Tucked inside the story of Brisbane’s Olympic stadium is a decision that has nothing to do with concrete and everything to do with how big projects really get pushed through. In February, the Queensland government amended the law to convert the parkland the stadium needs from trust land into freehold, clearing the legal path for the build. The change went through without debate. It skipped committee scrutiny. It skipped public comment. Fast, clean, effective. Also exactly the kind of move that buys you speed today and bills you later in a currency that’s harder to count.
I’ll be fair about it, because on a fixed-deadline megaproject the instinct makes sense. The Games are coming whether the land’s ready or not. Ordinary legislative process is slow, and slow is a luxury a project with an immovable end date can’t always afford. Cutting through the procedural undergrowth to keep the schedule breathing can look like decisive leadership, and now and then it genuinely is. There are moments when following every step to the letter just buys you a project that misses its deadline.
But the bill is real, and it doesn’t land on the construction budget. Bypass the scrutiny, the consultation, the public voice, and you are spending trust to buy time. The people who’d have spoken in that committee, the community that’d have had its say on losing parkland, the process that exists precisely to test a decision before it’s locked, all of them got stepped over. And people who get stepped over remember it. The resentment doesn’t evaporate. It comes back as opposition, as legal challenge, as a community that has quietly decided this thing was done to them rather than with them.
This is the project-leadership tension that never fully resolves, and anyone who tells you it does is selling something. Process protects, and process slows. Scrutiny catches mistakes and builds legitimacy, and it also costs time you might not have. Consultation creates buy-in and surfaces problems early, and it also opens a door to delay and objection. Every leader on every serious project has to keep deciding where to stand on that line, and there is no clean universal answer.
What I’d argue is that the cost of the shortcut almost always gets underpriced in the moment, because it’s deferred and invisible while the benefit is immediate and obvious. The time you save by skipping scrutiny shows up right now, on this week’s schedule, where everyone can see it and be grateful. The trust you spent shows up later, smeared across months, as friction and opposition and reputational damage you can’t easily trace back to the decision that caused it. So the trade looks better than it is. You bank a visible win and defer an invisible loss, and you tell yourself it was worth it because the loss hasn’t arrived yet.
The discipline is to count the real cost of the shortcut before you take it, not after. Ask honestly what trust you’re spending, whose voice you’re skipping, what it’s likely to cost you downstream in opposition and legitimacy. Sometimes the deadline genuinely justifies it, and you take the shortcut with your eyes open and a plan to repair the relationships on the far side. But sometimes the honest sum shows the time saved is small and the trust spent is large, and that the slower, more legitimate path would have served the project better, even at the price of a few weeks.
The thing to never do is take the shortcut unconsciously, treating scrutiny and consultation as obstacles in the road rather than systems that were protecting something. Because the trust a project runs on is far harder to rebuild than a schedule is to recover. Spend time when you must. Spend trust only when you’ve genuinely counted what it costs, and decided, clear-eyed, that the project can carry the bill.
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Ben Webb is a Sydney-based project leader and strategist, named Australian Institute of Project Management Project Manager of the Year in 2022 and nominated for the International Project Management Association’s World Project Manager of the Year in 2023. He writes about delivery, leadership and getting things done.
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