BEN WEBB

Two queues formed this month, an ocean apart.

The first was in a park in southwest London. Thousands of people camped overnight in tents, were issued dated and numbered Queue Cards by stewards, and moved through a system so refined it has its own published code of conduct. People describe queueing for Wimbledon as part of the holiday. The Queue gets a capital letter. It has fans.

The second was in a car park in New Jersey. A ticketing glitch met a presidential security perimeter, thirty-second problems became hour-long problems, and fans arriving four hours early still missed kickoff of a World Cup final. That queue made news on every continent, for the wrong reasons.

Same engineering problem: move enormous numbers of people through a controlled gate, fairly, on a deadline. Opposite outcomes. The difference is worth taking apart, because it isn’t talent, budget or effort.

It’s reps. Wimbledon has run the same queue, in roughly the same place, for the same event, every year for decades. Every failure mode has already happened: the overnight surge, the touts, the medical emergencies, the rain, the year demand doubled. Each one produced a fix, and the fixes accumulated into the current system. Queue Cards exist because of a specific historical problem. The steward playbook is sediment, laid down one bad Tuesday at a time. The institution doesn’t just remember the answers. It has forgotten the questions, because they stopped occurring.

The World Cup final’s entry system, by contrast, was running for the first time. Not the components: digital ticketing was tested all tournament, and the Secret Service screens crowds constantly. What had never run before was the combination at that scale on that day. First attempts fail in ways no risk workshop predicts, because workshops enumerate the failures you can imagine, and systems fail at the seams you can’t see until you’ve stood in them.

This is the part organisations undervalue when they restructure: institutional memory is infrastructure. It doesn’t appear on any asset register, and it walks out the door in every redundancy round, every vendor switch, every decision to rebuild a team from scratch because the new leader wants their own people. The Wimbledon Queue’s real asset isn’t the stewards or the cards. It’s forty years of survived failures, encoded in procedure. You can’t buy that. You can only accrue it or destroy it.

For projects, which by definition do things for the first time, the lesson bends rather than breaks. You can’t have forty years of reps before go-live. You can decide where your reps come from. Hire the people who carry the scars from the last comparable attempt. Pilot at genuine scale, the way FIFA quietly rehearsed its halftime show a year early. Run the full dress rehearsal that everyone wants to cut when the schedule tightens. Every rep you bank before the real day is a failure that happens cheaply instead of publicly.

And when something does go wrong, write it down where the fix can outlive the team. The difference between an organisation and a collection of employees is what survives the staff turnover.

Somewhere in your organisation is a Wimbledon Queue, a process so reliable nobody remembers why it works. Find out why before the person who knows retires. And somewhere else is a New Jersey car park waiting: a first-time combination of proven parts. That’s the one that needs the rehearsal money.

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.