent years, and a continued high-stakes disputes environment across the industry.
That kind of environment changes behavior on site. The question is no longer just how to solve the problem and keep the project moving. More often, the question is who owns the issue, who approves the change, who carries the cost, and what needs to be documented before anyone touches the work. The CMAA's 2025 State of Construction report identifies contractual ambiguities and project management failures, including ineffective communication, as leading drivers of disputes.
None of this means the industry has become less capable. It means the operating environment has changed. A 2003 paper in Construction Management and Economics described a construction "claims culture" centered on the planning and management of claims, and later research has continued to treat collaboration as something that must be deliberately structured rather than assumed.
Ten or fifteen years ago, a lot of field issues were resolved the way they had been for decades. Two people on site, a set of drawings, a short conversation, and a decision. Someone made a call, someone else made it work, and the project kept moving. The paperwork caught up afterward, or sometimes not at all. Most projects do not run that way now. The same issue today generates an RFI, a response, a proposed change, a cost impact, a sign-off chain, and a paper trail before anyone commits to the work. The conversation on site still happens, but it is no longer the decision. It is the opening of a process.
The field is still full of capable people who want to get things built. What changed is the structure they operate inside, and the consequences of making a call informally have gotten too big to absorb.
There are reasons for that. Margins have tightened across most project types. Complexity has grown faster than the systems built to manage it, with more stakeholders, more specialized trades, and more interfaces between them. Contracts followed that complexity, and dispute exposure became a financial risk that owners and contractors both plan around. When the cost of being wrong about who owns a decision is high enough, the rational response is to stop making decisions informally.
Defensive behavior is not a cultural failure. It is a reasonable response to an environment where unclear responsibility creates real money exposure. The trouble is that when every party on a project responds the same way, nobody feels comfortable acting without cover, and the cooperative behavior that used to carry projects through hard moments starts to thin out.
Speed is the first thing to go. Decisions that used to close in a conversation now take days or weeks. RFIs accumulate. Change orders stack up. Issues that would have been resolved in the field sit open while everyone positions their side of the paper trail. Conflict changes shape too. When cooperation was the default, disagreements tended to surface and get resolved early, before they hardened. In a more defensive environment, they surface later, with more documentation behind them, and with less room to move. By the time an issue is formally on the table, both sides have usually already built their position.
Trust thins out alongside speed. Conversations that would have happened face to face move into email, because email is a record. The record protects everyone, but it flattens the working relationship into something more transactional, and over the length of a large project, that accumulated distance shows up in the finished work. A project where every decision has to survive a liability review is a project where good ideas get filtered out because no one wants to own them.
None of this is going away. The contracts are not getting shorter, the disputes are not getting smaller, and the stakeholder lists are not getting simpler. Anyone waiting for the industry to return to a more informal way of working is going to be waiting a long time. Documentation, clear contracts, and defined responsibility are part of delivery now. A project that tries to operate without them is a project setting itself up for the exact disputes everyone is trying to avoid. Even major public owners now formalize collaboration through structured partnering programs, which says a lot on its own.
Here is where I want to be direct about what I think.
The answer is not less formality. The answer is getting the formality done earlier, so the cooperative behavior has room to happen during the work itself. Most of the defensive behavior I see on projects is not coming from people who do not want to cooperate. It is coming from people who are not sure what the rules of cooperation are on this specific project, with this specific team, under this specific contract. When that is unclear, everyone defaults to protecting themselves, because that is the only thing they actually know how to do.
If the expectations around cooperation, escalation, decision-making authority, and documentation are set explicitly before the work starts, a lot of that uncertainty goes away. Not all of it, but enough that the team can actually operate cooperatively during the build because they know what the guardrails are and they trust that everyone else on the project knows them too. That is front-loaded work. It happens in the first few weeks of a project, not in the middle of a dispute.
The technology piece is different. During the work, the pressure is on documentation, traceability, and speed of information flow, and that is where the leverage sits. Better systems for capturing field decisions, surfacing scope questions early, keeping the record clean without making the record the whole job. The current generation of tools is starting to do that well, and it is going to get better.
What I am interested in is the combination. Formalized cooperation up front, tight documentation during the work, and technology that makes the documentation fast enough that it does not crowd out the conversation. A project environment where the contract is respected, the record is clean, and people can still pick up the phone and solve a problem. Not a return to something the industry has already moved past, but a better version of the reality it now operates in.