Take risk!

Richard Noble’s achievements brought the land speed record back to Britain in 1983, and he hasn’t stopped taking extraordinary risks on his subsequent land, sea and air projects. Here, this awe‑inspiring APM Fellow argues why project professionals need to up the ante when taking risks.

The number of times I have been approached by would-be project entrepreneurs seeking some wise advice is endless. My first question for them is: ‘Have you got someone to project manage the programme for you?’ Their usual first answer is: ‘No, I was thinking of doing it myself.’ My response? ‘That may be your first very expensive mistake!’

There seems to be a common view that project management is very simple – you know where you want to get to, you think you know the intermediate steps, then it’s just a matter of lining up the sequence, drawing up the Gantt chart, nailing the critical path and master budget – and charging ahead! If it really was that simple, there would be no need for APM.

The reality of high-tech, high-risk projects

Frankly, project management is always hellishly difficult – there are always design and manufacture misunderstandings, invisible corporate politics, failed communication, excessive optimism, negotiation reversals, IT disruption, delivery slippage, cash-flow leaks and unexpected critical path delays from suppliers who prioritise their own programming. And this excludes government negotiations (in my experience, they will always confuse, let you down and be late). The finance people – when they make their minds up – tend to be the best of the lot.

Perhaps that’s a jaundiced view of what we do, but in our projects, we practise a rather unique form of project choice: high-tech/high-risk, unique world record‑breaking programmes that always have to start with zero funding. Conventional equity funding is understandably unlikely because of the blue-sky innovation and unlikely return on capital of these kinds of projects. So, the main funding comes from sponsorship successfully sourced because the projects tend to attract considerable levels of media attention, which of course migrates as a credit to the sponsors. Now, I forgot to mention the strategic importance of high risk – I’ll come back to that later.

But our teams’ successes have been inspirational. These included breaking the unlimited world land speed record at 633mph (and even more importantly achieving the project design speed, which is the speed target you set out to achieve when you initiate a project. When we started the Thrust 2 record programme in 1979, we set the peak design speed target at 650mph – in fact, we achieved the peak speed of 650.88mph).

We also: created a new all-metal light aircraft and its aeroengine from scratch and were flying it within 13 months of a no-cash start-up; fought our way through the labyrinthine certification process; established production; broke the sound barrier on land at Mach 1.02 (763mph), which has never been beaten in 24 years; worked with the JCB team and Ricardo to design and build the Dieselmax LSR car; and achieved a new and still unbroken world record for diesel-powered, wheel‑driven challengers.

Calamitous last-minute lurches

The problem with failures is that the project is most likely to fail when it’s getting towards achievement and every financial thread is stretched to the point of transparency. It’s as if you fight your way through the programme, battle through all the doubters and when you emerge into the sunlight with the project ready to go, key backers have second thoughts and run for cover. It’s as if they never really believed the team would get there! That’s when the losses are unacceptable. All of human nature is in these projects and we have to build that into our values and predictions.

Unhappily, we had this happen with the £30m Bloodhound 1,000mph car project when, within a year of high-speed testing, the UK Government decided not to pay against a ministerial offer. Our Chinese sponsor walked away and lost his first tranche but was kind enough to explain that this was not the project’s fault. Two hundred man years of work was lost, all the sponsors’ funding – and in South Africa, 1,000 man years of local work that went into the unique desert track preparation. Much later, the Secretary of State approved the deal, but it was too late to save the original project.

Despite the loss of the Bloodhound project, there was one enormously valuable national benefit. The Ministry of Defence was concerned about UK academic levels resulting in unsatisfactory recruitment into science and engineering careers, so they asked us to focus the programme on educational inspiration. Current education tended to revolve around learning by rote – resulting in learning the answers but an inability to recall the principles. We opened up the project, shared the technology challenge and the experience online at exhibitions and in classrooms and, by 2017, we were engaging with more than 120,000 youngsters every year. It could well have been the largest STEM programme in the UK. All credit goes to the Ministry of Defence, which came up with the idea.

All this makes the point that the backers and the project management team have to work closely – they have to join in and share the experience. Like any marriage, it will go through tough times with serious concerns. Frankly, the tough relationship is absolutely essential to drive the discipline. Faced with difficulty, the importance is always to stick to the programme, validate every stage and keep up the all-important pace of development – and communicate.

A risk-averse project culture

Now we come to the importance of risk. The taking of risk sets your project apart from its competition – ask yourself why the Boeing and Airbus airliners all look the same and how it’s difficult to differentiate between today’s SUV car brands. We seem to have a highly developed, endemic, risk-averse culture – it seems to suggest that there is only one way to design and develop a product, so the competition has to copy. Then, of course, the initial producer has to keep on upgrading the original design to the point of product exhaustion.

I think that the very act of avoiding risk in a project increases the risk of project failure dramatically. Experience shows that successfully taking risk actually increases the project life substantially simply because your team is going where the competition fears to tread. Think of the Jaguar E-Type in production for 14 years, the original Mini for 40 years, the VW Beetle in production for 65 years. Taking risk opens up the most incredible opportunities – it drives huge interest in the programme, and the new features themselves open up new avenues of experience, marketing and learning.

Compare the 1983 Thrust 2 car and its 35,000 jet HP conventional steering with the 1997 ThrustSSC car that had twin after-burning turbofan engines, 110,000 jet HP and rear-wheel steer. The innovation in design and testing gave us the world’s first-ever supersonic land speed record. We would have failed if we hadn’t made the change.

No luxury of failure

All well and good, but what happens to your project when it goes wrong? The usual medicine with a hierarchical government-type project is to fire the project director, refinance the programme and hope for better but delayed results. We have seen this with multiple extended defence projects. In our case, we can’t afford the luxury of failure, so we run flat companies with clear team responsibilities and appropriate empowerment. There is a culture of open and fearless communication and no blame (blame always means there is poor communication). In effect, this means that if the project is going off-track, it is corrected well before there is expensive damage or lost time.

So, we are off on the next project right now. It is very high risk, has real values for the community and the technology does not exist. This is going to be another fascinating experience…

[We’ll keep you posted – Ed]

Richard Noble’s advice on taking more risk

1. To start building the culture change you need, begin by taking risk at home – perhaps with purchases or ingrained habits – and see where the consequences will lead you.
2. To really create a risk-taking organisation, reset the organisation as a flat, non-hierarchical company and delegate both responsibility and appropriate authority. This will take a few months for everyone to understand and settle into, but it can result in real culture change and amazing results.
3. Read the early works of psychologist Abraham Maslow (who created the hierarchy of needs model) and Elton T Reeves.

On being a leader

“To understand risk, you have to welcome it, live with it, encourage it and accept its consequences every day. Acceptance of risk is the big differentiator. Failure to accept and live with daily risk leads to a very sterile climate in which innovation happens elsewhere and the economy suffers from overstaffing, delayed decisions, prolonged development and severely increased costs. And this is where leadership comes in. Leaders have to work harder and faster than anyone else in a team, and have a sacred duty to ensure that decisions are made very quickly so that the organisation can move ahead smartly with implementation. But above all, leaders have to delegate responsibility and authority wherever possible with the objectives of getting the organisation working really fast and effectively on a wide scale.”

Richard Noble’s new book Take Risk! is published by Evro. Listen to the APM Podcast with Richard Noble.

THIS ARTICLE IS BROUGHT TO YOU FROM THE Summer 2022 ISSUE OF PROJECT JOURNAL, WHICH IS FREE FOR APM MEMBERS.