As you know, I’ve been in China looking at things for our property business.

Tiles. Kitchens. Bathrooms. Doors. Windows.

A glamorous international adventure involving questions about hinges or how easy is to clean a toilet.

Naturally, everything looks fantastic.

That is rather the purpose of a showroom.

Nobody puts the work-in-progress window under a spotlight.

“Come in, sir. This one leaks.”

And that got me thinking about infrastructure and construction sites.

Project directors that had the pleasure to endure me know that well.

A construction site must be clean.

How you do something is how you do everything.

But that serious observation aside, in PPPs, we have other showrooms.

The most important one, for many, at least, are called Board presentations.

Full of confident programmes.

Full of financial models where everything goes up except the risks.

And all the other list of unimaginable things that make people averse to hear bad news eating lunch relaxed.

Anyway.

Let’s get practical.

When you’re buying something that will eventually arrive in a container, there’s a fairly important question:

How do I know the thing delivered will match the thing I’m being shown?

The sample looks excellent.

But what specification have we agreed?

Who checks production?

What happens if the materials change?

And at what point will I discover the problem?

Before payment?

Before shipping?

Or when someone in another hemisphere explains that “waterproof” was more of an ambition?

These questions are considerably less exciting than choosing colours.

They are also the questions that protect your money.

The same applies when you’re sitting in an infrastructure meeting.

“The risk has been transferred.”

Excellent.

Can the party carrying it actually survive it?

“The project is ready.”

Marvellous.

What evidence would make us disagree?

Your job as a senior decision-maker is to establish what justifies the confidence in the room.

Preferably before your signature turns everybody else’s optimism into your problem.

That doesn’t require you to become the expert on every technical detail.

It requires you to know where to push.

Which answer needs evidence.

Which assumption needs an owner.

And which reassuring sentence needs five more minutes before anyone moves to the next slide or goes to lunch.

That is the kind of practical judgement we work on inside The Room.

Lessons on procurement, negotiations, difficult clients, meetings and the decisions that come back to haunt people who were assured everything was fine.

​The Room​

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