BEN WEBB

The Tour de France finished on the Champs-Élysées on Sunday evening. Whoever stood on the podium, one result was decided weeks ago and shared by everyone in the race: 21 stages, three weeks, thousands of kilometres, and not a single morning where the start village wasn’t built, the barriers weren’t up, and the convoy wasn’t pointed the right way.

Think about what that record actually contains. A city relocated every night. Twenty-two teams, each rebuilding bikes past 11pm and serving breakfast in a new town by 7am. A race organisation that erected and demolished its entire venue daily, in a new municipality, with new terrain, new weather and new local authorities, 21 times without missing once. No other event on earth runs that operational cadence. Most projects can’t sustain it for a week.

Here’s the thing the highlights reel hides. Nobody involved did anything heroic. That’s the point.

Heroics are what operations produce when the system fails. The all-nighter exists because the plan broke. The miracle save exists because the risk landed. The Tour’s three weeks contained almost no visible heroics because the system absorbed everything the race threw at it: the transfer that ran long, the crash that reshuffled the medical plan, the storm over the col. Each disruption met a procedure, a spare, or a person who had handled it before. The convoy has been running for over a century. Its answer to almost every problem was written years ago, the same way Wimbledon’s Queue answers were.

I’ve written before that delivery is the only thing that matters, and the Tour is the purest demonstration in sport. The winning rider gains minutes across 80-plus hours of racing. The margins are built from unglamorous consistency: the recovery shake inside 20 minutes, the mechanic’s checklist completed properly at midnight for the nineteenth consecutive night, the chef arriving before the riders once again. Compounding, boring, decisive. The team whose staff cut one corner a night donates the final week to the team whose staff didn’t.

Projects have the same physics and pretend they don’t. Organisations celebrate the rescue, promote the firefighter, and tell the story of the launch that was saved over the weekend. Almost nobody gets promoted for the risk that never landed or the go-live that was simply ready. So people learn that heroics are the currency, and systems quietly decay because maintaining them earns nothing. Then the heroics become necessary, which proves how essential the heroes are, and the cycle feeds itself. I’ve watched it in more organisations than I can count.

The Tour’s culture points the other way. The soigneur who prepares 100 bottles correctly for 21 straight days is the job done well. There is no bonus for improvising bottles at the feed zone because someone forgot. The travelling workforce is selected and retained for exactly this temperament: people who find repetition satisfying rather than beneath them.

So here’s the audit worth running on your own team this week. List the last five things that got celebrated. If they’re all rescues, your organisation is rewarding system failure and calling it excellence. Find the person whose area produces no drama, no escalations and no war stories, and ask whether they’re your weakest performer or your best one. In my experience the answer is usually the opposite of the org chart’s.

The Tour ended with champagne for one rider. The record that should interest anyone who delivers for a living belongs to the whole caravan: 21 mornings, 21 starts, zero misses. Success comes from consistency, not heroics. The proof rolled through France for three weeks, and hardly anyone was watching that part.

What does your version of the midnight convoy look like? And when did you last thank the person who runs it?

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.