Forty-eight hours before the World Cup final, the risk that matters most drifted in from another country.
Canadian wildfire smoke has triggered air quality alerts across parts of the northeastern United States, including New York and New Jersey. Officials are advising sensitive groups, children and people with asthma among them, to limit their time outdoors. On Sunday, 82,500 people will sit outdoors for hours at MetLife Stadium, having been told to arrive three hours before kickoff.
Earlier in the tournament I wrote about the heat, the risk everyone forecast and nobody could remove. Smoke is a different animal. Heat was structural. It sat in the plan from the day FIFA chose a North American summer, and organisers had years to think about it. The smoke arrived late, from fires nobody at FIFA controls, on wind patterns nobody predicted when the schedule was locked. It’s the category of risk that never appears on your register because it doesn’t exist until it does.
Every project carries this exposure and most pretend otherwise. Teams polish their registers into false completeness, fifty rows of things someone already thought of, and quietly equate a full register with full coverage. Then the supplier’s factory floods, the regulator changes a rule mid-build, the smoke blows in. The register was never going to catch it. Registers catch what you can imagine. Real risk management at scale is about what you do when imagination runs out.
Here’s what that looks like in practice, and what the final’s organisers can actually do this weekend. You can’t filter the sky. You can decide, in advance, three things. The threshold: at what air quality reading does the operation change posture. The action: more medical staff, misting stations, public health messaging, altered warm-ups, and in the extreme, a delay. The owner: one named person with the authority to pull that trigger without convening a committee while the anthem plays.
Threshold, action, owner. That’s the whole framework. It fits on an index card and it’s worth more than the fifty-row register, because it works on risks you never saw coming. The register is a list of the past. The trigger framework is a machine for the future.
The smoke may clear by kickoff. Wind does what it wants, which is rather the point. Somewhere in the stadium’s command centre, there’s either a number written down that changes everything when it’s crossed, or there’s a group of people who will be working it out live in front of a billion viewers. Sunday will reveal which.
Worth asking of your own project this week: for the risk you can’t name yet, who owns the trigger?
Ben Webb is an Australian project manager and event delivery strategist. He was named AIPM Project Manager of the Year in 2022 and nominated for IPMA World Project Manager of the Year in 2023. He writes about project management, event delivery and leadership at benwebb.au.
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