Pop quiz. The four biggest sporting events of this northern summer were delivered by: a private members’ club that also sells tea; a governing body for golf headquartered in a Scottish town of 17,000 people; a privately held French family company that also runs the Paris Marathon and owns a newspaper heritage; and a Swiss-registered global federation with 211 member associations.
The All England Club runs Wimbledon. The R&A runs The Open. ASO, the Amaury family’s company, owns and runs the Tour de France outright. FIFA runs the World Cup. Four structures that share almost nothing. A club, a regulator, a family business, a federation. Not one of them looks like the delivery organisations we build in the corporate and government world, with their PMOs, their tiered governance boards and their assurance frameworks.
And all four just delivered, at the highest level, in the same fortnight.
Sit with what that does to the standard assumption. Most organisations behave as if there’s a correct structure for delivery, and most transformation programs are really structure programs: centralise, decentralise, federate, insource, spin off. Enormous energy goes into finding the right shape. This month’s evidence says the shape isn’t the variable that matters. Excellence came out of four shapes at once.
What the four actually share sits beneath structure. Each has total clarity about what the event is; nobody at the R&A wonders what an Open Championship should feel like. Each has an unbroken chain of accountability to a single owner of the outcome, whether that’s a club committee, a family or a federation council. Each keeps its delivery capability close and continuous rather than rebuilding it per event; the operating models differ, the retention of capability doesn’t. And each is judged by a public, immovable test every single year, in front of everyone. There is no hiding an event that doesn’t happen.
Clarity of product. Singular ownership. Continuous capability. An unmissable test. Those four properties will carry almost any structure. Their absence will sink the most elegant operating model ever drawn on a consultant’s slide.
It’s worth being honest about the shadow side too, because I wrote about FIFA’s governance theatre a week ago and the criticism stands. Concentrated ownership delivers events brilliantly and handles scrutiny badly. A family company answers to a family. A federation president with no plausible challenger answers to, roughly, himself. The same concentration that makes decisions fast and keeps the product coherent also removes the friction that catches bad decisions. The structures that deliver best are frequently the ones that govern themselves worst, and that trade sits unresolved across all of sport.
For anyone building or fixing a delivery organisation, the practical takeaway is a redirection of effort. Before the next restructure, before the operating model review, audit the four properties instead. Can everyone in the organisation state what the product is, in one sentence, the same sentence? Does one named person own the outcome, or does a committee? Does capability persist between deliveries, or does it disband and get rehired? And is there a real test with a real date that everyone can see? Fix whichever of those is broken. The org chart can usually stay.
Structure is what organisations argue about because it’s visible and movable. The four properties are what actually deliver. A tea-selling members’ club just out-operated most of the corporate world again, and it did it without a PMO in sight.
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.
Leave a Reply