Why we need to get better at celebrating successful projects
Mark Coates on why we should be shouting about infrastructure successes
AS a former quantity surveyor, I began working on project delivery more than 30 years ago. I have been blessed to be part of a diverse range of projects, ranging from national significant infrastructure projects such as London’s £18.8bn, Crossrail railway, now known as the Elizabeth Line; working to create infrastructure to support the world’s largest sporting event with The Olympic Delivery Authority; and a whole host of smaller infrastructure projects, which I felt were just as interesting and as important.
What has struck me over the years, however, is how poor we are at celebrating success. I think it comes down to two reasons. First, infrastructure projects are temporary organisations. For those working on construction, the lifespan of this temporary organisation often only lasts until the project is finished. As the renowned American author Gay Talese wrote in The Bridge about construction workers of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge: “They linger only a little while, only until they have built the bridge; then they are off again to another town, another bridge, linking everything but their lives”.
As, we naturally have to move from one project to another to pay the bills. As engineers, surveyors and professional problem solvers, we’re hardwired to solve the challenge were working on and then move on to the next one.
Importantly, it means not just learning from the mistakes, but also celebrating and learning from the successes.
The second reason is that the human brain has a natural tendency to give weight to negative experiences or interactions more than positive ones.
John Cacioppo PhD, one of the founders in the field of social neuroscience, was one of the first to provide hard evidence of this theory.
Cacioppo and his team showed people a set of pictures known to arouse positive feelings, a set of pictures to stir up negative feelings, and a control set of pictures designed to illicit neutral feelings.
He recorded electrical activity in the brain’s cerebral cortex to try and work out the magnitude of information processing taking place, and he found the brain produced a greater surge in electrical activity when faced with negative pictures compared to positive photos.
It’s time for us to get better at celebrating, sharing, and learning from success. It is especially true as the new government’s National Infrastructure and Service Transformation Authority (NISTA) aims to drive more effective delivery of infrastructure across the country.
As I mentioned in my last piece for CICES, only 8.5% of projects are delivering on schedule and within budget or better, according to Danish geographer and Oxford professor Bent Flyvbjerg’s database of 16,000 projects. However, that 8.5% still leaves us with 1,360 successful projects to learn from. Importantly, it means not just learning from the mistakes, but also celebrating and learning from the successes.
Heathrow Terminal 5.
While the £4bn Heathrow Terminal 5 is one of the highest-profile examples of a project delivered on time and under budget, there are many others to choose from. The Manchester Metrolink tram system, which delivered a £400m, 15-stop extension to Manchester Airport, the UK’s biggest airport outside the south-east and delivered the project one-year early.
After the initial project to deliver a new tram line for the Scottish capital of Edinburgh went £400m over budget and arrived five years late, City of Edinburgh Council delivered the next phase of its eight-stop expansion in-house and completed it on schedule and within its £207.3 million budget.
Earlier this year, Neil Holm received well-earned plaudits for his work on the £11.5bn, 76-mile Transpennine route upgrade (TRU), which is currently on schedule and under-budget. Going forwards, I’m going to do more to share some of the successes that Bentley Systems has been involved in.
These include Mott MacDonald driving efficiency and sustainability in material reuse through geoBIM on HS2. With approximately 25 million cubic metres of material earmarked for excavation, the integrated project team identified mass haul efficiencies that could minimise wasted material and reduce carbon emissions by 50%.
On Jakarta’s high-speed railway line, by using open civil design and digital twin technology, Wijaya Karya streamlined workflows and improved efficiency and design quality to save US$185m in construction costs and shortening the construction schedule by six months.
Giving yourself a pat on the back might be something many across the engineering and surveying sectors haven’t done since primary school.
Giving yourself a pat on the back might be something many across the engineering and surveying sectors haven’t done since primary school. However, if we collectively did more to raise awareness of the success of projects and celebrate them, then we stand a greater chance of embedding the ingredients of success into future projects.
I’ve written previously about the importance of organisations creating a learning organisation culture. There is little point in organisations having valuable knowledge locked away in the heads of one or two people. This knowledge needs to be recognised and utilised. Done properly, creating a learning approach has a compounding value. Learning from project A informs project B, and then learnings from both projects can inform project C.
More than just providing an ego boost, the process of recognising where a project has gone well and celebrating it accordingly can have massive benefits to how projects are delivered in the future.