The grandstands, the broadcast infrastructure, the qualifying pathways, the hospitality villages, the security perimeter, nine months of planning and a week of execution, all of it exists to produce one moment. A champion holes the winning putt, the Claret Jug gets presented on the 18th green, and for about six seconds the entire operation has a visible reason to have existed. Then the crowd moves, the ceremony wraps, and the dismantling starts within hours.
That’s an uncomfortable ratio if you think about it directly. Enormous effort, a moment of outcome measured in seconds.
Most projects lose sight of their six seconds
I’ve sat through plenty of projects where nobody could clearly say what the actual moment of success looked like. The plan had milestones, the dashboard had metrics, but the specific instant where the whole thing either worked or didn’t had gotten lost somewhere in the process. The Open never loses that clarity. Everyone involved, from the greenkeeper to the broadcast director, knows exactly what they’re building toward, down to the green the ceremony happens on.
That clarity is worth more than it looks. The one deadline that doesn’t negotiate is easy to say and hard to actually organise a whole operation around, but The Open manages it because everyone can picture the six seconds they’re working toward, not just the date on the calendar.
Outcome over process, made literal
None of the process matters if the moment doesn’t land. Nobody remembers the qualifying pathway of the champion who lifts the Jug. They remember the putt, the reaction, the trophy in the air. The process was never the point. It was only ever in service of an outcome small enough to fit in a single photograph.
Find your own six seconds
Ask your team to describe the exact moment your project succeeds, not the milestone, the actual instant. If nobody can picture it clearly, the process has probably become the point instead of the thing the process was meant to produce.
Ben Webb is a Sydney-based project delivery leader and 2022 AIPM Project Manager of the Year. He writes about why most project management is theatre, and what actual delivery looks like without it.
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