Every project has a moment where someone should have said it won’t work. The good ones build a place for that person to speak. The expensive ones build a place where that person stays quiet.
In June, reports emerged that work on The Line – Saudi Arabia’s hundred-mile city in a single mirrored corridor – had been paused until at least 2030. The cube-shaped tower beside it, the Mukaab, was already on hold. Billions in contracts had been cancelled earlier in the year. The most ambitious project of the decade is being quietly, carefully recalibrated.
The engineering was never really the problem. You can pour the concrete. The problem was the business case, and the sequencing, and the fact that the project’s plan never actually closed. The vision arrived fully formed and dazzling. The plan to deliver it never caught up.
I’ve sat in the rooms where this happens, on a far smaller scale. A founder, a minister, a board chair falls in love with an idea. The idea is genuinely good. And because it’s their idea, and because they hold the budget, a strange gravity takes hold of the project. The numbers that don’t work get described as conservative. The risks get reframed as a failure of imagination. The person who raises a hand in the planning meeting learns, fairly quickly, not to.
That is how a project dies. Not in a dramatic collapse. In a slow accumulation of unspoken doubt, while sunk cost quietly stacks up and nobody with authority is willing to be the one who says the schedule and the money no longer meet.
A vision attracts capital and talent. That’s its job, and The Line did it superbly. But a vision is not a project plan, and confusing the two is one of the most expensive mistakes a project sponsor can make. The vision tells you where you’d like to arrive. The plan tells you, honestly, whether you can get there from here with the money and the time you actually have.
What I keep coming back to is the silence. The most useful person on any serious project is the one allowed to say the uncomfortable thing without losing their standing. If your project doesn’t have that person – if everyone in the governance chain is invested in the dream and nobody is paid to puncture it – you don’t have governance. You have a fan club with a budget.
The fix isn’t cynicism. It’s structure. Build kill criteria into the project before you fall in love with it. Decide, in advance and in writing, what would have to be true for the project to stop. Put stage-gates between the vision and the spend. And when someone raises the hand, thank them, because they have just done the project a favour most projects never receive.
The Line may yet be built, in some form, on some timeline. But the lesson is already paid for. On every project that matters, ask yourself the quiet question: who here is allowed to tell me this won’t work? If you can’t name them, that’s the first thing to fix.
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