The Energy Transition Has a People Problem. And the Window to Fix It Is Closing.

Why human capital and Professional Collaboration are not support functions to the energy transition - they are its critical path.

Here is a statistic that should land harder than it typically does. Bain & Company's research across more than 24,000 transformation initiatives found that only 12% achieve their original ambitions. Not 12% of the poorly funded ones. Not 12% of the politically troubled ones. Twelve per cent overall. And when Bain looked for what the successful twelve per cent had in common, the answer was not technology deployed, capital committed or strategy quality. It was how well the organisation retained, developed and deployed the right human capability at the right moment.

The energy transition is, by almost any measure, the most ambitious transformation programme this generation of organisations has ever attempted. Trillion-dollar investment commitments. Thirty-year infrastructure lifecycles. Multi-stakeholder governance across utilities, regulators, investors, communities, supply chains and governments - often with genuinely competing interests. Unprecedented technical complexity delivered at a pace that the organisations carrying it were never originally designed to sustain.

The World Economic Forum's Energy Transition Index 2025 found that the primary constraints on progress are no longer capital availability or technological readiness. They are workforce gaps and the organisational capacity to deploy what is already known. Enlit World's Making it Work research found that just over half of the energy sector now believes the transition will run out of people before it runs out of money.

And yet the overwhelming proportion of investment - in boards, in programmes, in the coverage that surrounds this sector - continues to flow into the technical. Into platforms, into grid infrastructure, into digital transformation. All of which is necessary. None of which is sufficient.

The pattern we keep repeating

This is not a new problem. It is a recurring one. Advance has spent three decades working alongside complex organisations and major programmes in infrastructure, public services and regulated industries, and the pattern is consistent across sectors and generations of investment: the human and organisational dimension of transformation is treated as a downstream activity. Something to address once the technology is selected, the contract is signed, the model is designed. A support function, not a critical path.

The consequences of that sequencing compound quickly. When human capital - the culture, the leadership behaviours, the collaborative architecture of an organisation - is not built deliberately and early, it does not stay neutral. It develops its own patterns, and those patterns tend toward self-protection rather than collective performance. Accountability becomes ambiguous. Decisions migrate upward to leaders who lack the ground-level intelligence to make them well. Teams begin optimising for their own organisational interests rather than shared programme outcomes. The psychological safety required for honest escalation - for raising a problem before it becomes a crisis - quietly erodes.

What you are left with is not just an underperforming programme. You are left with an organisation whose dysfunction is now embedded: divergent cultures between delivery partners and client systems; stakeholders excluded from decision-making because inclusion feels too slow; learning that never propagates because nobody has built the structures that make it travel; and leaders, often technically excellent, who have never been equipped to lead in the genuinely collaborative and vulnerable way that complex, multi-organisational delivery demands.

Once those patterns are established, they are extraordinarily difficult to reverse. The energy transition cannot afford to discover this the hard way at scale.

What early investment in Professional Collaboration actually means

Professional Collaboration is not a soft concept. It is a specific, structured approach to building the organisational conditions under which complex, multi-stakeholder delivery actually works. At its foundation are three interdependent elements: the ability to collaborate - the skills, knowledge and systems that make working across boundaries possible; the licence to collaborate - the formal authority structures, the clarity of accountability and the governance design that gives people genuine permission to engage, to challenge and to decide; and the courage to collaborate - which is fundamentally a question of psychological safety.

Psychological safety here means something precise. It is not comfort. It is not the absence of challenge. It is the condition under which people in an organisation have enough trust in the relational environment around them to raise real concerns, to question decisions they believe are wrong, and to escalate problems early - even when the political or hierarchical dynamics make that uncomfortable. The IPA's research on major programme performance has consistently found that the single most reliable indicator of whether a programme will surface problems in time to resolve them is not the quality of its reporting systems. It is whether the people in it feel safe enough to report honestly.

Alongside psychological safety, two further elements define whether Professional Collaboration takes root. Clarity of accountability - not the blurred, diffused, everyone-responsible-so-nobody-responsible version that complex multi-partner environments naturally drift toward, but explicit, understood, accepted ownership of decisions and outcomes at every level of the organisation. And embedded learning culture - not lessons-learned exercises conducted at project close, but the organisational habit and structural capacity to capture, test, share and apply learning in real time, across boundaries, without waiting for a debrief that may never happen.

And underneath all of it: leadership that is willing to be vulnerable. Not weakness. The opposite of weakness. The willingness of senior leaders to model honest uncertainty, to ask questions they do not already know the answers to, to be seen to change their position in the light of better evidence. In complex programmes, cultures follow leaders more faithfully than they follow strategies. If the leadership modelled at the top is defensive, hierarchical and risk-averse, the organisation will replicate it at every level, regardless of what the Alliance Agreement or the delivery model says.

The window is now

The energy transition is, right now, in the mobilisation phase that determines everything that follows. Frameworks are being awarded. Alliances are being formed. Programme teams are being assembled. The norms, the habits, the behavioural patterns that will define how these organisations function for the next decade are being set - mostly informally, mostly unremarked upon, mostly without any deliberate design.

This is the window. Not the review at the end of Wave 1. Not the reset after the first major delivery failure. Now, in the mobilisation and early delivery phase, when investment in the human and organisational architecture is still genuinely formative rather than corrective.

The organisations that navigate the energy transition successfully will be distinguished not by the sophistication of their technology choices. They will be distinguished by whether their people have the psychological safety to raise problems early, the clarity of licence to make decisions without upward escalation for every difficult question, the learning culture to compound capability across time and organisational boundaries, and leaders with the courage and vulnerability to model the collaborative behaviour the mission actually demands.

That is not a nice-to-have. The evidence, across sectors and decades of transformation research, is unambiguous that it is a delivery requirement. The energy transition deserves to be treated as one.

References
Bain & Company (April 2024). 
World Economic Forum (2025). 
Enlit World (2026). 
IEA (2025). 
Infrastructure and Projects Authority 
Advance Consultancy. Professional Collaboration framework
B Lab Global