The rules for delivering a successful megaproject are devastatingly simple

1. 10/26/18, 2)03 PMWhat the Sydney Opera House can teach us about Brexit | Financial Times
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What the Sydney Opera House
can teach us about Brexit
The rules for delivering a successful megaproject are
devastatingly simple
Mr Blobby 8 hours ago
The Sydney Opera House: a stunning achievement built on lies © AFP
Go down to Bennelong Point and make such progress that no one who
succeeds me can stop this going through to completion.”
That is how the ailing Joseph Cahill ensured that the Sydney Opera House
would be built — at least according to one of his successors.
Excavations for the project duly began at Bennelong Point. Cahill, the
premier of the state of New South Wales, died of a heart attack not long after.

2. 10/26/18, 2)03 PMWhat the Sydney Opera House can teach us about Brexit | Financial Times
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The Sydney Opera House was indeed completed, but in 15 years rather than
five and at a cost of A$102m rather than A$7m — a truly impressive cost
overrun of nearly 1,400 per cent.
Brexit, it seems, is also likely to overrun its original schedule, to the surprise
of nobody who has been paying attention. I decided to look up Bent Flyvbjerg,
perhaps the world’s leading authority on “megaprojects”, large and ambitious
endeavours such as hosting the Olympic Games, building a high-speed rail
line, or overhauling a big IT system. Such projects often — although not
always — go badly wrong.
Is it useful, then, to think of Brexit as similar to a large construction or IT
project? Professor Flyvbjerg’s answer: Yes, it’s a very useful analogy indeed.
But, given the failure rate of megaprojects, it is not an encouraging one.
Brexiters will point out that some megaprojects live up to their promise, most
famously the Guggenheim Bilbao— a tenacious, visionary scheme delivered
on time, on budget and with benefits outstripping any reasonable
expectations. Remainers anticipate the best-case Brexit scenario to be
something more like the NHS National Programme for IT, abandoned after a
decade and several billion pounds of wasted money.
Whichever side of this debate you are on, there is much to be learned from
studying megaprojects. I gleaned six pieces of counsel from Prof Flyvbjerg to
improve chances of successfully delivering a complicated project. Checking
the list against what is happening with Brexit makes my heart sink.
First: prepare thoroughly. This one is awkward. Civil servants were banned
by David Cameron’s government from preparing for Brexit before the
referendum. Then, for her own reasons, his successor as prime minister,
Theresa May, scrambled to begin the Article 50 countdown. “Zero
preparation”, says Prof Flyvbjerg, “is as bad as it gets”.

3. 10/26/18, 2)03 PMWhat the Sydney Opera House can teach us about Brexit | Financial Times
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Second: try to de-bias yourself, noting and adjusting for overconfidence,
wishful thinking and other well-known cognitive biases. Alas, most British
politicians are wary of seeming negative or timid about Brexit, for fear of
implying the electorate was unwise. Instead, both government and opposition
have embraced the goal of leaving while enjoying all the benefits of staying —
hardly a clear-eyed exercise in spotting obstacles.
Third: choose an experienced team. Hmm . . . Sir Ivan Rogers, the UK’s
ambassador to the EU and an experienced negotiator abruptly resigned early
in the process.
Fourth: try to break a large project into smaller, standalone chunks, so that
the failure of one is not a failure of everything. When everything is
interconnected, small obstacles can snowball into major delays. (See also:
The Irish border.) The logic of both politics and of diplomatic negotiation for
Brexit points in the opposite direction: “nothing is agreed until everything is
agreed”.
Fifth: key decision makers should be aligned, with everyone having an
incentive to make things move smoothly. Alas, politics (again) pushes in the
wrong direction here. Many of the people with power to smooth the way for
Mrs May, from opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn to the former foreign
secretary Boris Johnson to the EU’s chief negotiator Michel Barnier, have the
incentive to make things difficult for her in one way or another.
Finally: have an early warning system so problems can be spotted and fixed
before they grow. Yet warnings are routinely derided as “Project Fear”.
Even without political pressures, megaprojects are hard to deliver on time
and on budget: their sheer scale opens up a thousand ways for things to go
wrong. But they are always somewhat political, and Brexit is more political
than most. Even as a pure organisational challenge, it is likely to take far

4. 10/26/18, 2)03 PMWhat the Sydney Opera House can teach us about Brexit | Financial Times
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more time and money than advertised.
The Sydney Opera House itself is, of course, a stunning achievement. But
unlike the Guggenheim Bilbao it is an achievement built on lies. Those lies
came from politicians who decided that an honest account of the likely costs
would not achieve their goals. They tarnished the reputation of Jørn Utzon,
the architect who became the scapegoat for their impossible promises.
Lauded far too late, he received no other major commissions and never saw
the finished Opera House. Would the truth really not have served?
As far as Brexit is concerned, we have dashed down to Bennelong Point and
started shovelling frenetically, desperate that no one should “stop this going
through to completion”. Perhaps one day we will get the Sydney Opera
House, although that seems unlikely. At the moment, we’re at the bottom of a
deep hole and we are still digging.
tim.harford@ft.com