Taking time to deliver with speed: why creating buildings with distinction needs the right mindset

Setting up projects in the right way allows for rapid action later

Large-scale projects are demanding and complex to work on, but they don’t need to be overwhelming if projects teams develop the right mindset. Mott MacDonald global market leader for major events and venues James Middling discusses how slowing down is the fastest way to deliver.

Large-scale projects are exciting and often career-defining endeavours but they are also extremely challenging. They require clarity of purpose, resilience under pressure and the teams delivering them need the ability to make sense of thousands of moving parts. However, what I’ve learned over three decades of working across the buildings and transport sectors, as well as other global development programmes, is that the key to managing them is surprisingly simple: you need to plan slowly in order to act quickly.

It’s an approach that feels counterintuitive in an industry where momentum matters. The temptation to “get going” is huge. Clients may have been working on a project for years before a consultant comes on board and, understandably, they want to see quick, visible progress. But when you’re dealing with ambitious projects that involve multiple disciplines, stakeholders, contractors and locations – plus billions of pounds of investment – rushing into delivery without a fully integrated plan is the surest way to guarantee delays, additional work and spiralling costs.

The power of thinking slow upfront is that it enables you to act fast later with confidence and it is a project management and strategic approach that has been popularised by Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner in their book How big things get done.

Using the “Think slow, act fast” approach means that once the plan is right, delivery can move quickly. A well-designed large-scale project should be predictable, repeatable and continuously improving to ensure delivery can happen at pace. The Empire State Building is a classic example. Although it was commissioned during “the race to the sky” period in New York, the team spent months planning every detail before construction began, with numerous revisions of the plans. But once they started, they treated the project like a vertical factory, delivering a constantly improving building process, learning and improving floor by floor, until they finished a floor a day. Ultimately, they delivered the building under budget and earlier than programmed – an extraordinary achievement even by today’s standards.

Embracing ambiguity

One of the first things to accept with large-scale projects is that ambiguity is unavoidable. Data can be limited or unreliable, requirements can shift and external forces – from politics to supply chains – can unexpectedly change during the life of a project. Unfortunately, you can’t eliminate ambiguity; you have to learn to work with it and that involves taking a step back to look at how you approach a project.

Teams often respond to uncertainty by breaking a project down into something that's more familiar and manageable. They create a series of smaller, self-contained projects that become almost like a community of villages. They have strong neighbourhood relationships, but they're still separate and not really integrated. This approach may make individuals feel more comfortable, but it creates siloed working. Each smaller project works independently to achieve its goals, but often doesn’t consider the bigger picture. When the pieces are finally brought together at a gateway review, the misalignments start to show, particularly at the interfaces between the different projects, and months, or even years, of work can be undone. Ambiguity isn’t the problem. The problem is allowing ambiguity to push teams into siloed delivery that can hide issues until it’s too late.

Navigating complexity through systems engineering

To avoid fragmentation, the industry needs a way of viewing huge projects as a single, integrated system of systems. Systems engineering is an approach commonly used in highly regulated industries, such as rail and nuclear. It ensures that every requirement, interface and dependency is captured, tested and assured before a single drawing is done or a spade hits the ground. While regular buildings don’t carry the same safety risks as a nuclear power station or a high speed railway, the principles of systems engineering can be easily applied to large-scale building projects – with transformative effects.

When we truly understand the reasons behind a client’s requirements, we can start to strip away unnecessary noise and make the complex simple, while confidently delivering the true outcomes needed.  

As an example, Mott MacDonald used systems engineering on a major buildings project to plan the simultaneous construction of multiple buildings – all over 500m high. There are only eleven buildings in the world that are over 500m, so building a number at once on the same project is quite a challenge. Without a structured approach to requirements, interfaces and assurance, the project would be impossible to manage. Using systems engineering, we were able to create a unified ecosystem where each team understands how their work connects to the whole. This makes for a better coordinated project with confidence that there will be no last minute surprises when work moves to the delivery phase.

Using digital tools to enable quick delivery

Digital tools play a crucial role in enabling the “think slow, act fast” approach, particularly when coordinating large, multidisciplinary teams, and can become powerful accelerators. On one mega buildings programme, for example, Mott MacDonald used a requirements management platform to map every client objective to the engineering systems responsible for delivering it. This approach, drawn from rail and nuclear practice, allowed more than 50 different design teams to work simultaneously while still maintaining a single source of truth. When a change was proposed, for example to a façade system, sustainability target or mobility movement prediction, the digital model instantly showed the ripple effects across structures, MEP (mechanical, electrical and plumbing), cost and operations. Instead of discovering conflicts months later at a gateway review, teams could resolve them in real time.

Keeping the client at the centre

At the heart of every successful large-scale project I’ve worked on there’s a really informed, engaged client who is clear on what they want. This matters because the “think slow, act fast” approach depends on clarity. Our job as engineers and advisors is to help clients clarify and articulate their true objectives and build trust that we can deliver them. That’s why I spend so much time asking clients “why?” By asking the right questions, challenging assumptions and refining requirements, we help clients become informed partners in the project’s success. When we truly understand the reasons behind a client’s requirements, we can start to strip away unnecessary noise and make the complex simple, while confidently delivering the true outcomes needed.

One of my favourite examples of the benefits of asking why comes from stadium design. Clients often have a shopping list for stadia, like more seats, better equipped training facilities or upgraded back of house facilities. But when you ask why, what they really want is more revenue, better performance and greater competitiveness. Once you understand that, you can propose innovative – or proven to work elsewhere – solutions that lead to that result, for example enhancing hospitality instead of simply adding expensive to construct but low value seats. This enhances the fan experience which, in turn, will bring in more revenue and success to the club.

Taking the time to dig into the “why” will help with determining the “what”. Working with the client in this way means they’re more engaged, informed and empowered, resulting in the entire project becoming more resilient.

Planning with care, delivering with pace

Large scale projects will always carry uncertainty, complexity and pressure, but they don’t have to be overwhelming or prone to risk. By taking the time to plan slowly – listening, clarifying objectives, integrating systems, aligning disciplines and engaging clients and stakeholders – the project team creates the conditions to act quickly when it matters most. With an informed client at the centre and a collaborative approach to delivery, large-scale projects can become not only achievable, but genuinely transformative.