Part 3: Conclusions & Takeaways - How Not to Make a Hard Thing Harder
Welcome to Part Three of a three-part series “A Trail of New Cities: A Simple Story About Planning Complex Things Better” an insider view of new city mega-projects too big to fail, but too expansive, too expensive, and too dependent on outside factors to succeed. Practices, pitfalls, and how to do it better.
Part One provides the thumbnail sketch of urbanization and why people build cities, how they do it, and a few of the more obvious big-picture challenges facing such an effort. Part Two is for urban planning and/or project management geeks, and speaks to the “master plan” itself, the set up for early implementation, and several specific issues impacting these undertakings. This part, Part Three, provides a handful of constructive ideas that have broad applicability for project management in general, and urban development in particular.
PART THREE: HOW NOT TO MAKE A HARD THING HARDER, A HANDFUL OF CONSTRUCTIVE IDEAS
By this point in the story we have completed the master plan and have begun to organize the design and execution of the works. It has been a tumultuous ride, and the challenges faced by the project are large, varied, and just getting started. But it is not all bad news. Fortunately, there are a number of simple thoughts and recommendations that can significantly improve the odds of success. Some are directed toward project owners, others to the professionals executing the works. Simple thoughts, but ones routinely ignored.
While you can never turn a bad idea into a good project, you can turn a good idea into a bad project if you are not careful. While a few of these recommendations are easier to articulate than to execute, the majority can be acted on immediately:
1. Look Before Leaping: Work through the big questions first.
Once signed on to a project existential questions are out, but the rest is fair game. What are we trying to do (beneath the headlines)? How will it be done? Who will do it? Do we have the necessary means and capabilities? What must happen first for this to move forward? What are the environmental/ social/ economic constraints? What do we hope/expect to gain from it? It is not that these questions are not asked, substantial resources are deployed in project planning and due diligence, it is how they are asked and the context in which they are asked. As the initial decisions to proceed are most often ambitious and uncompromising, those of us situated below can become too intent on building post facto justifications, making statements when we should be finding answers to the difficult questions.
2. Do Not Be Seduced By The BIG Announcement: Excessive exaggeration is not a victimless crime, it is a self-inflicted injury.
Nothing undermines credibility like over promising and under delivering repeatedly. Resist the temptation to throw a grab bag of superlative, hip, buzz words at the wall to see what sticks. The scale of the endeavour can still be fabulous when the “hype meter” is dialed back to 8 and not “turned up to 11”. And if we are unable to control the message arc, we can avoid believing the farthest flung parts of it - inhaling our own exhaust can prove fatal.
3. Accept That There Is No Silver Bullet: Do not overburden the project with expectations of driving reform.
Expectation management is key, as is keeping the project from becoming a “poster child” for progress and a vehicle for leapfrogging over many deep seated economic, social, institutional, or regulatory shortcomings. Projects can be excellent catalysts for change if used in a focused way, but they cannot be wielded like a magic wand in all directions to wish away a collection of profound problems.
4. Prioritize Innovation: Pick a limited number of targets for innovation recognizing that not everything can be special.
Following up on the previous, innovation’s Siamese twin is disruption. Disruption is risk, and risk must be managed very tightly. For example, do not make irreversible investment decisions relying on a “cutting edge IOT [Internet of Things] enabled integrated infrastructure and building management strategy as a way to limit energy consumption and cut back drastically on hard infrastructure requirements” if we are currently unable to uniformly enforce even simple building efficiency measures such as maximum U-values, low flow faucets, and energy efficient appliances. Aim for targets that can be hit.
5. Avoid ‘Best-Practice’ Distractions: The only best practices that matter are those that work for us.
Context is everything. It is critical to understand global trends and the state of the art, but overly ambitious, poorly crafted, mandates based on other people’s success are among the most common weaknesses in the conceptual stages of these projects. As these ideas are what set the mold for everything to come, the hangover will last more than a lifetime.
6. Make Phasing Our Friend: If, in the harsh light of day, the full mandate is unachievable, scale Phase One to fit and leave the dreams for tomorrow.
Promise as large as we must in out-years but be as realistic as possible in early ones, designing each phase to succeed autonomously. Success with a smaller phase will work out far better than failure with a large one.
7. Be Prepared For The World’s Longest Roller Coaster Ride: This is a marathon not a sprint.
Pacing is critical as these are multi-generational, non-linear activities. They tend to start with high ambitions and a mad flurry of activity, but can quickly lose steam as external realities intrude, bottoming out then rallying, often repeatedly, in classic “too big to fail” style via restructurings and cash injections. If we step in during year ten, a project can easily be entering its third iteration, having vaporized enormous amounts of money and only partially attaining its goals but never stopping.
8. Pick Horses For Courses: If we want to build a city, find people that understand cities.
Real estate and infrastructure are to the physical city as trees are to a forest. During the conceptual and planning stages we will need people from many disciplines, all of whom must have an understanding and appreciation of the dynamics of urban development. Later, other skills will dominate but at the start it is important to have strong urbanists.
9. Contract Success: Balanced contracts lead to superior results at the best price.
Contracts have huge impacts on the nature and quality of the work produced. At the front-end of a project where we require creativity, exploration, thought, and iteration, it is important to balance positive and negative inducements to promote this. Too often an overly rigid contract from an approximately related discipline governs the creative process. A good analogy is trying to design a modern racing bicycle by following the detailed instructions and check list for an old steam engine. Yes they are both modes of transport, and yes they both have wheels, but using one to build the other is not recommended. This mismatch between type work and type of contract is among the most common and least appreciated obstructions in projects of this type.
10. Draw All Lines Before Coloring: Time and money “saved” by fast tracking at the outset is most often lost, with interest, when faults and corner cuts appear.
When a high profile project starts, people are impatient to see progress on the ground. One of the most popular ways to compress a project schedule during “soft” planning and design stages is to pile sequential activities vertically, or worse yet to start constructing before even completing the detailed planning. Simple, and capable of significantly shortening project durations on paper, doing this introduces major, avoidable, project risks while also undermining the alignment of the parties involved. It is important to find a formula to provide the “quick wins” while allowing time for the project development stages to unfold appropriately.
Conclusion: Building a new city is not easy and statistics tell us that, like all new businesses, the odds of achieving notable success are slim, but we can tilt the playing field toward success by keeping these ten rules in mind.
This concludes Part Three and the final installment of “A Trail of New Cities: A Simple Story About Planning Complex Things Better”. Part One provided the set up for the new city project, Part Two discussed to the master plan itself, the set up for early implementation, and several of the large issues overhanging these projects. If you haven’t read Parts One or Two, do so as it will help put the above in context.
Kind regards,
Geoff Batzel