More than 300,000 people are attending The Open at Royal Birkdale this week, a record for the Championship and up nearly 30 percent on the 235,000 who came here in 2017. It beats the previous all-time high of 290,000 set at St Andrews in 2022, off the back of over a million ballot applications. By any normal measure of a growth story, that’s the headline: biggest crowd ever, demand through the roof.
Mark Darbon, the R&A’s chief executive, didn’t talk about it that way. He called it a delicate balance, growing numbers to meet demand while protecting the spectator experience and managing the crowd sensitively around the course. That’s an odd thing to say about your own record-breaking success, unless you actually understand what growth costs.
Most organisations only measure the growth
A 30 percent jump in attendance in a single cycle is the kind of number that gets celebrated in a results deck without anyone asking what it did to the thing being sold. More people usually means longer queues, tighter sightlines, a harder job for every steward and every food outlet on site. None of that shows up in the attendance figure. It shows up in whether the fifth person through the gate has the same day as the first.
You can protect the schedule or the quality, rarely both, and attendance growth is the same trade-off wearing a different name. Every extra ticket sold protects the revenue line and puts a small amount of pressure on the experience line. Somewhere there’s a number where that trade stops being worth it, and most organisations never bother finding out where.
Naming the trade-off out loud
What’s unusual isn’t that the R&A grew the numbers. It’s that its chief executive said, in public, that growth and experience quality pull against each other, instead of pretending a bigger crowd is an unambiguous win. That’s a genuinely uncomfortable thing to admit while also announcing a record. Most leaders would let the record speak for itself and let someone else discover the downside later.
The community around the course pays part of that cost too. Southport started planning for this week’s disruption five months out, and a 30 percent bigger crowd is a 30 percent bigger version of everything that planning had to absorb. Growth on one side of the ledger shows up as pressure on another, and naming both at once is rarer than it should be.
Say what the number costs, not just what it’s worth
Next time your own project hits a record number, whether it’s users, revenue, or attendance, resist reporting it as a pure win. Ask what it cost somewhere else in the system, and say that part out loud too. A record you’re honest about is worth more than a record you’re just proud of.
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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