Crossrail and spin

Any effective endeavour needs good, multi-directional feedback, and the feedback must be straight: timely and complete, with nothing hidden.

Look at the Crossrail project as a delegation. TfL and the DfT (the Sponsors) delegated the job of delivering it to Crossrail Ltd (CL).

For it to go as smoothly as possible, there needed to be straight feedback between the Sponsors and CL.

More than that, there needed to be feedback between them and the project itself, and, further, feedback among the players, the project, and the “systems” (forces) that influenced the outcome.

The London Assembly report identified the relentlessly positive spin put out by CL until late in the day. It minimised warnings and trumpeted good news, to the point of disguising the actual state of progress.

You can see why: they didn’t want trouble. Perhaps they wanted to be left alone to do the job in the way they felt would work, or the only way they knew how.

But it delayed the moment of reckoning, the point at which all parties could look objectively at what was working and what wasn’t, and ask, what are we going to do about it?

Money and time could have been saved if that moment had come sooner.

Effective delegation is impossible without deep feedback.