The defence sector measures what it can and avoids what it can’t, and this is quietly costing billions. While systems, capabilities and schedules dominate the conversation around projects, one factor remains glaringly unattended: people.
In projects we see conflict, misalignment in objectives and behavioural drift. Human dynamics are just as critical to a project’s success as engineering milestones and budget forecasts. This needs to be managed in each major program by a specialist called a project guardian.
The numbers show why this intervention is urgently needed. The Auditor-General’s 2024 Defence Major Projects Report revealed a staggering 442 months of cumulative delay across Australia’s top 21 Defence procurements. The previous report was as bad. The 2024 data also showed an $18 billion increase in approved costs.
The human factors behind this remain elusive because we haven’t yet built the mechanisms, or the courage, to properly see and manage them.
The tendency to discount or marginalise human dynamics and efficiency stems from organisational immaturity, an underdeveloped capacity to quantify behavioural and relational inputs and a discomfort with managing what we cannot easily define. As a result, we continue to embrace financial metrics and delivery milestones as the primary measures of progress, even when they fail to capture what actually unravels a project: conflict, disengagement, misalignment and interpersonal breakdowns.
These delays are predictable consequences of a system that lacks the behavioural architecture to detect early warning signs, manage interpersonal friction and respond to invisible shifts in relational dynamics before they cascade into risk.
These kinds of project failings have precedents. When the US Expeditionary Combat Support System was cancelled in 2012, seven years of effort and more than US$1 billion had produced not one line of usable code. The cause? Cultural resistance to change, lack of leadership and a behaviourally led disregard for new orders and processes. Better management of relationships and human dynamics would have made the difference and saved the American tax payer a ten-digit sum.
What this example demonstrates isn’t technological failure but a breakdown in human behaviour. These outcomes arise when those in power perceive emerging risks but are behaviourally unequipped to act, whether due to fear of interpersonal conflict, avoidance of uncomfortable truths or cognitive overload in complex environments. In many cases, decision-makers unconsciously rationalise inaction, maintaining the illusion of control while the conditions for failure quietly multiply.
We approach behavioural and relational issues very much this way in the Australian defence sector. This is why the role of a project guardian must be formalised and mandated in critical Commonwealth contracts.
A project guardian is a behavioural sentinel, embedded alongside large-scale and critical projects but independent of delivery timelines. His or her role is to monitor the psychodynamic health of a project: alignment across stakeholder groups, the emotional climate of teams, the behavioural fluidity of leadership and the subtle but powerful interpersonal dynamics that determine whether decisions are understood, contested or subverted. Ultimately, a project guardian ensures that the human dynamics within a project are helping to achieve its goals.
Where traditional change managers focus on engagement plans and communications, a project guardian operates in the undercurrent, offering counsel, surfacing unspoken tensions and intervening early when people begin to drift from shared purpose. A project guardian provides a continuous temperature check of how well the human system is actually functioning.
This approach has already been applied successfully in complex defence programs, including through my firm, Workforce Dynamics. Its model of behavioural oversight, termed ‘project guardianship’, has demonstrated that interpersonal dynamics can be actively managed alongside formal governance without adding unnecessary bureaucracy. It offers a practical way to support delivery, reduce leadership risk and provide senior executives with insight into the human factors that shape outcomes, especially when they lack the bandwidth to manage those dynamics directly.
Yet, within most project environments, psychodynamic inputs remain undermeasured, undervalued or misunderstood. While some internal human-resources and assurance teams attempt to adopt behavioural measures, these efforts often lack legitimacy at senior levels, dismissed as qualitative or soft in environments dominated by engineering logic and procurement timelines. Worse, the widespread pop-psychologising of workplace dynamics and leadership reduces human behaviour to one-liners and models, robbing the topic of the rigour it deserves.
Project guardianship is a vital component of a more mature, accountable and human-aware approach, particularly in a time of growing geopolitical pressure and strategic urgency. It’s no longer sufficient to say that projects fail due to ‘poor leadership’ or ‘communication breakdowns’. We must treat decision making, team dynamics, relationships and leadership psychodynamics with the same seriousness as cost variance or missed deadlines.
To achieve the capability outcomes our defence sector demands, we must focus on the human layer and build the behavioural infrastructure required to sustain the systems we so heavily invest in.