Learning Across Space and Time
The latest mega project research by Professor Bent Flyvberg, Dr Atif Ansar and Alexander Budzier is titled "Do projects learn across space and time? Evidence from the Olympics".
The question asked is do mega projects learn from one project to the next, using the Olympics Games as their case study.
Olympic Games are among the worst-performing mega projects, with an average cost overrun of 159%. (This has already been established in previous research).
An analysis of the games from 1960 to 2024 has shown no sustained reduction in cost overruns, their magnitude or variance over 64 years.
They find abundant evidence of lower-level learning - tactical improvements within existing routines – but no evidence of strategic shifts in organisational norms and delivery models needed to change the average cost outcomes.
Attention is given to the fact that Olympics Games are delivered through temporary organisations, which are inherently more difficult to transfer learnings through. Think about how the Olympics rotate every 4 years through different host cities, Olympic committees and diverse public and private institutions and you get a sense of the diverse ecosystem that is in play delivering each games.
A great quote to sum up what is going on, ‘As knowledge transfer remains inconsistent and politically influenced, host cities and governing bodies often prioritize short-term problem-solving over long-term institutional learning. This tendency to focus on immediate execution rather than cumulative improvement reflects a deeper pattern of organizational myopia, where lessons from past events are either selectively remembered or entirely forgotten, shaping how future projects unfold.’
For learning to happen, organisational learning must be a deliberate process (higher level learning), as distinct from adaptation (lower-level learning).
Time and geographic distances are compounding factors against learning. The term coined in the paper for this challenge is ‘spatiotemporality’ and the Olympic Games present an extreme case of both time and geographic separation between projects.
Four strategies are offered to change the outcomes:
o Centralisation – a permanent Olympic games venue
o Decentralisation – give each event a permanent home globally and allow events to occur asynchronously
o Real Options Strategy – systematically exploit time to make sequential investment decisions
o Public management organisational learning – adoption of higher level learning (e.g. high reliability organisation theory) by the public sector
For Brisbane, where I live, only one of these strategies is available to us which is to deploy higher level learning techniques. These include high reliability organisation theory, which is a space I have expanded my practice into over the last 5 years.